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Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®
Dawn Fiala, Lisa Marsolais, Annette Ziegler, and Valerie VanBooven RN BSN provide insight into home care marketing strategies. They cover in-person, in-field sales and online marketing every other week. These podcast episodes are part of the Home Care Marketing Mastermind, sponsored by Approved Senior Network®. Find more information at https://ASNHomeCareMarketing.com
Home Care Marketing & Sales Mastery by Approved Senior Network®
Website Essentials That Drive Phone Calls for Home Care Agencies
Your home care website isn't just a digital brochure—it's your most powerful lead generation tool when properly optimized. In this comprehensive session, we unpack the essential elements that transform an ordinary website into a conversion machine that makes your phone ring consistently with qualified leads.
Website speed emerged as the non-negotiable foundation of digital success. Since Google's shift to mobile-first indexing in 2018, sites loading in under two seconds receive preferential ranking while sluggish websites get "the side eye" from search engines. We explore practical tools like GTmetrix that measure your site's performance and highlight specific improvements to implement immediately.
The mobile experience deserves your focused attention with 70% of web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets. When adult children search for home care solutions—often from hospital rooms during moments of crisis—they need thumb-friendly navigation, instant-access phone numbers, and forms that don't require pinching or zooming. These seemingly small details make the difference between capturing a lead or watching them bounce to your competitor.
Lead capture mechanisms must work flawlessly. We demonstrate how tracked phone lines reveal which marketing sources drive your most valuable calls, while integrated form submissions should trigger immediate notifications to your team. The "speed to lead" principle becomes your competitive advantage—responding within minutes rather than hours dramatically increases conversion rates.
Perhaps most fascinating is how AI is reshaping how potential clients find home care services. When someone asks Google or ChatGPT questions like "How much does home care cost?" or "Can I get paid to care for my mom?"—the agencies providing thoughtful, comprehensive answers in their content secure the coveted "position zero" in search results. We reveal specific strategies to ensure your agency appears in these crucial AI-generated answers.
Ready to transform your website into your best salesperson? Implement these proven techniques to create a digital presence that builds trust, captures leads, and ultimately makes your phone ring with families who need your services.
Continuum Mastery Circle Intro
Visit our website at https://asnhomecaremarketing.com
Get Your 11 Free Home Care Marketing Guides: https://bit.ly/homecarerev
And it's the top of the hour, so we'll just get started as all these folks roll on in. All right, hi everybody. Happy hump day, woo, and I'm going to get started. Welcome to May 21st. Can you believe it? This year will be half over in about a month.
Speaker 2:Oh God Right, it's crazy how fast.
Speaker 1:The Start Mastery Circle. Let me go to the next. Oh, that didn't work. Oh, okay, introductions. I'm Valerie Van Boeven. I'm a registered nurse and a co-owner of Approved Senior Network. I'm going to be talking a lot more today. Usually, everybody else does these. They may do a fast job, but I'm going to be talking about digital marketing, which is my favorite. So you guys want to introduce yourselves.
Speaker 3:Sure, hi everybody. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Annette Ziegler. I've been with ASN for just about a year now. I have about 20 years experience in home care and I teach the sales training classes here. Welcome, I'm looking forward to your program today, valerie. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love doing this, lisa Marcelle.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm Lisa. Marcelle Trey says coach, what's up to the net? I have been in home care forever and a day. I've worn every single hat imaginable and I just love being here with you guys to share the knowledge and just be a part of your home care journey, and you'll see me all the time in different places.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2:I'm Dawn Fiala. I've been with the Proof Senior Network for three years now. I just have my three year anniversary. I have been in home care for a really long time and I love that I'm still in home care with all of you. I appreciate you allowing us to be a part of your journey, and we do mostly do lots of training here, and today it's going to be Valerie with Digital Marketing. I'm really looking forward to this, because I always learn a little something too, so thanks for coming everyone.
Speaker 1:The pressure is on.
Speaker 3:I don't know if we have a few more numbers, you can email it to her and I'll tell her, but email it to her so she can respond to this email.
Speaker 1:Maybe we can mute everybody. Okay, send it. Okay. Thank you All right. Housekeeping Lines muted unless speaking. So if you are not muted, you might want to go in and mute your line. But please speak up, put something in the chat if you want to talk, share stories, experiences, tips, ask questions, make recommendations and tell us what you want to know.
Speaker 1:If we haven't covered something in fact, somebody asked me today to cover something that we haven't got we're going to talk about it a little bit today, and that's about AI. I'm going to talk about it a little bit today. I don't want to bore people with my nerdy AI stuff, but I will talk about it a little bit. Commercial interruption, marketing and sales 90-day mastery program. A lot of you on here have been through this but have not, or your team has not, or someone in your office has not who's a salesperson. We would love for you to get them signed up. May 28th, june 17th and June 26th are on the boards, so if someone needs to get that sales training done, it is a lovely program. I highly recommend it. It's all Annette and Lisa, and I bet Dawn sneaks in once in a while and they do a wonderful job. So please sign up for that. So that is my commercial. Thanks, and Annette, you want to say anything else about that?
Speaker 3:No, I still have a couple spots open for next week. It's not too late to sign up, but if anybody is out there that wants to be motivated and it's 12 weeks, once a week for an hour I always say we spoon feed you, we tell you what to do, what to say, we make leave behinds for you. We have, by week six, we have a lot of our class members getting private pay referrals. Don't hesitate to join in. We'd love to have you. Thanks, all right, I'd love to have you Thanks.
Speaker 1:All right, agenda today home care websites that make the phone ring, and so we're going to talk about essential elements of a 2025 website why mobile matters more capturing phone and form leads. Does blog posting still make sense? How to get AI answers. We are going to talk a little bit about AI and to notice your website. So how to get AI to notice your website when it gives out an answer, but I'll show you examples of that in Q&A, just so you know.
Speaker 1:The guy who weed eats the front is here now, now. Now, besides, the weed eat outside really loud. So sorry, if the box drops, I can't win. It's a scott.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about essential elements of a 2025 website and if you have a question or if you want this list, I would happily send that to you. If you could just put a little, put a word in the chat that says list, I will send you this little list. It's nice to pass on to your web developer. Oh, my goodness, can you guys hear that? Oh good, I'm not going to go through all these things because that would take forever and it's crazy, but these are some of the things that we highly recommend that you have for a 2025 website.
Speaker 1:I am going to go through some of them, the ones that are most important off this list. But if you want this, I will happily send it to you, no big deal, and you should just work through it and work through it with your web developer. If we're a web developer we already know, you're welcome to share it with us too, or bug us about it, all right. The first thing on the list is speed. Speed is always going to be one of the most important factors for your website.
Speaker 3:It has everything to do with Google.
Speaker 1:Google went to a mobile first. It cares about mobile first attitude or rule, in 2018. So we are way beyond that rule, and so today, if your website doesn't load fast, as on a mobile device, you are going to lose, and what's going to happen is Google wants all of their users to have an amazing experience when they do a Google search. So if your website has errors on it it's loading slow, it doesn't render correctly Google is going to stop showing it because it doesn't want the people using it to have a bad experience. So what you can see on my screen are a couple of different paths that we put our websites through. This website was just developed by us, and so the desktop speed, as you can see, is an A, and also the mobile speed is an A. So on the left, you see how it looks like a desktop version of the website, and on the right you can see it looks like a mobile version of the site. I'm going to show you some bigger pictures of this, but this is what your website should look like.
Speaker 1:Now, sometimes, if you have a website that you know maybe needs a little update every, we use WordPress, so in a WordPress website, almost every day there's some plug in or something that needs to be updated. So sometimes if a client comes to us and says, hey, I don't think my website's as fast as it used to be, then we just go in, we update a few things or do whatever, take a look at it, see if there's an issue and then, bang, it's right back to an A. Anytime you run a test, I use this thing called GTmetrix, I don't know. Oh yeah, here it is, gtmetrix. You can go there and run your site speed for free. It's going to default to a desktop version, but you can change the settings and also run a mobile version. All right, so let's keep going there.
Speaker 1:So speed is number one. Also, your website should be ADA compliant, have clear calls to action and clearly state your service area. So on this website you can see all my arrows are pointing to something that's important. So at the top here we have. This website says serving Indianapolis, in central Indiana. Now it can say a lot more than that, or maybe say a little bit less, depending on what your service area is. But if I am not familiar with your business and I only know your website address, I may not know exactly your service area. Think about folks that are in Florida or Manhattan or somewhere where it's really crowded. You have no idea what that home care agency service area is if they don't state it pretty quickly. So we always want to make sure that people coming to the website know where you are.
Speaker 1:And then calls to action. We start right at the top. There's a phone number that's clickable and a get started button which leads to a form, and then we continue with those calls to action with free assessment, and then down here on the bottom right-hand corner you can see hi there, have a question, text us here, so you can. It's another call to action to get someone to communicate with you. And on the left-hand side you see the little person in the blue dot at the very bottom of my screen, bottom left. That is ADA compliance.
Speaker 1:Now, some people have a lot more. If you were to go to a website like Coca-Cola or Nike, you would see a lot more ADA compliance, a higher level of that. What we do is we do use a plug-in and if you were to click on that, it would allow you to adjust the screen if you are colorblind or if you need to hear it with audio and you have an audio reader on your computer, it will skip to the text and it'll skip all the pictures. So, anyway, that is our version of ADA compliance. There are different levels of ADA compliance, but this one pretty much has taken care of everything.
Speaker 1:And remember, every single person who comes to your website either does have some form of disability, or they're a family member of someone who has a disability, or they're trying to help someone who has a disability. So it's really important that you have a website that is ADA compliant. If you have any questions, be sure to just put them in the chat. All right, so now you're looking at a more of a mobile view, so I wanted to show you how this stacks up on mobile. The left-hand picture is a little bit wider than it's from my, my, my phone, but it looks wider for some reason.
Speaker 1:Anyway you can see right at the top. We always want the phone number to be right at the top and the get started goes to a form and the free assessment and on the mobile this is. If you scroll down a little bit on your mobile device, you can see that all the places they serve are here and their ADA compliance is still there and the chat is still there. But it's big and folks can see it. The text is big, so even people with low vision can see the mobile version really nicely. This is what your website should look like, Something like this on a mobile device.
Speaker 3:If your phone number is not showing up at the top.
Speaker 1:Then you need to talk to your web developer and see what you can get done about that. Then you need to talk to your web developer and see what you can get done about that. All right, Anybody have any questions about that? Are we good? We're good Speed, ADA compliance and calls to action. Okay, First question I have for you all here is do you think this is an AI image, yes or no? In the chat, give me a yes or no. Is this image created with AI?
Speaker 3:Yes or no?
Speaker 1:Okay, what are people telling us? We have three yeses, four yeses, one no. It is not. It is not an AI image. This is the real owners and I believe a mom or a grandma perhaps in this image. This is the real deal I'm going to show you.
Speaker 1:I'll probably show you some AI images as we go along here, but I know that everybody's wondering can you tell the difference between an AI image and a real image? In this case, it's real. I have seen some really terrible AI images. If you use AI imagery, you have to be very careful about how it renders and make sure people don't have six fingers and three eyes or their hand is warped out at the bottom. I've seen a couple of kind of bad looking AI images.
Speaker 1:However, I will tell you that AI has gotten very good. If you are good at generating AI images I think we are then you can generate ones that are so lifelike and so pretty that you would never know the difference. I'm not promoting that you have all AI images, but I would say that there are some websites that we have created where the client wants everybody in red scrubs or and that's more of a graphic image adjustment or they want everybody in polo shirts. So if they don't have their own pictures, then we can adjust that. So I want to hit escape for a second here. Hold on a second.
Speaker 1:I want to get rid of this and I want to get rid of this. Okay view slideshow. All right. So my next comment is use real photos of staff and leadership whenever possible. So this is a real photo of staff and the two owners. So I would.
Speaker 1:I know that a lot of you don't like to have your picture on a website, but it will tell you that leadership should always have a professional image on their website, or even a casual image. It doesn't have to be a professional headshot, it can be casual, but nice People want to know who they are doing business with. They desperately want to know that. Who are they going to trust? Who is the person? Who's behind the people who answered the phone? Who is accountable? Please come out from behind your websites. On your about us page it shouldn't just be your vision, your mission. It should have a picture of you, or you and your wife, or you and your husband, or you and your family, or your team, whatever it is you want to do. It could be a big group picture. Please come out from behind your website. That really does make a difference for the consumer.
Speaker 1:So here is another sort of view of all of these pretty ladies. You should have branded design across all of your platforms. You can see their website here on the left and then below that you can see their Facebook business page has the same image, the same logo. It's rearranged a little bit, but we use the same branding in everything we do. So they have a now hiring post on their Facebook page. You can see they use some similar imagery. They have all of the posts that go up on their Facebook and their LinkedIn are branded to them. And then if you look to the top right, the very top, you can see for their LinkedIn business page. We use the same kind of imagery for that. And then their newsletter, which is on the right in the middle, all the way to the right monthly care newsletter for families. We're using the same colors imagery, so we're matching all the way across.
Speaker 1:What happens is there's something called brand recognition, but also facial recognition. So not only are you going to recognize that logo every time you come across them everywhere you go, if you're in their local area, but you're going to see their faces, their logo, their colors. You're going to know that's welcome home Every single time, that you're going to be reminded. That's them, so their branding keeps them on through everything they do, also on your LinkedIn personal profiles. If you are leadership of your company, behind your head, there's a place where you can put an image.
Speaker 1:Everybody should have a similar image with similar branding. You see how all of us have this background here. That has a proof of your network on it. We have something like that on our LinkedIn's as well, so you'll recognize our colors. You'll recognize that branding of us behind our heads on LinkedIn. I highly recommend that you all do that for everything that you have online. Now, if you are not in leadership, but you're a salesperson, you are a community liaison, you're maybe the operations person, and if you are willing to do that for your company, I would highly recommend you do that. You can always remove it if you move on to another role, but it really helps the company stand out if folks see that every time. Any questions?
Speaker 4:about branding no.
Speaker 1:All right, okay, search engine optimization. So there is big search engine optimization and a little search engine optimization, so we're going to talk about little search engine optimization here. Every time we create a website, we want to make sure that we have done the very best we can to search engine optimize each page, the home page and throughout the whole website. We want to make sure that Google knows who they are, who you are, where you're located, your service area and what you do. Those are the three main things that Google wants to know who you are, where you're located or your service area and what services you provide. So the proper schema and markup metadata are really important, and that is big nerdy words. So I'm going to show you what that looks like. Not dirty words or nerdy words Nerds, yes, that would be me. So long tail, keyword optimization and internal linking and fresh monthly blog content OK, so the picture you see here is a picture of a blog and this is the Welcome Home blog. They send in company news and so you can see there's two blog posts here this beautiful young lady and learn life savings, cpr in first aid. You can see both of those posts there. Below that, you can see one of the posts that we Below that you can see one of the posts that we put up the benefits of companion care at home for older adults. And guess what? That's an AI image right there. I think it's pretty. You might be able to tell, but it's really a pretty picture. So that is more of an educational post. So we do educational posts.
Speaker 1:Our clients send in company news, and the more company news they send in, the better their SEO is, because every time they are at a specific location you're at an assisted living facility, you're at a skilled nursing facility, you're giving out your chat keys, you're doing your leave behinds. When you take a picture and you put four sentences to it and you put it on your blog. I visited the blah blah skilled nursing facility today, had a great time. May is older Americans month and I left them with DD. And when you do that and you post it on your blog, even if it's short, google understands what, where you were, what you were doing there and who you work with. It is definitely important to submit company news. Educational content is awesome. Company news tops it all Inside of these posts.
Speaker 1:You would notice if you were on this website and you looked at one of these that we are internally linking. So if the post is about companion care the benefits of companion care at home for older adults I can tell you right now the keyword phrase in there is companion care and we link to the companion care page from that website, from that blog post. I'm sorry so. Companion care, that page that we created, always is getting links. Let's link back to you from blog posts. The word companion care, that page that we created, always is getting links. Let's link back to you from blog posts. The word home care, the word in-home care, the words personal care services all of those link back to a specific page that talks about that service in particular. That helps Google a lot. So you're organizing your content and pointing to like okay, this is Tammy, I'm gonna help you can you guys mute that?
Speaker 1:for me, thanks. Okay, that is basic search engine optimization, what we're talking about there. I'm going to show you the next picture, which looks like craziness. So this error doesn't it so this is so.
Speaker 1:So Google doesn't see your beautiful website, it doesn't see your beautiful pictures, it doesn't see all of that stuff. What it sees is what you're looking at right here. This is what Google sees. So if this code that you see in front of you actually tells Google all the things it needs to know about you, then you are going to rank better. Now some web developers will say we just use a plugin for that, and I will tell you that is not enough. There are lots of SEO plugins that you can use on your website, but if you don't add the extras, you are going to be left behind. So what we do is we add code by hand. We do have a code generator that we use, but we put in all the particulars. We put in what your pay sources are, what your services are. We put in your social media links. We put in your logos, we tell Google what areas you serve. So we tell Google a whole lot of stuff that a plugin does not do. So I highly recommend that, when you talk to your web developer, that you ask them about SEO and you ask them do I have an adequate amount of schema on the back end of my website? And if they're not doing this, then they're not doing enough. So that is my. This is totally nerdy. It's boring, but essential.
Speaker 1:Why mobile matters more. So mobile is the default experience. 70% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Now I look at Google Analytics for a lot of home care agencies a lot we look at this and when mobile started becoming important, we could see that they were maybe like 10% of people would see them on a mobile device. 20%, 30%. It was just caregivers. Now it's at least 50% of the traffic that comes to your website is mobile traffic. Everybody's on their phone. Your adult daughters are sitting in the hospital next to their mom's bed looking on their mobile device at who they can call to set up home care services before discharge. So please make sure that's what we talked about the speed and how your website looks from a mobile perspective. Please make sure that all the things we talked about are there, because that adult child is overwhelmed and they're in crisis and they really just want to be able to click a button and call you crisis and they really just want to be able to click a button and call you. So on the right hand side you can see Amanacare and you can see two phone numbers because they have multiple offices and some of our clients have even more than that. But just make sure that you have various ways for people to contact you.
Speaker 1:If your website isn't built for mobile first, you're instantly giving most of your audience a bad experience. All right, google's mobile first indexing. We've talked about how, in 2018, google said it's all mobile. Now, folks, we don't care as much about desktop. They care about it not as much. A beautiful desktop with a clunky mobile version will get poor rank, fewer leads and a side eye from Google. That's true, it'll give you the side eye. So here's just another. All of these screenshots are various websites we've built over the years with different calls to action. So you have your call today on this one and you have a free home care guide, and this actually does get a lot of action. People do want that free home care guide and they will put in their name, their email address and sometimes their. People do want that free home care guide and they will put in their name, their email address and sometimes their phone number for that free home care guide, which gives you what Another lead to follow up with.
Speaker 1:Mobile users have different intentions. This is true. Mobile visitors are often in a do something now mindset calling, booking, finding directions, requesting help so they're ready to go. If they're using their mobile device, they need something your site needs click to call, fast loading, intuitive navigation and clear calls to action for mobile users. Again, another website, two more calls to action let's get started and a phone number you don't have to make it complicated a phone number. You don't have to make it complicated, just make sure they can do something quickly. Speed and simplicity win. So mobile users are more impatient. You have three seconds or less before they bounce. So remember those speed tests. Those sites loaded in 1.5 seconds or less. It might've been a little more than that we are talking about fully loaded in less than two seconds. Clean design, compressed images, fast hosting and simple structure matter more on mobile. So if your hosting is slow, a website might be beautiful, but if your hosting is slow, that's another challenge that you have to overcome with speed. So don't use GoDaddy's business shared hosting, blah blah, because you'll never have a fast website doing that.
Speaker 1:Conversions happen on mobile. In industries like home care, users often find your business via mobile and then they call, submit a form or request info After hours on weekends we see a lot more forms coming in, but, as you all know, people calling the office is really where it's at. Most of your leads are going to be calls and if it's Monday night at 10 pm, it's probably going to be a form. If your mobile site makes them pinch or zoom pinch, make it littler or zoom out, you're going to be losing leads. So just make sure that everything looks good and if you haven't looked at your own website on a mobile device lately, or the people you work for, look at it and see what can you call the office through that number easily. Is it? Click to call? Responsive isn't enough anymore. It's not just about resizing, it's about designing for mobile behavior.
Speaker 1:Thumb-friendly buttons. I have the two biggest thumbs in the world. I have weird flat bubble thumbs and so these buttons are definitely friendly for my thumbs because I'm constantly touching the wrong thing. Minimal text and a user journey optimized for scrolling. So this needs to be an easy, fluid setup. All right capturing phone and form leads.
Speaker 1:Form submissions go straight to follow up. No black holes. Oftentimes have you? I've done this before. I filled out a contact us form after hours for some service that I needed. Maybe it was a plumber or electrician or I don't know whatever carpet cleaning and no one ever answers me. I never get. I have to call that next Monday If I really want to use that service. No one's going to follow up with me if I fill out a contact us form. That should never be the case. We never allow that to get past you. So when we develop a website, we use our ASN Spark CRM for all the forms and what happens is not only do you get an email that someone just filled out a form on your website, but someone in your office should also be getting a text that says hey, trying to get a hold of you. They need care so that whoever the responsible person is for following up can do it just like that Fast, fast, fast fast.
Speaker 1:You don't want to be slow about following up. When a family fills out a form, their info is captured instantly, they are tagged and they're put in a pipeline for follow-up. You want no lost emails, no sticky notes, no guessing who followed up. Everything should be spelled out for your staff and for you. As far as follow-up and follow-up timing, less than five minutes is ideal. Within the hour is a definite Not following up till tomorrow is not an option. You will lose them. They're gone. They've already got services.
Speaker 1:Track phone calls like a boss. Okay, not everybody wants us to track every phone call that comes into their office, but I will tell you, no matter how married you are to that phone number that you've had for 15 years, it is worth it to put a tracked and recorded phone line on your website at the top. And here's what I mean. We buy a phone number that's a local phone number and we put that one on your website. That phone number forwards directly to your office line. And trust me when I say no one remembers what your phone number is to your office, except the people that work there, and even they don't remember what the phone number is. I would get a tracker recorded line. Put it on the top of your website. It forwards directly to the office. Then you can know who called and which marketing source drove them to you.
Speaker 1:So inside our CRM we can track did they come from a Google ad? Was it organic? And you can even ask the question how'd you hear about us? Everybody should be asking how'd you hear about us and recording that somewhere. Not just hearing it, but writing it down and or entering it into your system, wherever it is, and finding out where the most folks hear from you. I am always surprised when Annette or Lisa or Dawn tell me most of the leads we've had lately are coming from YouTube or they're coming from LinkedIn. I'm always surprised by that. I don't know why. I'm surprised by that. We do a ton of video, but that's where that would not be where I would think our leads come from. I would think they come from our website and people would just Google us and find us and that does happen. But they see our videos, they see our posts on LinkedIn and they pick up the phone and call or they fill out a form on our website. You need to know what kind of calls are coming in. We've had several clients say well, our phone doesn't ring, our website doesn't make our phone ring, and then we put a tractor recorded line on their website and they find out pretty quickly that a lot of the calls that are coming in are coming from their website.
Speaker 1:Calls can be recorded for training or quality assurance and if you missed a call, what we do is we trigger an instant text message that says we're sorry we missed your call. Or this is ABC Home Care. We're sorry we missed your call, let us know. Text us back or let us know or we'll reach out to you. I can't remember what it says, but it acknowledges the fact that they called you and nobody answered. Or it went to voicemail and instantly they get a text we want to talk to you. Sorry, our phones were busy at the time.
Speaker 1:You're not just answering the phones, you're analyzing trends and improving conversions. The person who answers I know we talk about this all the time but the person who answers the phone in your office they're your first line of marketing. Everybody's a marketer in your business. So if they aren't being receptive and kind and a good listener, then you might be losing folks. So being able to listen to those calls and see what's happening is really a good way for you to know what's happening when you're not around or when the boss isn't around, or how are people really answering the phone? Are they answering or are they taking their time and talking slow and being a good listener?
Speaker 1:chewing their gum yeah, yeah, I word like it even. Oh my gosh, If I call the vet, I want to hear Hi. Or this is Elm Point Animal Hospital. This is Joan. Can I help you? I want to know that I called the right place. I want to know who on the phone I can tell somebody hey, it was Joan that helped me and she was great. Or it was Joan that helped me and she was a jerk. I want to know your name. I want to know who you are. Did I call the right place?
Speaker 2:All right, I can't stress enough that you're answering your calls live.
Speaker 2:Cause so when Valerie says my phone's not ringing from the website, what's going on? And then we put a track line and we can tell whether they're answered live or not. Most adult children that are in crisis, they're in crisis and they don't want to fill out a form and they want to talk to somebody now. They don't want to wait for whoever to call me back. Right, and sometimes you might get the assessment just because you answered your call, your phone live, and your competitors didn't. So I can't stress that enough. It just has to happen Somebody and they have to be good on the phone, as Valerie said, but that call answer, because that's the other thing is that the caregiver doesn't show up. Are you going to answer or am I going to fill out a form? Am I going to leave a voicemail Because my caregiver didn't show up and my mom is laying in bed and there's nobody there? It also tells them what the service might be like down the road too.
Speaker 4:Anyway, sorry, just it's so important it is your first impression.
Speaker 1:Yes, the force is strong with these people you know.
Speaker 1:All right, I just posted about this today Speed to lead automation. Home care inquiries like this is what you said are urgent. Families want help right now. So when we use our CRM, we text or email a lead instantly after they submit a form. We send that via email and text. Whoever that responsible person or persons are get that immediate information. Auto-assign leads to the right person for a fast response. Sometimes we have companies with multiple salespeople across multiple territories and in that case we can organize it so that when that lead comes in from a certain zip code if assuming we're asking that question then we can route to the right salesperson.
Speaker 1:So every second does count and we set up our CRM and all the things that we do to make sure you don't miss a moment, you don't miss anything. That text comes to you, you see it, you answer it. Sometimes we're away from our desk and we're not on our email. Or if you're out in the field and you're responsible for following up with leads, then having a text is super important. All right, seamless website integration. So I put a loaded baked potato on here, because ASN built websites that come with ASN Spark built in. That's our CRM. It's baked in like a loaded baked potato Forms, chat widgets, call tracking all pre-configured to work out of the box. You may also have this with another provider, and that's awesome. We want to make sure everything works together. Everything's going through the same CRM and you are being notified. No tech headaches, no plugins, no third-party tools to juggle. Everything fits together perfectly. So that's our rule of thumb for websites, and we hope that whoever's doing your website feels that way too.
Speaker 1:All right, does blog posting still make sense? I've heard that a lot lately, and I've also heard people say or other providers like us or say who, by the way, don't do SEO they say you don't need to blog post anymore. It doesn't make a difference. I'm going to tell you the reason they said that to you is because they don't offer blog posting or they don't do SEO. Yes, it still matters and yes, you should have blog posts.
Speaker 1:Google loves fresh content. Every time you add a blog post or a page to your website, google re-indexes your entire website. So the more frequently you do that within reason, the better you are. Google notices that. Google comes back and reindexes your website and takes note of all the new things that are there. Google's algorithm rewards websites that are active and updated regularly. A blog tells Google this site is alive, relevant and worth ranking higher. If your website shows that the last blog post was April of 2023, then I highly suggest that you get in there and start putting in some relevant, up-to-date content.
Speaker 1:That is for today, because your web-savvy adult children of aging parents, web savvy adult children of aging parents, which could be Gen Xers, gen Zs, millennials they will look at stuff like that. They'll look and see when was the last time they posted on Facebook? It's been a year ago. Are they still in business, I wonder. It's been a year since they've done a blog post. What happened a year ago? That's what I always think. What happened to this organization a year ago? Frequent blog posts help you rank for long tail keywords. Meaning home care services for the elderly is a really long tail keyword phrase, voice searches and trending questions in home care. So frequent blog posts help with all that. I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a second here. Do we have any questions before I keep going? We all good.
Speaker 2:Nope, we're good All right.
Speaker 1:Blogs build authority and trust. So I put an example of a blog post here. How can families help seniors fix loneliness and isolation? That's a huge problem. You can see on this blog post that we bolded the words companion care at home. That's probably the keyword phrase that they're SEOing for in this blog post. Families are searching for answers like how to know when it's time for home care. What is dementia care at home like? When your blog answers these questions, you become the trusted expert, not just another agency. Trust equals calls, calls, equal clients. So yes, you need to blog post.
Speaker 1:All right, every blog post is multi-use content gold. So what we use blog posts for is newsletter content. So we turn the blog posts into newsletters. So you can see my pictures here. The left-hand side picture is an employee of the month post and my right-hand picture is the newsletter that went out that also talked about the May caregiver of the month. So we use all the content that our clients send in and our educational content for their newsletter and it works very nicely. We repost and repurpose all of as much of the content from blogging as possible. One well-written blog can power a week of marketing content and that's true. You can use that in many ways. A really good post can also become a press release, can also become a little video. It could be used in as a reel.
Speaker 1:There's all kinds of things you can do with one good blog post. Okay, this is where I show you how AI and voice search equals content demand. So AI and voice search are becoming more and more important. So I'm showing you on the screen an example of how our organization shows up for the and this is a long tail keyword phrase it's not meant to impress anybody but best home care website design agencies in 2025. I put that in an incognito Google search. I put that in an incognito Google search. Did I, did I?
Speaker 3:Yes, I think I did.
Speaker 1:And this is what comes up Approve senior network marketing. What, and you know why this is like this? Our competitors are also listed there. The reason this shows up like this is because I wrote a blog post that talked about the best home care website design agencies in 2025. And I listed our competitors. Of course, we were first, but I didn't list them all. So that blog post you can see it on the right-hand side there where my two arrows are best home care website design agencies in 2025 and approved senior network home care website.
Speaker 1:Whatever you can see, both of those are referenced for this AI answer from Google. So if you want your blog posts to show up in an AI answer, then you need to write blog posts about the questions that people ask. So if you've answered those questions in a blog post, you could be the source on ChatGPT, bard Alexa Is BARD, even a thing Alexa references and then it says hello, position zero. That's true. You are above. If you're in an AI answer, you are above every single thing that appears on Google, including sponsored ads, including paid advertising. So this is where you want to be. The way to do that is to answer the tough questions. One of the questions that's really tough, but you should have a blog post about, I believe, is how much does home care cost? And I know you don't want to put your hourly rates in there, but you should. You should try.
Speaker 1:No you should not put your hourly rates in there, but you should answer the question and just either give a range or don't say anything at all. Tell them why you need to have a conversation about it first, because it depends on how much care the person needs. It depends on how sick they are. It depends on if it's for a wife and a husband. Sometimes it depends on if pet care is involved. Whatever your parameters are, make sure that you answer those questions in that blog post. All right, oh, what am I doing? Okay, get paid to be, do we?
Speaker 4:have a question? A question. No, I was just saying, that's great information. Oh, I meant to say it in my head, but I said it out loud all right.
Speaker 1:Here's a couple of home care examples and this is something you might want to forward on to our friends at care tech. It says get paid to be a caregiver in north flatte. Now, in the state of Nebraska, and in many states, you can get paid to be a family caregiver right, and some of you don't do that. You're private pay only, so this would not apply to you. But if you are one of those that takes Medicaid waivers and this is the question that everybody's asking how do I get paid to care for my mom, how do I get paid to care for a family member? So I typed in get paid to be a caregiver in North Platte and on this one, I did get paid to care for a family member in Omaha, and this is what came up yes, it is possible to get paid to be a caregiver in North Platte, nebraska. Now, again, that's also not like Miami or Manhattan, so this was easier to come up with. But look at the first person, the first home care agency that's on there, it's our clients at CareTech, and if you look at this one over here, yes, it's possible. Also, caretech is part of the answer, so they're listed over here on the right. This is all Google search. Can I get paid to be a caregiver in whatever? And if you're not showing up, you need to show up, so you need to write a blog post. I can tell that these are linking to pages, not blog posts. I think. Let me see, I'm caring, me see, I think that they are pages as opposed to blog posts. So this is a pretty big deal in Nebraska. So that's why I would say definitely address all the things that you need. I think you should take a screenshot of this and send it over to Care Time. They would love it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I went through a little bit of AI. We talked about speed. We talked about blog posting. We talked about schema. We talked a little bit about SEO. There's way more to SEO than just blog posting, please know that. And schema it's way more to it. But we've talked about all the things you need speed, speed and a great mobile. Look to your website. Does anybody have questions about website design?
Speaker 4:No, I don't have anyone in the chat, but if anyone wants to speak up, hey, in that case, hey, okay.
Speaker 4:So look in the chat here if you want to enter for custom leave behinds. Say yes in the chat and Annette will take all your names down. Oh, yay, yay, yay, okay. So homecaremarketingnewscom slash store a little easier for you to go with our leave-behinds. Is we kind of research for you? Go grab the links, find something that's pretty affordable and then we add them to this May, june, july, august. So when you click on August, you'll see what we recommend for the August leave-behinds. So pretty cool. You don't have to buy here. It just makes it a lot easier. So you don't have to do the legwork. And the winner of the May Leave Behinds was Lorraine at Adult Alternative Home Care and they got the Mother's Day. So celebrate Mother's Day. And they went out to. Wherever they went out to, I'm not sure, but they gave this out and sent us photos, and so congratulations on the win and we're glad you were able to use these and send them to us. We love this stuff, we love to see this. That is so nice.
Speaker 1:Yes, so if you want in the past, we're waiting for those pictures.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we need them because that's part of the deal. Yeah, and, valerie, what you were saying about the blog post, I know you said that it's community news isn't all everything, but I've seen the difference and so these, those photos, can be repurposed into all of those things we were talking about earlier, and I just love to see that because it's pretty simple to just take the same thing and repurpose it everywhere and just full circle.
Speaker 1:And so in order to show up in AI search, you might show up for something else that's on your website, but what you really want to look at is questions that people normally ask about home care, and when you see that you can see that right on a Google search page, it says people also ask. When you answer those and you do a good job and it's not just gobbledygook, you have to put a lot of work into that post or that page in order for Google to say, yeah, this is a very good answer. So, anyway, that's the way I found is the easiest to.
Speaker 2:You had mentioned something about a Bing like our Google business profile, but doing that on Bing or somewhere else for AI?
Speaker 1:Yeah, chatgpt is pulling its data from Bing. So if you want to show up in a chat TPT answers, you need to make sure, at the very least, that you have your Bing. It's like Google Places, but it's our Google my Business, our Google Business Listing, whatever it's called now I don't know. But you also want to get your Bing listing up to date and you have to. Man, you're going to have to do this as the owner, as somebody who's in leadership, either update it or create one, because you won't show up in chat GPT unless Bing is indexing your blog posts. And also, you want to have that listing, that business listing in Bing and a lot of people don't have it for some reason, so it's very important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, chatgpt is all about Bing.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, cause I never even Bing was never even on my radar.
Speaker 1:No, it is totally crazy, because we haven't used bing for anything in years and if you ask chat, gpt where do you get most of your information for your answers? It'll tell you by bing. It'll tell you exactly. We've tried it. So, yes, we make sure you're visible on bing as well. Thanks, yeah, have a great rest of your week all right, thanks everybody bye.
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