Starting the Family Conversation on a Senior Care Blog
Those of us who have worked in public relations and marketing roles in the assisted living and home care industries know that keeping families engaged during the often lengthy decision process is a constant struggle. The line between being persistent and feeling like a pest is a fine one. Fortunately, the digital age has opened up new options. Online content provides us with many new tools. The best of these is a senior care blog. With a senior care blog, we have the ability to have what blogger extraordinaire Robert Scoble calls “meaningful conversations” with families.
Senior Care Blogs Have SEO Value
Let’s get the SEO reasons out-of-the-way with just a quick overview. Then we can get on to what you really came to hear. How to get rolling…
The fresh, unique content that you create with frequent blog posts has undeniable SEO benefit. Contentplus.co.uk studied traffic and blogs. They found that blogs can increase your visitors by as much as 55%. Good content brings people. Good content creates quality inbound links which brings more people. I could create lots of lists and share stats to try to convince you. But I think we have all accepted it by now. Content is king and blogs are its queen.
Blogs as a Conversational Media
For an industry like ours, starting a conversation with families early on in their search for care is important. But finding them isn’t easy. That’s where quality senior care content comes in. Blogs are especially suited for this. They can help families find you and then help you keep the conversation going. Blogs are inherently a conversational media. They provide you with the means to both educate and engage families.
Top Seven Tips for Starting a Senior Care Blog
Don’t let anyone kid you in to thinking this is a quick and easy process. It isn’t. But these seven tips can help you get started:
- Set up categories you think are meaningful for families. Then create your editorial calendar around them.
- Each post should be a minimum of 300 words. Not just filler and fluffy stuff. Real quality content.
- People read differently online. Build content that is easily scannable. Like my bullets. They make it easy to scan this blog while you are on your divisional census call for the week don’t they?
- Remember to optimize your content with the keywords and phrases your SEO team has identified. Don’t keyword stuff. Make it a good experience for readers not a fat laden keyword buffet for the search engines.
- Blog frequently. Especially when you are first getting your senior care blog up and running. Most experts we’ve spoken with say 52 posts is the tipping point for increasing traffic.
- Remember to link to existing content on your site and to quality external sites. Don’t be gratuitous. Two or three links in a 300 to 500 post is best.
- Watch your spelling and grammar. Here’s why in a quote from the Google spam man himself, Matt Cutts.
“We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”
- Final point…and it’s an important one…don’t copy other senior care providers’ content. Google is watching. Their fuzzy little Panda will penalize you. (Read more about the How the Panda caused content farm foreclosures if you have somehow missed hearing about it over and over and over for almost two years now.)
Ok…so I lied…this is my last tip for you. Convince your CEO to send you to the next Content Marketing World conference . It’s in March. In Sydney. Yes. That Sydney. If she says “no way am I sending you to Australia” and you are still struggling, contact us. We rock at creating senior care conversation blogs for clients.
In our next post we will share the results of our best senior care blogs research. No… we won’t be including our own clients in those ratings. That would be cheating wouldn’t it?