Another Voice on Internet Marketing for Elder Care and Senior Service Providers

In this installment I will discuss a few ideas about Internet marketing.

By Tom Day                www.longtermcarelink.com

I am by no means the expert on Internet marketing, but I am using it successfully. The National Care Planning Council has achieved our growth primarily through using the Internet. As far as I can remember, we have never spent a dime on hiring salespeople or using traditional media advertising strategies. Our primary website — www.longtermcarelink.net — receives about 800,000 hits a month from roughly 60,000 visitors a month — almost all from search engine searches. We currently have a Google page rank of 6. We are ranked by Alexa at around 500,000. People find us through approximately 16,000 keyword searches a month. At least 15 of these keyword searches are common public search engine inputs for long-term care issues and bring up our site in the top three returns on a Google search.

In September, we will have a brand-new version of www.longtermcarelink.net and expect this will increase our traffic and our business by 20% to 30%. We are already in the process of redesigning our state council websites and this has brought increased traffic as well.

Our other 20 websites are also popular for certain keyword search strings and come up in at least the top five searches on Google for these categories. In addition, we maintain another 83 websites for our veterans benefits consultants. We are adding 6 or 7 new websites a month. A year from now, we will have well over 180 websites generating leads for our members.

Our websites are designed to produce requests for help from the public. The number of these requests has doubled or tripled every year. As an example, the search category that attracts the public to our primary website on the aid and attendance benefit is currently producing about 10 to 20 requests a day for all of our veterans aid and attendance consultants. The volume of these requests has quadrupled over the past two years since we started offering this service.

I’m sure many of you are well-versed in strategies using the Internet to attract new business. I will share with you a summary of some of my observations on Internet marketing.

Using a Website to Establish Your Credibility

When someone contacts me about our services, I go to that person’s website. If I don’t get a URL or recognize a domain from their email, I will do a Google search until I find a website. If there is no website, I will go to the specific search links that reference that particular person to learn as much about that person as I can. Sometimes, a website will give me an idea of who people are and what they do and give me some confidence in their services. I would like to think I’m not alone in this behavior. I believe more and more that the public is doing this or will be doing more such person-specific Internet searches in the future.

I realize that social networking websites can serve a similar purpose. Quite frankly, I am older — a baby boomer — and I don’t feel comfortable registering for a social network site to find out about someone. Somehow I think this more of an activity for people in their 30s or younger. These people are not our target market. It is either the older folks or their children who are in their late 40s or in their 50s. My personal opinion is having a website is more effective than using social networking sites to tell people about you.

I believe there is a trend for the public to rely on Web searches for an unknown individual to check that person out and to try and get an indication of that person’s credibility. I know this isn’t fair and might not even be true, but I often judge a person’s ability by the design of that person’s website. A crummy looking website gives me a negative feeling about that person’s abilities. If I have this feeling about websites, then perhaps others may as well. I might not be alone in the way I relate people to their websites. Here are some of the things I look for when I land on a website. I could write pages on each one of these items. There is simply not enough room to do this here.

· professional and pleasing design

· intuitive and easy navigation of the site

· generous content on a number of pages

· clear message of the services provided

· good biography of the people offering the services

· compelling sales message why I should use the services

· third-party endorsement by being a member of one or more recognized organizations

Using a Website to Establish an Identity and a Presence in the Community

It seems that everyone in business has a website. Those who don’t have a website are likely at a disadvantage to those who do. I think it is getting to the point that the public expects any organization offering services to the community should have a website or that person or company might not be considered to have an identity or a presence in the community. The lack of a website may result in losing some new business that would have been created had there been a website.

Using a Website to Attract Search Engine Users

There is no possible way I can go into the issues of search engine optimization and some of the strategies that are currently in use. This would involve pages and pages of discussion. The National Care Planning Council’s services include designing websites for you that incorporate most of these principles. Here are some of the issues that you need to be aware of when optimizing your website for Internet searches.

· awareness of your Google page rank

· anticipating the keyword searches

· using your website statistics to improve your site

· implementing other common strategies for search engine optimization

· optimizing keywords without violating search engine guidelines (violation could result in your removal from the search engine index)

· providing lots of relative content

· frequently updating

· generating links from sites with better page rank

· placing articles with links to your website all over the Internet

· effectively using blogs in conjunction with your website

Pay-per-Click

We don’t use pay-per-click (such as Google “adwords”) because we don’t have to. We get sufficient traffic from search engine placement. I tried it in the past and was not satisfied with it. At some point in the near future, I intend to try it again to see if it can augment the number of public requests for services at a reasonable cost.

If you have the bucks, then pay-per-click can bring in requests for your services immediately. Search engine optimization takes time and effort but pay-per click is quick and dirty. It can also become expensive. I wonder if Google doesn’t give preference on search engine placement to those people who buy its advertising services.

Using Email Lists

We have always used email campaigns to grow our business. This has been very effective. Compared to direct mail, the cost is insignificant. Our marketing systems include extensive instructions on how you can use email campaigns to your opt-in recipients to promote the veterans aid and attendance benefit.

If you are interested in marketing support to promote the aid and attendance benefit, give me a call at 800-989-8137 or send me an email at Tom@careUtah.com.

Tom Day

Director, National Care Planning Council

http://www.longtermcarelink.net/a13consultant.htm

Send me an e-mail if you don’t want to hear from me again on this subject.