Home Care Websites: Pro Tips for Success with Valerie from Approved Senior Network

Is your home care website struggling to keep up with modern technology? Discover the secrets to staying ahead in the digital world with Valerie from Approved Senior Network. With over 16 years of experience, Valerie shares her invaluable insights on the essential aspects of crafting a high-performing home care website. From the importance of regular updates to ensure your site is technologically up-to-date, to the critical elements of user-friendly navigation and mobile responsiveness, Valerie covers it all. She underscores the need for lightning-fast loading times and how these factors can drastically enhance user experience and maintain your competitive edge.

But that's not all—Valerie dives into the world of search engine optimization (SEO) and quality content. Learn from her real-world examples of beautifully designed websites that fell short due to poor SEO practices, and why basic SEO is non-negotiable from the get-go. Valerie also provides practical advice on making your website accessible and easy to read for all age groups, particularly the older demographic, emphasizing the importance of prominent contact information and clear communication of your service areas. Don't miss these valuable tips to ensure your home care website not only looks fantastic but also performs exceptionally well. Tune in and equip your business for digital success!

Visit our website at https://asnhomecaremarketing.com
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, this is Valerie, and today I'm going to talk to you about your website, your home care website. At Approved Senior Network, we've been working with and designing home care websites for non-medical home care and home health care websites since 2009. We've been in business 16 years, though, so that's a lot of experience over the years with WordPress and building websites and seeing how our competition builds websites and seeing how the big players in the market build their websites and which ones perform better. I will tell you this On the whole if your website is two to three years old, it's time to start thinking about upgrading your site, and they don't mean you have to have it. If you like the look and feel of it, you can keep that, but the back end of a website gets old pretty fast. Technology changes every day, and as we advance into AI and better WordPress themes and all kinds of great back-end technology, the website that you built three years ago is becoming harder to keep up with. I mean, any web developer who's been around for a long time will tell you that older websites are harder to manage. They are fraught with errors as technology moves forward. So think of your website as an investment in your business.

Speaker 1: 1:37

If you started out with Wix or Weebly or Squarespace and your business has grown, think about investing in a website that really does do all the things I'm about to talk about. First of all, user-friendly navigation, whether it's on your phone and actually you want to make sure on your phone, on your mobile device, that your website looks really good. So on your phone it needs to have user-friendly navigation. Of course, it needs to be mobile, responsive and the loading time for a mobile version of your website needs to be super fast. Now, years ago 2018, google told us we don't care about anything but the mobile version. So today we measure website speed not only on desktop, but also on mobile. So when we develop a website, we test it on the desktop how fast does it load? Then we test it again on a mobile device how fast does it load? And we need to get those scores in the A range. It needs to load in less than a second or in 1.5 seconds. A website that loads in 5 seconds, 11 seconds, even 3 seconds on a mobile device is going to get left behind, because Google wants their users to have a great experience and a user is not going to even wait 3 seconds for that website to load. We want instant everything right, so your website has to load fast. Seo everything right, so your website has to load fast. Seo.

Speaker 1: 3:07

Lately and I can't believe this still exists, but lately I've run across websites that were beautifully developed but had no search engine optimization added to them after the fact. The pages of the website were some kind of technical gobbledygook stuff. It didn't make sense. The way they're appearing on Google search didn't make sense. So what happened was a web developer developed a really nice site but they did nothing on the back end to make it say the right words and give the right descriptions. So we had to go in and fix all of that for that client. Even though we did not build the website, they paid us to fix their SEO. So all of our websites are 100% search engine optimized from the minute they're developed. And then some of our clients pay for enhanced SEO developed. And then some of our clients pay for enhanced SEO, which is even more additives to your website to give it better visibility.

Speaker 1: 4:03

But all websites should have at least some basic SEO and then quality content. All of the content on your website needs to be easy on the eyes and easy on the reader's brain. So we're talking about 50 year old, 60 year olds and even older that might be looking at your website and they may not be super web savvy. So it's really important that your website is easy on the eyes and uses bulleted lists and shorter paragraphs so that people can skim the page really fast. Contact information your website phone number, your office phone number, should be at the very top of your website and it should be visible both on the desktop and mobile, and on mobile that number should be clickable. So if that's not happening, make sure you talk to your web developer.

Speaker 1: 4:51

We see time and time again where a website pulls up. It looks beautiful, but nowhere does it say what areas they, but nowhere does it say what areas they serve. Nowhere does it say the phone number. I have to search for the phone number or the contact information. There's this really good book out there called Don't Make Me Think and it was written back in 2012 by a website developer, and the idea behind Don't Make Me Think is to educate web developers that the consumer doesn't want to have to think about how to make contact with the business owner, so don't make me think about how I'm going to have to change pages or search around your website to contact you. If I have to do that, I'm gone, so don't make me think.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Make sure your phone number, the areas you service and even your services are located on the homepage in an easy-to-see format. Your content should be unique to your website and not a duplicate of anyone else's website. Let's see what else Cl few testimonials. Put them on the homepage. You can have an entire page dedicated to testimonials, but make sure that you have a few on that homepage. Google Analytics should be set up from the very beginning of a website going live so that you can see over time how traffic is changing, improving, decreasing.

Speaker 1: 6:12

What happens when you run a caregiver ad, what happens when you turn it off? All those traffic patterns need to be noted and you should learn about how people are reaching your website. All of these things are things that you can do or your web developer can do for you very easily, but what we find is that we're often playing the rescue card. People come to us and say my website's not performing the way I thought, or I'm not getting great customer service, or it doesn't load fast, or it doesn't show up anywhere on Google. Can you help me and absolutely at approve senior network. We can help you with all of your website needs. Just go to ASN home carecom and click on website portfolio and you can see a list of all of our websites and not all of them, but you know a great number of them samples and you can click through and see those websites in real time. Thanks for watching.