If you're already blogging for your senior care facility, chances are you've heard of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You've probably heard that using SEO in your blog posts is an excellent way to reach potential customers, but how do you use it effectively? This post is how to effectively optimize your blog posts so you can get your content indexed and found through search engines. Utilize the following tips while content marketing for assisted living in order to attract the right type of readers to your blog posts and website.
Decide on Target Keywords Before You Write Your Post
Before you write the first sentence of your blog post, it is important to nail down your search engine optimization keywords. Those keywords are the words somebody is likely to enter into a search engine when looking for your services. It may be "senior care," "nursing home," "assisted living," or variations of those words, but you need to have keywords ready to go before you write your post. It may seem counterintuitive to write a post around keywords, but that's exactly what you must do if you want to attract people to your site effectively.
If you are unsure of the keywords, you can use keyword software such as Moz or SEMrush to generate keywords and phrases. After you come up with the phrases and keywords, try plugging your keywords into Keyword Planner from Google or a like service and see which keywords work best. You'll want to pick keywords with a relatively low competition level in your geographic area and (if possible) a decent number of localized searches per month.
Write Your Posts Around Specific Keywords
Once you have the keywords you think are the best, start blogging. You'll need to keep your keywords in mind as you write and use them naturally. For example, let's say you decide on the keywords "Senior Assisted Living." You can come up with a blog title using that term people might search such as "best senior assisted living facilities." These phrases that include your keyword are called "long tailed keywords." These are keywords people may normally use in their search that may have high numbers of searches, but low numbers of local competition to rank for. In this way, you can stand out from the crowd when you have sentences or post titles such as "How to Find the Best Senior Assisted Living Facilities."
When you write your blog, don't stick your keywords in just anywhere. A big part of effective SEO is writing content flows in the right way. This means not just writing content for computers to index but also for people to actually read. The "readability" factor of content is a major component to Google's algorithm that decides if a piece of content is optimized correctly. You'll want to keep this in mind when choosing how to insert your keywords into sentences.
*Statistics on the Benefits of Frequent Blogging
Put Keywords in the Right Places for SEO
The keywords are great in the post, itself, but you also need to ensure you have the keywords in the right places in order to fully optimize a post for a specific term. You won't be able to get the keywords in every place and nor should you, but if possible try to include them in the following places:
- All headers, especially the "H1" or "H2" headers
- The title of the blog post
- The meta title
- The meta description
- The post or page URL
- The alt & title tags of any images on the post
- One "anchor link" in the first paragraph
And "anchor link" is when you link the target keyword back to another page on your website that you're trying to optimize that term for. For example if your blog title is "Things to look for in a Senior Living Facility" and the keyword you want to optimize is "senior living facility" you'll want to link this phrase in the first paragraph of the post to the "about us" page on your website. This tells Google and other search engines to index your "About Us" page as a "senior living facility" page and it will help it come up in searches for that term.
If this is somewhat confusing don't worry; you'll get the hang of it quickly. Below is a free guide on search engine optimization for assisted living and will go into more depth on each subject. Click the button below to download our free guide.
