We work with home care agencies to get them to show up better in Google (and other search engines) primarily by getting them broadly listed (see my letter from last week) and by increasing the number of positive reviews that their clients give them (see the letter I wrote in January).
But, there are some simple things you can do to increase your CTR (click-through-rate) from the search engine results page (SERP). The higher your CTR, the better you will rank in Google.
Here are a few tricks to help your boost your CRT:
- Check your title tag. Your title needs to demonstrate the gist of the page in the first few words. You can use the leftover space to describe the page more fully. Be sure to stay within the character limit (55 to 60 characters); a title that goes over may confuse the searcher, especially if important main keywords are over the character limit and therefore not present in the search result.
- Avoid using calls-to-action in your title, or spammy words and repeated exclamation marks, since this may alarm searchers (and search engines) and discourage them from clicking on (or showing) your result.
- Optimize your URL. Make sure the URL briefly explains each page using the appropriate keywords, in as few words as possible. These are the words after the slash defining your sub-pages on your site (e.g. ***.com/ (here).
- Write an engaging meta description. The meta description is where you can write engaging copy and try to get people to click. Google does not take into account the words you use in the meta description in terms of keyword ranking, so you don’t need to worry about including a load of targeted keywords. However, you should still include the keywords that are relevant to the page, to demonstrate to the searcher that the result is relevant to the search.
The maximum a meta description should be is 160 characters, so try and get close to this number to ensure that you take up as much space as possible on the SERP with your result. Additionally, try and include a call-to-action in the meta description to encourage users to click.
Help is available if you need it.
It is very likely your webmaster can do any of the above things very easily. Should you not have a webmaster (or one in which you have confidence) we stand ready to help. Getting your website to be SEO-friendly is not a big, nor expensive, project. And, with years of experience specifically in the home care space, we know more than a few short-cuts and precise language to use.
If you would like a full analysis of your website in some detail, we will produce it for you for free.
Simply click HERE and complete a little information so we will know who you are and where to send the report. You may use the report to work with your own webmaster or it will give us a starting point should you want us to help you.