It is a common challenge for home care companies and home care franchises to find cost-effective ways to grow their patient volume outside of referrals from hospitals, doctors, physical therapy centers and other medical referral sources. With the 54% increase in search queries in search engines such as Google for home care related terms in the past 5 years there is a very strong reason to add home care search engine optimization and home care pay per click marketing to your marketing mix.

First, let’s explain what this all means. There are two types of search engine rankings, the paid rankings and the organic rankings.

Paid search rankings make up 30% of the total web traffic that comes from Google, Bing & Yahoo. The paid rankings appear on the top of the search results and on the right hand side of the search results and have the word “Ad” next to the ad or “Ads” above them.

Paid Ranking Example

The big advantage to pay per click advertising is that you can turn it on and get immediate results and you have 100% control over the text that is placed within the ad itself.

Organic search rankings make up 70% of the total web traffic that comes from Google, Bing & Yahoo. The organic rankings appear in the main body of the search engine results page.

Organic Ranking Example

The advantage of organic rankings is that you do not need to pay per click to get traffic the traffic is free. The disadvantage of it is that it takes a lot of expertise and effort to optimize your website and other websites that direct traffic to your website in order to obtain rankings and traffic. The other disadvantage it that it takes several months to see results in traffic and rankings improve over time. Yet if you have expertise and can put in the effort you can see huge amounts of inexpensive traffic that is worth a lot of money to your home care franchise.