My name is valerie van Leuven, I’m a registered nurse and a co-owner of LTC expert publications. My business partner is George no vison and you guys are listening to the home care revenue. Builders, monthly, webinar. It’s my turn this month, and so since we are the online portion of training for homecare revenue builders, and many of you are our clients already.
What we’re going to talk about today is something that I think is a little bit misunderstood. I’r going to say a lot of information pretty fast, so that’s why i’m going to send out the replay on a youtube article for everybody to read at the end of the presentation. I questions. So if you have any questions you might want to jot them down the way we take questions because we tend out a lot of people on these calls is by typing them in.
So if you do have a question any time you don’t have to wait till the end. You can type it into your little questions area there on your little dashboard that you have so with that. Let’s get started so we’re going to talk about backlinks for your home care website, we’re going to talk about what are backlinks. Why are they important? Can you rank your website on the first page of Google without them? How do you get more backlinks, I’m going to show you some examples with some pictures that are pretty interesting and what are other SEO factors that matter so LTC X, for publications is all about content search engine optimization and getting you to the first page of Google And backlinks are part of what we do, but there are cells and other things that matter to so we just thought we’d.
Take this one little piece and talk about it today. So what are backlinks backlinks are incoming links to a web page when a web page links to any other page. It’s called a backlink in the past backlinks for the major metric for ranking of a web page. A page with lots of backlinks tends to rank higher with all major search engines, including Google, and so we’re going to talk about some common terms that are associated with the word backlinks, so link juice.
We hear that a lot and, if you’re, not a web geek like me, it’s hard to remember all this stuff. You don’t have to remember it, but just have a general knowledge of it is really important, so link juice when a web page links to any of your articles or your website’s homepage, it passes, link juice. So if the New York Times links to your website, that’s huge, and that would be an awesome thing to have happen – doesn’t happen to us very often.
But it would be great because in New York Times of course, has tons of credibility and authority according to google. So if it links to your page is passing link juice, and that gives your website a ton of credibility and authority. This link juice helps with the ranking of the article and also improves your domain Authority, meaning it makes your importance of your domain and the eyes of Google go higher as a blogger or as a website owner.
You can stop passing link juice by using a nofollow tag. So let’s say you have a resource page on your website and many of you do. You want to list all the local and national resources which, by the way, is not necessary. But if you insist on that, then that is okay, but you need to make sure that those links are nofollow links when a website like yours links to another website. But the link has a nofollow tag and that’s something behind the scenes that you can’t see that link does not pass link juice.
So while the New York Times can afford to give you some link juice, you all being a small small player in the world of web sites cannot afford to pass much link juice. That’s why we encourage you not to have resources page, you really don’t need them. It’s okay: it doesn’t really hurt that much, but you know you are the resource, so people should be calling you for that information. Nofollow links are not useful concerning the ranking of a page as they do not contribute anything.
In general, a webmaster uses the nofollow tag, meaning behind the scenes when he is linking out to an unreliable site, okay, so in other words, if you are also leaking out to sites where you’re not sure, if that website or that biz, this is going to be Around five years from now or two years from now or you’re, not really sure about it, but it does have something valuable that you want to link to, and then you might want to make sure that your link is a nofollow link so that if that website Goes away it doesn’t, you know, hurt you or if it’s tagged as an unreliable site by google, it won’t hurt you.
So these are some of the things that your webmaster probably takes into consideration. But it’s just important to kind of know. The differences between a nofollow link and a do follow link. I do follow link by default, all the links that you add in a blog post or do follow links and these paths link juice. So if we put up an article on your website or a page on your website – and it has some content in it – and it has a link to another to like near the source of the article or something like that – that’s okay, and unless we tag it As a nofollow link, it’s called a do, follow, link and do follow.
Links pass the link juice in some cases, that’s appropriate, especially if you’re citing a source in your article – that’s perfectly appropriate, but you just don’t want to have tons of links going away from your site. You want to have people stay on your site for the most part linking root domains. This refers to the number of backlinks coming to your website from a unique domain. Even if a website has a link to your website ten times, it would be considered as the one link root domain.
I’r going to show you an example of that in a minute. So if you were to get some links from the new york times like this, a new york times, /a old age, blog link to your site, you’re really only getting a root domain link from the new york times. Even though the page is ford, /, old age, blog, so low quality links – and this is the biggest problem that I see most of our clients having and it’s usually from some mistakes that have been made in the past by pipe prior web developers prior SEO, people And that’s having low quality links, low-quality links are links that come from harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites or even porn sites.
Such links do far more harm than good. This is the one reason you should be careful when buying backlinks. Careful is not even the right word: you should never buy backlinks, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never buy backlinks. So if someone has told you that they bought backlinks, for you are they’re going to give you a backlinking service and you ask them how and there you say: well we’re going to buy backlinks for you.
You need to run away quick because low-quality links like that are typically going to destroy your rear, ranking of your website. Sometimes we run across a site that has been completely d indexed by google and the reason that has happened is because in the past that website has been abused and no one knows it. So a prior SEO person a prior web developer, someone who thought they were super smart, went out and bought tons of backlinks that are now invalid or on shady websites, and so your website is not penalized and there are ways to see if that has happened, and There are ways to correct it, but the reality is it’s a long haul, a long process and a lot of work.
You’d, almost not in every case, but in a lot of cases, you’d be better off starting over with a new website domain name as much as people hate doing that. Sometimes that is the very best thing to do. If you are completely what we call in the geek world sandbox and you have no chance of ever ranking for anything, but that doesn’t happen very often seen it once or twice in the history of our business.
And someone has come to us with a website that has just been pretty much destroyed by someone who work for them previously internal links. This is important to internal links. Links that are going from one page to another within the same domain are called internal links, and the process itself is referred to internal, linking so with our clients. You would see at the bottom of every website or every blog post, that we do if you scroll to the bottom, usually there’s a final sentence there that says, if you were an aging loved one, are considering in home care services in the Los Angeles area.
Please contact blah blah blah home care agency at buppa, buppa, buppa and somewhere in that sentence. We link home care Los Angeles to another page on your website and the reason we do that is because you need some internal linking so when I say home care, in Los Angeles, I usually would link to your services page because that’s where you talk about all Of your home care services that you provide in city of Los Angeles, so we do some internal linking with each blog post, but we don’t overdo it.
We only do it one time with 1g word phrase, so that’s important to know to anchor text anchor text is a text. That’s used to hyperlink to some other place, so anchor text. Backlinks are great when you’re trying to rank for particular keywords. This is you have to be very careful about this internal, linking you can link from any so the word home care, in Los Angeles, would be the anchor text and if you click on that text, that text goes to the services page and that’s okay, you’re, linking Internally, jarrow stuff on your own website.
However, if you were to go out and let’s say by a thousand backlinks – which you should never do – and you told the person who is doing those backlinks that every time they back link to your website from all these styles and other websites, that you want it To be the keyword phrase home care Los Angeles, so all these other bad shady sites are back linking to your website with a keyword, phrase home care, los angeles’, that’s a no! No! No, and because now Google will say: okay, you’re, spamming, rephrase home chair Los Angeles.
So now we are not going to rank you at all for the keyword phrase home care, los angeles’ goodbye and they that you may rank for senior chair los angeles but you’ll, never ranked for the keyword phrase home care los angeles’. So you have to be careful about your anchor text. What’s normal with anchor text is having a your text that says view our website or read more here. Those kinds of things are completely normal anchor text when you’re linking from one website to another website.
So why are backlinks important? They improve organic ranking backlinks help in getting better search engine rankings. If any of your content getting organic links from other sites. That content will naturally rank higher with search engines. Your goal should be to create links to individual posts and pages along with your home page. So if you do get a link back to your site or you know, you have an opportunity for somebody out there to link to your site – you not just directed to the home page all the time you want some of your backlinks to go to internal pages.
On your website, and that will help you also tremendously another reason that backlinks are important: faster indexing of your site, so backlinks help search engine BOTS to discover links to your site and crawl your site effectively, especially for a new website. It’s important to get backlinks as they help in the faster discovery and indexing of your site. So if you don’t have any backlinks, it’s really hard to rank.
If you have some backlinks, that’s great, especially if you’re in a really competitive market, i’m going to show you what that looks like for the keyword phrase home share, los angeles in just a minute. But when Google indexes – let’s say my website home care daily and they see a link to your website and your website’s brand new. Well, that’s great, because now they say okay, we also have to link this index.
This other website that Valerie’s home care daily.Com websites linking to so they go to your website and index it again. So all the backlinks help you get more discoverability referral traffic. So the other thing that backlinks view like say that your blog post is there’s a link to it on Facebook. People will click on that link and they’ll go back to your website. So one of the major benefits of backlinks is that they help get referral traffic.
Usually, referral traffic is targeted and has a low bounce rate, so referral traffic is going to come to you from places like facebook and twitter and linkedin pinterest other websites. That may have referenced your link and we see a lot of on our some of our national sites that we run. We see a lot of people on twitter, referring to the article that was just posted and saying that this is a good read and then other people will click on it and so we’re getting referral traffic.
Google wants to see engagement, so the more people are clicking on links and they’re. Going back to your website. That’s awesome! So engagement. It really helps and that’s why referral traffic is important. Ok. So this is a long, long string of text, but I want you to know something important: can your website rank without backlinks? Well, it is possible to rank without backlinks you’re going to have a difficult time trying, especially if you’re hoping to rank for a competitive keyword.
So if you’re in South Florida and you’re trying to rank for home care Palm Beach Florida, that is the most one of the most competitive markets, home care, San Diego, would be another example anywhere we have a large metro area or in the Sun Belt. We have a large group of seniors you’re always going to have home care, be an extremely competitive word. Google still sees quality backlinks as a sign of authority, and obtaining them should still be an important element of your SEO strategy.
There are two times when it’s possible to rank well without backlinks number. One is if you’re attempting to rank for a unique keyword, one that no one uses or phrase when there’s little competition and ranking that way, ranking becomes much easier. So if you want to rank for tiny little widgets in West Winnemucca Nevada, if that’s the keyword, phrase you’re looking for then use probably pretty easy to do even without backlinks but home care, Los Angeles is going to be exponentially harder.
It’s possible for individual pages to rank well without backlinks, as long as a site as a whole has several backlinks and is already seen as an authority within google, and i’m going to show you that in just a minute. This is common in large and well-known web sites, particularly media websites like, for example, the New York Times that would not have backlinks immediately upon publication, while acquiring backlink would certainly help.
They aren’t always necessary in this case, to rank. So if your website is super popular in the world, you know what you have less worries about: bank backlinking, because you’ve already done it and it’s a huge website and its trusted by google. So most of us aren’t drudge most of aren’t the new york times or Huffington Post or any of those. So we are going to have to work on backlinking. Most of us don’t live in West Winnemucca Nevada, so we are going to have to work on backlinking.
So how do you get backlinks, and that is the trick, so there are a few ways to do it. None of them are easy, but some of them are easier than others, so right awesome articles for other websites. Now, if you are our client and you are in our SEO program, then you know that you have articles on other websites. Already we have the approved senior network which covers topics like Alzheimer’s care and reducing hospital readmission rates and many other things home care safety.
Our safety in the home for seniors. Well, it just it’s all kinds of stuff, so we already have you with backlinks to your website on a national site and also on a local site. That is not yours, but that’s not going to carry you far far far far far. We do what we can, but you also need to work on some of that too. The best way to do that is to write an article and have it placed on another website. There are tons of eldercare websites out there that would love to have good content and there it’s easy for you that you know you’re, not writer, so we get it.
You can have somebody write the article for you, ghost write it for you and place it on another website. You can write awesome articles for your website. If you are a client, you know that you already have some content. That’s put on your website every single week and when you contribute content, that’s even better so that kind of, if you have a service like ours, that’s engaged with you. You already have this being done, start commenting, so you can start commenting on websites like caricom, caring calm, I don’t know whatever elder chair websites.
You can google them there’s a million of them out there. If they have a forum section, you can go in and comment. I wouldn’t go in and pay somebody to comment randomly and spam, a bunch of websites. You can buy anything on fiverr com. That doesn’t mean it’s any good. You want to pick and choose the websites that you’re commenting on and you want to make sure you can leave your URL or your website address there for people to find more information about you so start commenting, I’m submit to web directories and this isn’t just any Web directory, you need to research those web directories and make sure they are.
They have a good presence. The google trust them. If you just go willy-nilly and submit your pay, somebody to submit your website to 5,000 directories that can hurt you much more than it could help. You so only submit your website to web directories that are valid and that are useful. Okay. So we’re going to look at some examples, real quick and if you have any questions by the way, go ahead and type them into the questions area and I’ll answer them when we’re all done here so home care agency.
So I did a google search and i’m sitting in st. Louis missouri I just put in home care los angeles’ and after the paid results which are way at the top. Then you have your map and then you have upset doesn’t help, and then you have your top four right here. One two, three four: these are your top for organic results, so home instead is number one 24-hour home care’s number two home home read. Caregivers is number three and mom.
Some cares number four. So this is a good mix, because here we have a huge franchise and website, and then we have a medium-sized franchise website and kind of a big website franchise website. And then we have a one-off, and that means an independent person who is not part of a franchise. So that’s good to see so we’re going to look at each of these and talk about them. So if we were to look at home instead calm and look at how many backlinks they have now, this is for their entire network.
This isn’t just for that page or that one franchise location, because home instead has such a gigantic website, and they have so many franchise owners, and they have worked extremely hard on this, and I will tell you they even have their own websites that ranked really high. That are not that you would not know are owned by home instead, so they worked a lot on this. So this is a huge franchise. They have 31.
8 thousand web total backlinks, they have 1000 or 1.4 thousand referring domains. That means other websites referring back to them and they have one point one thousand referring IP addresses. So that means that their backlinks are not all clumped in one place or on one website. They are all over the place, and this is a fabulous representation. So, and you can see over on the right hand, side how how many backlinks they have four different kinds of websites, so they have 24 edge new website backlinks.
They have 65 net 65 CA, which is canada, 290 org and 898 domains that are calm. They also have some gov here so export gov is, I don’t know what that’s about, but that has they have two backlinks on that site and that’s pretty huge and the domain score for these. Are they have also dimas org? So these two are extremely high, ranked in the eyes of google and they have backlinks on them. So this is one of those things where you could hire a full-time person to do nothing but get you back lling.
You could hire them to do it for a month and then you can have higher them back like once, every six months to do it for you and update that. That is what the kind of that’s the kind of work it takes. This is a huge amount of work, so we don’t expect you to be a home instead, though, because you don’t have time for that and they have an entire staff dedicated to that. So, let’s go to the next one.
This is 24-hour cares now. I think there are small franchise they’re, not a huge, huge franchise, maybe middle of the road – and I know I’ve met them before, but haven’t done a huge amount of research. They are also on the first page of Google and they are number two on that list of home care Los Angeles and they only have 268 backlinks 56 referring domains and 63 IP addresses. So that is a good mix.
But what you can’t see here and what’s important to know is that these 268 backlinks on some pretty good websites, so our arch respite org has a high domain score, so they worked pretty hard on getting some really good backlinks. So this is a smaller franchise and they have done some good work and of course they have an office right in Los Angeles, so that helps to proximity but and they’ve been around a long time and they have good content on their website.
So that really helps so they’ve done a good job with their backlinking strategy. Even though it’s much smaller home read caregivers, they are another large franchise, maybe not as large as home instead, but definitely on the one long lines of a big franchised um and they have five point. Eight thousand website total backlinks to home, read caregivers, calm, 334, referring domains and 332 referring IP.
So they have also worked hard on this and there was a time when they hadn’t worked hard on some of the stuff and and they were having a hard time getting to the first page of google. But I can see that they’ve done a lot of work. So – and you can see here too, they have five point: six thousand of those backlinks are follow, links and only 154 are nofollow links, so this is a really good place to be, and of course they can do better, but it’s like I said it’s a lot Of hard work, so this is the independent home care agency that you saw there.
This is this fourth, the fourth person on the first page of google and they have a total of 171 backlinks 16 referring domains and 13 referring IPS, which is a good number and 171 total backlinks doesn’t sound too high, but they probably have some good backlinks they’ve. Definitely worked on a little bit, but I took a look at their website. It is a wordpress website and they do have a lot of good content on it.
So there’s other things that matter besides backlinks, but I can tell you that they’ve worked on this a bit, so content is really another key to this. So this just kind of gives you an idea from a smaller mom and pop shop. That’s not a franchise! All the way up to a huge franchise, the kind of work that they put in on backlinking. So let’s talk about other SEO factors and be sure to type your questions in and I will take them at the end here.
Other SEO factors are quality, unique content or blog posting every single week without fail, you can do it more than one time per week, syndicating your content. That means – and this is what we do for our clients – we provide them with that that quality unique content every week, and then we syndicate that content for them, meaning we send that content out it just doesn’t see on their blog. It can’t stay there.
It has to go out to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest Google+, if possible and there’s all kinds of places it needs to go so syndicating. Your content is important, get it out there, so your local community will find it. Social media engagement is important. So if someone sees your article on Facebook and then click on it and they go back to your website, Google sees that as engagement. If they like your article, if they you know, comment on your article, all these things are engagement, engagement from your e-newsletter.
So if you are our client – and you know that you have in monthly newsletter that goes out – that newsletter in and of itself is a little web site address. So you want to make sure that people are not only do you have a good amount of context to send that newsletter to, but that they are all. You can see that they’re clicking on different articles they’re scrolling through their finding a title they want to read.
They click on it. They’re sent right back to your website and that’s really important site structure is also important if your site is screwed up on the back end or it’s too hard for google to read, or it’s just breaking the rules somehow or it just doesn’t work right. The google is not going to like that, google specific tags and HTML markups. This is all geek speek, but on the backend of your website you should have all the structural pieces intact to make sure google knows exactly what it’s looking at it’s reading and and then it will give your website more prevalence if it can read it easily.
Seo of the static pages of your website so search engine, optimization means making sure the keyword phrases are there. Your location and Google knows where you are and what you do so the static pages of your website are pages like the about Us page in our services. Page those pages – don’t change very much at all. So it’s important that you have good search engine optimization of those pages. Your blog posts are not static.
Pages they’re added all the time, but your static pages are the ones that just don’t change very often and then getting rid of bad SEO practices. So if you were to look back at the history of your website, your URL, your website address, and you can see all the backlinks that it’s ever had. If you wanted to. You, can find a place on Google to do that. And if you know that someone in the past has really run amok with their SEO practices and they practiced on you, maybe – and they have looked at backlinks and bought them for you and dental kinds of stuff.
They could be even now today, even if they didn’t two years ago or three years ago, they could be jeopardizing the situation for your website. So those are the kinds of things that you want to take a look at. They may not even exist, their companies may not even be in business or they may be. A single person who you know just was doing it on the side and bad SEO. Practices are going to hurt you for years to come, so you need to make sure you get rid of bad backlinks and anything else that might be on your website.
So my final piece of advice is this: when it comes to SEO there are no shortcuts. No shortcuts at all, there is no way that you can go from zero to first page without a lot of hard work. Quality content optimized by a knowledgeable company wins every time. So when you are hiring someone to help you with your website, if you are not a franchise owner and you’re, an independent person who has to make all of these decisions, your local SEO guy, just because he belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t mean you right Fit for a home care agency, please be careful and make sure you hire folks that know the home care industry and know what’s going on, so I have a couple of questions number one.
How do you know? Google trust certain web directories? What I do is I look for reputable web directories that have lots of. I can tell by running some of the tests on the back end of our 4 sem rush and some of the other things I can tell which ones are trusted web directories and which ones are not, in other words, if they show up readily on the internet. They’re, probably pretty good if they are ones that someone says that they’ll they’ll get you a thousand web directory backlinks.
I wouldn’t trust that at all, if I don’t know which ones they are, but I can also send out a list of web a reputable web directories when I send out the recording so i’ll put a link to a list on with the recording. Is it necessary to pay google ads to get on the first page? No, it’s not you’re, probably on the first page of google for a lot of things. You do not have to pay. Google, organic results and paid results do not mix, so you can pay and use Adwords we have, but it has no bearing on your organic search.
So just because you have AdWords doesn’t mean you’re also going to be on the first page. Naturally, and if you don’t have AdWords, you certainly can be on the first page. Naturally the to do not mix a Google would be in huge trouble for that, so they do not mix at all. So, yes, you can be on the first page of Google without running Google Adwords, and if, if I were to give advice on AdWords, I would tell you this for google adwords.
This is for the home care industry only and no one else is going to tell you this, because of course they want you to run google adwords and spend tons of money. So here is what i’m going to tell you. This is home. Care agency only doesn’t apply to roofers or plumbers or lawyers, or anybody who sells t-shirts. This is for home care online. Google AdWords is not necessarily a good fit for home care, no matter what way you slice it.
It is not a good fit and the reason I say that is because we’ve tried it a thousand times over with many different organizations with many different experts. We have investigated it: we’ve sunk, our own money into learning whether or not this is viable – and it’s not in here is the rationale for that. If you have a thousand dollars a month to spend on google adwords, it’s the 8020 rule for home care, eight hundred dollars of that one thousand dollars will be spent on people clicking on your ads, who are looking for employment, two hundred dollars of that one thousand Dollars is going to be spent by people who really do need help perhaps, but there, as you all know, sometimes leaves don’t close overnight.
There are people who are in crisis and need help right now, and there are people who know it’s coming and they search for six months until the crisis hits or they sit on it. So there are two hundred dollars of money. That’s each month of your thousand they’ll actually be allocated to people who actually need care, because your employment seekers, no matter how you spin it no matter what negative keywords you put in no matter what you do, eight hundred dollars of that typically is going to go Toward employment seekers, if you can afford that budget, you can afford that 8020 rule by all means, I would say, use AdWords if you’d like, but and if you scale it down.
Let’s say you only have a three hundred dollar-a-month budget for Adwords you’re talking about ten dollars a day and one click can sometimes cost five dollars, you’re getting two clicks a day, and so, typically speaking, the percentages get even worse. The smaller your budget is so. If you at three hundred dollars a day, you may have, you know five clicks that are really people seeking care and the other cliques are all going to employment seekers.
So AdWords is not necessarily a good fit for home care, and that’s just my opinion. Maybe a really dumb question, but if you comment on a form of another site, could you leave your facebook link instead of your url? Yes, you can leave your facebook link, but you really should use leave. You don’t want to give Facebook any extra credit. You want to give your website extra credit, so I’m not sure why you would want to leave your facebook URL, because you should have a valid website and you should want to drive traffic to your website not to facebook.
Facebook has all the traffic it needs. Your website is the place where people are going to interact with you, they’re, going to pick up the phone and call you or they’re going to fill out a form. So that’s where you want to send people all the time. Okay, I think that’s our last question. So I am going to wrap this up and I appreciate everybody being on the call. If you have any questions, you can call us at 888, 404, 15, 13 and Georgia, or I will call you back if your current client, you can use the support desk.
You know how to do that, and I appreciate you all being on the call today and we’ll talk again next month. Thanks everybody, bye, bye,
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