Helping Hands home care is a leading national home care provider with over 155 branches across the UK. They’re a perfect example to look at if you are a home care provider that needs more leads from SEO. Here’s what Helping Hands home care gets right about SEO.
Home care SEO is different from general business SEO (but the same as healthcare business SEO) in that families who need help are often in a high emotional state, they need help urgently and there are trust concerns around getting someone to help their loved one in the family home. People who need support are often vulnerable and may have dementia or learning disabilities.
Helping Hands home care is a brand that understands that local discovery and credibility are important. They have a trust-led, local first SEO strategy that is well developed and meets the needs of families who are looking for help.
Local first search strategy
Helping Hands home care has over 155 branches across the UK, so local visibility is a major part of its SEO footprint. The website has targeted local branch pages with location intent built into them, not just broad national terms like “home care UK”.
For example, they have branch pages for “home care Hereford” and “home care Gloucester” with unique content about the area and towns that they serve locally and an introduction to the team in that area. This local first approach matches how families actually search for home care near them.
Trust led content and reputation
When a family is looking for help for their relative or someone is looking for help for themselves, social proof is essential to reassure them. They need to know that your home care agency has helped other people in the local area and other people like them.
Reviews and testimonials, especially from third party sites, provide social proof that informs a care decision. Strong reviews help both click-through to the site and confidence once the visitor is on the website. In the healthcare sector e.g. care homes and home care trust is essential.
Search features like Care Quality Commission inspection ratings, customer reviews, frequently asked questions, and local specific information can strengthen visibility, but they also increase credibility. Fake reviews do the opposite, of course!
Strong local landing pages
Location pages matter for ranking in city-, locality- or branch-based searches. These work more effectively than a generic search, they are familiar and reassuring. They support SEO performance and raise confidence in the home care provider.
Strong local landing pages do more than just swap out the name of the location and add place names, they give genuinely useful context – in Helping Hands home care’s case they introduce you to the local team so that you can put a face to a name before picking up the phone or emailing them.
This is where dynamic content and programmatic page generation is invaluable – when done well – there are many examples of websites where this has gone awry and the wrong content is shown on the page or the page is not crawlable or indexable, especially dynamic URLs.
Technical SEO discipline
Large websites like Helping Hands home care and small websites need to be technically clean and usable for both search engines and for real people. There is real value in technical audits which can uncover issues with the website that can be resolved.
For example, Helping Hands home care underperforms on website tests, scoring only 66/100 for performance and 54/100 for best practice while accessibility and SEO score highly. Most of the performance score is caused by page load speeds which is common in a big website but this will be impacting on user experience.
A good clean site structure helps bots to index the website and helps people to move around the website and find what they need. In healthcare, this is extra important as users may be older and be less able.
Websites that are easy to use are also perceived as more trustworthy, whereas a website that has broken links or doesn’t behave the way the user expected can erode trust. In a competitive sector like home care they’ll leave and go somewhere else.
Technical SEO supports long term rankings and stops local pages from underperforming (all pages actually!) It is the foundation of good SEO performance and underpins the strategy and content work.
Authority building
As far back as 2014, Google introduced the concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). In 2022, it updated this acronym to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Relevant links and sector authority build trust in the eyes of search engines (aka Google, Bing, etc).
Home care is a competitive industry so brand reputation and authority matter even more in order to compete against other home care providers (and there are many – an estimated 13,000 registered domiciliary providers in the UK). These signals matter as much as on-page optimisation.
Helping Hands home care has a moderate authority score, a low spam score and over 3,000 backlinks but more importantly, it has a solid brand reputation with both employees and customers rating them highly. A strong reputation like this, with relevant backlinks ranks the brand higher in search.
Conversion ready SEO
The primary goal of SEO is not visibility and traffic alone, but enquiries and leads for local branches. Local traffic and Google visibility followed by conversions suggest that the strategy is aligned with the end goal.
Helping Hands home care have clear, strong, calls to action throughout their website. They make sure that the contact phone numbers and their opening hours are clearly visible.
This brings us back to where we started. Good SEO in care should reduce the friction for families who are looking for help, are highly emotional and need to access care urgently. The entire SEO strategy should keep this in mind at all times.
Helping Hands home care’s SEO works because it is local first, trust led and built for real people to access rather than just Google. They have a strong local first strategy with local landing pages to increase local branch visibility, good inspection ratings, abundant reviews, moderate authority, backlinks and conversion focused optimisation, which all combine to focus on what matters most – helping families find support.
Want to improve your own local-first, trust-led SEO strategy? Book a free SEO review for your care brand.