When we first started working with home care, home health, hospitals, long term care, reverse mortgage companies several years ago, we were surprised! The first thing that we noticed - most providers of senior care services did not recognize the need to be visible on search engines.

Some providers purchased Googe Adwords which can be helpful. But the most part, they had a website.. and did not market it. I guess the reasoning is “we have a website and that should be enough”. So, is it?

Good questions to ask yourself when asking whether you need more search engine visibility:

1. Do a Google search on “your company” industry keyword term, add your local city, and click the search button. For example, if you are a home care agency, the keyword search would be home care, senior care, elder care, at home care, and then add your local city; home care chicago. Do your competitors show up on first and second pages of Google? If they do and your website is not found in the first 4 or 5 pages, then you (obviously) need more visibilty.

2. Do a little research, on the web, on “users on the web” - this will give you information on the number of people using the Internet.

3. Go to this site https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - and do a query on your industry and local city, i.e. home care chicago and see how many users are searching on the Internet for that keyword term.

I just did a query using the above tool on the term home care chicago - guess how many people in November 2008 searched that term? 3600!!!

You may not even realize just how many people are looking for you on the web.

Before Carebuzz.com and WorkingCaregiver.com, my career was embedded in high technology. Not so much like it exists today. It goes way back to the conception of PCs.. desktops. Maybe many of you don’t remember back then or maybe you weren’t here, but my point is… we’ve evolved.. technology that is.

When helping care for my own parents, I was pretty amazed at the marketing mechanisms most companies in the health and medical industry used in order to get visibility and referrals. Since I was a long distance family caregiver and working full time, of course I used the Internet to do a lot of research on mom and dad’s health, help at home, and aging information.

Back in the early 2000’s when researching for elder care help, there was a lot of information but not well organized so, I developed WorkingCaregiver.com.  Today it still exists for families seeking local elder care. But out of marketing WorkingCaregiver.com, I was shocked to see how most providers of senior services marketed to adult children of elders. Actually, didn’t market to adult children of families!! The health, medical, and senior care industry… to this day market to one another!

Hey folks, marketing has evolved!

So, what’s wrong with that picture? If you are a Senior Service Provider, that’s a good place to start because it’s the doctors, hospitals, and geriatric clinics who are closest to the “sick” elders needing care. But let’s step back a moment… and ask yourselves this question… who is doing the primary caregiving for our older adults? Who do you think?

Out of that question Carebuzz.com is born.. helping evolve marketing providers of senior care to adult children using the web.