Growing your home health website not only grows your business, it also leads to more people cared for, and more jobs for caregivers. But how do you do it?

While every business is different, there are a few key elements that make incremental growth attainable, measurable, and sustainable for any home health agency. 

These days, most people visit a website to learn more about their services before inquiring or scheduling care. A strong digital presence and quality sales tools will grow your home health business while maintaining ADA and HIPAA compliance, attracting quality caregivers, and increasing the number of clients who start personal care services.

Is Your Agency’s Website Ready to Grow?

Feeling ready to grow and being prepared to grow can be vastly different things. Your drive and readiness to build your agency are absolutely essential for growth, but it’s imperative you have the right tools in place to facilitate sustainable growth. 

In an eye-opening analysis of over 200 home health agencies websites, our research revealed that only 72% have clear contact information listed on their website. And a staggering 83% don’t have a way to self-schedule appointments online at all. Even if a potential lead is highly motivated to request care, they might not know how to schedule a visit or reach your customer service team with your current website.

A professional website with clear information, intuitive navigation, and good search engine optimization will lay the foundation for more successful outbound communication, sales conversations, and highly satisfied clients.

So, are you ready to improve your home health website?

Click on the links below as we go deeper into what to consider to improve your website so patients, caretakers, and candidates can find you online easily. 

Improve your home health website with clear information, calls to action, & easy navigation

How speed affects your home care website design

Why your home health website design should be mobile friendly

Tools for home health website sales

Bonus: 6 Tactics to Grow Your Home Health Agency

This post is part of our series on how to improve home health care websites. You can view all the topics on the How to improve your home health website blog post.

Growing your home health agency is an excellent way to contribute to your community. You’ll simultaneously create new jobs for nurses and caregivers while providing care to those in need. 

While there’s no secret recipe to achieve instant business growth, there are tactics you can use to drive traffic to your website, increase consideration of your services, and systematically increase the list of patients you serve. 

There’s a lot of competition in the home health care industry, but the right business tactics can help you grow your business, serve your community, and emerge as an industry leader.

Begin Growing Your Agency With These 6 Digital Tactics

Whether you’re starting a new home health care agency or looking to build on your existing company’s success, rapid and sustainable growth are possible with the right tools and tactics. 

Your digital properties including your website, app, and social media pages can be designed and used to help your agency stand out from the crowd and take your business to the next level. 

#1 Social Media

90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation Xers, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers are active social media users. The average person spends about 3 hours a day on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. If you’re not using social media to reach your audience, you could be missing out on the opportunity to reach thousands of potential patients, nurses, and caregivers.

The key to effective social media marketing and engagement is taking the time to understand your audience, which platforms they frequent, and regularly posting content that resonates with them. If your posts aren’t driving much engagement now, try sticking to a regular posting schedule and varying the types of content you post.

Since 40% of people 65 years and older use Facebook regularly to see pictures of their grandkids, reconnect with old friends, read news, and find activities and events taking place in their community, you might consider starting with your Facebook page before moving on to other social networks.

Not sure what to post? Here are some ideas:

• Local events
• Patient testimonials
• Activities for seniors
• New patient webinars
• Health & nutrition information
• Updates to your app & website
• Exercises for those with limited mobility
• Live interviews with nurses & caretakers

Social media channels are ripe for building strong communities where people engage regularly, give feedback, and become loyal customers. Direct social media communication can be approached much like in-person networking where you engage in conversation, build trust, answer questions, and share valuable information. 

When people respond to your posts or reach out with a question in social media, be personable in your response just like you would if they were to walk into your office.

Use their name to show they have your attention.

Address their question/comment before sharing more information about your home health care agency.

Share information and resources to help them understand their options.

Type out answers in addition to directing them to a page on your website.

Respond privately if personal information is needed.

Tip: Start with one social media account and invest your time and energy there instead of spreading yourself thin across all the channels at one time. Once you’ve established yourself on one you can begin adding others. 

#2 Website

Every home health care agency absolutely needs a website to attract new patients and caregivers, but it’s not enough to just have a pretty homepage. 

There is a lot that goes into designing and developing the experience a website provides to craft an attractive website that is easy to find, easy to use, and effective at driving new appointments.

In fact, 73% of companies invest in professional website design to help their home health care agency stand out from competitors. Does yours stand out?

Your website should be:

Fast! Studies show that you only have 3 seconds to make a first impression as 40% of visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. A web development team can help you optimize your site to make it load faster.

On Brand. A website that’s consistent with your brand image and personality is much more effective that one that just looks nice. A well-branded website builds brand recognition and helps your home health care agency stand out from competition. Make sure to provide your web development team the branding assets they need to align your logo, colors, graphics, and voice across your website and app.

Search Engine Optimized. When a customer searches “home health care agency” in Google, you want your company to be at the top of that list. For that to happen, you need to optimize your website. Search engines look for many pages of relevant content that use the keywords customers are searching for. Your chosen web development team can help you manage the technical elements including, meta tags, title pages, image tags, and an updated business directory listing. 

Mobile Optimized. 63% of home health care service searches begin on mobile devices including smartphones and tablets so it’s essential your website is optimized for these smaller screens. That might mean adjusting the text and image sizes on your existing website or designing an improved experience for mobile visitors including a collapsed menu or forms with fewer fields to complete.

Educational & Informative. Quality content that is relevant to customers will help improve your website’s SEO and establish your agency as a thought leader in the home health care industry. Use a variety of content to appeal to your audience including, photos, videos, blog posts, and FAQs. The more types of content, the more appealing you are to a varied audience. 

Tip: Include images, videos, and blog posts that showcase positive reviews and testimonials to build trust with those who want to learn more about your home health care agency. 

#3 Live Chat

Live chat has become the top support channel of choice for many potential patients. In fact,  41% of consumers prefer live chat support over any other customer service method. More importantly, the home health care industry is just starting to dip their toes into this highly effective tool, which means that any business using it will stand out. 

Live chat, also called live support or chatbot, allows your business to have a real-time text conversation online with visitors to your website. The purpose is to allow a person to get immediate help, whether they have a question or would like to make an appointment. 

Commonly found on retail websites, live chat is an innovative and powerful tool for a growing home health care agency. 

How to Choose a Live Chat Tool

Choosing a reliable live chat tool is essential for success. While you can find live chat website plugins, a professional web development team will help you design, implement and even manage an intricate and beneficial live chat system. 

If you’re ready to add a live chat tool to your website, consider these questions to help your chosen developer implement the best solution for your home health care agency.

Questions to consider:

1. Should your live chat work on smartphones and tablets?
2. Is your team ready to answer online questions in real time?
3. Should live chat be available 24/7 or just during business hours?
4. Would you like the ability to proactively reach out to your website visitors?
5. Are you interested in automatically saving chat records and/or collecting data?
6. Would you like to integrate it into your customer management and/or marketing software?

If you’d like your live chat tool to work around the clock, you’ll need to either have a customer service team that can respond 24 hours a day, 7 days a week or an automated response system. This is where hiring a web development team can make a big difference.

If you don’t have the staff to respond in real-time, a web developer can design your live chat tool to immediately respond to frequently asked questions, schedule appointments, and update profile information like a new address or phone number. Your automatic responses can be programmed to run 24/7 or just during the hours your customer service team is unavailable, like nights and weekends.

Modern live chat systems can also empower your home health care agency to initiate new conversations. For example, if a customer has visited multiple pages on your website pertaining to companion care, the live chat tool can alert your team to strike up a conversation. Simply reaching out to inquire about the care needed can give them the push they need to schedule appointments. 

Offering live chat on your website will help improve the customer service experience your home health care agency provides, which will also set the tone for the quality of care a patient can expect to receive. As 56% of people admit they have stopped doing business with a company following a poor customer service experience, it’s essential your live chat tool is configured to offer excellent and reliable service.

Tip: If you implement live chat on your website, make sure that there is someone monitoring responses regularly to get the full customer support benefits. If you don’t have someone on your team who can manage it, there are 3rd party teams available to help. Ask your web developer to recommend a reliable team.

#4 Online Appointment Scheduling

What’s the most important factor that influences a patient’s decision making when scheduling an appointment? 

51.3% of patients say convenience and access to appointment scheduling is the single most important factor. Online appointment scheduling makes it easy for new and existing patients to book care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week while also reducing the administrative tasks your team is involved in and providing a better experience for everyone involved.

Online scheduling can also be extremely beneficial to patients interested in scheduling multiple appointments and people who schedule care for their loved ones. It’s especially beneficial to those who may be hard of hearing and have trouble making appointments over the phone.

From a caregiver’s perspective, online scheduling also helps them streamline their daily schedules by allowing them to schedule based on their patient’s proximity to other appointments that day. 

As digital resources, like online scheduling, become more prevalent in the health care industry, patients are beginning to prefer the ease and convenience of using these systems. Without an online scheduling tool, you may be losing out on new patients who would prefer to book online or don’t have time to call during normal business hours. 

Tip: When looking to add an online scheduling system, talk to a web development team that specializes in home health care websites and apps. They can help you incorporate new online scheduling tools that include automated appointment reminders to help reduce no shows and late cancellations.

#5 Landing Pages

Another aspect of your web development should be the addition of landing pages. Your core website will have a lot of information, but landing pages allow you to target messages and improve interactions to achieve a specific goal such as scheduling in-home care following a surgery.

Landing pages are especially important if you invest in advertising. When advertising, associated landing pages should encourage viewers to do something very specific like schedule a consultation or download a brochure. 

Landing pages can help drive traffic and improve SEO, but most of all, businesses use landing pages to generate new interest. In fact, 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each unique marketing campaign. 

Tip: For an exceptionally effective landing page, make sure you work with your chosen developer to zero-in on the offer and focus on what you want people to accomplish. Remove any distractions or additional links.

#6 Mobile App

It might seem like a huge undertaking to consider building an app specifically for your home health care agency, but the ROI is definitely there for an app done right. By the year 2022, there will be 258 billion mobile app downloads, many home health care agency apps to improve access to care. Will yours be one of them? 

An app can help your home health care agency:

Enhance the patient experience. Mobile apps are specifically designed for smaller screen sizes, so it’s easier and simpler for users to schedule appointments and set up automated medication alerts.

Provide easier access. Unlike your website, an app is always visible on a person’s screen so your services remain on their mind. Mobile apps can often be designed to open faster with a simplified experience to target specific needs such as accessing upcoming appointments.

Offer better care. Apps allow home health care agencies to have a direct relationship with customers by enabling communication wherever they are. Your app can be built to send push notifications reminding users of upcoming appointments, medication schedules, or test results.

Increase caregiver efficiency. Your app can be designed to make it easier for nurses and caregivers to self-select new patients, input care notes, get appointment reminders, access critical patient information, and get driving directions on the go.

Streamline operations. Apps can automate routine processes and improve workflows by tracking completed appointments and sending details straight to your payroll department to eliminate extra paperwork and processing time.

Tip: Work with your chosen website development team to ensure your app is worth downloading and offers the features that will help your home health care agency grow.

Get Ready to Grow Your Home Health Care Agency!

Growing your home health care agency can be done systematically with the right blend of innovative digital tactics and strategic marketing.

At Onward Development, we understand the importance of embracing digital technology to improve the patient experience, increase appointment bookings, encourage repeated use, and build brand loyalty and trust. As patient expectations grow, we’re here to help you take advantage of this prime opportunity to get ahead of your competition and grow your home health care business with a website and/or app. 

Want to learn more ways you can encourage your home health care agency’s growth? 

This post is part of our series on how to improve your home health website design. You can view all the topics on the How to improve your home health website blog post.

Did you know that 63% of home health service searches begin on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets? This is why it is imperative your home health website design works on all devices, particularly on smartphones. 

While most websites will display on mobile devices, a website designed for smaller smartphone and tablet screens provides a much better user experience. Before smartphones, websites were designed to a fixed size to display properly on a standard computer screen. 

Today, devices are built in a wide range of screen sizes and websites need to be designed to fit a variety of viewports (the area of a website that can be seen on a smartphone, tablet, or computer). 

That means all images, text, and tools used on your website need to fit 6.1” iPhone 11 screens, 6.8” Samsung Galaxy Note Plus screens, 10.2” iPad screens, 12.3” Surface Pro 7 screens, 21.5” iMac screens, etc. It’s important all images and your website’s viewport are optimized for these mobile devices, fonts aren’t too big or too small for the viewport, and the website layout adapts to fit all screen sizes.

In addition to building mobile-friendly websites, developers pay close attention to how long it takes for pages on your website to load on different mobile devices. If your website is difficult to navigate or takes forever to load, visitors may become frustrated and even take their business to a competing agency without giving yours another thought.

Common problems with a website’s mobile experience include:

• Slow load time
• Poor formatting
• Difficult navigation
• Broken or missing images/text

Google works hard to provide its users the best possible experience and will actually penalize a website by knocking it down in search results if it does not display well on mobile devices. 

According to Backlinko, a website that shows first in Google search results averages 31.7% clicks while a second page search result averages out considerably lower at 0.78%. That means no matter how great your website is, a poor mobile display can cost you your first page search result even if the search was specifically for your agency’s name! A subpar mobile website can even bump a competing agency with a mobile-friendly website up above your listing in search.

The good news is, it’s possible to add a mobile version to your existing home health website design or build a new website that displays equally across all screen sizes.

This post is part of our series on how to improve your home health website. You can view all the topics on the How to improve your home health website blog post.

As more and more new inquiries begin online, it’s important you have effective sales tools built into your website to truly grow your home health agency.

For example, what are your current options if a website visitor has a question about medication pickup and delivery services? Can they call your phone number directly? What if they are hard of hearing? Can they email or do you provide a contact form?

Chat windows are growing in popularity for their ability to quickly provide answers to commonly asked questions and offer personalized support. According to author and influencer, Neil Patel, about 79% of people use live chat when it’s offered on a website and 57% actually prefer to use it over other communication when making decisions about using your services. Simply adding live chat functionality to your website has the power to increase conversions by as much as 45%.

Live chat windows can be set up as a live connection to one of your customer service representatives in addition to existing phone support. They can also be programmed to automatically provide scripted support to help visitors feel valued and heard during their decision making process.

Another excellent sales tool to add to your website is a self-service appointment setting tool for consultations and services. These make it easier for patients to schedule care on their own time and take control of their health. Adding appointment setting tools can help decrease the time your team spends on the phone and increase the quality of customer service provided.

If you do any digital advertising or manage a social media presence and don’t need to adhere to HIPAA compliance, you might also consider adding a Facebook pixel and/or re-targeting tracking code to your website for better success. These simple additions to your website’s code help advertisers better target your audience and display your ads to the right people. This, in turn, makes your advertising campaigns more effective and can be instrumental in growing your home health business.

This post is part of our series on how to improve home care website design. You can view all the topics on the How to improve your home health website blog post.

Does your website load immediately, or is there a lull? 

Believe it or not, every millisecond of load time counts against your home care website as potential patients and family members increasingly expect immediate results. Just two seconds while your banner image loads can frustrate people and send them running to your competitor with a slightly faster website. 

In fact, more than 50% of people will completely give up on your home health agency if it takes more than 3 seconds to load your website on their smartphone or tablet. 

Every. Single. Second. Counts.

If you’re getting ready to launch your first website or improve an outdated website, be absolutely certain it’s built to load pages and run scheduling tools quickly on all devices, regardless of a person’s internet connectivity. 

There are a number of strategies skilled website developers use to increase a website’s speed while still maintaining a robust, interesting, and content-heavy website. For example, they often save images as JPEG instead of a PNG to cut the file size in half, resize them to fit the webpage appropriately, and some may even compress the image to encourage a page to load quicker. 

Experienced development and design teams know that as a website’s load time increases from 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability that a visitor leaves the website before it loads increases by a stunning 123%. 

If you’re thinking about a new home care website design, ask your chosen developer what your current load times are and what it will take to get them all under 3 seconds. They may be able to clean unnecessary JavaScript code, remove unpredictable 3rd party widgets, and even tell you exactly how many images is optimal for your website to load in under 3 seconds every time. 

Of course, websites should be designed to grow with your business as you add new locations and new services. As you grow and best practices evolve, be sure your chosen web development team will continually optimize and improve your website to ensure no code or images negatively impact load times on any device.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDNs work by saving a version of each website you visit to help it load quicker the next time you visit. The saved version is especially handy when a potential patient tries to visit your website when traffic is heavier than usual due to a limited time promotion or deadline. Our CDN is designed to help make your website faster, stronger, and more reliable to empower your agency’s exponential growth.

Our CDNs Ensure Your Website:

• Loads quickly
• Can grow & expand affordably
• Can withstand heavy traffic surges
• Continues to function well as your daily visitors increase

This post is part of our series on how to improve home health care websites. You can view all the topics on the How to improve your home health website blog post.

Take a moment and visit your home health care website. Try to look at it as if you’re seeing it for the first time. 

Is it clear what services your agency offers? Are there any buttons or text that encourage you to click to schedule care or learn more?

When a potential patient or caretaker lands on your home health care website, they are most likely looking for more information about the services your agency offers, where care is available, pricing, available jobs, or how they can schedule an appointment. A good website not only contains this information, but also makes it easy to find and understand by offering a visually appealing website with a positive user experience.

Your website should be designed to make it quick and easy for website visitors to find the information they need. In fact, there’s a whole field around this idea. It’s called User Experience Design (UX) and User Interaction Design (UI).

Experienced website designers often incorporate call-to-action buttons into a website’s design to encourage clicks and drive traffic to specific pages, like your appointment scheduling page. These virtual buttons are designed as part of a good user experience to visually stand out from the rest of the page and drive clicks to increase conversions. 

What is your number one goal when a new visitor lands on your homepage? Whether it’s scheduling a consultation, requesting more information, or learning about your agency’s unique philosophy, a call-to-action button will make that desired action very clear.

Search bars, tags, and landing pages can also be extremely helpful for visitors looking for something specific. You might highlight popular topics such as finding daily care for an aging parent with alzheimers or short term care for surgery recovery in a banner right on your homepage.

Hiring expert user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) designers will ensure your website is professionally built for easy navigation and conversion optimization.