Home Care Franchise SEO Case Study
In February 2024, I was asked to take over the SEO program as a white label specialist for a home care franchise with more than 150 offices in the U.S. My goal was to completely revamp the brand’s local search strategies for their individual offices and implement whatever changes I felt necessary for turning their organic metrics around.
The franchise had worked with a previous SEO agency that failed to produce the growth they promised, and a majority of their individual offices were struggling to appear in Google search and attract local leads as a result. This situation was putting significant stress on franchise owners, many of whom were facing significant revenue losses each month.
I was hired to create entirely new Local SEO strategies for these home care offices to improve their organic search traffic/rankings and bring local leads that would generate new monthly revenue.
Before
Website Metrics Before SEO Strategies
Below are two graphs from February 2024 that show organic traffic and rankings for all individual office locations combined. The first graph shows total organic traffic going to these individual home care providers each month.
The second graph looks at existing Page 1 keyword rankings in positions #1 – #10, as well as SERP Features, which are critical rankings at the top of search results that include Featured Snippets and brand mentions in Google’s AI Overviews.
In February 2024, these local websites received just 2,528 organic visitors to all the individual office websites. That same month, they ranked for a total of 731 keywords on Page 1, with an additional 248 keywords appearing in a SERP feature.
Quick explanation on keyword rankings: For these results, we are examining non-branded keywords that are appearing on the first page of Google. Here’s why: The SEO strategies I implemented targeted non-branded keywords only, such as “home care in MARKET”, “in-home caregivers near me”, and “MARKET elder care services.”
Branded keywords, which are the franchise’s actual name and similar variations on it, are not included in a typical SEO strategy because those keywords are used by searchers who already know what company they are looking for. In Local SEO, we rather want to focus on audiences who know they need services, but are shopping around different brands before reaching out. Those are all tied to non-branded searches.
SEO Issues that Harmed the Visibility of Home Care Offices
To begin, I audited about a dozen or so websites belonging to the franchise’s largest offices to look for clues explaining their poor SEO performances. It quickly became clear that the home care offices’ on-site content was pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable duplicate content for search engines.
Each location’s homepage was nearly 100% identical to one another, which produced hundreds of almost entirely duplicate pages on the franchise’s website. Because an office’s homepage is the most important page for its individual organic performance, this level of identical content was no doubt a huge red flag to Google and other search engines. Furthermore, these local homepages were missing critical keyword optimization for their nearby markets and appeared to be operating with some outdated research as well.
I also noticed that each of these locations featured the exact same client reviews on their sites. This meant that a home care office in Albuquerque was showing the exact same reviews as an office in St. Louis on their websites. When evaluating local, service-based businesses, reviews from the community are some of the most important elements that Google looks at to determine the rankability of a website.
Strategies
SEO Strategies Performed
Keyword Optimization & Content Strategy
To ensure we were starting with the right foundation, I performed a comprehensive keyword research project to capture new data around the brand’s most important keywords, such as “home care services” and “in-home caregivers.” Using this information, I then cross-referenced these keywords with each local office’s service areas to understand how their target audiences uniquely searched for these terms.
Finally, I dove into the SEO data for each local city/town that an individual office served to recommend one primary market and a handful of secondary markets we would target with new homepage content and keyword optimization. For example, an office that serves Atlanta needs to know where local searches for “home care” are most popular with reasonable difficulties in surrounding suburbs to determine its secondary market targeting.
In that example, I examined local keyword data for Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Decatur, Smyrna and beyond to find those answers and make optimization decisions accordingly. But all these offices’ identical content issues would need more than just new keyword optimization to compete against other home care providers in local search engines.
As part of implementing updated SEO strategies for this franchise, I also personally rewrote 50 new homepages for their individual offices from August 2024 to July 2025, and created a guide for other content writers to do the same on the remaining websites.
High-quality, useful content is so critical to achieving success in local search engines, so I paid extra focus to crafting the best possible homepages I could for these offices. Weaving in local markets, optimization for core keywords (i.e. home care services), and internal links to other pages throughout the body content, these new homepages jolted the local sites’ ranking performances in local search.
Improvements to Local Reviews
Finally, I worked with the franchise’s web development team to remove those duplicated reviews on office websites and instead pull in reviews from their Google Business Profiles. This simple change populated the locations’ websites with fresh, localized reviews that were entirely unique from all other office sites.
Not only are the presence of legitimate reviews crucial to achieving quality rankings by Google’s evaluation metrics, they’re also incredibly important to converting new visitors into new clients. Social proof like real reviews are extremely useful in home care SEO, so I made sure that change was implemented early in the strategic process by Spring 2024.
SEO Results 364% Increase in Organic Traffic
+364%
Organic Traffic
+380%
SERP Features
+26%
Page 1 Rankings
With 18 months of new SEO strategies implemented, Autumn 2025 looks very different from Winter 2024 for those 150+ franchise owners. In September 2025, these office websites received a total of 9,193 organic visitors. This is a 364% increase in monthly organic visitors from February 2024, which saw 2,528.
In the same month, these local sites ranked for a total of 922 keywords on Page 1, with an additional 943 keywords appearing in a SERP feature. That’s a 26% increase in Page 1 rankings, as well as a 380% increase in SERP features. Take a look at those final graphs showing the effects of our home care SEO strategies below.
Results
