SEO for Medicare-certified home health agencies

Medicare only covers home health when a doctor or other provider sees the patient in person and orders the care, according to Medicare.gov. That puts referral sources at the center of your intake. When a physician's office, discharge planner or case manager checks a new agency, they want your service lines, the counties you cover, the payers you accept and how to send a referral. A dedicated page answers that in a minute.

A strong referral-source page includes:

• Counties, towns and ZIP codes your clinicians actually cover
• Each skilled service, with the clinician type who delivers it
• The insurance and payers you accept
• Referral intake by phone, fax or secure form, with the hours someone answers
• A link to your agency's profile on Care Compare

Give every skilled service its own page. Medicare's home health benefit covers part-time skilled nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech-language pathology, and people search for each one separately. A single “our services” page can't rank for home physical therapy and wound care at the same time. Separate pages can, and each one gives a referrer something specific to send.

Home health aide visits deserve a mention too, but as supporting content. Medicare only covers aide care when the patient is also receiving skilled nursing or therapy, so it rarely leads a search on its own.

They are built for exactly that. CMS publishes two home health star ratings on Care Compare: a Quality of Patient Care rating drawn from OASIS assessments and claims, and a Patient Survey rating based on HHCAHPS. Both are updated quarterly. Your website can't change the ratings, but it can put them in context and show what you do with feedback.

According to CMS, the HHCAHPS survey asks patients about how providers communicated about their care, the quality of that care and whether they would recommend the agency. CMS also states that consumers can use the survey data and star ratings when comparing and choosing agencies. Smaller agencies should know that a Patient Survey rating needs at least 40 completed surveys over four quarters, so a newer agency may not have one yet.

What we do: link to your Care Compare profile, make sure your agency name and address match it exactly, and build a steady flow of Google reviews so families see recent experiences alongside the government data.

Patients can only use the Medicare home health benefit with a Medicare-certified agency, so certification is one of the first things families and referrers look for. Health content also faces a higher bar in search: Google says its systems give more weight to strong E-E-A-T on topics that affect people's health. Your credentials need to be easy to find and easy to verify.

• Medicare certification, state license and any accreditation stated plainly, with numbers where appropriate
• Named clinical leaders who review your service and education content
• Structured data so search engines and AI assistants read the same facts a human does
• Accurate clinical language, with no promises about outcomes

Build one page for each county or metro you genuinely staff, not one per ZIP code. Each page should name the towns your clinicians cover, the hospitals you take referrals from, the service lines available there and a local intake number. Google's spam policies list pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse, so thin copies with the town name swapped do more harm than good.

Each real branch office also gets its own Google Business Profile and its own page.

Yes, and for many agencies it matters as much as patient search. A referral you can't staff is a referral that goes to someone else. Nurses, physical therapists and occupational therapists search for jobs by role and location, much like patients search for care. A careers section with a page per role and region, honest detail on territory and schedule, and job posting markup helps you show up in those searches.

We treat recruiting pages as part of the same plan, because for many agencies growth is limited by clinician hours as much as by referrals.