7 Questions That Expose a Weak Home Care Marketing Vendor

Most home care owners have been burned at least once. Six months of retainer, a monthly report full of impressions, and no measurable change in the thing they were trying to fix. The reasonable response is to distrust everyone selling marketing — including, to be fair, us.

So here are the seven questions that separate vendors who do something specific from vendors who do something vague. They work on any agency, ours included. Where they cut against us, we've said so.

1. "What exactly do you guarantee, and what's the remedy?"

Good answer: something narrow, controllable and verifiable, with a stated consequence. "Your job pages pass Google's Rich Results Test within seven days or we work free until they do and refund the first month."

Bad answer: a guarantee of hires, leads, applicants or rankings. Nobody controls your pay rate, your interview process, your local labour market or Google's ranking. A vendor guaranteeing those outcomes is either inexperienced or planning to blame you when they miss — the escape hatch is always in the conditions.

Also bad: no guarantee at all, coupled with a twelve-month contract.

Follow up with: "Who decides whether the guarantee was met, and how?" If the answer is "we assess it internally", that's not a guarantee. If it's "you run this free public test and see for yourself", it is.

2. "What is the mechanism, in one sentence a caregiver would understand?"

Good answer: a specific causal chain. "Your open roles get individual pages with JobPosting markup, which is what Google's job panel is built from, so caregivers searching in your city can see your jobs."

Bad answer: "We do SEO and improve your online presence." That describes an activity, not a mechanism. You cannot verify an activity, and you cannot tell when it stopped.

A vendor who can't name a mechanism in one sentence is selling effort. You'll be paying for hours, and the results conversation in month four will be about how much work they did.

3. "Show me the last thing you fixed for someone like me, and how you proved it."

Good answer: a specific artefact. A before-and-after test result, a screenshot with a date, a named client who'll take a call.

Reasonable answer for a newer vendor — and this is where we sit on client case studies: "We've audited five agencies in this market and here's the pattern we found, with the method so you can reproduce it. We don't have a twelve-month case study yet because we're new to this niche, and I'd rather say that than show you results from a different industry."

Bad answer: case studies from unrelated industries presented as though they transfer. HVAC review counts tell you nothing about caregiver hiring, and a vendor who blurs that is hoping you won't notice.

4. "What will you report to me monthly, and why that metric?"

Good answer: metrics tied to your business outcome, with a reason for each. Applications received. Hours to first contact. Roles live and valid. Consultations booked.

Bad answer: impressions, reach, "visibility score", or a proprietary index nobody can audit.

There's a live example worth using as a test here. Google confirmed a logging error affecting Search Console reporting for "Job listing" and "Job details" search appearances from 16 April 2026 onward — impressions and clicks for those appearance types have been under-reported since. Ask a vendor working on job visibility what they report and why. If they're planning to bill you against job-listing impressions, they either don't know about a documented reporting fault in their own field, or they're happy to show you a number they know is broken.

5. "Do you work with my competitors?"

Good answer: a clear exclusivity policy with a defined boundary. Ours is one agency per zip code, which is why a metro genuinely runs out.

Bad answer: "We work with lots of agencies in the area" delivered as a credential. In a local hiring market, a vendor optimising two agencies for the same caregivers in the same zip code is being paid twice to move applicants between their clients.

Follow up with: "If a competitor in my service area signs next month, what happens?" A vendor without a rule will discover one is inconvenient.

6. "What do you need from me, and what happens if I'm slow?"

Good answer: a short, specific list with time attached. "About thirty minutes: your three current openings, access to your careers page, your Indeed and Google Business Profile logins."

Bad answer: "We handle everything." Nobody handles everything. Vendors who say this are usually planning to publish generic content that requires nothing from you — which is why it produces nothing for you.

The follow-up that matters: "What are the conditions on the guarantee?" If it depends on access you haven't given, you need to know that on day one rather than in the argument on day sixty.

7. "Who owns the work if we stop?"

Good answer: you do. The job pages, the markup and the profile improvements live on your domain and your accounts, and they keep working after the relationship ends.

Bad answer: anything hosted on the vendor's domain, on a subdomain they control, or inside a platform that switches off when the invoice stops. Some vendors host your job listings on their own site — which produces results that vanish entirely on the day you leave, and which quietly makes their traffic figures look like your traffic figures.

Follow up with: "If I cancel, what exactly do I keep?" The answer should be immediate and specific.

The three red flags that should end the meeting

A price that only appears after a call. Demo-gated pricing exists to price you personally. Ours is published, including the disqualifier that Medicaid-heavy agencies shouldn't buy it.

A twelve-month contract with a guarantee that only applies at month twelve. That's not risk reversal; it's a lock-in with a story attached.

"We'll handle your reviews" without explaining how. If a vendor's answer involves filtering unhappy customers away from Google, or writing reviews on anyone's behalf, they're proposing to break platform policies and FTC rules using your business as the vehicle. When it goes wrong the account is yours, not theirs. How we approach that is written down on our compliance page.

Turning it around: the questions a good vendor asks you

You can tell as much from what they want to know. A vendor who should be taken seriously will ask:

• What percentage of your hours are private pay? (If they don't ask, they don't know that Medicaid margins can't sustain the spend — and they'll sell to anyone.)
• How many caregivers are on your roster?
• How many cases did you turn away last quarter, and why?
• Who answers a caregiver's application, and how fast?
• What does your careers page currently look like?

If the first meeting is entirely them talking, the engagement will be too.

Do the diagnostic yourself first

Before any vendor call, spend fifteen seconds finding out whether your open roles are visible at all: the free job visibility check reads your careers page live and reports what Google can actually see. Then run the turnover cost calculator to know what the problem is worth.

Walk into the conversation with both numbers and you'll find out very quickly which kind of vendor you're talking to. If they can't engage with your own data, that's your answer.

Related

• Caregiver jobs not showing on Google — the diagnostic every vendor should have run before pitching you
• What caregiver turnover actually costs — the budget context for any proposal
• What we guarantee and refuse to guarantee — ours, in writing