Time to read: 9 minutes
Is Your Current Marketing Approach Filling Beds in Your Retirement Community?
Here’s Why SEO for Senior Living is Worth Your While.
Marketing your facility can be challenging. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be once you know where to start and what to do with your website to improve your online visibility. We want to help you learn how your facility should approach SEO, and what the easiest things you can do are. Let’s start with the basics:
First, What is SEO for Senior Living Communities?
Senior living SEO is a nursing home digital marketing strategy that focuses on gaining new visitors to your website by advancing your presence on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This is done through a variety of activities related to both on-site and off-site factors that combine to demonstrate to the search engines (and users) that your website serves as an authority on a series of topics and relevant keywords (such as “senior living facilities” and “independent living communities”).
Senior living SEO is a bit different than any other industry, as not only will a successful SEO campaign regularly drive potential residents through your sales pipeline, but you have to cater to both seniors looking for themselves and their loved ones who may be looking for them.
Getting Started on Improving Your Senior Living Community’s SEO Strategy
We want to help you get your website’s rankings on track to ensure that your community is front and center on search engines. Here are the three things you need to do:
Step 1: Determine the Top Keywords You Want to Target
What’s the first step in getting started in SEO? Keywords!
You typically want to begin by determining which keywords your audience is searching for in your area. There are a few tools that can help you with that. We’d recommend you check out Google Trends or even sign up for the effective keyword research and keyword tracking program called SE Ranking to assess where your site currently ranks for those terms. Ultimately, by tracking your keyword list, you can then test and measure how effective the changes that you make to your website are, both on and off-site.
An example of some terms you’d likely want to target includes
- Senior living in [your city]
- Senior apartments in [your city]
- 55+ communities in [your city]
- Retirement communities in [your city]
- CCRC [state or city]
- Continuing care retirement community [state or city]
Step 2: Optimize Your Senior Living Community’s Local Profiles
We’ve found that senior housing communities are focused on the immediate area around their facility and try to market to people within a 5- to 15-mile radius. So now that you have your keyword list and you’re ready to make changes, the next step is checking how you appear online locally.
If you haven’t claimed your profiles on Google and Bing, do that before doing anything else.
The next step you’ll want to take is to add as much information as you can to the profile, making the profile as complete as you can with photos, correct hours, etc. But you should also ensure you have the extras enabled, such as wheelchair accessibility.
It’s a good idea to take a look at your competitors in search to see to what extent they’ve filled theirs out, too. It may give you some good ideas for what categories to pick and what content to add.
And as you scope out competitors, be sure to search with different location modifiers in your search, such as [term], [term] [city], and [term] [near me], to see what changes. Here is an example of this approach:
Step 3: Add Helpful Content to Your Key Service and Location Pages
Try to include content that will not only help people understand the differentiation points of your business but also provide information on how to contact you and find your location. So, whether you decide to do your homepage or a location page (if you have two or more locations), the page linked from your local profiles should have these sorts of elements:
- Unit and facility photos: Showcasing the different options seniors will be able to choose from is going to be the most important element you have on your website. Designate an area that easily shows different bedroom and layout options, alongside accompanying unique photos.
- Location visuals: Embedding a Google Map of your location and adding an address to the page is also essential, even if it’s at the bottom. This will also be a great area to include parking details, nearby places your residents enjoy, and even pricing.
- Staff photos and bios: Senior care, much like medical care, is dependent on the quality of care by the providers. You can help humanize the search experience for users by adding photos and short bios of the people who run your facility.
- Additional facility information: Obviously, adding what you provide is vital to differentiating your community from the other places adults are considering. But not only does this information help the people visiting your site, but it also helps search engines to learn what search queries to rank you for.
Step 4: Ask Your Residents and Their Loved Ones for Reviews
While steps 2 and 3 can help you get on the map, one of the biggest parts of ranking locally and continuing to rank is consistently getting reviews. To stay on top of getting reviews, you have to get crafty in how you naturally ask your residents to leave you feedback on your Google Business Profile.
One suggestion we have is to set up a drip campaign to do a 30-60-90-day email campaign that automatically gets sent to new residents. This can typically be done using your customer relationship management (CRM) software or even in whatever email marketing platform you use.
And if all of that sounds a bit too techy, another idea could be to utilize flyers or posters with a QR code that leads to your Google Business Profile! You can hang these printed items in the elevator, common areas, or in residents’ mail.
Pro-tip: Use feedback from your reviews to create helpful content, such as FAQs, to answer any potential concerns from future residents.
Real Senior Living Case Study: Why We Stopped Focusing on Rankings and Started Focusing on Move-In Rates
We actually practice what we preach and in the past worked with several of National Church Residences’ locations, including Water’s Edge of Lake Wales.
Our senior living SEO agency provided various services, such as local SEO, design enhancements, and PPC management, which helped them fill up beds, and this is how we did it:
- Enabled Google Analytics and goal tracking
- Handcrafted call-to-action (CTA) to encourage conversions
- Optimized copy for service and location pages
- Ran ads for seniors across Google and Facebook
Due to our efforts, they saw traffic increase by 138%, 96% of which was from organic. And conversions increased by 295%! Not only did they reach nearly 100% occupancy, but they even had to put new leads onto a waitlist.
Here’s Why Your Senior Living Facility Should Be Investing in SEO
We know that you may be on the fence about either hiring an in-house SEO resource or deciding whether to hire an SEO agency to help. It’s a big decision! But the reality is that people are using the internet to find their next home or one for their loved ones. And SEO is the best way to ensure that when they search, your facility shows up. Here are some statistics that demonstrate how valuable SEO is:
- According to a study conducted by Google, approximately 75% of people surveyed who were looking for senior living options used search engines (Senior Housing News)
- Along with this, 39% of those looking for senior living for themselves or a loved one utilize organic search through search engines vs. paid listings (Invoca)
- 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, illustrating why getting strong Google Business Profile reviews is so important (Search Engine Land)
- Google has found that Baby Boomers spend up to 23 hours per week online, giving senior living companies a lot of touchpoint opportunities (Senior Housing News)
- Additionally, 45% of seniors who are 65 years of age and older utilize at least one social media platform, making social media posts and ads a lucrative marketing possibility, too (Pew Research Center)
- Plus, as the Pew Research Center has also reported, nearly half of the 65-and-older population utilizes Facebook, so the platform is a particularly viable one for your senior living marketing efforts (Pew Research Center)
- Smartphones are especially popular among seniors, with 77% owning them, and as much as 60% of seniors’ website visits originate from them, making mobile-friendliness essential for your website (Invoca)
- 48% of those who are searching online for senior living options are searching for themselves (Senior Housing News)
- As much as 83% of those looking for senior living online do not have a specific provider in mind, creating great openings for proven marketing tactics to draw them in (Invoca)
- 6,000 online searches for senior care and related topics are made every hour in America, giving businesses so many opportunities for engaging with prospective customers (Senior Housing News)
- 70% of those searching for senior living will call during their search process, making it (Invoca)
Want Results Like National Church Residences? Or Have a Question? We Hope We Have the Answer
We hope this article was helpful for you as you take on implementing your new SEO strategy for your community. But if there is anything we didn’t cover or you’d like us to give you more help, please contact our team.
