How To Improve SEO For Your Assisted Living Community

With more seniors using search and social media today, senior living communities need an effective senior living SEO strategy to increase visibility and climb to the top of search results. Sixty-seven (67%) percent of seniors are online today; we know that they are looking – the question is, who will they find? SEO is also critical to target your specific audience and differentiate from other senior living options. Seniors looking for independent living communities will use different keywords and a different search approach than seniors or their families looking for assisted living or skilled nursing.

Senior Living Keyword Research

Ranking for keywords is important but only if those keywords are used by your target audience. There are quite a few tools that can help you pick the best terms. Google Keyword Planner and Keywordtool.io are great places to start, they’re free and will give you insights and estimates of search volumes. This can help you narrow down to the keywords you really want and ensure that your content remains relevant. Senior living can be very specific and very local; the best approach to get local traffic is to target keywords with high volume of search as well as keywords with geo identifiers. For example, if your assisted living community is located in Houston, Texas, you’ll want to include the terms Houston, Texas in some of your keyword phrases so that prospects in the Houston area can find your website.

Long-tail keywords are also critical for traffic generation. For example, a long-tail keyword for an assisted living community could be “assisted living in Texas” or “affordable assisted living.” They’re more specific, may not necessarily have a high volume of search traffic, but tend to be less competitive (and therefore less expensive) for bringing in the people you want.

Go Beyond Keywords

Google whips out more sophisticated algorithms regularly and becomes a bit smarter every day. Search engines have begun incorporating the semantic web concept, identifying context and better aligning search queries with the user’s intent and behavior.  What this means is that you need to do more than just have specific keywords on your website or optimized metadata and H-titles. Your content needs to be free and valuable. In the senior living market, it could be a downloadable PDF with a checklist to help families find the best community for their senior parent. Click on the button below to download a template.

Optimize for Conversions

You’ve worked to increase traffic on your website, but that traffic needs to convert. While defining your SEO strategy, you also want to look at your website design and user experience. Is your website design senior-friendly? Are your landing pages optimized for conversions? Do you have phone numbers, online forms, a newsletter sign-up, clear call-to-action callouts in place?

Consider your mobile website experience as well. Does your website load fast? Visitors do not like to wait and will leave if it takes more than three seconds to load, thereby limiting your growth and lead generation. And since the latest Google Speed Update, a slow mobile site also affects your ranking. Run a test here.

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Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant

More than ever before, people search for information online and read reviews in order to make a decision (by the way: what do your reviews look like on social media and listing websites?). You will attract more traffic if you regularly publish new, valuable content that helps your visitors learn more about your assisted living facility and provides tools to select the right community for their needs.

Google loves fresh content (did you know that they have a Freshness Algorithm and a fresh content ranking factor?). Your new content, obviously optimized for your chosen keywords, and frequent updates let Google know that your site is relevant to the topic and will, therefore, help with your rank. The more good content your website has, the better.

Build Backlinks

A high-quality, diverse link building campaign is instrumental to your SEO strategy. Search engines like Google measure relevancy and popularity based on how many times your website is linked across the web. A great way to build highly relevant backlinks is to get your senior living facility listed and verified on Google My Business as well as on senior living directories like A Place For Mom, caring.com, senioradvisor.com, retirementliving.com, or seniorly.com. This will also help attract visitors who would not have found you otherwise.

It’s critical to keep your information consistent throughout the directories and using a data management tool like Yext or similar will make your life so much easier. 

Let Blue Sky Marketing Help

If you need help with your SEO strategy or want to talk about what our team can do for your senior living community,  , founder and chief marketing strategist at Blue Sky Marketing.