Senior & Assisted Living SEO: How To Rank Your Community 1st
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process that aims at increasing the value that Google assigns to your website. Adopting some carefully selected assisted living SEO principles can dramatically improve your position on the result page.
An effective SEO for assisted living communities is essential to ensure that your community presence is tangible and has a significant impact. Following a targeted senior living SEO strategy can more accurately reach potential residents and improve your conversion rate.
Here we will provide some great tips and advice on creating website content that will convince Google that your site is trustworthy and contains valuable content.
Before we delve into the various assisted living SEO strategies, it is essential to realize that an effective SEO for assisted living communities strategy develops over time. Refining your SEO strategies to accommodate new trends and market situations is critical for successful SEO for assisted living communities.
Let’s start with the page that provides the all-important first impression.
The Importance of your Homepage
Your homepage is where you make the critical first impression. Your page must highlight the advantages of becoming a resident in your facility. It should reflect the atmosphere and attention to detail your establishment devotes to making residents feel welcome and comfortable.
Critical information on your homepage is the contact phone number, which should also be on every main navigation page. Contact information should be easily accessible, and the “Contact” buttons should be enabled.
Individual Landing Pages
Google will rank specialized landing pages higher if the content is specific, so it is essential to separate your services and detail them on dedicated landing pages. Simply listing all the services your facility supplies on one page will result in a poor ranking, so highlight the advantages of your facility on separate pages.
SEO for assisted living communities comprises a wide range of activities, and separate pages are required for facilities like nursing care, independent living, sports and recreation facilities, meals, and entertainment options.
Utilize this checklist to assist Google in ranking separate pages higher:
- Ensure that readers can easily follow your text.
- Make sure your titles are clear and, where possible, locally defined.
- Include keywords and accurate descriptions in your page title.
- Check that search engines are familiar with the structured data.
Keep in mind that the primary aim of your page is for readers to find the content interesting and relevant. The material must provide information readers regard as helpful and encourage them to utilize the “call to action” functions.
The content on your pages is the most potent weapon in your arsenal to attract potential residents. Current consensus indicates that over 25% of your inquiries will view and evaluate your facility through the quality of your website content.
Location is a critical factor in getting traffic to your site. Location is one of the most relevant criteria that form part of the keywords utilized in searches, so let’s run through the important elements of local SEO.
Why is Local SEO Important?
Google My Business is an essential part of your webpage. Usually, the location of your facility will be the principal determinant of readers clicking on your site. The locality is critical when people are looking to move to an assisted living facility in whatever form.
According to this study, almost half of all Google searches are concerned with local information.
Elderly parents want to move closer to their children or to areas where the climate is comfortable, security is good, or where specific facilities are close.
Consequently, it is critical that your information on the Google My Business page is accurate and contact details are comprehensive.
The senior living or assisted living communities are industries based on enormous trust. People searching for facilities where they will spend the rest of their lives look for and demand absolute reassurance that they will be well cared for and be treated with dignity and respect.
Having a website near the top of the rankings generates trust and places your facility above those that rely on advertising to promote their business.
The building blocks of your SEO are the keywords and phrases that will direct potential residents to your site.
The Three Main Areas of SEO
Search engine optimization is divided into three categories, on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Here we will go through each one and explain how to use them to increase traffic to your webpage.
On-Page SEO
The aim of constructing the contents of your webpage is to make it easy for the algorithms utilized by Google to understand what your web page is about quickly.
Once Google has read the detail of your content, it can accurately match the contents to the target audience.
Blogs are an essential part of on-page SEO. They offer the opportunity to create specific text relating to different facets of your services. Contents of blogs can be made using the search terms people have used on Google. A search like “dementia care” becomes a keyword that can be used as a title for a blog describing the care facilities you have to accommodate residents with dementia.
Keywords
Keywords are an essential element of your SEO for assisted living communities strategy. Fortunately, Google has an excellent free platform to help you identify specific keywords, so look at Google’s Keyword Planner.
The trick here is to utilize the words and phrases people have used to search for particular facilities (keywords) and incorporate them into your web page’s text. It is a matching exercise.
A person interested in an assisted living facility offering a heated pool would begin the search by typing in the phrase “assisted living with heated pool.” A blog post with that title would be a great match.
When inserting keywords into your content, keep them as part of the natural flow of the content. Forcing them inappropriately into your text will have a detrimental effect on SEO.
There are three basic rules to follow when inserting keywords into your text:
- Make them relevant.
- Make them natural.
- Make them match the search intent.
Blogs need to be linked to your web pages by internal links. It is essential to connect blog posts that provide additional specific information to the relevant web pages. For example, you may have a page detailing the community’s recreational facilities, and a blog should be posted on the heated swimming pool and the health benefits of swimming.
Off-Page SEO
We now need to focus our attention on specific actions that are not on the webpage but will result in improved results and more traffic to your website.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to link your page to other relevant sites, but you must identify credible, trustworthy, and relevant sites.
Senior and assisted living facilities have a host of products used in all aspects of their business.
Writing compelling emails to suppliers highlighting your use of their product at your facility will provide the opportunity for your site to be linked to their products and brands. For example, if your meals are made with organic produce, this opens up a broad spectrum of links from your suppliers to your site by highlighting your attention to serving healthy and nutritious meals.
Another part of off-page SEO is the use of social media like Facebook, Instagram, and any other forums that gets your presence out there. A critical part of your social media campaign is the importance of consistency.
Make sure that the details of your facility are always presented in an identical manner. Name, email, contact phone numbers, and address must be reliably and coherently presented.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves tweaking your website to ensure that the technical aspects of the site create the opportunity for your site to rank higher in search results.
Issues like the speed your website loads at and whether your site are crawlable and indexable all play a significant role in getting your site up the rankings.
It would help if you also used the HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure) protocol to establish a secure connection between your respondents and your site.
Another critical factor is ensuring your site is accessible as one domain. This has the result in reducing the number of clicks required to access all pages on the website.
A key factor to remember is that the number of searches conducted on mobile devices exceeds all other devices, so your web content and blogs must be designed to be easily accessed. Google has the facility to check how friendly your website is on mobile devices, and it is well worth your while to check.
It is essential to ensure that all contact buttons are easily visible and available on mobile devices.
The Importance of Content to Produce a Great ROI in Senior and Assisted Living SEO
The quality of your web page content provides your readers with information about your services and related topics. Accurate and contemporary content results in readers viewing your site as trustworthy and authentic. The scintillating content will have little impact if the SEO strategy does not complement the content. It is a combined approach that is going to generate a higher ROI.
Here are some guidelines to steer you in the right direction.
- Take time to understand your potential audience better.
- Be aware of their needs, interests, and apprehensions.
- Be diligent in inserting keywords in your text. Check on your competitor’s keywords and find trending keywords.
- Provide content that is informative and better than your competitors.
Blogs are such a convenient way to introduce content that provides additional and relevant information, so let’s quickly look at some principles to employ when using Blogs.
Critical Elements of Blogs
Blogs are one of the most efficient ways of getting your message out to potential residents. They can add information on specific topics without detracting from the overall website construction.
They work hand in hand with the website that is easy to navigate and accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Ensure that the fonts you use are clear and of the correct size for easy reading. Remember what we said about mobile utilization?
Blogs should aim to accurately describe the benefits of living in your facility and why it is superior to other local facilities in terms of the quality of life and the monetary value it offers.
Facebook activity showing your facility winning an award or residents enjoying some social event is a great way to channel traffic to your website. An associated blog providing additional information about the Facebook content will provide a greater incentive for respondents to view your website.
Conclusion
Blogs are a neat way to ensure that your website will generate significant traffic. They have the advantage of being topic specific and allowing the reader to concentrate on relevant issues.
SEO for assisted living communities entails a wide range of topics. Each topic needs to have a specific text explaining why your facility should be considered in the most favorable light.
While your website may detail all the facilities and services you offer, potential residents want to find out how the specific requirements they need will be met by your facility. A list on your webpage may serve as an introduction, but additional information is required, and this is typically provided on separate pages.
Blogs on specific topics are ideal for providing additional detail and highlighting why your facility can offer superior services to potential residents.
Call-to-action features are essential elements of your website. Unlike the basket and check-out options on sale sites, the call-to-action buttons on assisted living sites need to offer additional information and establish personal communication channels between client and facility.
Features like the option to view a short video of the facility and reviews by residents are a great way to introduce the facility.
Interviews with staff and management of the facility may also serve to allay fears and apprehension customarily associated with moving to an assisted or senior living facility.
Your overall aim must be to demonstrate that your facility will match the requirements and aspirations of potential residents. Your selection of keywords and blogs will provide clarity and assurance to your future residents.