Assisted Living Search Engine Optimization: Your Guide To Gaining Traffic

Assisted living provides a solution for over 800,000 Americans who need help with daily living activities but do not require full-time skilled nursing care. Seniors and loved ones considering assisted living facilities often begin their searches online. Assisted living search engine optimization helps ensure your facility gets seen among the over 30,000 assisted living and other residential care communities in the U.S.

What Is Assisted Living Search Engine Optimization?

When potential residents or their families search for information related to assisted living, search engines provide a ranked list of results with the most relevant results at the top of the list. Search engine optimization is a collection of techniques that help your site rank at or near the top of these search results.

In addition to the general search results, search engines such as Google also provide local results that focus on relevant businesses that are within a certain distance of the searcher’s location. Because most assisted living residents choose a facility near where they already live, it is important to rank well in both the general and local search results.

What Are the Benefits of Assisted Living Search Engine Optimization?

The first few listings on the search engine results page get the majority of clicks. SEO helps you rank higher on the SERP, resulting in more visitors to your site. This benefits your assisted living facility in several ways.

Saves Money Over Buying Ads

SEO costs less than buying ads and can boost your rankings for a longer period, as long as you keep your content up to date. The more SEO content you produce, the better your results get.

Builds Trust

Choosing an assisted living facility is a big decision for residents and their families. SEO techniques reassure families that they are making the right choice by building your facility’s reputation as a trusted provider.

Informs the Public

Potential residents and their families usually have a lot of questions about assisted living. The content you produce to boost your assisted living search engine optimization also provides useful information to families.

Attracts Targeted Traffic

Because your SEO content answers the specific needs of the people searching for it, the traffic you get will be people who are already interested in assisted living. This targeted traffic is easier to convert than traffic from other marketing channels that may include people who are not currently considering assisted living options.

How Can You Improve Your Assisted Living Search Engine Optimization?

Most SEO techniques depend on improving your rankings for relevant keywords. Because you are mainly targeting people in your local area, focus on locally relevant keywords, such as “assisted living facilities in my town.”

Include the name of the city where your facility is and the names of surrounding towns as keywords in your content. Also include variations on search terms, such as “senior living facility” or “retirement home.”

When choosing keywords, think about what you would search for if you were trying to find your business. Seek out highly relevant keywords with low competition to get the best results. Once you have your keywords, there are a variety of ways you can use them in your SEO efforts.

Create an SEO Blog About Senior Living

Relevant, high-quality content is the most important factor search engines consider when ranking sites. Writing blogs about assisted living and other topics of interest to potential residents and their families is a good way to introduce a high volume of quality, relevant content to your site.

Build your blogs around locally relevant keywords, but use them sparingly. Overstuffing your blogs with keywords can harm your assisted living search engine optimization.

Focus on the concerns and questions your target audience has. Aim to publish a new blog about once per week.

Make your content unique. Don’t reproduce the same content everyone else is producing. Find a way to put your spin on it or highlight ways that your facility uniquely addresses a problem or concern.

Build Internal and External Links

Links from other authoritative sites to your site boost your credibility with visitors and search engines, driving more traffic to your site. Internal links help guide visitors and search engines from one page to another, ensuring all your content gets indexed and encouraging visitors to spend more time on your site.

Encourage links by producing high-quality content that other sites will want to share with their audience. Contact regional media to pitch stories about your facility or your residents and ask them to link to your site.

Offer to write guest posts for relevant sites in exchange for a backlink. Get your site listed in industry directories and make sure there is a link to your site in your Google Business profile.

Audit Your Content for SEO

Periodically assess your assisted living search engine optimization content to determine what is and isn’t working and make tweaks. Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Console can help you identify opportunities to improve.

Regularly Update Your SEO Content

Search engine algorithms change frequently which can cause your rankings to go down. Additionally, fresh content gets higher rankings than content that has gone stale.

Add new content to pages that are performing well to give them a boost and delete or edit underperforming content. Update your keywords to match current SEO practices and changes in the marketplace.

Maintain Your SEO Content

Update your website, blog, and Google Business profile to reflect current information about your business and anything that has changed in the industry since the content was originally produced. Check your links to make sure they still work and look for any technical issues, such as slow-loading pages.

Post on Social Media

Potential residents want to know what life is like at your facility. Share photos, stories, and reviews on social media.

How Can BKA Help With Assisted Living Search Engine Optimization?

BKA provides high-quality SEO blog content that we customize to meet your specific needs. We offer a variety of assisted living search engine optimization plans and services to fit your budget and your goals. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help.