IS IT IMPORTANT TO BUILD A SENIOR LIVING SEO STRATEGY?
Senior Living, SEO
If you’re looking to bring in more seniors and their loved ones to your senior living community, a conversation about search engine optimization, SEO for short, will help you grow your community’s census. This is simply a technology to get you to the top of Google where people are going to actually find you.
Thinking in modern terms, people in the old days will go to the phonebook to find you. These days they go straight to Google, at least 97% of the time. And typically you will find that they do not click on the advertisements at the top of the page is they don’t trust them as much. So they go to the natural results or what they call the organic results.If you are not there. They do not find you. SEO his how you get there.
Is senior living SEO worth the cost?
In short, easily. Currently, many senior living facilities are buying prospects from placement agencies. Those fees, per placement, can average from $3000 to $3500. If you bought one of those per week, you can see how quickly that adds up per year. Search engine optimization costs a fraction of that and can generate more reach into your community. If the SEO done well and correctly, you will be you higher in Google than those placement agencies. You should know that the same placement agencies that are selling you their prospects are getting them from Google, doing SEO.
SEO can help you reach a larger geographic region.
We worked with a senior living community one time that was located in a town of 780 people. As you can imagine, their reach from Google was very small. With the proper SEO tactics, you can reach a much, much wider area bringing in people from surrounding communities exponentially increasing the interest and your community.
Can SEO help my Online Reputation ?
Absolutely. You must remember how you do searches on the Internet. You go and look for anything and if there are no listings anywhere you question the credibility of whatever it is. If it doesn’t exist digitally, it is not trustworthy. When a service product or anything else is digitally prominent or even better, omnipresent, it is considered “real.” No one would put a loved one in a Community that looks questionable.
Can SEO Help us to understand who our audience is?
Most certainly. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to find out who is searching for you if you’re not there to be found in the first place. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg game. If you’re not there, you don’t get traffic and you don’t know who’s looking. But if you’re getting traffic you can see who is looking for you in this data.
How do we being doing an SEO strategy for our senior community?
1. Decide whether to do it internally or externally.
SEO, it’s a very niche specialty. If you are part of a very large group, you may have the facilities internally to have a whole marketing team and a full-time SEO person. If you are not, it will not make sense to do internally and you’ll want to hire an specialized agency. The cost of this will end up being a fraction of the amount that you would spend on a full-time SEO person internally and then you;d get the focus of an entire team and the agency.
2. Decide where you want your new community member to come from?
In that SEO can reach further than your backyard, you’d want to decide how far you want to reach out, and what is capable, from your local area. This would be part of any good geographic strategy beginning.
3. Make sure your website appears as you want to appear.
This can be tricky. Many senior living facilities do not take care of their websites and look very antiquated, weakly maintained, if at all. The problem is that’s going to be the public’s first perception of you. It’s your digital storefront. If it does not represent who you really are you, realize that people will not even reach out and contact you. Conversely, if you’re in a smaller community, you could overshoot “talking” to you who actually lives on your community, i.e. – look to big for who you’re really having come into your community.
4. Choosing an SEO Company.
This can be tricky as there is a lot to consider. First and foremost, you should likely be comfortable and like who you work with. SEO is a long-term process and it is difficult if you’re not working together with your service provider as a team.
Next, the SEO world is highly-specialized and technical, and it changes frequently. You have to know that the company that you are working with is up-to-date on all of their technology and it’s not executing strategies from 10 years ago, which unfortunately, is frequent.
SEO is, as mentioned, a long-term marketing process. It is sort of like a moving phone book. So the best SEO providers not only can get you up where you need to be but they can keep you up. It is frequent that people will be able to get you up, but you dwindle down and don’t remain high throughout the years. This is an important thing to consider.
If you need help with your Senior Living SEO, we can help.
Contact us and we can develop a custom, industry-leading SEO program for you, one that compete with and garner more member for your community s know if you would like us to develop a custom senior living SEO strategy for you.