Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is essentially the process/practice of improving your website to rank higher on search engine results. While Google dominates the search engine space and most SEO tactics and strategies focus on Google’s ranking algorithm, adhering to the best practices can also help you rank on other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask.com.
Importance of SEO for Senior Living Marketers
It’s important to understand that most good SEO practices are industry-agnostic and apply to businesses, industries, and sectors. Adhering to them can help you rank higher, but if you want to take your SEO to the next level and produce compelling results, you should understand its importance, frequently analyze your site’s SEO, and employ useful tactics and best practices in your industry or for your target market.
Even before that, it’s crucial to understand why SEO is important for senior living marketers in the first place.
Senior living business leads can come from various sources, including referrals and recommendations from healthcare professionals. However, most seniors or their family members who have a say in the choice of senior living facility/business or the power to make that choice for the senior prefer to do their own research. Even when vetting the recommended/referenced senior living businesses, they may compare them with other options.
That’s where SEO comes into play. When seniors, especially those in your region/proximity, search for senior living facilities, your business might come up high on the searches if your website is perfectly optimized for the search engines. If not, even if you offer much better services and prices, they may not even acknowledge your existence because your website may rank too low in the ranking. Most people only visit the first three to five links that come up in a Google search, and if you are not ranking that high, there is a good chance that you may be losing a lot of business.
5 Must-Know SEO Strategies for Senior Living Marketers
As a senior living marketer, you need to understand some essential SEO tactics that may significantly influence your ranking on the search engines and, by extension, the organic leads you generate for your business:
1. Target Market
The first crucial SEO tactic is understanding your target market and market segments since that will influence everything from your keyword selection and content to your User Experience (UX). You may think that the primary SEO goal is to get as many visitors to your website as possible (by ranking higher), but if 90% of your users don’t convert, that SEO goal doesn’t help you meet your business goals. So, the goal should be to get the traffic that converts. For that, you must identify your target market segments based on region, types of care, healthcare problems, etc.
It would be best if you also focused on the demographics of your target market. If you are operating in an area where a significant portion of the population has Spanish (or another language) as their first language, serving your website in both languages may get you more traction. There are several tools that can help you research your target market (or at least what they might be searching for) and create personas. This includes Google Trends and Hupspot’s Make My Persona.
2. Keywords and Regional Search
Once you have your target market segments down and have created personas based on regions, the services they might need in a senior care facility, affordability, etc., you can start your keyword research. Here, you have to balance out search volume and specificity. It might be far easier to rank for a long-tail keyword like “Best Senior Care Facility for Alzhimer’s Patients in XYZ ” than for best senior care facility. These keywords may not have the same search volume, but they might be more likely to convert as well.
Ranking high in local search should be an SEO goal for senior living marketers because many seniors tend to look for facilities close to home. However, this perspective shouldn’t limit your keyword research. If you provide services that few others in the country do or at a highly competitive price, this is also something you must consider when conducting your keyword research. Here, tools like Answer the Public, Moz Keyword Explorer, and even Google’s related search options, can be quite helpful.
3. Quality of Content
The quality and focus of your content may also help you rank higher. If you offer useful content to seniors or their family members/caretakers, you may get repeat visits and links, growing your traffic and improving your ranking. This may include useful guides, infographics, or content on relevant issues like how seniors should protect themselves during an influenza outbreak or alternatives for something most seniors (inside or outside care facilities) regularly use and is currently unavailable in the market or in short supply. If you can write this content from an SEO perspective as well, with natural keyword placement, that may give you an additional boost. AI content creators like ChatGPT, editors like Grammarly, and design tools like Canva can be highly useful in this regard.
4. User Experience (UX) and Accessibility
As a senior living marketer, you shouldn’t just focus on the technical aspects of the design that are essential for good SEO, like fast page loading time and good website mapping, but you should also keep your target audience in mind. Seniors, especially with visual, memory, or other challenges, may need a very easily navigable, intuitive, and supportive User Experience (UX). The ability to customize font size and text-to-speech on each page/blog may benefit the seniors. The accessibility features of your website should be more robust if you are particularly targeting seniors with health issues and disabilities leading to vision and memory impairment. UX design tools like Balsamiq and Figma can help you when employing this tactic.
5. Core SEO Tactics
Apart from the SEO tactics above that specifically lean towards senior living businesses and their target audience, you should also be familiar with and employ some of the core SEO tactics, including the following:
- On-page SEO optimization like good content formatting, compelling CTAs, meta details, image optimization, etc.
- Technical SEO optimization, including updated certificates, removing duplicate content, and webpage loading times.
- Linking, both internal and external, is something you should look into. Internal linking should create a healthy “map” for crawlers, while external links should be good quality sources.
- Off-page SEO strategies, including guest posting and social media engagement.
Final Words
A healthy SEO strategy for senior living businesses is built around their target market, needs, and limitations. A human approach to SEO for your senior living business, which leverages empathy and clarity, is more likely to get you the traffic that converts. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t develop content for or deploy SEO tactics for search engines, but it shouldn’t take priority over the humans you are hoping to connect with.