Senior Living SEO: What It Is & Why You Need It

While SEO is vital to any organization’s success, it’s especially critical for assisted living communities. Pew Research Center revealed that internet usage among senior citizens in the United States has increased: In 2022, 75% of those 65 and older said that they were online. What’s more, over 95% of their younger counterparts are online.

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Attracting clients and key decision-makers is a primary goal of senior living SEO. Search engine optimization is one core component of a digital marketing strategy for your assisted living facility.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Successful technologies adapt to and meet people’s needs. This basic premise is the reason SEO exists. To understand why SEO works, let’s take a look at search engines themselves — specifically, Google.

How Google Transformed the Internet

What do people often say when they want to search for something online? “Let me Google that.” When the Oxford English Dictionary added “Google” as a verb in 2006, it was a testament to the search engine’s popularity and market share. But how did we get here?

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Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, developed its first iteration while studying at Stanford in the late 1990s. Launching Google Inc. in 1998, the pair’s mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

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Thanks to Google’s mission, its approach differed greatly from its contemporaries. Algorithms determined how it served up valuable content — not human editors or curators. Web crawlers discovered content, while algorithms evaluated its worthiness. This approach resulted in a page ranking system, ultimately dubbed PageRank. It initially assigned importance to each web page by evaluating the number and quality of links leading to it. Keyword matching was also key: The more instances of a specific keyword that a page contained, the more likely it was to achieve a higher ranking.

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Google’s approach was revolutionary. Its search engine returned faster, more plentiful, and better quality results than its competitors. As businesses strived to gain visibility, they adopted tactics to increase their page rankings — and that’s how search engine optimization was born. In these early years, an assisted living facility desiring to boost its ranking would use basic SEO techniques focusing on keyword frequency and establishing quality links to its website.

Google’s Influence on Modern SEO 

With some trial and error, people figured out how to game Google’s earlier algorithm. This gave rise to “black hat SEO.” These tactics included keyword stuffing, buying links, auto-generated content, and hidden text. Today, using black hat SEO will make your page rankings drop or get your site completely deindexed.

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Naturally, Google adjusted. Content quality and relevance became critical factors in page rankings with its 2011 Panda algorithm update. Google rolled out Panda specifically to counteract black hat SEO techniques.

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Panda became a core component of Google’s algorithms in 2016. It influenced the development of modern SEO. Subsequent algorithm updates included Venice and Penguin, which introduced location-based results and eliminated the influence of paid links in page rankings. The Pirate update focused on penalizing illegally shared copyrighted content. With Hummingbird, Google’s algorithm began weighing individual words in a search query. Additional updates gave ranking important to secure sites, improved the algorithm’s ability to decipher user intent behind queries, sped up results, and made Google more mobile-friendly.

The Ultimate Goals of SEO

Understanding the basics of modern SEO is essential to developing a sound SEO strategy. Its goal is to improve your website’s rankings in Google’s search engine results pages. Ranking and visibility on a SERP depend on several factors. SEO looks at these factors and optimizes content to achieve two goals:

1. Appear on the first SERP.
2. Achieve the number one listing on that SERP.

Google’s web crawlers still discover content now as they did when it debuted. Its spiders download and index content, which algorithms evaluate to determine its quality and relevancy. This method allows Google to meet users’ needs by quickly serving content that matches their search.

How Do You Market Senior Living Communities?

To implement sound SEO techniques, you must start well before performing keyword research or optimizing your pages. Quality content comes first. Without it, you don’t have anything of value to offer your audience — and anything you do to increase your page rankings becomes irrelevant.

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Your senior living SEO practices depend on serving the best quality content you can create. When visitors access your site, they’re looking for valuable and useful information. Blog posts and articles are excellent examples, but these can also include product and service pages, video tutorials, infographics, maps, diagrams, floor plans, and testimonials.

Content Quality: EAT and YMYL

One of Google search’s prime objectives is to connect users with high-quality content matching their desires. Google uses search quality raters to assess a page’s value to its user base. These third parties must follow specific criteria to judge content and provide appropriate feedback. While their feedback doesn’t directly impact page rankings, Google does use it to implement changes to enhance how the search engine serves up content.

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The first guiding principle in judging content is “EAT.” While it’s not directly part of the search engine’s algorithm, EAT does look at content worthiness using three important criteria:

1. Expertise: Knowledge and competence by being well-versed in a given topic.
2. Authoritativeness: Overall reputation in one’s field.
3. Trustworthiness: Accuracy, security, and transparency. 

Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are all interrelated. When you create valuable, high-quality content, you can meet all three criteria.

Expertise

When we discuss expertise and online content, we aren’t just talking about people with the appropriate qualifications and credentials. Everyday expertise also counts. By these criteria, several people may have relevant expertise in selecting a senior living community: credible bloggers, gerontologists, third-party organizations that rate assisted living facilities, and applicable government websites. Depending on its authoritativeness and affiliation, an assisted living website can also offer relevant expertise.

Authoritativeness

Reputation directly impacts a source’s authoritativeness. Several best practices are crucial to earning a solid reputation when implementing senior living SEO:

• Offering trustworthy content
• Including content created by sources with expertise.
• Checking content for accuracy before publication.

If authorities in your field find your content valuable, they may link to it — which can also increase your site’s authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness

Just as content creators must earn good reputations, they should also earn trustworthiness with their user bases. Building trust and ensuring accuracy are both vital. You can build trustworthiness through the same strategies you use to establish authoritativeness.

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Transparency means providing important information to site visitors. For assisted living providers, this information may include its management team, board of directors, annual reports, privacy policy, code of conduct, and compliance with pertinent regulations such as HIPAA.

Your Money or Your Life

Another key principle when evaluating content quality is YMYL: “Your Money or Your Life.” Topics that fall under YMYL can “significantly impact readers’ health, financial stability, safety, or well-being.” These typically encompass medicine, finance, current events, mental health, weather, and safety.

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Google quality evaluators must look at the potential harm these types of content pose. In other words, how much can misinformation negatively impact people reading it? Factors to consider include the individual consuming the content, those possibly affected by that individual, and the groups impacted by actions from those interacting with the content.

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As these guidelines indicate, Google places importance on this chain of influence. It’s crucial to think about YMYL with any senior living SEO plan of action. Senior living facilities should consider whom their content could impact: prospective residents, their families, and medical professionals who deliver their care.

Content Marketing

High-quality content is important for several reasons, but it truly comes into play with content marketing. Site visitors want content that educates, informs, and entertains. While all three are excellent for senior living SEO, the first two are especially crucial. Content that successfully performs these functions encourages users to keep returning to your site.

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Keyword research, internal links, and backlinks are all essential in a content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, you should also focus on creating evergreen content — in other words, always relevant and helpful. You want to identify information that your target audience will continually seek out. Common examples of evergreen content include how-to guides, tutorials, and historical insights.

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A few other types are especially pertinent for assisted living organizations: FAQs, glossaries,  industry-relevant resources, and testimonials.

SEO Best Practices for Senior Living Communities

Several SEO strategies could help improve your ranking and visibility, leading to more clients finding you. While some of these are widely applicable to any industry, others can specifically benefit assisted living providers.

The Role of Technical SEO

You can think of SEO as a two-pronged approach. Content SEO focuses on creating relevant, high-quality written, audio, and visual pieces that an audience finds educational, entertaining, or informative. Technical SEO involves all the nuts and bolts of boosting page visibility and rankings. It includes coding, site and server configurations, implementing structures, and optimizing other details. While advanced expertise is ideal for working with technical SEO, we can break a few concepts down for better understanding.

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Site architecture plays an essential part in search engine optimization best practices, including senior living SEO. An SEO-friendly site uses a hierarchical structure: You have a home page, which links directly to several category subpages. In turn, those subpages link to individual topic pages. Your site’s architecture can include pages for written content, videos, photos, infographics, web forms, portals for secure client services, and much more.

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A hierarchical site architecture offers many benefits. Search engine crawlers can more easily travel through your site and index its content. You’re also less likely to end up with orphaned pages — those without any internal links connected to them.

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Sitemaps are another vital element of technical SEO. Encoded into a separate file, a sitemap tells Google how to locate all of your site’s pages. They detail the hierarchical structure: how the home, category, and individual topic pages connect with each other.

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Several other aspects are integral to the technical side of search engine optimization. These include HTTPS, the secure protocol that safeguards user data from being compromised. Page loading speeds positively or negatively impact a user’s experience. Mobile-friendly web design allows smartphone and tablet users to quickly browse and site and find what they need.

Understanding Your Target Audience

To attract your key demographic, you must know what they want from you. While this premise sounds obvious, it isn’t always the case. The assumptions you hold based on the products and services you offer may not completely align with what potential clients seek. Research is essential to understanding your customer base. When it comes to SEO, keyword research is a vital starting point.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is exactly what it sounds like. Your goal is to discover the keywords that potential customers type into search engines to find products and services. Once you know what they’re searching for, you can better create and optimize content that delivers what they want. This research can reveal other critical information:

• Search frequencies of certain keywords.
• Degrees of difficulty in achieving high page rankings and visible SERP results for them. 

Keyword research can reveal several major details:

• Industry-specific keywords. 
• How searchers find your competitors’ content.
• Long-tail keywords

Relevant keywords for senior living SEO typically include phrases such as “senior living in [your city],” “assisted living facilities in [your city],” “retirement communities in [your city],” and “senior apartments in [your city].” This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it should provide insight into the types of searches your target audience performs. Your research may reveal these plus variants and related keyword phrases they’re typing into Google search.

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During the research phase, you may discover valuable long-tail keywords. These are search phrases with lower volumes and high specificity. Some examples could include “Lutheran assisted living communities” or “LGBTQ-friendly senior living facilities.” Some users may add “in [your city]” to their queries — but even if they don’t, Google can automatically infer that they’re looking for local providers and serve up local results first.

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Keyword research is a valuable tool for understanding your competition. Competitor analysis can include this research, but it may reveal other valuable information. You can discover who your direct and indirect competitors are, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they draw their customers.

Local SEO

Local SEO is critical to a robust senior living SEO plan. According to Hubspot, 46% of all Google search queries seek local information. With nearly all prospective clients of assisted living facilities coming from their surrounding communities, it’s clear that local SEO can make or break your organization’s success.

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Creating locally-focused content is key, but you can use other strategies. If you haven’t already, claim your organization’s Google Business and Bing Local profiles. Your contact information should be consistent in every place it appears online. Social media presence can also attract new clientele and improve your local visibility. Encourage clients to leave reviews, which can also draw new visitors.

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Finally, make sure your website is optimized for mobile users. With 63% of organic search engine visits occurring on mobile devices, delivering a positive user experience to site visitors on smartphones and tablets is important.

Link Building

Link building is a critical part of improving your online presence. Google established its role in identifying and serving high-quality content in the late 1990s. It continues to play a huge role: When authoritative sites link to your content, it helps establish your own expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

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Hyperlinks to your content can come from three sources: backlinks or inbound links, outbound links, and internal links. Of these three categories, backlinks are the hardest to obtain. However, they’re the most valuable in terms of your SEO approach. Why? Because when a high-quality external site links to you, it tells visitors that your content is valuable. The external site shares its page authority with yours, enhancing your own authority and ranking.

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Creating quality content is crucial in your link-building plan. Meanwhile, you can take other steps to increase the number of backlinks to your site:

• Search for authoritative sites in your subject area and ask them to link to pertinent content on your site.
• Review your competitors’ backlinks. Contact those sources and request backlinks to your content as well.
• Obtain backlinks from a wide variety of sources. For assisted living facilities, relevant places to start include government agencies, nonprofit groups, reliable media sources, and other experts on aging and health care for seniors.
• Review backlinks regularly and remove out-of-date and low-quality links to your content. 

Building backlinks with these strategies could increase your site's visibility in search results. Be sure to avoid black hat techniques such as private blog networks, link farms, buying links, hacking vulnerable sites, and spamming online discussion forums.

Analytics and Reporting

How do you measure success? In the SEO world, metrics are vital: They help you assess how well your strategy is working. Semrush calls them key performance indicators, or KPIs, for short. Think of KPIs like an SEO “report card.” They tell you how your site’s doing, but they can also assist you in setting goals for further improvement.

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The KPIs used to measure success can differ by industry and organization. Some commonly tracked metrics include cost per acquisition, return on investment, organic visibility, keyword rankings, backlinks, and Google Business Profile metrics. Choosing metrics that provide the best measures of success is a meaningful part of your senior living SEO methods.

Growth SEO

A smart senior living SEO plan encompasses the strategies we’ve discussed so far. If all this sounds like a lot, that’s not surprising. Why? Because it is. But it’s all essential to help your organization accomplish its objectives. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all alone.

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At elk Marketing, we’ve pioneered a service we call Growth SEO, We focus on longer-term approaches, helping clients increase their brands’ visibility, boost traffic to their websites, and improve revenue. Our method incorporates a three-pillar approach:

• Onsite Optimization
• Content Development
• Offsite Authority

Our approach is data-driven: We look at metrics such as global search volumes and keyword difficulty ratings to identify the most effective keywords to target. We put our resources and efforts toward areas that can achieve the most impact for your organization. Our first priority is to help your site appear on Google’s first SERP page, where 95% of all search engine traffic goes.

Impactful Senior Living SEO Solutions

Assisted and senior living communities face unique challenges in boosting visibility and attracting new clientele. elk Marketing offers professional SEO services that improve search engine rankings and increase organic search traffic. We’d love to work with you to achieve growth for your senior living community. Contact us to learn how we can help you accomplish your goals.