If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re a fairly perky crew! We try to focus on the bright side of the rainbow where the unicorns live and the green beer flows freely. It isn’t our typical MO to go negative.
But we got an assignment a month or so ago from a home care franchise that required us to be just that… a neighsayer.
Or as we decided to think of it… a senior care blog detective on the hunt for lost leads… And boy did we find a lot of missed opportunities for them!
Identifying Senior Care Blog’s Weaknesses
Each of our client’s franchisees had their own home care blog. And no matter what criteria you used to define success…they weren’t having any of it.
Zero. Zilch. Nada. None.
They asked us to take a peek and identify potential problems. It didn’t take long to see why they were MIA in the search engine results.
It prompted us to take a spin through a few senior living blogs of various sizes to see how they compared. Holy Hannah! Many were equally as bad.
So what blog mistakes are our senior living friends making?
Turns out that the majority of senior living providers are making similar mistakes on their blogs.
Making the Most of Your Senior Living Blog
See how we turned that subhead around and made it more positive?
Unfortunately, many of the topics that can help your senior living blog gain traction are negative ones. Those tough topics and events we encounter every day in senior living.
Mistake #1: Know Your Audience
While we know half of the senior living industry is trying to build their brand on hospitality and the other half on health care services, the topics that adult children often search for are the concerns that keep them up at night.
- Fall prevention
- Identity theft
- Alzheimer’s issues
- In-home safety
- Poor nutrition
- Loneliness and depression
- Driving safety
- Financing senior care
Once you have the evergreen topics on your blog built out, you can tackle other fun and trending topics.
Mistake #2: Duplicating Content
This is one that keeps us up at night. We often find instances where a company owns multiple senior living communities and each one has a unique blog.
What isn’t unique?
The content!
They literally use the same copy on every…single… …blog.
We found one instance where the company owned six senior living communities in the same city and… you guessed it… the blogs were all duplicate content. Cluster market issues aside, Google frowns on duplicate content.
Mistake #3: It’s Not about the Reader
We’ve talked about this before. Your blog isn’t a place to yammer on and on about how wonderful your independent or assisted living community is. Your blog is a place to educate families. Answer questions they have with targeted blog topics. Check out How Developing Great Content is Like a Toby Keith Song to learn more.
Mistake #4: The Long Pause
Google loves fresh, relevant content. It’s how they can tell you are still out there caring for folks and that you haven’t abandoned your website.
You know who else loves fresh content?
Your readers a.k.a. seniors and their families.
If your blog hasn’t been updated in months, it makes them scratch their heads and wonder what else you are letting slide… Not the best brand builder for an aging services provider.
Mistake #5: No Way to Keep in Touch
This one is a doozy! We have a few clients of our own that we just can’t convince how important this is.
You have to have a way to capture email addresses. Seriously. You have to have a way to capture email addresses.
We found terrific blogs out there with no way for families to subscribe to follow them. You are missing out on leads my friends! Lead nurturing is the name of this game and you flunk if you can’t contact your visitors again.
You’ve taken great measures to position yourself as the expert, take the next step and set up a Subscription box. Don’t count on adult children remembering to seek you out again. We all know how busy life is.
That’s it folks! The mistakes we see most often. We hope these 5 tips help you get your blog on track and turn your senior living website in to a lead generating machine…
Need help getting your senior living blog up and running? Shoot us a note!
We can help you with everything from editorial calendar development to writing and posting the content!