Are you heading out for the annual candy grab in your community tonight?
It is something of a curious custom isn’t it? Dressing your kids up and taking them to strangers homes to beg for candy?
Ask any of your pals who live outside the States and they will share their befuddlement about Halloween with you.
And speaking of befuddling…
Is your senior living SEO strategy built on tricks or treats? And by treats we mean good solid content.
We bring this up on our blog today because we’ve had another influx of providers who are exasperated with paying high prices for SEO consulting with little to no return on their investment.
While we aren’t SEO consultants, we are SEO-certified content writers with a background in senior care.
That last part… “with a background in senior care” seems to be what really throw SEO consultants off their game.
Senior Living SEO
The senior living industry is fairly complex.
From levels of care to types of services to the many different types of financing, it isn’t like hiring an SEO consultant to optimize your site for “Christmas tree farms in southeast Michigan” or “how to tell if a Thanksgiving turkey is done.” (My two most recent Google searches.)
Is your SEO consultant asking the right questions to help you capture qualified family leads?
Here are a few mistakes we’ve seen over and over again. Some are just rookie consultant mistakes – not taking the time to learn the industry before wasting a client’s money. Others are, unfortunately, some black hat tricks no one should be using.
Off-track keywords: Optimizing for keywords that might gain traffic but not qualified traffic.
Yep, the key phrase “low income senior housing” will get you traffic. Loads of traffic. But unless you offer sliding scale assisted living or accept Medicaid waivers (which the senior living provider that contacted us didn’t) you are just driving a lot of unqualified families to your door. A waste of time and added frustration for the family and for your crew.
Non-relevant keywords: Along the same lines is optimizing for keywords and phrases that just aren’t relevant.
Here’s a recent example that crossed our desk… a client wanted us to write blog articles for phrases their high-priced SEO researched for them. One that wanted written about in several different variations is “senior living food suppliers.”
It had a lot of traffic.
But there is no conceivable way that traffic is qualified families. Have you ever had a family on a tour ask you who supplied the food the chef in your community uses? While they might be interested in what is on the menu and where it is sourced from, they aren’t searching for senior living based on that key phrase.
Keyword stuffing: Another outdated practice is to stuff an article full of keywords.
While this worked in the olden days before Google got wise to it, those days are long, long gone. Yet we still see it deliberately used.
Because our industry is somewhat behind the curve in content marketing and SEO, it is easier to slide this one by. But it can actually cause Google to penalize you for being spammy.
If you want to get all technical, Google now uses latent semantic indexing. That means they look for the intent behind the user’s search and matches it to the content they think is relevant – to the intent behind your copy.
The Bottom Line on Senior Living SEO
These are just a few examples of the senior living SEO mistakes we see most often.
The bottom line is this… take time to learn more about content marketing and SEO.
You don’t have to become proficient in either one. But you need to invest enough time in both to tell when you are providing site visitors with a treat (the answers and information they were seeking)) or just tricking them in to visiting your site and making your SEO consultant look good.
Subscribing to our blog (use the handy form on this page) and working your way through our Senior Care Content Learning Center are two great ways to do that!