The majority of seniors (age 65 and above) are online, with at least 82% using search engines for research. As senior living community managers are aware, prospective customers often have help from their children or other loved ones, who are even more likely to rely on the Internet to investigate possible retirement homes and assisted living facilities. In fact, every hour in the United States, there are 6,000 online searches related to senior living communities.

Internet, social media, and smartphone usage will only increase as time goes on, in every demographic. As your most important marketing tool, your website needs to be as accessible, accurate, attractive, and search-engine-friendly as possible. Is your website effectively selling your facility?

Senior Living Community Website Checklist:

• Mobile Optimization. Enter your URL here to see if your site is mobile friendly. https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
• Large Buttons and Text. The size of the words and the buttons to click or tap affects how well older visitors can use your site on both desktop and mobile.
• Easy Navigation. Make it easy for visitors to move around your website and find the information they’re looking for.
• Accurate Information. Make sure all the facts and links on your site are correct, especially contact information.
• Search Engine Optimization. Is your website appearing in search results as high and as often as you would like?

Beyond your website, digital marketing possibilities are endless. Every facility has different services, target customers, and branding, so a digital marketing plan needs to be customized just for you. However, in general these are RSPR’s most recommended digital marketing methods for senior living communities to get the best return on the dollar.

• Local Listings. Starting with Google My Business, local listings are essential to helping people in nearby neighborhoods find your community when searching online.
• Google Ads. We recommend varied Google Ads campaigns—search, display, YouTube, and more—to reach your full target market when they’re searching in Google or viewing content related to senior living.
• In addition to video ads on the platform, it’s important to have a YouTube channel and make regular video posts.
• Facebook reports that 62% of online seniors aged 65+ are on the platform, and 72% of those between age 50-64 are on the platform. We recommend posting to the senior community’s Facebook page at least twice per week. Setting up a variety of Facebook advertising campaigns will increase brand awareness, page likes, interactions with posts, visits to the retirement community’s website, and more.
• Other Social Media. Don’t underestimate the benefits of having a broad social media presence that includes LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
• Online Media Relations. More and more people get their news online. Get your community in the news with a media relations plan.
• Email Marketing. Use a friendly and informative email newsletter to keep in touch with prospects and the family members of residents.

Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level? RSPR Marketing + Communications takes pride in offering comprehensive marketing plans that are customized to get results for you. With experience and skill, we’re the best choice for managing digital marketing for senior living communities.

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So how does Google decide which websites are the best to put on the first page of search results? Here are a few of the basics.

Website Setup

There are some things you should make sure your web developer has addressed.

Is your website responsive—does it deliver a great user experience across all screen shapes and sizes? What is your page speed—do your pages load fast enough? Do you have sitemap.xml and robots.txt files? Are there any broken links on your site? Are there any 404 errors to fix or 301 redirects to set up? Has your web developer validated your HTML and CSS coding?

Keywords and Content on Your Website

Keywords used to be enough. You could load up a page of your site with fifty repeats of the word for which you want to rank on Google and call it a day. Today, such keyword stuffing has negative effects, because search engines evaluate content and context. Google’s algorithm updates are always working hard to better weed out the spam sites, and you don’t want to be one of them.

If there is a keyword phrase for which you really want to rank higher on Google, dedicate a page of your site to that phrase. Use that phrase in the header tag and in one or more subheadings on the page. Write the content naturally, including the phrase a few times within the text, which should be at least 300 words. Include at least one relevant photo on the page, and give that photo an alt tag with the phrase. To take it a step further, on other pages of your website, use the phrase within text and have it link to that page (this is called internal linking). Then find other ways to get people to visit the page by promoting it on social media and asking your vendors to link to it on their websites (external linking).

Titles, Snippets, and Structured Data

How each page of your site looks in Google search results matters. The title tag is what appears as a bold headline in your search result entry and should be 60-65 characters long. The snippet, sometimes called a meta description, is the text beneath the title that should be around 155 characters. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, make sure you have an SEO plugin that allows you to write unique titles and snippets for each page of the site, and that you use the appropriate keyword phrase within each.

The structured data, sometimes called schema markup, is the additional information Google may include in the search result listing, such as operating hours, pricing, and review ratings. Setting up structured data is a way of helping search engines interpret and index both basic information (name, address, phone) and more complex information (events, products, articles). The more information Google has, the greater the chances Google will use it.

History and Other SEO to Rank Higher on Google

Two types of history are relevant here. First is your website’s history of being clicked on when Google shows it for that particular search term. The more often your site is chosen, the more often and higher Google will show it for that search in the future.

The second relevant piece of history is the user’s. Your site will show up high and often for someone who has a history of visiting your website. If people from a particular city or region tend to choose your website over your competitors’, then a searcher from that city is also more likely to be shown your site higher in search results.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which is the general practice of improving your search engine ranking to maximize website visitors. To rank higher on Google, there are more aspects to SEO than what has been listed here so far.

One such factor is backlinks—how many websites and online articles out there have a link to your website? Another important factor is claiming your business on all social networks and directories, including Google My Business and Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. Are your website address, location address, business name, and phone number consistent across all online directories?

Search engine optimization is broad and constantly developing. Having a well-written, organized, user-friendly website is only the beginning. One final factor you must overcome to rank higher on Google—the factor that is out of your control—is your competition. If your product or service is offered by many other companies in your target area, you’ll have to fight that much harder for your Google ranking. Contact RSPR for help with your SEO.

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Google’s switch to focus on mobile is reactive, a response to real life trends. Starting in 2015, more searches have happened on mobile than on desktop computers in 10 major countries, including the United States. The majority of smart phone owners who have an immediate need will turn to their phone’s search feature first. As this happens more and more, the more important your mobile website becomes for SEO (so people can find you) and for user experience (so visitors convert to buying your goods and services). Google’s primary goal has always been to give its users a positive experience — after all, that’s why users keep coming back — and if the mobile version of your website isn’t easy to navigate and super fast to load with high quality content, Google will not want to show it.

During Mobilegeddon, when Google started penalizing sites based on how they performed on mobile devices, we changed the way we thought about the websites we had and the websites we wanted to have. At RSPR, we’ve been perfecting our own system of “Mobile-First Web Design” where navigation menus are intuitively constructed, photos are carefully sized down and themes are chosen for minimum load times, and website text is written and arranged to communicate useful information and keep visitors on site.

The switch to Mobile-First Index probably will happen some time in 2018, which means right now is the time to make sure you have one responsive site instead of two separate sites. Responsive design continues to be the best way to go because the website will respond automatically to the size of the device, showing the appropriate website to the user. Having two distinct versions of your site (website.com and m.website.com) is extra work and can actually hurt your SEO because 1) there’s a duplicate content problem, 2) if you’re lucky enough to get some awesome websites linking to you, they’re only linking to one version of your website, which diffuses the SEO benefit, and 3) when Mobile-First Index begins, there will be some display problems when Google provides the separate mobile site to desktop users.

Where should you begin? You can check what Google thinks of your site’s mobile friendliness here: search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. Call or email us to discuss how to make your website work for you.

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What’s a backlink?

In the list of SEO best practices — things to do to make your website come up high and often on search engines — great backlinks are in the “super awesome and hard to get” category. Simply put, a backlink is a link to your website that exists on someone else’s website. They can be bad, if that website is a spammy paid link farm as mentioned above. But for those of us who don’t cheat, backlinks are very good things to have.

Some backlinks are better than others.

There are different levels of backlinks. The easiest ones to get have the smallest effect on your SEO, but by all means, get them. These are links to your website that exist on your social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, etc.), directory pages (manta, yellowpages, superpages, bbb, etc.), and any other site where you can create a free profile. In our marketing proposals, we often refer to this setup process as “profile linking,” and it all helps to cement your main information — exact business title, address, phone number, and website address — in search engines.

NOTE: The most important profile linking setup you can do is to get verified in Google My Business. We do this for all of our clients. If you haven’t already done this, get going on it ASAP or give us a call!

Medium level backlinks are the links to your website that are on semi-popular websites, such as the sites of your suppliers, manufacturers, and vendors. The more national and higher traffic the better. One of our exterior remodeling clients frequently receives high quality (not bounced) website visits that originate from the Pella and GAF websites. Google sees this, and it gives the site more credibility. That’s why backlinks still affect SEO, and it won’t be changing any time soon.

The highest level backlinks are the links to your website on very popular website and news media sites. One of our clients was upset that a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story covering the illegal actions of an employee was showing up high in search engine results for searches of the company name. It wasn’t even a recent story, but Google continues to give importance to accredited news sources.

How can I get backlinks?

Remember this the next time you scoff at the idea of a well-rounded marketing plan that includes the dissemination of press releases and the writing of blog posts. What if one of those press releases gets picked up by a major news source? What if one of your helpful blog posts gets shared by someone with a large audience, or even goes viral? Every small pickup of your company name and every backlink leading back to your website contributes to your overall SEO.

1. Set up your social media profiles, free directory listings, and especially Google My Business with consistent company information.
2. Ask your associates, vendors, and suppliers to include a link to your site on their websites, the more popular the better. You can offer to link to them too.
3. Set up a comprehensive PR and marketing plan that includes media relations and the writing and disseminating of high quality content that people will want to share.
4. Call or email RSPR to discuss how backlinks still affect SEO!

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Google’s advertising platform is called Google AdWords, and it encompasses a wide range of capabilities. They are divided neatly into Google’s two advertising networks: The Search Network and The Display Network.

Advertising on Google’s Search Network

When you advertise on Google’s Search Network, the text ads you create will appear as part of Google’s search results, as well as other Google sites like Maps and Shopping. The ads also appear on hundreds of non-Google “partner” websites like AOL that will match your ads to search results.

This is a great way to show text ads to customers who are actively searching for your type of products or services.

Advertising on Google’s Display Network

This is where it gets really interesting, because there’s so much you can do and so many people you can reach. The Display Network includes YouTube, Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, a billion partner websites, mobile websites, and even apps. The ads can be text, graphic, video, or some really cool rich media combinations of text, image, and video that drop open when you hover on them.

We can choose the topic of the web pages on which we want the ads to appear. Or we can be specific and choose which websites on which to advertise. We could ignore the website and instead focus on the person — Google collects data about Internet users and can show your ads to people who fit the demographics, affinity, interests, locations, and languages you select. Usually, the display ads we set up for clients are a combination of all of these things, to reach the most relevant targeted group of people possible.

Those Ads That Appear After You Visit a Website

They’re called remarketing ads. Many of our clients like the idea of an attractive graphic ad that appears to people who recently visited their website, to remind potential customers of their products and services and encourage them to come back to the site and complete the purchase, research, or other conversion metric.

How Much Do Ads on Google Cost?

The cost for Google AdWords depends on what you want to advertise and what kind of results you expect. The good news is you choose your own budget. For some ads, you pay for impressions, video views, or specific conversions (website visitor actions) that you choose yourself. For the most part, though, you pay per click to your website. The biggest deciding factor for cost per click is your competition (it’s a bidding war), though other factors will affect your rate (the quality of your website landing page, how high you want your ads to appear in search results, how relevant the ad is to the keyword search, etc.).

You can spend a couple bucks a day, and get a few clicks to your website out of it. One company’s most effective Google ad plan will be vastly different from another company’s, due to different goals, different competition, and different target markets. A large e-commerce company with high competition may be spending thousands of dollars per month on shopping ads and remarketing ads, while a small corner coffee shop is spending a few hundred per month on mobile ads targeting people within a 15 mile radius of the location, while yet another company with a more obscure service is spending very little to appear in search results for specific searches with less competition.

Why Google?

Why are we so focused on Google? According to Forbes, Google is the No. 2 most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple), America’s No. 2 best employer (behind Costco), and worth $101.8 billion. According to NetMarketShare, as of August 2017 Google far surpasses the other search engines at 82% of search engine use worldwide. Bing is at 7%, and Yahoo and China’s Baidu are each around 5%. It’s estimated that Google processes at least 5.5 billion searches per day. Some of those searches are in your area, searching for your services, and we want potential customers to find you rather than your competition!

Google’s advertising capabilities continue to expand in more unique and targeted directions as it strives to give advertisers more success and users a more pleasant experience. “What will they think of next?” is a question I could ask almost daily. Sometimes it feels like Google knows us better than we know ourselves.

Google ads can encourage people to:

• Buy on your website
• Visit your website
• Take an action on your website (such as fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter)
• Call your business
• See your ad (branding)
• Visit your business

This was just the bare basics of how Google advertising works. I didn’t cover ad positions, bid strategies, keywords, conversion tracking, or any of the more complex intricacies of setting up and measuring the results of an effective digital advertising campaign. When you meet with us, we’ll discuss your budget, who you want to reach, and what you want to accomplish. We’ll set up the Google advertising plan that’s right for you. Call or email us to learn more about how Google advertising works, and how it can boost your bottom line.

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For popular brands, updating the website is necessary to give frequent visitors something new to view. For other companies, though, frequent website updates are not so much for the customer as for search engines.

Of course, it is crucial that your company, product, and service information stay up-to-date on your website; that’s just good business. But even when nothing has changed in what you do or what you offer, fresh content gets the attention of search engines. When websites continuously change, improve, and grow, Google views you as an active business that will provide web users with an average or above average experience. That means you’ll rank higher in search engine results.

People searching Google for your services are the best leads you can earn — they’re seeking you out, not the other way around. The more quality updates you make to your website, the more quality leads will find you on search engines.

Conversely, a website that isn’t updated frequently is automatically viewed as outdated and lower quality by Google. Want to stand out among the competition? Prove yourself to the search engines.

We all know one crash diet isn’t enough — good eating habits and regular exercise are necessary for maintaining your health. Similarly, creating the website isn’t enough. It needs to be maintained! The good news is regularly updating the website can be a lot more fun than dieting.

Step 1: Make sure you or the website company you work with has access to make edits to the website. If your website doesn’t have a blog and a way for customers to contact you with testimonials, make it happen.

Step 2: Create a plan. The easiest way to remember to make regular updates is to have them figured out ahead of time. One example is to go week by week. On the first week of the month, update your sales special; on the second week, post a customer testimonial or project photo; on the third week, write a blog post about a product or manufacturer; and on the fourth week, add or update the text or graphics on one of your web pages (this could also be adding a new tip for your customers or a link to a relevant news article).

Step 3: Follow through. Put someone reliable in charge of making the updates, and see that they get done.

Whether your company is large or small, search engines are the great equalizer. Don’t let a good website go unseen. It’s up to you to maintain and nurture not only your relationship with your customers, but also your website’s relationship with Google.

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