3 Questions to Ask When Auditing Your Senior Living Website

Your website is a living, breathing part of your marketing plan. For most senior living marketers, their website is the bedrock of their promotional strategy and makes up most of their community’s digital footprint.

Taking good care of this essential marketing asset is never easy. Cultivating quality content takes time, a lot of patience waiting for results, and constant tweaking to maximize impact. For many senior living marketers, just keeping up with the community website is a full-time job.

When prospective residents land on your website, they form an opinion about you in 0.05 seconds, simply based on your website’s appearance.1 And three out of four web users judge your community’s credibility based on your web design alone.2 So you can’t afford to hope your website will magically do a great job, or worse, ignore it!

Maintaining a high-impact website that generates a large number of leads requires auditing your website regularly. A website audit is an analysis of the factors impacting your site’s visibility for search engines and ease of use for users. We advise performing an audit every one to six months, depending on local competition and community size. There are three important questions to ask when auditing your senior living community website.

1. Can Users Find My Website?

What comes up when someone types “senior living community” (or another similar search) into Google? Hopefully, your community’s website is one of the first five organic search results, because those pages get more than 67% of the clicks.3

An engaging, well-curated website means nothing if seniors can’t find you. That’s why your pages need to be specifically optimized for Google searches. You’re probably well-versed in SEO. But did you know that the top four ranking factors are direct website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate?

Paying attention to these metrics is incredibly important. But don’t forget, there are more than 200 ranking factors Google considers when determining page rank. Although the ones we’ve mentioned are a few of the most important, many other digital metrics help users find your website—and hopefully stay long enough to convert!

2. Is My Website User-Friendly?

User experience is incredibly important—and it’s a key Google ranking factor. As it should be! When seniors can navigate your website seamlessly to find the information they came for, they’re encouraged to stay longer, learn more, and convert faster.

Prospective residents visiting your website expect to see beautiful design, experience fast load times, and read helpful, intuitive content. Any less, and they’ll leave your site for one that more closely matches those expectations.

Don’t believe us? About eight out of ten web visitors will stop engaging content that doesn’t display correctly on their device.4 And four out of ten say they’d leave a website that took too long to load.5 For the record, most web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less.6

Nearly nine out of ten web visitors will leave a website and not return if they have a bad experience.7 Your web design matters. The website speed matters. And user experience matters. You work hard to get seniors and their decision makers to your website in the first place. Don’t waste the opportunity by not working just as hard to keep them there.

3. Does My Website Convert Leads to Residents?

One of the last stops on every user journey is the purchase. Of course, you hope you’ve provided a user experience that supports conversion, but that’s easier said than done. Converting new residents can take some patience and the right follow-up.

Take a look at your resident journeys. Did they begin on your website? How much total time did they spend there? On what pages did they stay longest? How often do those who start online actually become residents? Are the tools you’re using effective? The answers to these questions will help you learn just how well your website is working.

To improve conversion, add contact forms, clearly displayed contact information, webchat, subscription opportunities for e-newsletters, and event registration. Even though these aren’t likely to provide immediate conversions, contact information is the first and best step to turning a lead into a resident.

Ready to audit your website but still need some guidance? We can help. Contact us at 888.307.7304 to get started.

For a list of references, please contact us.