Is your assisted living marketing working as well as it should? Does your website produce the results you need? Your answers determine the success (or failure) of your marketing efforts.

As each day passes, more and more seniors are on the internet. One survey finds that 55% of seniors use the web to research health and medical issues. They’re also researching assisted living communities. Is your assisted living marketing delivering the information they need? Is it motivating them (or their families) to take the next step?

 

Assisted Living Marketing & Your Website

 

More than any other marketing tool, your assisted living community website has to do a great job detailing what your community provides. It needs to explain the services you offer in a clear way so that readers can easily understand it. Your content shouldn’t be all about your facility. It should be all about benefits to its residents. How do you help them? How will staying at your assisted living community improve their lives and increase their dignity? Your assisted living marketing must have solid answers to these questions.

 

Is Your Assisted Living Website Dynamic?

What should go into the creation of an effective assisted living community website is subjective. The answer is different for each facility. A website can be as static or dynamic as you desire. Photos, 360° views of your facility, and video testimonials help tell the story of your assisted living community. It is what inspires viewers to take the next step and contact you.

 

Does Your Website Photography Do Your Community Justice?

Photos in particular help convey what life is like at your assisted living community. Do they do your facility justice? If the graphics and images are generic, your assisted living marketing is doing nothing to set your community apart from any other.

 

For example, stock photos of people in front of nondescript backgrounds doesn’t brand your assisted living facility. Even worse, these stock photos are probably showing up on websites all over the web, perhaps even on a competitor’s website. Happy residents should be seen in photos that were obviously taken at your assisted living community.

 

Your photography also shouldn’t be a sanitized version of reality. In the past, some assisted living facilities would have avoided showing residents using walkers or wheelchairs. But that’s reality. Everyone looking at your website, both seniors and their adult children, know it’s reality. When seniors see others living the same way they do, they can relate better.

 

The culture of your community needs to be apparent in your professionally taken photos. And it goes without saying that these photos must portray the quality so very important to any assisted living community: dignity. If your assisted living marketing accomplishes that, your marketing is halfway there already.

 

Does Google Love Your Website?

Website developers usually a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google… easy to love when the rankings are good, easy to hate when Google doesn’t like elements of the website. It’s important to remember that Google’s self-proclaimed mission is to provide users with accurate, useful search results. The better the website in terms of content and construction, the more likely Google will award it with a good ranking.

 

Your assisted living marketing plan takes a huge hit if you get penalized by Google. By penalizing you, Google is saying that something on your website isn’t up to its standards. Rather than agonize over whether this is deserved or not, it’s best to correct the problem and get back into Google’s good graces quickly. A poor ranking is always worth avoiding.

 

How Do You Know That You’ve Been Penalized by Google?

Google can give your website either an algorithmic or manual penalty. You’ll probably be informed of a manual penalty by Google, but you may not necessarily become aware of an algorithmic penalty right away.

 

Algorithmic penalties happen because:

 

• You previously had page one ranking. Now, that ranking has dropped to page two or three.
• The name of your assisted living community isn’t ranking as well as it did previously. Regardless of how well other keywords rank for you, the name of your facility should rank very high when someone searches for it.
• When you search your domain name, no results can be found.
• Google has removed your website from their cached search results.
• You search your domain name but results only show pages other than your homepage.

 

If you maintain your own website, it’s technical challenges like this that should make you consider viable outside options. It’s no sin to admit that this task is demanding and perhaps even overwhelming. After all, your main task is providing excellent resident care. When other things get in the way of that goal, something has to change.

 

Is Your Assisted Living Marketing Working?

 

The center of your marketing efforts is your assisted living community website. Consequently, you need to be certain it is competitive with other assisted living websites. The best way to do that is by partnering with a company that can put its digital marketing skills to work for you.

 

Dreamscape Marketing has created hundreds of websites for its healthcare clients. In addition, we’ve authored more than 50,000 pages of SEO-rich content designed to improve your Google ranking. As a Premier Google Partner, we can leverage our extensive SEO knowledge to drive more traffic to your website.

 

It’s time to take your assisted living marketing to a whole new level. Call us today at 888.307.7304 or email us at info@dreamscapemail.com. Let’s talk about the future of your assisted living community’s website.