Assisted Living SEO Agency

The short answer

Assisted living SEO is the work of being found by adult children, not by residents. The searcher is usually a son or daughter acting inside a two-week window after a parent falls or gets a hospital discharge date. Referral aggregators outrank most communities on their own city terms and charge the community a placement fee on every move-in they send. Ranking a community's own pages and Google Business Profiles above them changes where the tour call lands and what a move-in costs.

share of move-ins from paid referral networks across senior living clients — verify with Tim

Move-ins currently coming through aggregators

cost per direct move-in vs referral placement fee — confirm

Direct move-in cost against a placement fee

Your buyer is a 55-year-old daughter with two weeks to decide

Nobody wakes up and shops for assisted living. A parent falls, a hospital case manager says discharge is Friday, and an adult child starts searching that night. The decision window is days, the emotional load is high, and the person searching has never done this before.

That changes what the site has to do. Pricing, care levels, what is included, what triggers a move to memory care, and whether you can take someone off a hospital discharge this week are the questions being asked. Most community sites answer none of them and lead with a photo of a garden.

The searcher is also not the resident. Copy written to an 82-year-old reads wrong to the person making the call and writing the check.

You are competing against aggregators, not other communities

Search assisted living in almost any US city and the first page belongs to national referral networks. They outspend and outrank individual operators, capture the inquiry, then sell it back to you as a placement fee when the resident moves in. Communities end up paying for calls generated on their own brand and city terms.

There is nothing wrong with using them. There is something wrong with using only them, because you never build a channel you own and your cost per move-in never comes down. The communities that get out from under this rank their own location pages, run their own Google Business Profile properly, and answer the phone.

For skilled nursing there is a third competitor: your own CMS star rating. It is public, it ranks for your brand name, and no amount of website copy outweighs a two-star inspection result on Care Compare.

Assisted Living SEO: how we run it for assisted living and nursing homes

A real page per community and per level of care

Independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing are four different searches with four different urgencies. One community page trying to cover all four ranks for none of them.

Google Business Profile per address

Correct category, hours, photos, and a Q&A section that answers pricing and admission questions before the call. The map pack is where the drive-time filter happens.

Paid search on discharge-urgency queries

Campaigns split between planners researching for a parent months out and families with a discharge date this week. The second group converts at a completely different rate and deserves its own budget.

Reputation and review response

Family reviews are the primary trust signal in this category and the one thing aggregators cannot own for you. A review engine that runs without your executive director remembering to ask.

Tour tracking and CRM integration

A unique number per campaign flowing into your CRM, with tour scheduled, tour completed, and move-in written back, so you can put cost per direct move-in next to what you pay per referred move-in.

Services

What we would run here

Search engine optimization

Other agencies report positions; we report phone calls. Every keyword we chase is one a family types when they are ready to place someone, and every call traces back to the page that earned it.

Local search marketing

Families search for help close to home, and the map pack sits above every organic result on that search. Ranking your locations there is a different job than ranking a website, and for treatment providers it carries rules nobody else deals with.

Online reputation management

One angry post on a thin profile costs you calls you will never know you lost. We build the review volume that absorbs it and write the responses that will not get you fined.

PPC management

Our best-fit accounts run $50,000 to $100,000 a month through Google. Run right, paid search is the only channel that produces admissions this month; run badly, it funds your competitors' research.

Lead generation

Lead generation in this industry has a bad name for good reasons: the same inquiry sold to four facilities, per-admission deals that violate federal law, dashboards full of form fills nobody answered. We build the opposite — your own inquiry flow, on your own numbers, tracked to the admission.

Call tracking and analytics

Every page, every campaign, and every listing gets its own number. When admissions picks up, we already know what made the phone ring.

Free audit

Want to see where your calls are going?

We audit your rankings, ads, and call tracking against the programs you compete with, then show you what is leaking. Yours to keep either way.

Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833

Compliance

The rules that apply to this category

This is the part that catches agencies who have not worked in this category before.

Fair Housing Act applies to every ad you run

Senior housing is housing. Advertising cannot express a preference or limitation based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability, and that reaches imagery as well as words. Copy like perfect for active Christian seniors and photo sets showing only one demographic are both exposure. Communities marketing as 55-plus rely on the Housing for Older Persons Act exemption and have to meet its occupancy requirements to advertise that way.

CMS Five-Star ratings and Care Compare are part of your search results

For Medicare-certified skilled nursing, the star rating, staffing data, and inspection deficiencies are public and surface on brand searches. Marketing that contradicts a low rating does not work. The honest play is fixing what the survey found and letting the reporting show the trend.

State licensure defines what you may advertise

Assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing are licensed separately and the definitions vary by state. Advertising memory care, dementia services, or nursing-level care beyond what your license covers is a survey finding, not a marketing risk. We check the license before writing the page.

Anti-Kickback exposure on placement arrangements

Communities that bill Medicare or Medicaid, skilled nursing especially, take on Anti-Kickback Statute exposure with referral arrangements paid per move-in. Private-pay assisted living sits in different territory, but mixed-payer operators need counsel to look at the contract. We do not structure marketing as per-admission payment.

Written on this in more depth

No gate and no form. These go further than a services page reasonably can.

Assisted living and nursing home SEO

Nursing home SEO for assisted living and skilled nursing communities: adult-child search intent, CMS ratings, pricing pages, and tracked tour calls.

Sources

FAQ

Questions we get asked

Should we stop using A Place for Mom and similar referral networks?

Not on day one. Cutting your only lead source before you own a channel is how occupancy drops. Build direct search and paid campaigns first, put cost per direct move-in next to the placement fee, and shift budget once the numbers say to. That usually takes two to three quarters.

How long does assisted living SEO take to move occupancy?

Local search and Google Business Profile work shows up in eight to twelve weeks. Ranking above national aggregators on competitive city terms takes six months or longer, and in some large metros it does not happen on the head term at all. Neighborhood and level-of-care queries are where a single community wins.

Should we publish pricing on the website?

Yes, at least a starting range. Adult children screen on affordability before they call, and hiding price sends them to the aggregators who will quote one. Communities that publish a range get fewer calls and more tours.

Our CMS star rating is low. Can marketing fix that?

No. The rating is public, it ranks for your name, and pretending otherwise costs you trust with the one person who checks. What marketing can do is make sure the profile is accurate, that improvements since the last survey are visible, and that families see current staffing and current leadership.

Who should be answering the phone?

Somebody who can schedule a tour on the call, seven days a week. The most common leak we find is not traffic. It is a Saturday inquiry called back on Monday, by which point the family has already toured somewhere else.

Free audit

Find out where your calls are leaking.

We take apart your rankings, your ads, and your call tracking, then show you where the calls are going instead of to you. The audit is yours to keep whether we work together or not.

Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833