3 Paid Search Tips for Your Assisted Living Community

With 95,000 Google searches for Assisted Living in the last 12 months, Pay-Per-Click ads (PPC) which start as low as a couple of dollars per click, are a great way to generate leads. Google Ads and other paid search programs place your ads at the top of the search engine results page, where prospect residents and their families can find you.

Over the last three years on Google, search engine results page (SERP) click-through-rates (CTR) lost 34.4 percent of click share on desktop and 61.5 percent of click share on mobile (Moz Data, July 2019) due to Google's Knowledge Graph and Structured Snippets. Paid ads have further contributed to pushing organic results down on SERPs and have steadily gained more real estate since 2010.

Working at a faster rate than SEO (Take a look at our blog on How to Improve SEO for your Assisted Living Community), PPC can connect you right away with an audience that’s already searching for your services. The very nature of paid search is to deliver a lead that’s already moving down the funnel. The user lands on your website and wants information, or has questions that need to be answered quickly.

SEO-informed Keyword Research

Google Keyword Planner and Keywordtool.io are great places to start. They’re free and will give you insights and bid estimates of search volumes. Google Trends is also a good tool and can provide you with an overview of how a search term has changed over time. Use forums, social media and review sites to align your SEO strategy and your content with your audience and their intent. You’ll also want to collect a list of your competitors to identify more keywords ideas (and eventually start building competitor ads).

As we say in our blog here, Senior living can be very local; the best approach to get local traffic is to target keywords with high volume of search as well as keywords with geo identifiers. For example, if your assisted living community is in Houston, Texas you’ll want to include the terms Houston, Texas in some of your keywords so that prospects in the Houston area can find you. 

Long-tail keywords are also critical to generate traffic. They’re more specific, may not necessarily have a high volume of search traffic but tend to be less competitive and therefore less expensive.  

So Many Formats, So Many Options

Google offers different ad formats that can be used for your Senior Living Community: Expanded Text Ads, Responsive Ads, Image Ads, Video Ads, and Call-only Ads.

Ad Extensions are too good to be overlooked and can expand your ad with additional information — giving prospects more reasons to choose your facility. They can increase an ad’s click-through-rate (CTR) by several percentage points. Extension formats include call buttons, location information, links, additional text and more. By adding more content to your ad, extensions give you more real estate, and even greater visibility and prominence on the search engine results page.

Optimize your Landing Pages and Track Conversions

What happens when your lead clicks on the ad and lands on your website? What will they find? When creating your landing page, make sure that it aligns with your ad. Use the same keywords and text so that the message is consistent.

Keep it simple and make it easy for the lead to convert into a customer. Do you want them to call you? Make sure your call-to-action and phone number are front and center. Do you want them to fill out a form? Be sure to provide an incentive or reason for them to share their contact information. Do you want them to visit? Embed a map with directions to your facility.

Tracking is immensely important. Make sure your Google Ads and Google Analytics are connected, and if you’re interested in listening to your calls for quality assurance, a call tracking tool like CallRail will be very useful. 

Let Blue Sky Marketing Help

Blue Sky Marketing is a Google Premier Partner (that means that Google tested our skills, think we're great, and gives us we have access to exclusive information, insights, and support not available otherwise. See full details here).

If you need help with your paid search marketing strategy and landing page optimization or want to talk about what our team can do for your Senior Living community, , founder and chief marketing strategist at Blue Sky Marketing.