How Senior Homes Get More Residents by Blogging [2023 Edition]

How to Create a Blog That Attracts More Residents

What Content to Post

As a manager of a senior home, you probably get asked tons of questions daily, on various topics: conditions, age restriction, medical staff, food, quality of life, cost and more. You are an expert in your field and your potential clients need your know-how. It is a difficult decision, as you probably know, to put an elderly parent in a home — which is why people look for someone they can trust. This is what your blog does: other than answering people’s questions, it builds you up as someone they can trust. Now, when they are truly ready to visit a home, they will most probably contact you first. Then it’s on you to close the sale.

Before you start your blog, think about the questions you get asked most often. The easiest way to do that is to start with your most asked question and then branch out into different topic clusters. This way, you are covering different topics that your clients might be Googling.

Now that you have this list of questions, you are ready to write your blog posts. In order for you to make sure that the information you share is reaching your clients and is one of the top Google results, here are a few tips to follow.

How to Get Traffic to Your Content

Your blog posts should be between 800-1200 words for most, 2000- 3000 words for more comprehensive topics.

Google has hundreds of different factors that go into their algorithm, one of which is comprehensive content. Questions that are answered more thoroughly are given higher authority by Google and thus rate better on the search page.

Your blog post should feature quality content.

2000 words sound like a lot and you might think it’s a good idea to just “bulk up” your content, but Google has another feature built into its analytics that considers bounce rates.

This means that if readers are leaving your page without reading or at least browsing through your article, Google will perceive your content as incompetent and your post will immediately drop lower in search results.

Use crosslinks in your blog posts.

Remember when we said you should start with your top question and then branch out into other topic clusters? When you start writing about related topics that all have to do with a particular question, such as “How to choose the best senior home”, for example, Google starts to view you as an expert in your field, thus ranking your website higher. When you’re writing, always consider related content and put links to it to answer other questions that may pop up in your reader’s head.

How to Make Sure You’re Not Giving Away Too Much

Some senior homes, when thinking about starting a blog, get concerned that they will share too much information upfront and prevent a potential client from contacting them, which deprives them from the opportunity to make a sale. A simple guideline to writing blog posts is sharing the “what” and not the “how” in what you do. Clients want to know what you can do for them, the “how” on the other hand might only be interesting for your competition.

That being said, Google doesn’t care who is reading your blog post, that is not a metric that they measure. As long as people are clicking on your content and are staying long enough to absorb the information, you are getting the SEO benefit out of it.

It is up to you what you want to share with your readers and how much of your insights you are willing to disclose. The important part here is that you are sharing and people are now able to find you because they are searching for answers on the topics that you are blogging about.

How to Know You’ve Succeeded

If you’re answering your potential clients’ most pressing questions and you’re getting enough traffic to your blog, your phone should ring often. If it’s not, contact a marketing agency that specializes in marketing for facilities for the elderly, let them review where the problem is and be ready and willing to implement their suggestions.