With the continued shift to digital-first sales and marketing strategies, having a strong senior living SEO (search engine optimization) strategy has become a must for senior living providers and 55+ community builders.
One of the best ways to attract traffic to your site is to appear among the top results in search engines. That’s where SEO comes in.
In this post, you’ll get an overview of the three basic types of SEO and how they can be implemented to impact your website’s search engine ranking.
What Is Senior Living SEO and Why Is it Important?
SEO can be summarized as the practice of enhancing technical, on-site and off-site aspects of your website to increase its search engine visibility. As the old saying goes, “Page two of Google is where content wastes away.”
That’s why having a strong 55+ or senior living SEO strategy is so important for builders and providers. The stronger your site’s optimization, the higher it will rank when prospects search organically on sites such as Google. And the higher it ranks, the more traffic your site will earn.
Understanding the Different Types of SEO
Most of your efforts to optimize your website for organic search will fall into any of the three main types of SEO: technical, on-site and off-site.
Technical SEO entails much of the behind-the-scenes aspects of your website, such as speed, responsiveness and source code elements. It involves optimizing your website structure so that search engines, such as Google and Bing, can crawl it quickly and efficiently.
Crawling describes the process through which a search engine’s robots analyze a site’s content. Through crawling, search engine robots collect new and updated links from websites and store them in databases. When a user searches for a term, relevant links are retrieved from these databases and returned as search engine results.
Basic technical SEO tips include:
- Specifying your website’s preferred domain name
- Optimizing your website’s Robots.txt file
- Designing your website for the best user experience rather than conversion
- Optimizing for website speed
- Incorporating mobile-friendly design principles
On-site SEO involves changes to the content on your website that can be seen by visitors. One of the key aspects of on-site SEO is understanding how search engines crawl websites versus how readers consume content. The reason for this being that the words, images and graphics that readers see on your site also have technical SEO elements involved; this is due to the coding on the backend. As such, when optimizing your site pages, you should do so with the intent of finding the perfect balance between crawlability and readability.
Fundamental on-site SEO tips include:
- Optimizing for the right keywords
- Considering the user’s intent when searching
- Creating quality content
- Avoiding keyword cannibalization
Leading SEO resource, Moz, defines off-site SEO as any actions you engage in outside of your own website to impact its ranking with search engine results pages (SERPs). On one hand, on-site senior living SEO efforts help search engines match your website to user’s queries. On the other hand, off-page efforts, help them rank your page in the listings.
For example, one of the most common off-site senior living SEO strategies is backlinking. This is when other websites link their content back to your page. If the page(s) linking back to your website have a high domain authority and trust rating, it will signal to search engines that your content is valuable to searchers. In turn, your ranking in search should increase.
Tips for off-site SEO include:
- Establishing backlinks to your content
- Using social media
- Commenting on industry blogs
- Writing guest blog posts
Watch Our 15-Minute Webinar for More SEO Insights!
Now that you know the basics of senior living SEO, you’re likely thinking about next steps and more in-depth insights on how you can begin optimizing your website. Check out the 15-minute webinar below for additional insights and examples of steps you can take to further strengthen your site’s SEO.