Senior Living SEO: Strategies to Outrank Directories & Build Trust with Families

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on March 6, 2025

Senior living SEO is a battle of reputation and building trust with families. Compared to other direct-to-consumer industries, you have to target two groups of decision-makers for senior living communities.

And that plays a significant role in optimizing your website for better rankings and organic lead generation. 

What is Senior Living SEO?

Senior Living SEO is the process of optimizing a senior living community’s website to climb higher in Google’s search results (and other search engines, too). The goal is to attract as many potential residents and their families (who are decision-makers) as possible and generate more inquiries for assisted living, independent living, memory care, and other senior care services.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to do senior living SEO effectively so you can outrank large directories such as A Place for Mom and Caring.com (with the right search intent) and get more inquiries for your senior care services. 

Senior Living SEO Strategies

While there are strategies similar to those of other SEO industries that you should implement on your community’s website, I’ll offer tailored examples and SEO techniques to help you climb Google’s SERPs for your target keywords (and maintain being in the top 3 positions). 

Content Strategy for Senior Living SEO

As I mentioned earlier, if you’re optimizing your senior living website for search, you’re addressing the needs of two groups:

• Seniors: Searching for a comfortable, engaging community.
• Adult Children & Caregivers: Researching safety, cost, and care quality.

Tapping into both of these targeted audiences helps you increase your chances of getting more search traffic, as they have different sets of pain points, challenges, and problems they will be searching on Google (and in other places where they would be making decisions, given that target clients today don’t only search on Google, they also look for solutions on LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity).

Pro Tip: Create a content strategy that considers emotional decisions. Your content assets across all platforms (including blogs) must provide clear, valuable information while building trust and credibility through their emotional appeal. 

Create “Decision-Stage” Content to Convert Leads

Families and seniors rarely make an immediate decision when choosing a senior living community. Generally, it takes them months, if not years, to research multiple options, compare features, and consult family members before taking the next step.

They may not be in the B2B space, but it is almost similar, as it takes a longer sales cycle to help seniors’ families choose the right facility. 

Some content formats and topics will work for senior living community websites. 

1. Comparison Guides

There is a need to educate potential residents and their families about the differences between senior care options. So, your content must provide clarity initially and draw insights to help them make informed decisions.

Examples of topics for comparison guides:

• “Nursing Home vs. Assisted Living: Which Is Right for You?”
• “Memory Care vs. Assisted Living: Key Differences Explained”
• “Independent Living vs. Assisted Living: What’s Best for Your Loved One?”

These types of content will help you position your community as a trusted advisor instead of just a service provider. Showing your expertise across your landing pages and blog content increases your thought leadership in your space, which later translates into lower CAC (cost to acquire a customer), as potential residents already recognize you in different places where your brand appears. 

2. Pricing Breakdown

Cost is one of the biggest concerns for families researching senior living. Since most communities don’t list prices upfront, creating transparent and detailed pricing content gives you a competitive advantage.

It also helps make your back-end operations more efficient, as you’re only getting qualified leads—people filling out their forms are the ones with target purchasing power.

Here are examples of topics for pricing breakdown:

• “How Much Does Assisted Living Cost in [City]?”
• “Understanding the Cost of Memory Care: What’s Included?”
• “Senior Living Costs: Breaking Down Fees & Payment Options”

This content format also helps you appear on Google’s SERPs for keyword variants for high-intent pricing-related keywords (e.g., “affordable senior living in [CITY].”

3. Checklist & Decision-Making Guides

Families have a set of factors to consider when making decisions to hire a senior living facility. So, having checklists and guides that make it easier for seniors and families to make their decisions when the time is right are high-utility content assets you can publish on your site. 

Make it interactive or downloadable (particularly for checklists) to increase engagement and collect lead details (through your lead magnets). The type of lead magnet that works is the done-for-you content that eases people’s decision-making. 

 

Video & Virtual Tours for Higher Engagement 

Create facility walkthrough videos that show the facility, the rooms, the dining area, and the activities of your senior living facility. 

By showing people what it looks like in your facility, you give them a glimpse of the actual experience their senior relatives would be expecting. 

Upload these videos to YouTube and optimize them for search by targeting specific keywords in the titles. You can add links to your website in the description to drive traffic from organic social media. 

Don’t Neglect Long Tail & Local Keywords

If you’re trying to rank for broad, competitive keywords like “senior living”, you won’t quickly achieve it, especially if you’re doing SEO for a new website.

The best alternative is to focus your content strategy on long-tail, hyper-local keywords that indicate strong search content.

Examples of these are high-intent keywords for senior living SEO:

• “Best memory care facility in [CITY] with 24/7 nursing.”
• “Assisted living costs in [CITY]: What to expect.”
• “Pet-friendly senior living near [CITY].”

These keywords match the way people search, as, more often than not, families include the specific needs of their seniors (memory care, pet-friendly, and pricing). These are considerations and preferences that have high intent for purchase. 

You can quickly search for any head term and see more questions in the”People Also Ask” section that you can add as FAQs for each relevant article you’re writing. 

 

Fix Technical SEO Issues

Standard SEO practice is to fix technical SEO issues before tackling content marketing and link building. This ensures that your site’s most important web pages are indexed and crawled correctly—vital components for your web pages to rank for their target keywords. 

 

Here are common technical SEO challenges we’ve seen across many senior living community websites, and we show you how to fix them. 

ADA Non-Compliance & Poor Readability

Make your senior living website ADA-compliant, given that you’re catering to an audience with potential vision impairments, mobility issues, or cognitive decline. 

Addressing these needs increases user engagement on your website and greatly affects your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers.

A couple of solutions to these are the following:

• Use large, high-contrast fonts (recommended to be 16px+ for readability).
• Add alt text to all images to help users better understand the context of your image, particularly for facility photos and call-to-action buttons.
• Ensure keyboard navigation works for form submissions and menus, assisting your target audience in seamlessly navigating your website properly.
• Implement ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes for screen readers.
• Use Google Lighthouse and WAVE Accessibility Checker to scan for ADA compliance issues. 

Slow Page Speed & Mobile Performance issues

The desire to upload high-quality photos has disadvantages when these photos are not optimized for search. Large images and heavy media files could affect your site’s ability to load webpages faster, especially when shown on mobile devices. 

Here are actionable tips to fix them:

• Use WebP format as your image format when uploading to WordPress or your CMS, instead of PNG/JPG. 
• If you have dozens of photos already uploaded on your site, compress these images with tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel.
• Lazy-load videos and images so they can load only when visible on the screen.
• Enable browser caching to speed up repeat visits.
• Minimize unnecessary scripts, codes, and plugins that will only slow down the website. If you’re using WordPress, delete plugins you no longer use. 
• Run Google PageSpeed Insights on your web pages (start with your homepage) to see specific technical issues you must fix (e.g., Largest Contentful Paint—LCP). 

Duplicate Content and Thin Content Issues

If you keep copying the same content from other senior living communities, you won’t be able to rank for your target keywords because of duplicate content issues. 

Here are hygienic things to ensure every webpage is clean from any duplicate content issues:

• Write unique descriptions for each location, highlighting specific amenities, staff, and resident testimonials. This would consume resources, but investing in landing page copy is essential as users begin to fact-check most information (especially in today’s age when they can easily validate facts). 
• Add user-generated content (reviews, testimonials, and FAQs) to make each page distinctive.
• Implement canonical tags to avoid duplicate content penalties and point similar pages to one page you think is more relevant and that your search engines should crawl and better index your website. 
• Use structured data (LocalBusiness schema) to differentiate each location’s details for Google. 

Poor Internal Linking and Crawlability Issues

Diagnose your website for orphan pages (pages that don’t have internal links pointing to them). Doing so sends rich signals to Google that the webpage is critical to crawl and index.

Here’s my SEO checklist for smart internal linking:

• Create a clear, logical site architecture by mapping your service and location pages.
• Use breadcrumb navigation (if it’s better with your current web design) to improve user experience and ranking potential.
• Internally link from blog posts to service pages to drive more users to your landing pages, where they can be converted into potential clients.
• Submit an updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console. This is one overlooked technical SEO solution for most assisted living websites. It’s pretty basic SEO, but it’s not implemented most often.

You can use Screaming Frog, still the best technical SEO tool for me, to identify orphan pages and broken links and find more technical SEO issues on your senior living community website. 

 

Apply Basic and Advanced GBP Optimization

Since 70% of senior living searches are local (e.g., “assisted living near me”), you can’t ignore optimizing your Google Business Profile.

Your Google Business Profile is your most important local SEO asset, as it sits above Google’s organic search listings. Before you rank for any local pages, it is best to focus your efforts on optimizing your GBP.

Here are the essential GBP for senior living communities:

• Claim and verify your GBP. If you haven’t claimed your listing, verify ownership through Google Business to manage and update your profile.
• Ensure NAP consistency. Your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) must match exactly across your website, local directories, and social media profiles. 
• Check even small differences (for instance: “St” VS “Street”), as these can create duplicate listings and might hurt your rankings. 
• Choose the correct GBP categories. Your primary category must reflect your core service (assisted living facility, retirement community, or nursing home).
• Include secondary categories based on your services (e.g., memory care facility, independent care facility, senior citizen center).
• Turn on GBP messaging to enable messaging and call tracking so potential residents or their families can message you directly on GBP.
• Encourage resident families and visitors to leave reviews for more trust-building and a positive online reputation. 

Many Google Business Profiles of senior living communities may have the majority of the above tips implemented in their respective GBPs.

However, you can further optimize your Google Business Profile to create a wider gap of advantage for local map rankings and organic local ranking improvements of your website. 

Here are more advanced Google Business Optimization tips:

• Trigger justifications in GBP (justifications are bolded texts that usually appear to highlight relevant keywords matching the user’s search intent). You can trigger these justifications by adding specific service-based keywords to your Business Description, posts, and Q&A. 
• Post weekly updates to your GBP. Google rewards active business profiles with higher rankings, helping you engage more potential residents and sending rich local signals to Google that you deserve higher rankings on Google Map Packs.
• Add event promotions, such as seasonal promos, to your Google Business Profile. 
• Include resident spotlights for clients who can publicly disclose their testimonials.
• Include service and appointment links directly on your GBP profile. For instance, add a “Book a Tour” link to your tour scheduling page or service pages linking to your assisted living, memory care, or independent living pages.
• Make it easy for visitors to request more information through your contact page.
• Test your phone numbers and Google Maps directions. When more residents actually use them, Google receives signals that they are accurate, which could help improve the ranking of your Google Business Profile. 

Be Generous to Create Local Awareness

The local SEO game requires getting the right types of backlinks to increase your community site’s ability to rank for local keywords. Helping others within the local sphere is one of the best ways to acquire hyperlocal backlinks. 

Most SEOs in the space treat local link building as a one-sided relationship where they only give value if there’s a link involved. In local SEO, getting local backlinks is much easier if you do it without expecting immediate returns. That means you naturally earn media attention, partnerships, and backlinks as a by-product. 

Here are actionable ways to get backlinks for senior living SEO (through local generosity and engagement):

• Host free community health fairs or caregiver support workshops (a by-product of this is having local news outlets cover your story).
• Offer your community’s medical director or head caregiver as an expert for interviews (“expert commentaries”) where they provide as much value on topics like aging, caregiving, and senior wellness.
• Partner with local hospitals, physical therapy clinics, and home health agencies to get your senior living facility featured on their referral pages.
• Provide educational sessions on fall prevention, dementia care, or senior nutrition at hospitals. 
• Sponsor local senior-friendly initiatives, such as park bench donations, fitness programs, or transportation services for seniors. 
• Host free senior wellness webinars or workshops (and get more local features on local news websites).
• Partner with churches, libraries, and community centers to provide caregiver training or financial planning for senior living.
• Sponsor high school service projects or intergenerational programs to foster goodwill and create natural press coverage.

The more you invest in your local area, the more brand recognition, trust, and natural backlinks you will earn organically. Not only will it help your site’s SEO performance, but it will also position your senior living community as a go-to solution provider in your city. 

 

SharpRocket—Agency of Choice for Senior Living Communities

Need link building or full SEO campaigns? Schedule a strategy call and we’ll show you how to grow your site’s organic traffic.