In this day of texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Google age, it is becoming more and more critical for those marketing to seniors to also be tech savvy. To many people’s surprise, seniors are becoming more and more tech savvy, especially when it comes to searching for products and services. In one recent consumer survey, researches found that 57% of individuals over the age of 55 began their search for major purchases online.
What this means for assisted living and other senior services marketing is that web sites need to be integrated into the marketing and selling process. Gone are the days when an assisted living website was simply an extended business card online. Instead, we are now in a time where the website plays two critical roles:
1) Attracting raw visitors or traffic; and
2) Convincing those visitors to take the next step with your community.
The website has truly become part of the decision-making and selling process.
This totally flies in the face of many web designers who, in our opinion, don’t “get it”. There are still in the mode of designing web sites that do not attract visitors to their site nor do they attract potential clients if someone happens to be lucky enough to land on your site. If you are an assisted living facility owner or marketer, and if your website is mostly flashy, pretty pictures, then you can be certain that you are missing the boat. Probably, you are not ranked highly in the proper local search terms and probably, people do not spend long on your website because you are not providing them what they want. Both are big mistakes.
In this article, let’s tackle getting traffic to your website and what has to get done. These days, new visitors to your website come from one of two places:
1) Search engines like Google where people are looking for you; or
2) Somebody saw something in print with your website on it;
For purposes of this article, we will really only focus on the first because search engine marketing is where great dividends can be made.
Let’s face it, there is a TON of people that will search for your assisted living facility online. Don’t get me wrong, the website is not the end all, be all selling machine. Oh contraire, it is the start of the selling process where people first get exposed to you. In an ideal world of web marketing, your website simply gathers visitors, exposes them to why you are so different, and then gets a percentage of them to call you, visit you in person, or request more info.
To get that all important traffic to your website means that you need to show up for search terms like:
Your City + Assisted living;
Your City + Assisted Living Facilities;
Your City + Retirement Community;
etc.
For your web marketing team, this means that they will need to carefully focus on what is on your website that Google, Yahoo, and others key upon as well as they need to focus on what other web sites are saying about your website. It is only when this process is carefully managed that the assisted living website will rank highly in Google which then brings in the all to critical website visitor.
Dr. Chris Anderson is founder of http://www.AssistedLivingMarketingPro.com, a specialist in website marketing. Visit today to learn how your ALF website can dominate Google at absolutely no risk to you.