High-quality blog articles are a great way to add information and education to senior living communities’ websites. These articles are dynamic and can be indexed by Google. This will make your website more accessible to seniors and their families looking for information about senior living.
With more than a third of today’s
population accessing the internet, it is essential to meet your potential clients and get their information. 61% of global internet users spend a portion of their buyer journey online researching products before making a final decision. This is even if the product is ultimately purchased offline.
Your blog can help educate potential customers about the product and answer they’re most commonly asked questions. Before you start investing time and money into creating your website and writing blog content, you need to learn how to make blog posts optimized for search engines.
Search engine optimized blogging (or SEO blogging) is the practice where blogs are written with keywords and phrases to make them easy to find on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Bing. SEO helps your blog posts rank higher and more quickly than your competitors.
Use longtail keywords
Google receives over 3 billion searches per day. This makes it easy to lose your blog posts in the mix. Here’s where longtail keywords come in. The short keywords “senior living,” independent living, and assisted living can bring up thousands of results. They are also searched by thousands upon thousands of internet users who may not be your target market.
To develop longer-tail keywords with more specific meanings, consider what makes your product different and who will use it. What descriptive adjectives can you use to describe the product? Perhaps you are selling a luxury independent community targeted at wealthy consumers who have saved for retirement for their entire lives. Or perhaps you’re selling an affordable independent community aimed at budget-conscious customers with little or no retirement savings. Longtail keywords such as “luxury independent lifestyle” and “affordable independent life” with the community’s address added to the long keyword will return more specific results than generic ones.
You should choose one or two longtail keywords for each blog post and include them in its title and headlines, body, URL, text, alt text, and meta description. (Be careful when writing your headline. Google cuts off the search engine results at this point. Your longtail keywords shouldn’t be used too often or in strange places. They should be used throughout the post.
Think like customers
You need data before you decide which longtail keywords you want to include in a post. Google’s Keyword Planner allows you to discover what consumers are searching for; Google Trends allows you to explore hot topics within your industry, and social media allows you to understand consumers’ thinking and speech patterns better. Ask your sales and leasing personnel! They will be able to answer questions from seniors and their families.
Many consumers start their search online with a question. If you are looking for senior living communities, the questions “How can I afford assisted living?” and “What should I look out for in a community that offers senior living?” are two of the most common queries. Your blog post could help answer these questions using longtail keywords in its title and beyond.
Link to external and internal sources
SEO can be improved by including links from internal and external sources in your blog posts. Linking to your blog posts will increase the likelihood of search engines optimizing them. A service like Article Market makes it super easy and cheap to put out content for tier 2 links to your main blog posts. This is because it provides readers with additional resources and helps expand their initial searches. Also, the links help search engines better understand your posts’ content.
If you have several blog posts, link to them so that readers stay longer on your site. Perhaps your blog post “How do you afford long-term care?” links to a post that details the Medicare and Medicaid benefits accepted in your area. You could also link to Medicare and Medicaid websites or blog posts by big industry names like AARP.com, A Place for Mom.com, and Caring.com. These links can quantify the reasons consumers should choose your product and point them toward the information you want.
Why readability is important
Blog posts can simplify complicated topics and provide answers to complex questions. Your blog posts will need to be detailed to fulfill their function, but they shouldn’t prove difficult to understand. Blog posts are intended to assist consumers in their buyer journey. Therefore, they should be easy to understand. Use headings, subheadings, bolding, italicizing, and bulleted lists to break down long posts.
Consider writing a blog that provides readers with the top five-10 things they need to be aware of. Many factors must be considered when choosing a senior community. “Five factors to consider when choosing a senior living community” will be more attractive than “What should I consider when choosing one?” because readers can quickly scan the bolded five points without ever having to read the entire post. Although more content can help improve your SEO, don’t confuse readability and less content. It is essential to understand readers’ preferences when it comes to information consumption.
Remember that more people use smartphones to access the internet than desktops. So your blog posts must be mobile-friendly. This goal will be achieved with a simple format. However, it is essential to consider a mobile-friendly platform and theme for a genuinely mobile-friendly site.