Client Bio: Living Care is a family of retirement communities committed to exceeding expectations with unparalleled service while honoring resident choice, dignity and independence; promoting peace of mind. They offer an active adult retirement community, senior housing, and assisted living facilities in beautiful retirement villages.
The Goal:
Sanctuary Marketing Group was hired to review the existing Living Care website properties located around the country and provide basic search engine optimization based on the extensive research that we performed. The existing websites Living Care had were built by a company that had no knowledge or experience with online marketing strategy. The websites look great but they couldn’t be found online. So our goal was to work with their existing websites and put them on the map. Ultimately the goal was to increase their listings in the search engines for relevant and highly targeted keywords and increase traffic without a huge investment in time and budget.
The Challenge:
The senior retirement community market is crowded and competitive. Not to mention the market for assisted living. So we had to do our best to optimize their sites for a broad range of highly targeted services and keywords with the goal of surpassing the competition and ultimately increasing traffic.
The Solution:
Our recommendation was to go through the process of properly researching the retirement community and assisted living market and then based on that research we would optimize their websites. An SEO (Search Engine Optimization) project is a great way to effectively take a “good” website and make it work for you without going through the time and expense of starting from scratch. Sometimes it’s necessary for a number of reasons to start over but in this case it was not in the cards. Ideally we would like to design and build the website, provide an ongoing search engine optimization campaign to continually increase traffic for our clients but performing a one-time, basic search engine optimization for a website is a good place to start. With our decade and a half of experience we were easily able to identify all the points where we could improve the websites. With a reasonable investment we provided Living Care with websites that were now built based on research, a sound strategy and our best practices instead of just a pretty face.
The Result:
Based on our work we were able to greatly increase the amount of organic traffic* to their websites which is our goal. Below is an illustration demonstrating our success for one of the web properties in Texas.
Beginning statistics November 2009:
Note that in November over 80% of all traffic to the website was direct traffic which means that someone actually typed in their web address and went to the website. Only 16% of all traffic was from potential clients coming from search engines.
The graph below shows statistics from almost a year later. Notice that the traffic to the website has increased but more importantly visitors are typing in their website address half as much but search engine traffic is now almost 50% of the site traffic instead of 16%. All of this because the website was properly optimized to rank better in the search engines. Consider that this is only a base-level, one time optimization and not an ongoing campaign over the course of the year. Imagine what could be accomplished if we were given the opportunity to work on this site on a regular basis.
* Organic traffic is “free” traffic from the search engines that show up in search results vs. pay-per-click results that show up in the right column of Google. Our goal is to increase organic traffic because we believe that it’s the best return on your investment. Click here to read more about our philosophy.