SEO for Care Homes
Families do not choose a care home from a near me search. They spend weeks reading, comparing plus asking questions almost nobody answers properly. We make sure yours is the home that answers them.
Only 6% of care home demand is a near me search. In most trades we work in, that number is the whole game. Here it is almost nothing. What we found instead is that 78% of the demand in this sector returns a People Also Ask box, the highest share of any trade in our programme. Families are not looking for a map. They are asking questions, for weeks, usually after something has already happened at home. The home that answers those questions properly is the one on the shortlist when they finally pick up the phone.
How Our Service Works
Most agencies sell a care home a few blog posts plus a monthly report. Content is one card on this list. Everything below runs on your account from the first month, plus none of it is charged as an extra.
Google Business Profile And Maps
Primary category corrected, every type of care listed individually rather than as Care Home, the towns you genuinely serve defined plus hours that reflect when somebody actually answers. Near me is a small share of this sector, though when it does happen 97% of it returns a map.
Reviews And Family Feedback
A working process for asking families for reviews, plus a reply to every one including the difficult ones. In this sector a review is not a nice-to-have. It is a stranger telling another family what it was actually like, which is the thing they most want and least often find.
Fees And Funding Pages
The highest intent subject in the sector plus the one homes are most reluctant to write about. We build the pages that set out how fees work, what is included and what funding routes exist, without pretending the answer is simpler than it is.
CQC Rating And Inspection Pages
Your rating, your report plus what has changed since it was written, presented on your own site rather than left for a family to find on a directory. If the rating is good this is the strongest page you own. If it is not, saying so plainly beats being found out.
A Page For Every Type Of Care
Nursing, residential, dementia, respite plus end of life care are five different searches made by five different families. One page listing all of them ranks for none. We build a proper page for each type you genuinely provide.
Photography And Video
Video results appear on 72% of the demand we measured here, second only to personal training across our whole programme. A family wants to see the rooms, the garden plus the dining room before they will book a visit. Stock photography of a stranger holding a cup of tea does the opposite.
Citations And Directory Listings
Your name, address plus telephone number made consistent everywhere they appear, including the sector directories families use. Cheap, dull plus one of the few things that still moves a local listing on its own.
Technical Audits
A full technical audit every quarter covering crawling, indexing, broken links, redirects plus everything that fails silently. Then we do the fixing, which is the part an agency emailing you a list of errors has skipped.
Speed And Mobile
A family researching in the evening is doing it on a phone, frequently a fairly old one. Pages that load slowly lose people before they read anything, plus care home sites are usually heavy with large uncompressed images.
Schema And Structured Data
Your home marked up properly so search engines know what it is, where it is, what it offers plus who wrote each page. Never an invented rating, in this sector or any other. Structured data is read as a statement of fact.
Internal Linking And Site Structure
Pages organised so a family can move from a question to an answer to a visit request without going back to Google. Most care home sites are a flat list of pages with nothing joining them.
Enquiry Routes And Visit Requests
A clear way to ask a question, arrange a visit or request a brochure on every page, worded for somebody who may not be ready to commit to anything yet. Ranking well plus making people hunt for a telephone number wastes the ranking.
Website Management And Development
New pages built, existing ones rewritten, the site kept current as your home changes. If your website needs rebuilding entirely we will tell you plainly rather than optimising something that cannot work.
Social And AI Optimisation
Your pages structured so an AI assistant answering a family's question can find and quote you. Question and answer content is exactly what those systems draw on, plus this sector generates more questions than any other we work in.
Nobody Chooses A Care Home In An Afternoon
In most local trades the decision happens fast. Somebody needs a plumber, they search plumber near me, they ring one of the first three. We have measured that pattern in trade after trade, plus it is why the map listing usually comes first.
This sector does not work like that at all. Near me searches make up 6% of the demand we measured, against 78% of it returning a People Also Ask box. That is the highest question signal we have recorded anywhere. A family is not looking for the nearest home. They are working out what type of care is needed, what it costs, who is liable for the bill plus whether they are doing the right thing, over a period of weeks, usually starting after a fall, a diagnosis or a hospital discharge that has forced the issue.
Then the finding that decides where we start. The questions families actually type are almost entirely about money and legal responsibility, plus they are extraordinarily uncontested. Whether a person with dementia has to pay fees carries 2,400 searches at a difficulty of 15. Whether next of kin are responsible for those fees carries 1,600 at a difficulty of 8. Whether somebody can refuse to pay carries 480 at a difficulty of 9. These are frightened people asking reasonable questions plus almost nobody in the sector is answering them.
The map is flat, which is unusual. London takes 4% of all place-name demand in this sector, the lowest capital share of any trade we have measured. Care is bought where people live, so the demand sits in Derby, Sheffield, Watford, Doncaster plus Chesterfield rather than concentrating in a handful of cities. The average difficulty across the hundred busiest towns is 20, plus several of the busiest sit at 14 to 16.
So the position is not complicated. An independent home competing on a near me search is fighting the groups with the biggest marketing budgets. An independent home that answers the questions a family is genuinely asking, three weeks before they are ready to visit anywhere, is competing with almost nobody.
Who Is Looking For You
Before we quote anybody we pull the demand for their own patch. 449,520 monthly searches in this sector carry a place name across 150 towns and cities. Below are the top 100 by volume, carrying 392,940 between them.
London takes 16,390, which is 4% of local demand plus the lowest capital share of any trade in our programme. That is the single most useful thing on this page for an independent home. In most sectors the capital distorts everything. Here the demand genuinely sits where the families are, so a home in Barnsley or Sunderland is looking at a real local market rather than a rounding error. A further 50 towns carry smaller volumes, so if yours is not listed we will pull it for you free.
Now the number that matters most. The average difficulty across these hundred places is 20. Derby averages 14. Warrington and Kingston 15. Chesterfield 15. Sheffield, Watford, Richmond, Doncaster, Rotherham, Portsmouth plus Grimsby all sit at 16. These are markets where the corporate groups are bidding on brand terms and nobody is doing the local work properly.
Monthly UK search volumes carrying each place name, from our own research, rounded. Not a promise of traffic or enquiries. If your town is not here, ask and we will pull it.
What You Get For £350
Everything on this page is in the £350 plan for one home covering one area. The larger plans cover more ground plus more work, not a longer list of services.
The Care We Build For
Nobody searches for a care home in the abstract. They search the situation they are in: a parent who needs nursing rather than residential care, a diagnosis that changed what is required, two weeks of cover while a family carer has an operation. Here is where the demand actually sits once the home care agencies, the job adverts plus the corporate brand searches are stripped out.
Where We Will Not Spend Your Money
The raw keyword file for this sector shows 4,032,640 monthly searches. A fifth of it has nothing to do with a residential care home, which makes this the cleanest sector in our programme. It also makes the contamination easier to miss, plus more expensive when an agency builds for it.
The largest piece is a different service entirely. 859 terms carrying 365,800 monthly searches are home care: agencies, domiciliary visits, live-in carers plus companionship calls. A family searching that has decided to keep somebody at home. They are not your enquiry, they are the opposite of your enquiry, plus any agency reporting that volume as your market has read the file without looking at it.
Then the corporate brands. 472 terms carrying 241,130 searches are people typing the name of a specific group they have already heard of. You cannot win those, you should not try plus nobody searching them is choosing between you and anybody else.
Then the people who want to work for you. 337 terms carrying 180,110 searches are jobs, vacancies, shifts, pay rates plus how to become a carer. Worth having a careers page for, since staffing is hard. Not worth a penny of your marketing budget, plus it is the easiest way to make a traffic graph look impressive while the telephone stays quiet.
Smaller pieces: 32 terms of furniture, hoists plus insurance from people selling to you rather than buying from you. 19 terms of homes for sale and investment enquiries. 8 terms of training courses.
Now the part that is not about wasted money. There are searches in this file we will not build for at any price, plus they are the ones where somebody is in real distress. 8 terms covering care home abuse and neglect. 5 terms covering complaints, compensation and solicitors. Terms about deaths at named homes. A care home appearing in those results would be indefensible, plus we will not do it whatever the volume looks like.
We will also not write anything that pressures a family into deciding faster, imply any guarantee about the care somebody will receive, publish a review or rating that did not come from a real family, nor use the language of a sales funnel on a page about the end of somebody's life. If another agency offers you any of that, the offer tells you what you need to know about them.
Getting Started
We audit everything, free
Your site, your listing, your citations, your reviews plus where you sit against every other home in your own towns. Then we pull the keyword data for your patch and strip out the home care agencies, the corporate brand searches plus the job adverts.
We answer the questions first
Fees, funding, who is liable, what happens on the day somebody moves in, what your CQC report actually says. These are the softest and highest intent searches in your sector, plus they are what a family is reading three weeks before they ring anybody.
We fix the listing, then build the site out
Categories, every type of care listed separately, service area plus a proper review process with families. Then the technical work, schema, internal linking plus a page for each type of care you provide, in the order the demand justifies.
We keep at it, plus you hear from us
A written update every three weeks saying what we did, what moved plus what is next. A full technical audit every quarter. No jargon, no dashboard you have to log into, no month where you wonder whether anything happened.
Run The Arithmetic
Drag the sliders to your own numbers. Use your weekly fee and a realistic length of stay rather than a best case, since either will flatter it considerably. This is a rough illustration to think with, not a promise of results.
Illustration only, based on a month of 4.33 weeks. Real results depend on your area, your competition, your rating and your business. We do not guarantee positions, enquiries or admissions.
Simple Pricing
All fourteen workstreams are in every plan. The tiers change the size of the area plus the volume of work, not the list of what you get.
- One home, one service area
- Google Business Profile and Maps
- Reviews and family feedback
- Fees, funding and CQC pages
- A page per type of care plus website management
- Social, quarterly audits, monthly reporting
- Several homes or a wider area
- Everything in the plan alongside
- More pages built each month
- Deeper competitor work
- A group operating across regions
- Everything in the plans alongside
- Highest volume of work
- Multi location listing management
Answer The Questions They Are Already Asking.
Fourteen workstreams on one monthly fee. Your listing, your reviews, your CQC pages, your fees and funding pages plus a proper page for every type of care you provide. We will pull the numbers for your own towns before you commit to anything.
Everything included in your plan:
One clear retainer. No setup fee. You own the site.
