Aged Care SEO and Content Marketing for a Booming Industry 2024

SEO and Content Marketing Strategies for the Care and Support industry

By 2056, 22% of Australia’s population will be 65 and over, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This statistic has many implications, but if one thing’s for sure, it’s that the care sector is set for a huge amount of growth and competition.

In 2018 and beyond, being competitive means having a comprehensive and focused marketing strategy. With almost any industry, search marketing is extremely important for acquiring new customers and raising brand awareness, and aged care is no different. In such a competitive and high growth industry, having a strong presence in search is crucial for care and support businesses around Australia. With increased competition comes increased difficulty in ranking for those high search volume keywords.

Recently, Prosperity Media has achieved great results for several clients in this space. Here are just some of the tactics we have found to be successful in the in-home support and aged care industry.

In-Depth Keyword research

As always, keyword research is fundamental to any SEO campaign. Again, aged care is competitive so getting your new aged care startup to rank for ‘aged care’ is going to be a tough battle.

As always, you must consider what your target audience is searching and the motivations behind these searches. Consider targeting specific locations that your aged care business can service. Getting granular with your keywords will help you capture searchers with more intent. When it comes to aged care, most aging Australian want to move into some sort of care with minimal disruption to their lives. In other words, not many seniors are moving from Sydney to Perth for an aged care facility. They want to stay in a familiar community where friends, family and the greater community are close by.

Targeting locations simultaneously lower competition, making it easier to rank, while also helping to ensure you’re getting the right type of visitors to your site.

Obviously, if you’re a single facility, scaling a location-based strategy won’t be possible, but for national organizations and care services under a sharing economy model, it’s possible to target a wide range of locations and cash in on that longtail traffic.

SEO Considerations

With the importance of location, it’s essential that you get your service locations, facilities or head offices listed on Google Maps. Ensuring your Google local listings are correct and up to date is crucial.

In addition to this, your site must optimised for mobile in 2018. With the rollout of mobile-first indexing and a huge number of mobile searches relating to location, your mobile site is crucial, especially if location play a part in your strategy. 

Blog Content

It’s long been known that content can be a huge driver of traffic and the care and support industry is no exception. The general rules of content marketing apply. Know your audience, provide them with value and make sure your brand’s voice shines through in your content.

At first, it might seem like a difficult task to create unique, engaging content for an industry such as aged care. While it’s certainly not as glamorous as the travel industry, there’s still a great amount of opportunity to create content that attracts and engages visitors to your blog.

Leverage News

One strategy that works well in this niche is covering industry news and events. For example, the NDIS is a topic that has been gaining a large amount of attention in the care industry of late. It’s a controversial issue that’s experiencing public backlash and wide news coverage.

Industries like aged care and support sectors can leverage news content as a way to inform readers but ultimately attract a wider audience. This is sometimes called newsjacking and with the right strategy, it can bring great results but brands must be careful in how they position themselves on certain issues. Controversial topics can get great engagement, but at the same time, there’s a need for balance. An aged care or support service blog that only posts about controversial topics will likely scare readers away.

As a content marketer in aged care, you must be able to speak the language of your audience. People searching for in-home care services or aged care facilities are hungry for answers. Informative content that answers to consumer questions are a staple of the industry and can’t be ignored.

Use a Content Calendar

Having a content calendar is always a great idea. Not only will it help you plan out your content months in advance when you find yourself in a slow month and lacking content, you can reference your calendar and get a piece of relevant content out.

While not every event on your calendar will relate to aged care and support services, the industry revolves around people and their families. Write about events both in your local area and larger events that your readers will be interested in. When you generate valuable, engaging and relatable content, your readers are more likely to trust your business which is incredibly important in such an industry.

Targeting longtail keywords, optimising for mobile and creating high quality, valuable content is just some of the strategies we have found to be highly effective in the in-home support and aged care industry. As part of a wider SEO and marketing campaign, these strategies have played a fundamental part in getting results and helping clients achieve success.