Local SEO for Nursing Homes and Senior Living: Fill Beds

Updated 2026-10-16 · 6 minute read

How Google decides who shows up locally

Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence, on its tips to improve local ranking page. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching or the place they named. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google ties to things like links from other websites and your reviews.

You cannot move your building, so distance is fixed. Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. That leaves relevance and prominence, and both come down to a complete profile, real reviews and a website that clearly says what you do and where.

Your Google Business Profile comes first

Verify your profile and fill in every field. Google's ranking tips specifically mention verifying, keeping your address, hours and category current, adding photos and responding to reviews.

Follow Google's guidelines for representing your business closely. Care providers break them often, usually by accident.

Name: use the name on your sign. Do not add “Best Rehab in Tulsa” or a phone number. Google does not permit marketing taglines or service descriptions in the name.
One profile per location: each building gets one profile. If you have a separate rehab entrance with its own staff and hours, Google's rules on departments may allow a second profile with a distinct name and category.
Categories: choose the fewest, most specific categories that describe what the business is, not everything it has.
Home health and hospice: if families do not come to your office, you are a service-area business. Hide the address and set a service area. Google says service areas generally should not extend beyond about two hours of driving time.
Photos: real photos of rooms, dining, therapy and the entrance. Add new ones every few months.
Hours: list the hours the front desk or admissions line is staffed, and use special hours for holidays.

Reviews: ask everyone, answer carefully

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. The way to get more is to ask, consistently. Google's tips to get more reviews suggest sharing a review link or QR code, replying to reviews, and accepting all reviews rather than only the good ones.

There are hard rules here. Google's fake engagement policy prohibits incentives for reviews, including discounts and free services. It also prohibits discouraging negative reviews, selectively asking only happy families, setting staff review quotas, and reviews from people with a conflict of interest, which includes employees. The FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule separately bans fake reviews, undisclosed insider reviews and incentives conditioned on a positive or negative review.

A simple process works: at discharge or at a care conference, hand every family a card with your review QR code. Ask all of them. Do not screen first.

How to reply to reviews without a privacy problem

Google recommends short, professional replies, honesty, apologizing when appropriate, and taking complex issues offline. It also says never to share a reviewer's private information.

For a nursing home, home health agency or hospice, that last point is a HIPAA issue as well. In 2023, OCR settled with a practice that disclosed patient information in replies to negative reviews. Do not confirm that the reviewer or their parent was a resident or patient. Do not mention dates, conditions or what staff did. Thank them, say you want to hear more, and give a name and direct phone number.

Reply to positive reviews too, but not with the same sentence every time. Google specifically advises against generic thank-you replies. Most replies show within about 10 minutes, though Google says some take up to 30 days to clear its review, per its read and reply to reviews help page.

One page for each type of care

Relevance starts on your website. If someone searches memory care and your site has one page that lists ten services in a paragraph, you are asking Google to guess.

Build a page for each care type you actually offer: short-term rehab, long-term care, memory care, assisted living, respite, hospice or home health services. On each one, say who it is for, what a day looks like, how it is paid for, and how to schedule a tour. Use the words families use, like memory care or rehab after surgery, alongside the clinical terms.

Location pages that earn their place

Every building in a multi-site organization needs its own page, with its own address, phone, photos, administrator, care types and directions. Link each one to that building's Google Business Profile, and link the profile back to that page, not your home page.

Be careful with pages that target towns you are not in. Google's spam policies name doorway abuse, giving the example of pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and scaled content abuse, where many pages are made mainly to manipulate rankings. A page for every suburb with the town name swapped is exactly that. If you serve nearby towns, mention them naturally on your real location page, or write a genuinely useful page only where you have something specific to say.

Add LocalBusiness structured data to each location page. Google's LocalBusiness documentation lists name and address as required and recommends telephone, hours, URL and geo coordinates. Do not mark up your own testimonials as review stars. Google's review snippet guidelines say pages about a local business are not eligible for star snippets when the business controls the reviews about itself, including embedded widgets.

Page speed on a phone

Many of these searches happen on a phone in a hospital or a parking lot. A slow page loses the family before it loads.

Google's Core Web Vitals give you a target. Per web.dev, a good experience means Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Google Search's Core Web Vitals page says good scores align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward, though relevance still comes first.

The usual fixes on care provider sites: compress and resize photos, drop the auto-playing hero video, remove old tracking scripts and chat widgets nobody answers, and stop loading five web fonts.

Referral partner pages

If you take hospital discharges, your website has a second audience: the hospital case manager or discharge planner. Serve them too.

The hospital discharge planning rule at 42 CFR 482.43 requires hospitals to give patients a list of available home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities and other post-acute providers in the area, to tell patients they are free to choose, and to use and share data on quality measures when helping them choose. Discharge planners are looking at your quality data and your capabilities, quickly.

A Referrals page with a direct admissions phone and fax, and the hours you accept admissions, including weekends
What clinical services you can take: IV therapy, wound care, tube feeding, dialysis coordination, bariatric, behavioral
Insurance and Medicare Advantage plans you accept
How fast you respond to a referral, stated honestly
A named liaison with a photo
No PHI on the website: referrals should come through your secure referral system, fax or phone

Measure tours, not traffic

Traffic is not the goal. Tours and admissions are. Set up tracking that shows how many families called or requested a tour from the website and from your Google profile, and which pages they came through.

In Google Analytics 4, mark the tour request confirmation as a key event. Google's key events help page shows how to create an event that fires only on the thank-you page and mark it as a key event. Track tap-to-call clicks the same way.

Keep tracking clean of health information. Count that a form was sent, not what was in it, and keep ad pixels off form pages. HHS OCR's tracking technologies bulletin treats information a person types on a scheduling page, like the reason for seeking care, as potential PHI. Confirm your setup with your compliance officer.

Then close the loop. Once a month, ask admissions how many website and Google leads became tours and how many became admissions. That number is the one that matters.

Checklist

Verify each building's Google Business Profile and complete every field
Use your real sign name, the most specific category and current hours
Hand every discharging family a review card with a QR code, without screening
Reply to every review within a few days, without confirming anyone was a resident or patient
Build one page per care type and one page per building
Link each Business Profile to its own location page
Add LocalBusiness structured data, without self-review stars
Get mobile pages under 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint
Publish a Referrals page with direct admissions contacts and clinical capabilities
Track tour requests and calls as key events, and review leads with admissions monthly

Questions

Can we offer a gift card for Google reviews?

No. Google's policy prohibits incentives for reviews, including discounts and free goods or services, and the FTC rule bans incentives conditioned on a positive or negative review. Ask every family, and offer nothing in exchange.

Should we make a page for every town near us?

Not as copies with the town name swapped. Google's spam policies call that doorway abuse. Mention nearby towns on your real location page, and only build a separate page where you have specific, useful information for that area.

Can our staff leave reviews?

No. Google's policy prohibits reviews based on a conflict of interest, and current or former employment is one of its examples. Staff can ask families to review you, as long as they ask everyone and offer no incentive.

How should we respond to a bad review about care?

Briefly and without details. Thank them, say you want to understand what happened, and give a name and number to call. Never confirm the person was a resident or patient or discuss their care, because that can be a HIPAA disclosure.

Sources

This guide is general information, not legal advice. Confirm regulatory and legal questions with your compliance officer or counsel.

Ready for a better website?

Census Web Studio builds care-type pages, location pages and tour tracking that work with your Google profile, so you can see which searches turn into admissions.

How to fill beds from Google