By Jo Edwards, Senior Director
Marketing for residential care homes has its own unique set of challenges because the sector is fundamentally built on trust, reputation, and locality.
All three are difficult to communicate, yet with the right approach, they are achievable.
Having worked with care homes for years, I can say with confidence that the biggest frustration they face is this:
“How do we get found, in the right area, at the clients’ point of need?”
Unlike national providers, residential care is hyper-local. Social services and families are not searching for “the best care home in the UK.”
They are typing “dementia care in Chelmsford” or “residential care near Lincoln.”
If you do not appear when and where your potential clients are searching, you are effectively invisible, no matter how good your carers are.
For many care homes, the answer has been found in SEO (search engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) targeting.
But ranking well locally is far from straightforward…
The competition is fierce
Type almost any care-related search into Google, and you will see the same thing: a handful of local providers competing for the top spot in their area.
For smaller or independent providers, this can be incredibly difficult, especially when competing with multi-location providers.
If your website has not been optimised with local SEO best practice, (things like location pages, Google Business Profile optimisation, local backlinks, and properly structured content), you are already losing ground to competitors who have invested in it.
Yet, many care providers either do not know this or do not have the time or resource internally to tackle it.
Reviews and reputation carry huge SEO weight
Although word-of-mouth used to be the primary way we, as humans, judged the effectiveness and value of a service, this is no longer the case.
Google reviews and online ratings directly influence local rankings and the perception of your brand.
A care provider with fifty 5-star reviews will almost always outrank one with five, no matter how polished its website looks.
This means care home marketing teams have to think beyond content creation and ads and implement systems to encourage, manage, and respond to reviews.
Of course, all of this must be done while balancing the sensitivities around families, privacy, and compliance.
GEO needs a smarter approach
AI-driven search tools are changing how your potential clients find information about care homes.
In this sense, we are no longer dealing solely with Google’s traditional rankings.
People are starting to ask questions directly to generative engines and getting summarised, AI-written answers instead of scrolling through endless search results.
You can use a GEO service, therefore, to ensure your care home is mentioned, referenced, and well-represented in the sources these AI tools (like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) draw from.
If your content is thin, outdated, or not optimised for these emerging technologies, you risk being invisible when someone types “best dementia care providers near me” into a generative engine and gets a neat, AI-generated list of suggestions without ever visiting your website.
To win here, care providers need:
- Authoritative, well-structured content that answers the kinds of questions families are asking
- Consistent mentions across trusted sources (like Reddit), not just their own website
- A clear focus on reputation and reviews, as generative tools tend to pull from these signals
If you have not yet invested in this new form of marketing, your competitors likely have, so it may be time you got on board.
Internal capacity often falls short
Here lies a fundamental challenge and one that I have heard time and time again.
Most care providers do not have dedicated marketing teams and SEO, content writing, GEO, and reputation management often get bolted onto someone’s already overstretched role.
Alternatively, they get neglected entirely and thus the care provider falls behind local competition who have either engaged a marketing team for help or employed specialists.
The easy way to catch up is to speak with a marketing expert that a) specialises in the care sector and b) can provide SEO and GEO assistance at a fraction of the costs of an in-house team.
If you’d like to speak with a marketing team that understands your sector, please get in touch.
