How a retirement community filled its pipeline with quality leads by outsourcing PPC and SEO to Cardinal
King’sBridge Retirement Community
King’sBridge is a not-for-profit, single-location senior living community with a large campus in the Atlanta area. The community is known for its accommodating and transparent fee structure, full-service model (housekeeping, meals, utilities, and maintenance included), and modern amenities. The organization takes great pride in offering its residents a unique living experience.
Create advertising campaigns to reach the right audience
From a business perspective, the King’sBridge team had their hands full with handling resident turnover and keeping their units full. On top of the typical challenges senior living companies face, the COVID-19 pandemic impact brought even more hurdles. Families were hesitant to have their loved ones reside in senior living communities, which left King’sBridge with more vacancies to fill.
From a marketing perspective, their one-person in-house team was limited in terms of available bandwidth for even fundamental digital marketing activities. As many companies experienced during COVID – client communications took precedent over new client marketing. This made it difficult for King’sBridge to optimize their website for local search and to target their advertising campaigns to reach the right people. As a result, they weren’t attracting the right leads, so conversion rates were too low. To come out of this slump, the in-house team needed help to reach its goals.
Comprising two core activities: Paid Media Advertising and SEO
We’ve helped King’sBridge build and launch a marketing strategy comprising two core activities: pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). But overall, Cardinal Digital Marketing has stepped in to be a consultative partner for the King’sBridge team. We act as an extension of their inhouse marketing efforts, advising on digital strategy to help them meet their admission goals. To date, we’ve made recommendations about how to invest in digital marketing technologies to improve operational efficiency (such as CallRail). And we continuously help King’sBridge refine their core messaging, ad targeting, and performance reporting.
Revamped Pay Per Click (PPC) Strategy
Our goal was to help King’sBridge get a higher volume of higher quality leads and build its brand without inflating digital advertising costs. Sound account structure is essential to successful PPC and formed the foundation of our strategy. By restructuring the account for King’sBridge, we built a foundation that can more effectively use Google’s Smart Bidding and increase relevancy and improve quality scores, all while ensuring that admit data was being used most effectively.
Senior living communities serve their local regions; families want to keep their relatives close by. That meant that we needed to penetrate the surrounding local region and combat national competitors bidding in this space. Through our geographic strategy, we were able to drive more relevant traffic in-market and capture opportunity that was being lost to competitors and help King’sBridge reclaim their own backyard
and ensure that brand impression share stays strong in their locale.
To reach King’sBridge’s goals, our teams needed to scrap the existing campaigns entirely and relaunch improved non-brand and brand campaigns.
Here’s more on what we did:
Key PPC Results:
1075% YoY increase
in PPC conversions
64% decrease
in PPC CPA
140% YoY increase
In PPC conversion rate
Hone Keyword Strategy
To bring the King’sBridge PPC strategy in line with today’s best practices and ensure each campaign was attracting the right people and reducing low quality leads, we had to use effective keywords and messaging. To get there, we deployed several PPC keyword best practices.
- Mined historical keyword data from Google Ads
- Used keyword planner and research tools to find longtail, transactional terms
- Looked at auction insights and research tools to understand competitive digital set
- Used responsive search ads (RSAs) and responsive display ads to build effective messaging combinations
Develop New Ad Creative
While King’sBridge’s in-house marketing resources might be limited, the organization itself has plenty of unique selling propositions. Our team worked with King’sBridge to develop new ad creative that reflected the community’s advantages to better resonate with their target market. Specifically, we tuned ad messaging and creative to focus on compassionate care and community.
Improve PPC Brand Campaign
Our PPC strategy for King’sBridge was about more than just generating leads. It was about building awareness for a single-location retirement community in a crowded Atlanta marketplace. To strengthen the PPC brand campaign, we:
- Added more brand variations
- Segmented ad groups by keyword match type
- Made the ads better using distinct themes for expanded text ads (Activities, Luxury, etc.)
- Used {Dynamic Keyword Insertion} in ETAs to increase relevance and CTR
- Created RSAs to leverage machine learning
- Constantly rotated out poorly performing RSA assets
- Used Search Query Reports (SQRs) to decrease unfruitful traffic moving forward
A Comprehensive SEO Strategy
In the twelve months leading up to our engagement with King’sBridge, the organization’s traffic and keyword visibility had been stagnant. While some of this could be explained by the impacts of COVID-19, we did see large spikes and drops in keyword volume, a telltale sign of gray-hat SEO tactics at play. Our SEO strategy focused on building a solid foundation for future growth.
Key Results:
59% YoY increase
in organic sessions
#1 keyword rankings for 4 competitive keywords
Independent Senior Living
Independent Assisted Living
Independent Senior Living Atlanta Georgia
Senior Independent Living In Atlanta Georgia
92% increase
in local visibility through GMB optimization
Technical SEO Optimization
The King’sBridge website needed faster, user-optimized experiences aligned with today’s technical SEO best practices. As part of our technical SEO audit, we implemented Yoast SEO, resized images with Imagify, and added WP Rocket to assist with mobile and desktop site speed.
On-Page and Content Optimization
King’sBridge also needed our help in bringing all of its web content in line with best practices for on-page SEO. Our team supplemented thin content on service pages (assisted living, memory care, etc.) and optimized it with a proper keyword strategy, headings, and meta descriptions. We added structured data to tell search engines what each page is about. Finally, we built a new resources section to rank for long-tail keywords, answer relevant consideration questions, and gain authority in the industry
Google My Business (GMB) Optimization
Location is hugely important to King’sBridge. People want to stay in independent living facilities that are close to home and family. King’sBridge’s primary market is the Atlanta region. So we compiled reports examining keyword volume and competition across the Atlanta region that revealed potential opportunities to expand their reach and grow their market share. This included optimizing King’sBridge GMB page by adding services, service areas, the correct phone number, and URLs where applicable.
Thanks to our optimizations, King’sBridge now enjoys an average #1 position on the local pack and within the Top 10 positions for the immediate surrounding areas. This is a huge win to make sure their primary audience can find them.
Google My Business Performance
- 13% increase in total views
- 20% increase in website visits
- 17% increase in direction requests
- 11% increase in total actions
Ranking Position in Local Map Pack
King’sBridge now ranks for an average #1 position
on the local pack and within the Top 10 positions for the
immediate surrounding areas.
