Fifteen chapters of this guide have been about finding families: tracking their calls, buying the right searches, writing ads they trust, answering when they call from the hospital. All of it assumes one thing. When the family says yes, the building can say yes back.
That's not a safe assumption for a nursing home. A bed with no aide to staff it isn't really available, and admissions directors know the feeling of turning down a referral they wanted because the schedule couldn't absorb one more resident. So the last chapter of a guide about admissions is about hiring. For a nursing home, the recruiting campaign isn't a separate department's problem. It's part of how the building fills beds.
Nearly Half of Nursing Homes Limited Admissions Because of Staffing
The American Health Care Association, the nursing home industry's trade group, surveyed its members in early 2024. Forty-six percent said they had limited new admissions. Thirty-eight percent were turning away potential residents weekly or monthly, and 7% were doing it daily. Nearly 20% had closed a unit, wing or floor because of labor challenges, and 99% had open jobs. MedPAC, the commission that advises Congress on Medicare, summarized the same survey plainly: about half had turned away potential residents.
The workforce has recovered since then. Federal jobs data show nursing facility employment back above its February 2020 level, at about 1,590,200 workers in August 2026 (a preliminary figure). But recovery across the industry doesn't mean every building is fully staffed, and families notice when one isn't. Staffing and call bell response drew 118 complaints in the 422 reviews Chapter 8 read.
The link runs both ways. A short-staffed building turns away admissions, and the families it does admit write the reviews about waiting for help, which makes the next family less likely to call. Every aide you hire helps the admissions numbers twice.
CNA Jobs Top Out Near $6 a Click. CNA Classes Run Past $20.
People really do search for nursing home jobs, and those clicks come cheap. Here's the spread around Pittsburgh:
About 590 people a month type "cna jobs near me," and a top spot on it runs $0.72 to $6.12. "lpn jobs near me" gets 720 at $0.20 to $4.28. "nursing home jobs near me" gets 170. All of them cost less than the family searches Chapter 7 priced at $2.09 to $10.11.
The surprise is next door. "cna classes near me" gets 880 searches a month, more than the job search, and its top-of-page bids run from $3.69 to $20.54. "cna training program" runs $4.04 to $19.12. Those are the people who want to become aides but haven't trained yet, and training schools are bidding hard for them. As in Chapter 5, the bid ranges are estimates, so treat any figure as a range of about 30% either way.
For a nursing home, that expensive search hides a real opportunity, because of a federal rule most schools can't match.
Federal Law Already Makes a Nursing Home's CNA Training Free. Put That in the Ad.
Nurse aide training is regulated by Medicare's rules for nursing facilities. Under 42 CFR 483.152, a state-approved nurse aide training program must include at least 75 clock hours, with at least 16 hours of supervised practical training. And the rule on cost is blunt: no nurse aide who is employed by, or has an offer of employment from, a facility on the day training begins "may be charged for any portion of the program," textbooks and course materials included. If someone pays for training elsewhere and is hired by a facility within 12 months, the state must reimburse the cost on a pro rata basis while they work as an aide.
In other words, a nursing home that hires people into training can't charge them for it. Nursing homes can run their own state-approved programs or sponsor students through one, and a building that does can write "Free CNA Training, Then a Job Here," a line a tuition-charging school can't match.
So answer the class search with the offer. A campaign aimed at "cna classes near me" and "cna training program," with an ad that says training costs nothing and ends in a job, competes for the most expensive searches in the recruiting market with the strongest possible reason to click. Check two things first: that your program or sponsorship really works this way, and whether you pay trainees during the course. Only advertise what's true.
Google Holds Nursing Home Job Ads to the Same Targeting Limits as Housing Ads
The moment an ad offers a job, it falls under Google's employment policy. In the US and Canada, employment ads can't be targeted by gender, age, parental status, marital status or ZIP code. Location targeting by radius, city or country is allowed, with a radius of at least 1 kilometer.
If your family campaigns already follow the housing rules from Chapter 9, none of this is new: the same banned targeting, the same radius instead of ZIP codes. A training ad that promises a job at the end should be treated as an employment ad too, by our reading of Google's examples.
The draw area is different, though. Families come from wherever their parents live. Aides and nurses come from the commute. Draw the recruiting radius around a realistic drive to work. Leave evenings and weekends in the ad schedule until the campaign's own data shows when applications actually arrive, since many of the people you want are working a shift somewhere else during the day.
Recruiting Gets Its Own Campaign, and the Family Campaigns Keep Job Seekers Out
Keep hiring and admissions apart in the account, the same way Chapter 4 kept rehab and long-term care apart.
- Its own campaign and budget. A recruiting campaign competing with admissions for one budget will lose on the days admissions matters most, or win on the days it shouldn't.
- Its own conversion. Count completed applications, not calls to the main line, and keep that conversion out of the admissions campaigns' bidding.
- Its own landing page. A careers page built for applicants, with the positions, the pay or pay range if it's competitive, the training offer and a short application that works on a phone.
- Its own phone number. Chapter 1 showed how job seekers calling the admissions line get counted as leads. A separate hiring number fixes that on both sides.
And the family campaigns stay closed to job searches. The negative list from Chapter 5 already blocks jobs, careers, CNA classes and salary searches. Recruiting having its own campaign is the reason those words can stay blocked everywhere else.
Three Local Operators Already Buy Nurse Searches, One With a Student Loan Offer
Some competitors are already in this market. In Google's Ads Transparency Center, three operators with nursing homes in our example market ran 11 hiring ads between them, recruiting RNs, LPNs and CNAs. One of those operators ran nothing but hiring ads, and its careers page offered student loan repayment to eligible employees. A job board ran another 33 nurse job and salary ads.
That tells you what the ads compete on: pay, schedules and help paying for school. Lead your recruiting ads with whatever real offer you have that others don't. Free training with a job attached. Loan repayment. Shift differentials for evenings and weekends. A sign-on bonus if you offer one. And a named, reachable person in HR who calls back the same day, which, as with admissions in Chapter 14, can be the difference between hiring someone and losing them to the next building.
Sixteen Chapters Build One Nursing Home Account That Fills Rehab and Long-Term Beds
That's the whole account, in the order we build it:
- Track rehab and long-term admissions, not just calls.
- Start where families are ready to call: "near me" and your name.
- Set the budget from what an admission is worth by payer.
- Split rehab and long-term care into their own ad groups and pages.
- Build the keyword list and block drug rehab.
- Buy the known searches on exact match, then open the long tail.
- Bid for the top of the page.
- Write ads from your reviews.
- Target as if nursing homes count as housing.
- Bring in Performance Max once Search has the data.
- Put a walk-through video on YouTube when the budget allows.
- Win the map pack and answer reviews safely.
- Set limits on AI Max so it can't blur the two sides of the building.
- Get picked from the hospital list.
- Tell families the truth about Medicare and Medicaid, and skip the offers the law forbids.
- Hire the staff who make every admission possible.
Every chapter is also on the guide's home page.
If you'd rather have this built for you, it's what we do in Google Ads management for nursing homes and other health care businesses: tracking first, the account in this order, and a person who reads the search terms every morning for the first month. If you're running your own, start where Chapter 1 did. Find out how many of last month's admissions you can trace back to a click.
