Type "assisted living near me" into Google Maps and you get a map full of pins, each with a star rating and a count in parentheses. For a lot of families, that screen is the shortlist. They read the stars, open three or four listings, scroll the reviews, and call the one that sounds like people actually live there.
No bid wins that screen outright. Google ranks the map on its own, and the part a community can most directly earn is its reviews. How a community goes about earning them is where many get into trouble, because Google's review rules are stricter than most owners realize, and senior living's habits run straight into them.
Families Find Communities on Google Maps, and Ads Can Follow Them There
Many local businesses can buy Google's pay-per-lead Local Services Ads. Senior living can't: Google's list of Local Services categories has no assisted living, memory care or retirement community category. The paid route onto the map runs through regular Google Ads instead.
Four kinds of campaign can put a senior living community on the map, by Google's own count: Performance Max, Demand Gen, Smart campaigns, and a Search campaign carrying location assets. On the map, those ads can appear as promoted pins, square pins that stand out from the round ones, or as ads in the list of Maps results. Chapters 10 and 11 already covered Performance Max and Demand Gen. This chapter adds location assets for Search, near the end.
But the ads are the smaller half of the map. The listing itself, your Business Profile with its photos, hours, category and reviews, shows up whether you advertise or not. It's free, and for many families it's the first page of your community they ever see.
The Map Weighs Relevance, Distance and Prominence. Reviews Are the Part You Earn.
Google says its local results rest on three things. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google says draws on things like how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. In Google's words, more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking. Google is also blunt that there's no way to pay for a better local ranking.
You can't move your building, so distance is fixed. Relevance is housekeeping, and it's worth doing carefully:
- The right category. Google's rule is to describe what the business is, not what it has. In our example market, communities list themselves as "Assisted living facility" or "Retirement community." Pick the one that describes the whole place, and add as few extra categories as honestly apply.
- One listing per community. A campus with independent living, assisted living and memory care is usually one place with one address. Don't split it into listings to occupy more of the map.
- Real photos. The same rooms you filmed in Chapter 10: the dining room at lunch, an apartment, the courtyard. Families can compare photos on the map before they ever click through.
That leaves prominence, and the reviews inside it.
Fewer Than Half the Reviews on Senior Living Listings Come From Families or Residents
We read and classified 798 Google reviews from 30 senior living listings in our example market, Houston. Here's who wrote them:
- Families, spouses, residents and people who toured: 387
- Reviewers who never said who they were: 235, mostly short five-star notes
- Visitors, friends, volunteers and event guests: 94
- Skilled nursing or rehab patients and their families: 40
- Vendors, referral agents, hospice staff and other professionals: 27
- Employees and former employees: 14
- The wrong business entirely: 1
Fewer than half came from the people a prospective family most wants to hear from. The rest came from brunch guests, choir visitors, vendors, rehab stays in the skilled nursing wing and unsigned five-star notes.
Those reviews aren't a problem. A brunch guest who loved the food is telling the truth, and nothing in Google's rules says a community should flag or hide them. They still count toward the star rating and the total. But when a family opens a listing and starts reading, the reviews that persuade are the ones that describe living there: who answered the call button, what the food was like after the first month, how the move went. Those come from families and residents. They're the reviews worth asking for, and the rules below say how.
Google isn't the only review page families read. Caring.com and A Place for Mom publish their own reviews, and both describe those review programs as tied to their referral business. Chapter 14 comes back to that business. For the map, the reviews that count are the ones on your Google listing, and those are the ones you can do something about.
Pressure on the Tour, a Gift for a Review or a Staff Quota All Break Google's Rules
Google's policy for reviews on Maps is short and specific. For a senior living community, it rules out several common habits.
- No pressure on the premises. While a family is in your building, Google's policy treats leaning on them for stars as off limits. In a community, that's the end of the tour, the afternoon of move-in day and the lobby tablet with the review page already open.
- No incentives. Nothing of value in exchange for a review: no gift card, no discount, no dinner credit, and no move-in special that depends on one.
- No cherry-picking. You can't ask only the families you expect to be happy, and you can't discourage negative reviews.
- No scripts. You can't ask people to include specific content in their review.
- No staff quotas. Google calls out two management habits by name. One is giving employees a review target. The other is having them gather reviews that say particular things, and Google's example of a particular thing is the employee's own name.
That last rule matters more in senior living than almost anywhere. Families here name staff all the time, and they mean it: the caregiver who knew their mother's routine, the chef, the salesperson who didn't rush them. Unprompted, that's the best kind of review there is.
Prompted, it's a problem. On one listing in our sample, dozens of reviews arrived within about two months, many naming the same dining servers. We can't tell from the outside whether anyone asked for them, and we're not naming the community. But that burst is exactly the pattern Google's staff rule describes, and it's the kind of pattern a family reading the page may notice too.
The Reviews Worth Having Arrive Weeks After Move-In, Asked of Every Family Alike
None of this means you can't ask. Google's rules are about how you ask, not whether. Here's the approach that stays inside them:
- Ask everyone the same way. Every resident's family, and every independent living resident who manages their own email, gets the same short request. No filtering first.
- Ask after the move-in has settled. A few weeks in, families know what daily life is actually like. That's the review a future family wants to read, and it's asked for away from the building.
- Ask in writing, from home. An email or a letter with the link. No tablet at the front desk, no request at the end of a tour.
- Say nothing about what to write. "We'd be grateful if you'd share your experience on Google" is enough.
- Send it to the right person. For a resident with memory loss, the request goes to the family member who handles their affairs, never to the resident. A review should come from someone who can choose freely whether to write one.
Some of the most useful reviews in our sample came from people who hadn't moved in at all. Forty-three were written by prospective residents and their families, many of them after a tour, describing what they saw. You can't ask for those on the premises, but you can earn them: a tour that's thorough and unhurried is the one people go home and write about.
A Reply to a Hard Review Is Read by Every Family Who Comes After It
The example market's communities reply a lot. Owners answered 570 of the 798 reviews in our sample, and 61 of the 79 reviews from families, residents and prospects that gave one to three stars.
A reply to a bad review isn't only for the reviewer. It's for the next family scrolling past it.
Keep it short and calm, thank them, take it offline with a name and a phone number, and don't argue the details in public.
One rule matters more than the rest in senior living. Never confirm in a public reply that someone lives in your community, and never discuss anyone's care, health or incident. A family's review may describe their mother's fall in detail. Your reply shouldn't repeat any of it. "We'd like to talk with you directly. Please call our executive director at this number" protects the resident and still shows every reader that someone is listening.
Location Assets Put Your Pin Beside the Search Ad
Link your Business Profile to your Google Ads account, then add location assets to your Search campaigns. A location asset can add your address or the approximate distance to the ad, along with a call button and a link to a details page with your hours, photos and directions. It's also what lets a Search campaign show on Google Maps.
For a community, that turns the ad from Chapter 8 into something a family can act on from the car: the tour headline, your starting price, and how far away you are, in the same place. Google pulls that information straight from your Business Profile, so the profile work earlier in this chapter shows up in the ad too. Fix a wrong phone number or address in the profile, and the ad follows.
Next: AI Max and the Words Your State Licenses
Google keeps adding automation that writes and targets for you. Chapter 13 looks at AI Max and the words it may put into your ads, some of which your state licenses before you're allowed to use them.
All fifteen chapters are in Google Ads for Senior Living, including the ad copy chapter the reviews feed into. If you'd like us to set up your community's ads and Maps presence, see our Google Ads management.
