Type "nursing homes near me" into Google's Keyword Planner and it reports about 201,000 searches a month across the United States. "Assisted living near me" comes in at about 165,000. The searches that sound like the other business are the bigger crowd.
Keyword Planner doesn't care which license hangs in your lobby. Ask it for senior living ideas and it hands you nursing homes, home care, group homes, senior apartments, job openings and every other community's name, all mixed together. Some of those belong in your account. Most don't. What decides it isn't the keyword. It's what your community is licensed and built to do.
Nursing Home Searches Outnumber Assisted Living Searches, and Keyword Planner Hands You Both
Families mix up the levels of care constantly. "Assisted living vs nursing home" alone draws about 5,400 US searches a month. In our example market, Houston, the same pattern holds at a smaller scale: about 6,600 monthly searches for "nursing homes near me" against about 5,400 for "assisted living near me." Your market's numbers will differ. The overlap won't.
To see how much of that ends up in a keyword list, we seeded Keyword Planner with the websites of 16 senior living advertisers in the example market plus a few starter searches. It returned 23,026 unique keywords. Among them:
- 1,259 about nursing homes or skilled nursing
- 2,684 about jobs
- about 600 about home care and home health
- about 440 about group homes, personal care homes and board-and-care homes
- 790 about senior apartments and senior housing, 382 of them about low-income or subsidized housing
- 224 about Medicaid
- 149 about referral sites by name
That's the raw material. The work of this chapter is sorting it.
Your Competitors' Websites Are the Fastest Start to a Keyword List
You don't have to guess what families search. The communities already advertising in your market have done a lot of that work, and Google lets you borrow it.
First, see who's bidding. Google's Ad preview and diagnosis tool, inside your Google Ads account, shows you the results page for any search and location without piling up ad impressions in anyone's statistics. It beats typing searches into Google from the sales office, which muddies your own data. And resist tapping a rival community's ad to study it. The preview shows you the same ad, and nobody's budget pays for your curiosity.
Next, feed their websites to Keyword Planner. Pick "Start with a website," paste in a competitor's address, and Google reads the site and proposes searches that fit what's written on it. Google notes that giving it a keyword and a web address together produces more ideas than a web address alone. Put your own website through the same step. And change the location from the whole country to the area your residents actually come from, or the volumes and prices will describe somebody else's market.
Then sort the keepers into tight ad groups by service. Five or six close searches each, one group per care level you offer: assisted living, memory care, independent living, respite stays. Each group points at its own page, the way Chapter 4 laid out. A memory care group holds searches like "memory care near me" and "memory care facilities near me," and nothing else.
Launch on exact match only. That's the first campaign in our rollout, which we call Isolation: the searches you're sure about, at bids a person sets. Phrase and broad match wait for the second campaign, Exploration, once the account has real tours and move-ins to learn from.
One caution on price. Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid ranges are planning estimates, not quotes. Treat them as plus or minus 30%, and let the live account tell you the real number.
Your License Decides Which Neighbors Are Yours
Here's where senior living differs from most businesses. The same search can be a perfect lead for one community and a wasted click for the one down the street. What changes the answer is what each community is licensed and staffed to provide.
- Nursing homes and skilled nursing: keep these only if you actually have skilled nursing, as many life plan communities do. A standalone assisted living community that bids on "nursing home near me" is paying for families whose parent may need care it can't legally give.
- Home care and in-home care: cut them unless your community also runs a home care or home health service. Some do; one nonprofit campus in the example market operates its own home health agency.
- Personal care homes and group homes: in some states these are licensing categories of their own. Check your state's terms before deciding whether a family searching them is looking for you.
- Memory care and respite: keep them if you offer them, each in its own ad group. Cut them if you don't. A family looking for secure dementia care will not stay on an assisted living page that can't provide it.
- Senior apartments and low-income senior housing: for an independent living community, these are a price and eligibility question. Many of the 382 low-income searches come from families looking for subsidized housing. Before you exclude anything tied to how residents pay, read Chapter 15. Fair housing rules, and some state laws on source of income, apply to housing ads.
A life plan community shows how this plays out when one campus holds several licenses. Picture a campus with independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing. It runs a campaign for each, and each campaign carries the others' searches as negatives. The independent living campaign blocks "nursing home" searches so they flow to the skilled nursing campaign, where a nursing page is waiting. The skilled nursing campaign blocks "55+ apartments" so an active 70-year-old doesn't land on a rehab page. Nothing is thrown away. Each search is routed to the one door on campus that fits it.
Every Other Community's Name Is a Keyword You Should Refuse
Community names draw real searches. In the example market, four individual communities' names each drew between 1,600 and 2,400 searches a month, and the list also held 149 searches for referral sites by name.
Those families are looking for a specific place. Put competitor names and referral-site names on your negative list. Our rule on bidding for them is the same in every guide: that happens only in its own campaign, if and when we decide to do it, and that's a big if. It is never a routine part of the account.
Your own name is different. Put it in its own brand campaign. Those clicks are cheap, they come from families who already have you on their list, and they keep a competitor or referral site from answering a search meant for you.
Medicaid Searches Aren't an Automatic Negative
The pull held 224 Medicaid searches, such as "assisted living with medicaid." It's tempting to cut them on reflex. Don't.
Whether they belong depends on the community. Nationally, about 17% of residential care residents had Medicaid pay for some or all of their care services, according to federal health statistics. Medicaid waivers can pay for services but never for room and board, as Chapter 3 explained. If you take residents on your state's waiver, these searches belong in your account, with a page that explains exactly how Medicaid works at your community. If you don't, add them to the negative list. It's a business decision, not a default.
Job Seekers Are the Biggest Crowd You Never Want to Pay For
Senior living hires constantly, and Keyword Planner knows it. Of the 23,026 keywords, 2,684 were job searches. In the example market, "cna jobs near me" alone drew about 2,400 searches a month.
Job searches are cheap for a reason: they rarely turn into residents. Build an account-level negative list for job words (jobs, careers, hiring, salary, CNA, caregiver jobs) and apply it everywhere. It's the keyword side of the same cleanup Chapter 1 did for job inquiries in chat windows and contact forms.
If your community does want to recruit caregivers through Google Ads, give hiring its own campaign, its own job page and its own conversion, well away from the family campaigns. Google treats job ads under separate employment rules, and mixing the two teaches bidding that an application is as good as a tour.
"Cheap" and "free" searches are rare here, only 53 in the whole pull, but they belong on the list too.
A Negative Keyword Doesn't Stretch the Way a Keyword Does
Here's the catch most accounts miss. A keyword you bid on can match close variants of itself, but a negative keyword can't. Google says negatives don't cover close variants, plurals or misspellings. Its own example: a negative "flowers" blocks "red flowers" but not "red flower."
In senior living terms, a negative "job" blocks "cna job near me" and "caregiver job openings." It does not block "cna jobs." You need both forms on the list.
The three negative match types also behave differently:
- Negative broad (the default): blocks a search that contains all your negative words, in any order.
- Negative phrase: blocks a search that contains your words in the same order, even with extra words around them.
- Negative exact: blocks only the exact search, with no extra words.
Google lets you keep negatives in an account-level list that applies across all your Search campaigns, and in shared lists you apply to several campaigns at once. Use the account-level list for words that are wrong everywhere, like jobs and competitor names. Use shared lists for words that are wrong in some campaigns only, like nursing home searches in an assisted living campaign at a community that also has skilled nursing.
Negatives matter most once Exploration switches on broad match. Broad match reaches searches you never wrote, and some of them will be the wrong neighbors. During Exploration's first month, the search terms report is a daily job, not a monthly one: every nursing home, job or rival-community search that slipped through goes straight onto a list.
Next: Exact Match First, Families' Own Words Later
With the keepers sorted by care level and the neighbors on the negative list, Chapter 6 covers the two campaigns that use them: exact-match Isolation, and the broad-match Exploration campaign that finds the long, specific searches families type in their own words.
All fifteen chapters are on the guide's home page, and the landing page chapter covers the page each ad group points to. If you'd rather we build and prune the keyword list for your community, see our Google Ads management.
