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CASE STUDY: St. Andrew's
The Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy Putting Heads in Beds
THE RESULTS
13% increase in organic search impressions
45% increase in organic search traffic
70% increase in first page keyword rankings
Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing is all about activating our clients’ search superpowers. That’s exactly what we did for St. Andrew’s Resources for Seniors System, a senior living community network and resource system for seniors. A client of ours since 2022, we’ve helped St. Andrew’s continually improve year-over-year (YoY) growth in a hypercompetitive market.
The Problem
The online senior living landscape is ultra competitive; many senior living communities have a hard time getting access to leads to their own communities. Specifically, some organizations (third-party lead gen sites) in the online senior living industry collect digital leads for senior living communities.
It works like this:
- These lead gen sites create a web page for a specific senior living community, optimizing it for that community’s target keywords, which can include the community’s exact name and location.
- This lead gen site’s page ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Searchers give these third-party sites leads, usually by filling out request forms for more information about the community in question.
- When the actual senior living community in question wants access to that lead, the community needs to pay these third-party sites money.
Third-party lead gen sites have their place as they can make accessing leads incredibly easy. Relying on lead gen sites isn’t the solution for every community though. Relying on third-party lead gen sites means:
- Spending more money on each lead
- Having less control over brand voice
- Being dependent on another company
Switching to a robust SEO campaign that pushes communities higher in SERPs than lead gen sites can help senior living communities that want to reduce costs per lead and take ownership of their brand.
That’s where Digital Strike - Targeted Marketing comes in.
The Solution
St. Andrew’s is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of seniors and their families by managing a network of quality senior living communities and offering other senior care services, like Medicare-certified home health care. Despite having amazing services and compassionate staff members, St. Andrew’s knew it needed help climbing SERPs to win its own leads.
That’s why they hired us in 2022.
St. Andrew’s had 10 communities when the client approached us. Each community had its own site. That was a major problem. These sites each had virtually no SEO value, especially in terms of authority through link acquisition. Our solution was to help St. Andrew’s roll all 10 sites into one major site that was optimized for search engines and had major authority. This way, each community in the network could benefit from optimized content and a robust link-building strategy.
Our goal was to deliver tangible, sustainable results at a fraction of the traditional cost of paid search while also lessening dependence on third-party lead gen sites.
To that end, our team created a multi-pronged approach to help St. Andrew’s win leads:
- Work with a third-party partner to redesign the website to be more user-friendly and easier for search engines to crawl.
- Create a comprehensive content marketing strategy with a content calendar full of optimized community pages, service pages, and blogs.
- A local search strategy that helps communities in the St. Andrew’s network stand apart from other retirement communities in the area.
- Organic search/general SEO services to help St. Andrew’s web pages rank higher in SERPs for target queries.
- Link-building services to help the client acquire high-quality backlinks from high domain authority sites.
- Paid search services that capture bottom-of-funnel leads at the top of search results.
- Paid social services that meet families of seniors on the social media platforms they use every single day.
SEO can take awhile to work, but once it works, it works.
The Results
Thanks to our team’s combined efforts, we helped St. Andrew’s get new residents or, as we call it, put heads in beds. All without having to pay third-party lead gen sites. In fact, July 2024 was one of St. Andrew’s best months yet. Here’s what happened:
1. Impressions hit a whopping 124.k, a YoY growth of roughly 13% from July 2023.
2. It was the best month for this client in terms of organic visibility and traffic. Unique site visits topped at 2.7k, a YoY growth of nearly 45% since July 2023.
It was also the single-best month for the client in terms of keyword rankings. Currently, St. Andrew’s ranks for 234 keywords on the first page of Google alone. That is an incredible YoY growth of nearly 70% from July 2023.
Engagements over the last 24 months have been on a general upward trend, highlighting the growth St. Andrew’s has experienced since entering into a partnership with us. (Engagements below are broken down into form fills, web chats, and sales calls.) We have consistently helped generate 350 to 400 unique engagements, or leads, each month. That breaks down to roughly 30 to 35 a month per community. Considering the rough lifetime value of a new senior living community resident is about $180,000, that’s a hefty return on investment.
It is clear that our comprehensive digital marketing strategy hits everything that search engines and human users alike are looking for: the right terminology, the right look, user friendliness, and more, all backed by exceptional services from the St. Andrew’s team.
St. Andrew’s growth speaks to the three Cs that make us Digital Strike. We care enough about the client to compete in a hyper-competitive market. We are curious enough to look beyond the “quick and easy” route. And we are competitive enough to implement a long-term digital marketing strategy that delivers results. We don’t just apply these core values to St. Andrew’s, though.
Our team puts these concepts into action for all of our clients to activate their search superpowers and empower them with opportunities to grow. From increasing leads for senior living communities to climbing search rankings for our roofing clients, we pride ourselves on the fact that we don’t sell promises. We deliver customized solutions that, by definition, have to work.
“We were thrilled to help St. Andrew’s shift away from third-party lead generation and build a stronger, more cost-effective pipeline through their updated website, advanced digital marketing, and SEO strategies. Not only did this reduce overall costs, but it also significantly improved lead quality—making it a true win-win for them”
– Chris Westmeyer
CEO/Founder Digital Strike
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