There is hardly a senior living company or community that doesn’t pay close attention to how much web traffic they have each day, each week, each month. It is a crazy frustrating process for so many reasons:

  • There is huge variance in reported traffic depending on which tracking packages you use.
  • From week to week and month to month, there can be huge variances in traffic numbers without an easy explanation for those variances.
  •  Everyone has a vague sense that if they did just a little better job, they would have more traffic and more traffic would mean more qualified leads.
  • No one is quite sure that they are doing a good job of search optimization . . . they think that if they could do a better job of search optimization they would get more traffic which would in-turn mean more leads.
  • Even with decent traffic, it is tough or impossible to know who is visiting, why they are visiting, what they are really looking for, and finally how to turn those visitors into prospects.

Learning More About Your Visitors

Sales FunnelApril LeMon is one of the founders of Lead InSite a big data company that specializes in helping senior living communities (and is a Senior Housing Forum partner) understand who visits senior living websites, why they visit and what it takes to convert visitors into prospects. The goal of this additional knowledge is to convert more visitors into prospects and to convert them faster. 

I recently chatted with April about some of the things they are discovering:

  • For most senior living community websites, it takes 5-9 visits before they are ready to fill-in a form or pick-up the phone and call you.
  • Returning visitors behave differently than first-time visitors. This means that returning visitors want more information, they want more depth. 
  • An understanding of your returning visitors behavior (meaning what they look at) on your site can allow you to deliver the right content at the right time to each of those visitors.

Improving The User Experience

Improving the web user’s experience is all about conversion of the visitors to prospect. April offered the three most important things you can do to improve your conversion rates:

  1. Your website must make an indelible “first impression” upon first-time Qualified Visitors. This means you are telling your story in such a way that prospects will come back for more. They need to be intrigued by your story or the helpfulness of the information you provide.
  2.  Over time what those unidentified visitors are looking for shifts. At first, it is a simple “is this in the ball park of what we need?” And often times they are still trying to figure out what they need. As they get more educated and more clear about needs, return visits will be about getting more detailed specific information.  At the visitor’s core they are asking one question:  Should this be on my short list or not?
  3. The goal should be to reduce the number of visits a prospect needs to find the information they need, to  provide initial answers. There are proactive things you can do to make this happen. If you don’t, you risk losing them to another community that has done a better job.

What have you done to improve the user experience on your websites?

What are you doing to convert your visitors to prospects?

Steve Moran