Depending on how confident you are in your own website content, FRED can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare.

By Susan Saldibar

If you’ve ever clicked on what you thought was an informative link, only to be taken to a page with poorly constructed or over-the-top promotional sentences, you’ll be glad to know that there is a new sheriff in town. His name is FRED. And, depending on how confident you are in your own website content, FRED can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. But he’s here to stay, at least for now, and someone in your community will have to deal with him.

Why should senior living community leadership care about FRED?

FRED is Google’s latest in series of search engine ranking methodologies. And because of FRED, many organizations’ online content rankings have been significantly downgraded. That’s according to insight shared by Sage Age. a Senior Housing Forum partner.

Here’s why you shouldn’t just assume it’s all being handled. If you take your eyes off the ball with FRED, your website (that was once on page one of search results) could get buried and never seen. And, it could take a lot of work to get it back to where it was. This is important stuff, especially for today’s senior living communities, because your website is one of your key lead generation vehicles. So you need to make sure that those who say they’ve got your back really do. Otherwise FRED stands ready to undo all the hard work already done to secure your position on the net.

FRED wants your content to be good, informative and legitimate. What’s wrong with that?

According to Sean Orchester, Sage Age’s EVP of Digital, Integrated Marketing and Technology, “If you are a growth-focused senior living or senior care provider, it is imperative that you understand the changes that accompanied FRED and take immediate steps to modify your marketing approach accordingly.”

That said, here is what FRED is watching your content for:

  1. Real meaning, value and usefulness to your prospects and customers

  2. Little to no overly promotional or ad-laden text and internal links

  3. Support by backlinks to authoritative sites that establish or reinforce the legitimacy and credibility of your community’s message

Consequently, FRED will penalize content that is:

  • low in relevance and utility value to users

  • written primarily for search ranking purposes

  • heavy with advertisements

  • replete with low-quality backlinks that have low domain authority for the subject matter

How to get on FRED’s good side? Try “digital writing”.

Sage Age knows all about “digital writing” because they do it every day on behalf of their clients. Basically, it’s the product of an evolution of web content writing that achieves a mind boggling number of things all at once. It creates keyword optimized content in a digital framework that meets the criteria of the latest web search algorithms. It is optimized to weave in your key benefits, advantages and points of differentiation. And it is presented in a detailed digital context that search engines will respond to favorably. Oh yes, and it is well written, interesting and relevant. Wow. Not trivial.

What I like about the concept behind digital writing is that (assuming it’s well executed) it really hits on all cylinders. It produces content that is interesting, relevant, well supported, visible and positions your community in context with your key differentiators.

Will internet content get better with FRED on the beat? How about for senior housing? Will discriminating adult children appreciate more relevant, informative content? What do you think?

I urge you to read the entire article because it gets deeper into digital writing with some good tips and advice.

For more information on Sage Age, please visit their website.

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