Fix Your Star Rating Before Your Assisted Living Website

You’re already tired of this subject and I haven’t said anything yet.

Someone left you a review in the last few months that wasn’t fair, and you’ve been carrying it around in your back pocket ever since. I’d bet the room on it.

Nobody running an assisted living home gets to have a normal relationship with a star rating. The families writing about you are living through one of the worst months of their lives, and half of them are still arguing with each other in the parking lot before they ever reach your front desk.

So let me put the number on the table and then argue with it myself.

When I put all 47 industries in order by star rating, assisted living came out 43rd, at 4.3 stars on average. Nothing else this trade does sits that far down, not the mobile checks and not the page speed, and the trades stacked above it aren’t running kinder buildings. They’re running the kind of place a customer rates on the way out the door in a decent mood.

Wedding photographers finish top of that table, and nobody is ever rating them on the worst month of her life.

That’s not a fair fight and I know it. How many of the last twenty families who moved a parent into your building ever wrote a public word about how it went?

It’s also the first thing a daughter sees. Before your building, before your staff, before your food, before the twenty years you’ve poured into the place.

Give me a small budget and one month and I’d spend it in this order.

First: ask the families who already like you

89.5% of these businesses hold at least one Google review, so almost nobody in your trade is invisible.

Being on the board isn’t your problem. Who’s doing the writing is your problem.

Right now the reviews you get are volunteered, which means they come from the two families at the far ends. The furious one and the grateful one. Everyone in the wide, ordinary middle is busy, and busy people never write anything unless you ask them.

So ask them, and ask them at the right moment. Not on move-in day, when the family is exhausted and nothing has been proved yet. Around week six, when the son who calls every Sunday has stopped worrying and started sleeping again.

Ask by text, with a link that lands right on the review box, because a link you can tap in one thumb move is the difference between a nice thought and a review that actually exists.

Your activities director probably knows which four families would say yes tonight. Have you ever asked her?

One warning, because I’ve watched people get this wrong and then blame me. Do not send a list of talking points, and do not tell anyone what to write. A review that reads like it came from your brochure does more damage than the angry one it was meant to bury, and families comparing three homes can smell it from across the room.

The good ones ramble. They mention a nurse by her first name and a chair by the window and a Tuesday in February when someone stayed late.

This costs nothing. It’s the only item on my list that costs nothing, which is exactly why it’s sitting at the top.

Second: the phone in her hand

73.5% of these sites pass Google’s mobile check, against 78% of the small businesses in my data.

Passing that check means the page fits a phone screen and the words are big enough to read without pinching. That’s all it means, and a good chunk of your trade still doesn’t manage it.

Every family who reads your reviews at eleven at night lands on your website about ninety seconds later, on the same phone, in the same bed, in the same mood. Cleaning companies live through the same handoff, and the page those stars point at is usually the part nobody has looked at in years. A rating she half trusts and a website she can’t read is a strange one-two punch to throw at someone.

When did you last open your own site on your own phone, in the dark, with your reading glasses somewhere downstairs?

I’m not asking you to take my word for any of this, by the way. Pick assisted living in the explorer on my report and leave the city box empty, and it prints every check I ran with the number of sites sitting behind each one, which is the same view I have open when I’m on the phone with an operator. If you’d rather I just did it for you, that’s what my free website audit is.

Third: how long the page takes to show up

These sites average 55 out of 100 for mobile speed, and Google’s own scoring treats anything from 50 to 89 as a page that needs improvement.

Speed here is a score for how quickly the page appears on a phone on an ordinary connection, nothing more complicated than that.

In this trade the culprit is almost always the same three things. A photo gallery of forty pictures nobody shrank. A video playing behind the header. And a slideshow of testimonials that loads before the words do.

None of that was a bad idea. All of it was added one piece at a time by people trying to help, and none of it is worth the wait it costs you.

Would you make a woman stand in your lobby for eight seconds before anyone spoke to her? You wouldn’t, and neither would I, and yet plenty of homes do it online every night without ever finding out.

What I’d leave completely alone

A redesign, first of all. Your trade already scores 74 out of 100 on my report card, which is better than most of the industries I graded.

I build websites for care homes for a living, so you can imagine how much it costs me to say that out loud.

A platform swap belongs in the same pile, because more than half your trade already sits on WordPress and that settles a lot less than owners expect.

The blog is the second thing I’d leave alone. 46.2% of assisted living sites publish one, against 37% of small businesses in general, and writing more posts is the most popular way I see owners in your trade avoid doing the hard thing.

What would a brand new website buy you this year that a better rating wouldn’t buy you cheaper?

I gave Scottsdale owners the same answer when the quotes came in. Sign the cheap one, then go and get yourself reviewed.

And I’d leave the clever review software alone as well. The tools that filter unhappy families out before they reach Google are against the rules, they’re obvious to anyone reading, and they solve a problem you don’t have. Your unhappy families aren’t the issue. Your silent happy ones are.

One thing tonight

After the building goes quiet, do this.

Open Google on your phone, search your town and the words a stranger would use, and find yourself. Read your last ten reviews in the order they came in.

Then write down how many of your last ten move-in families you ever asked for one.

If those two numbers match, come argue with me and I’ll listen. If they don’t, you already know exactly where your rating came from, and you can start fixing it before breakfast.