How to rank higher in our search results

Why appear higher in search results?

There are many beneficial reasons to appear higher in our search results.  The main reason to appear higher is the higher chance of attracting a care seekers attention as they are searching for a care home on our website.  The further down the page your listing appears means that a care seeker will have to scroll to see it.  The more a care seeker has to scroll, the more likely they will choose a listing higher up and miss your care home entirely.  An average computer screen size (think laptop) shows only the top result before the user has to scroll to see more listings.  On analysis of care seeker behaviour on our search results pages we can see that only 50% of visitors get to the 11th listing on a desktop and on a mobile phone 50% reach the 6th listing.

Another reason to appear higher in our search is that your care home is likely to be perceived as better performing the higher the listing.  We recently watched 10 care seekers navigate our website whilst speaking out loud their experience.  At first glance our testers perceived care homes higher up the search results as the top performing care homes.  Although reviews are not the only factors that go into our ranking algorithm, they are for the most part correct.  As the testers continued they used a combination of search position, review score and total amount of reviews to make their decision on which care homes to click on.

Ultimately, the better you perform in our search ranking leads to more clicks on your carehome.co.uk profile which leads to more care enquiries from care seekers.

How is the search ranking decided?

There are a number of attributes that go into where a care home appears in our search ranking.

1.  Most importantly it is your review score.  By working to get as many good quality reviews as possible you can push your review score up.  Care seekers see your review score to one decimal place, however behind the scenes we work out your review score to more places than that.  Where two reviews of 9.5 can appear together, one care home can have a review score of 9.598 and the other 9.521.  So every review counts!

2. Your subscription with us.  An easy way to boost your ranking position is to subscribe to one of our packages.  Our Enhanced and Premium packages give you a 10 place boost in rankings.  Our Platinum package gives you the advantage of a 11 place boost.  We state this clearly on our website where any ranking is shown.  The other advantage of buying one of our packages is the features available to make your search listing look more appealing such as videos, descriptions and tour availability.

Example of a Platinum subscription ranking above an Enhanced subscription

3.  Random nightly sequencing.  If two or more care homes have the same review score down to several decimal places we will radomise their positioning each night to ensure fairness.