How to Fill Empty Care Home Beds With Private Residents

What fills private beds is being easy to find and easy to choose at the moment a family searches for a care home near them. After that, it is answering their enquiry fast, before they have rung the next home on their list.

Everything below serves one of those three things: found, chosen, answered. Each step is something an owner or manager of an independent care home can start this month, most of it without spending anything.

Who you are trying to reach

The person searching is rarely the future resident. It is usually a son, daughter or partner, often in a hurry after a hospital discharge or a fall, comparing three or four homes on a phone. They search Google for “care homes in [town]” or “dementia care near me”, look at the map results, check the reviews, look for your CQC rating and fees, and ring the homes that seem right. If any of that is missing or hard to find, they move on without telling you.

So care home occupancy, for the private side of your beds, comes down to how you look in those few minutes, and how quickly someone at the home answers.

1. Get your Google Business Profile right

For a search like “care homes in [town]”, the map results with their star ratings usually appear before any website. Your Google Business Profile is what fills that space, and for many families it is the first thing they see of your home.

• Category. Set the primary category to the one that matches what you are registered to provide, such as Care home or Nursing home. Add secondary categories only where they are true.
• Name, address and phone. Use the home’s real name, exactly as it appears on your website and the CQC register. Use a phone number that is answered.
• Photos. Add real, recent photos of the outside, the lounge, the dining room, a bedroom and the garden. Families want to picture their parent there. Replace dark or out-of-date shots.
• Reviews. Ask every family who is happy with the care to leave a Google review, and make it easy with the short review link from your profile. Reply to every review, good or bad, politely and without sharing anything about a resident.
• Questions and answers. If your profile still shows a questions section, add and answer the questions families ask most: visiting times, whether you take residents living with dementia, whether you offer respite stays.
• Posts. Use posts for things a family would care about: an open day, a new activity, a room becoming available. Keep it occasional and real rather than daily filler.
• Website link. Point the profile at your home page, or at the page for the main type of care you offer.

2. Look after your carehome.co.uk profile and reviews

Many families check carehome.co.uk alongside Google, and its listings often sit high in the results for care homes in a town. Treat your profile there as a second shop window.

• Claim the profile and check every detail: the care types you offer, room numbers, facilities, and contact details.
• Add the same good photos you use on Google.
• Invite families and residents to leave a review there too. A steady flow of recent reviews says more than a high score from years ago.
• Respond to reviews where you can, in the same calm tone as on Google.

If you list on other directories, keep the name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Inconsistent details make it harder for Google to trust which listing is right.

3. Show your CQC rating the way the law requires

Families look for the CQC rating to decide whether a home goes on the shortlist. It is also a legal requirement. Under Regulation 20A of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, where a provider has a CQC rating, every website maintained by or for it must show:

• the most recent rating, with the date it was given;
• displayed conspicuously and legibly;
• the CQC’s website address, and where on it the latest assessment can be read.

The simplest way to meet this is CQC’s official rating widget. You add it to your website once, it shows the rating, the date and the link, and it updates itself when your rating changes. Put it on every page, not just the home page. A family who lands on your dementia care page from Google should see the rating there too.

If your home is newly registered or under new ownership and does not yet have a rating, say so plainly rather than showing a rating that belonged to someone else.

4. Publish a clear fees page

Self-funding families want to know roughly what care will cost before they ring. A page that says “please contact us for fees” filters out exactly the families you most want to hear from.

The CMA’s advice to care homes, UK care home providers for older people: advice on consumer law (revised 8 December 2021), says care homes should prominently highlight key information on their website, including:

• an accurate and representative indication of the total weekly fee rates they typically charge self-funders, for each type of care;
• what the weekly fee includes, and what costs extra;
• details of any upfront payments, such as deposits.

The CMA considers that prominence is likely to require this key information to be no more than one click away from the home page. In practice, that means a “Fees and funding” link in your main menu, leading to a page that starts with the weekly fee for each type of care.

A good fees page also explains, in plain English, how paying for care works: self-funding, local authority funding, top-ups, and what happens if a resident’s savings run down. You are answering the questions families would otherwise have to ring to ask.

5. Answer every enquiry within 24 hours, and track where they come from

Enquiries are lost at the home as often as online. A family who rings at 6pm and hears a voicemail, or who fills in a form and hears nothing for three days, has usually booked a visit somewhere else.

• Set a rule: every phone message, form and email gets a personal reply within 24 hours, and sooner where you can. Decide who owns it on each shift and at weekends.
• Make the phone easy. On your website, the number should sit at the top of every page, with tap-to-call on mobile.
• Keep the form short. Name, phone, email and a sentence about the situation is enough to start a conversation.
• Track the source of every enquiry. Ask every caller how they found you, and write it down in one place: Google search, Google Maps, carehome.co.uk, a hospital discharge team, a recommendation, an advert. On the website, record calls and form submissions in your analytics, and add tracking parameters to the website link on your Google Business Profile so you can tell those visits apart.

After a few months you will know which channels bring private enquiries and which bring none, and you can stop guessing where to spend time and money.

6. Do local SEO for “care homes in [town]” and the care you offer

Families search by place and by need: “care homes in [town]”, “dementia care [town]”, “respite care near me”, “residential care home [area]”. Local SEO is making sure your home shows up for those searches, in the map results and the ordinary results below them.

• A page per care type. Give residential, dementia, nursing (only if you are registered for it) and respite care a page each. Each page should say who it is for, what daily life looks like, the weekly fee for that care, the CQC rating, and how to arrange a visit. A family searching for dementia care should land on your dementia care page, not a home page that mentions dementia once.
• Say where you are. Name your town and the areas you serve naturally in your page titles, headings and text, and include your full address on every page.
• Structured data. Mark up the home, its services and its FAQs so search engines can read them clearly.
• Local links and listings. Accurate listings on directories, the local council’s care directory if your area has one, and links from local organisations you genuinely work with.
• Keep it fresh. Update photos, fees and news so the site looks cared for.

Local SEO takes months, not weeks, and how long depends on how many homes compete in your area. If the website itself makes this hard, because it is slow, hard to use on a phone, or cannot hold separate pages for each type of care, that is the problem to fix first. Our page on care home website design covers what a site that does this well includes, and the earlier post on why a care home website is not getting enquiries goes through the most common gaps.

7. Know when Google Ads is worth it, and when it is not

Google Ads can put your home in front of families searching right now, as soon as the campaigns go live, while local SEO is still building. It is worth considering when:

• you have private beds to fill now and cannot wait months for SEO;
• your website already shows your fees, CQC rating and phone number clearly, so the clicks you pay for can turn into calls;
• someone at the home will answer every enquiry quickly;
• you can fund a steady monthly ad budget and track which calls and forms the ads produce.

It is not worth it when:

• your beds are mostly filled by local authority placements and you have few private places to fill;
• the ads would send families to a website that hides fees or is hard to use on a phone;
• nobody has time to answer enquiries quickly;
• you want a short burst rather than a steady flow, since campaigns need time to learn which searches bring real enquiries.

For our own care home marketing plan, Fill My Diary, we recommend Google Ads spend of £400 to £600 a month, paid directly to Google.

What we did for two homes

We built the websites for two family-run care homes owned by the same group: Tollington Lodge in Weston-super-Mare and Grafton Lodge in Strood. Both sites follow the steps above:

• Phone first. The number sits in the header, with a sticky tap-to-call bar on phones.
• Fees in the open. Tollington Lodge’s fees and funding page starts with the weekly price, from £1,150 a week.
• CQC’s official rating widget on every page.
• A page per care type: residential, dementia and respite care each have their own page.
• Grafton Lodge, rebuilt fast. When Grafton’s old website stopped working, we had the full site rebuilt and live within two days.

We do not have results to share for either home yet, so we are not quoting any.

FAQs

Why is my care home not getting private enquiries?

Usually one of three things. Families cannot find you, because your Google Business Profile is thin or you do not show up for “care homes in [town]”. Or they find you but cannot choose you, because the CQC rating, fees or photos are missing or hard to find. Or they enquire and do not hear back quickly enough. Check all three before spending on advertising.

Do care homes have to show fees online?

The CMA’s advice says care homes should prominently show, on their website, an accurate indication of the weekly fees they typically charge self-funders for each type of care, what the fee includes and what costs extra, and any deposits. It considers this information is likely to need to be no more than one click from the home page. The advice is the CMA’s view of how consumer law applies.

How long does local SEO take for a care home?

Months rather than weeks. A well-set-up Google Business Profile and accurate listings can help sooner, but steady results from pages for each type of care usually take several months, and longer where many homes compete in the same town. That is why some homes run Google Ads alongside SEO while it builds.

Is Google Ads worth it for a care home?

It can be, if you have private beds to fill now, a website that shows fees, the CQC rating and a phone number clearly, and someone to answer every enquiry quickly. It is rarely worth it if your beds are mostly filled through the local authority, your site hides key information, or you only want a short burst of activity.

What to do next

If you would like a second pair of eyes, send us your website for a free care home website review, or see how care home marketing with Fill My Diary runs your local SEO and Google Ads together.