Aged care website migration: what worked, and what happened after
Client location: Sutherland Shire, Sydney NSW
- 10,000+ search impressions across hundreds of aged-care-related phrases within 12 months
- Nearly 1,900 pageviews with over 2 minutes average time on site
- Around 20% of organic visitors reaching the contact page to enquire
- A page-one ranking, including position 3, for a genuine long-tail question with real search intent
- An 87% viewing completion rate on a client testimonial video
- An honest account of what happened after, including a costly, avoidable mistake
In early 2019, a private aged care service provider approached me about social media management. What they actually needed was more fundamental: a genuine website, a clear point of difference, and local search visibility they didn’t have at all.
What I found
- A GoDaddy free website builder site with zero technical SEO, generic in look and feel, with imagery that didn’t represent what the business actually did
- Visibility for their brand name only, no other search terms at all
- No real point of difference. Aged care is one of the most competitive, people-focused categories online, and the site didn’t even show the team’s faces or credentials
- No active Google Business Profile, despite a clear local service area
- No client reviews anywhere, despite years in operation
- Inactive, irrelevant social media, under 100 followers with almost no reach
They’d also already been let down once: a previous designer took six months to deliver only a mockup, then simply reformatted the existing site with no real SEO or marketing strategy behind it, a wasted $1,000+ that would have changed nothing even if finished.
What I actually did
- Rebuilt the site from scratch on WordPress with Elementor, rather than patch the GoDaddy build
- Wrote new copy across every service
- Ran competitor and consumer research into what people actually search for in aged care
- Built a genuine content plan around real, common questions
- Developed a real point of difference and brand positioning
- Set up Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and aged care directory listings
- Edited a client testimonial video
- Built a follow-up workflow to request genuine Google Business Profile reviews
- Wrote staff biographies and sourced representative, Australian-appropriate imagery
- Set up Analytics and Search Console properly, with sitemaps resubmitted
The results
- Over 10,000 search impressions across hundreds of aged-care-related phrases in the following 12 months, no longer reliant on the brand name alone
- Nearly 1,900 pageviews in a few months, over 2 minutes average time on site, bounce rate below 60%
- Around 20% of organic visitors reaching the contact page to enquire, call or email
- First-page rankings including position 3 for a genuine long-tail question (“can a person be forced into a nursing home”), a phrase with real, specific searcher intent
- A featured snippet win on a relevant search result
- An 87% completion rate on a short client testimonial video
- A PageSpeed Insights score of 79/100
What didn't get followed through, and the honest cost of that
I want to be direct about this rather than only show the highlight reel, because what happened afterward is a genuinely important part of the story.
- Despite a content plan and template being provided, no new content was added in the following 18 months, real, valuable patient stories that were never written up or shared on the website that could have helped grow organic search volumes and convert more visitors into clients.
- Worse still, elements were later removed from the site rather than added to.
- On reviews: despite a direct link being provided to make it simple, no genuine client reviews were ever collected.
- At one point, going directly against my advice, the owner wrote a review of their own business themselves. I want to be plain about why that matters beyond just being against my advice: a fabricated review is dishonest to prospective clients trying to make a genuinely important decision about care for a family member, and platforms can and do penalise businesses caught doing it. Months later, that single self-written review was still the only one on the profile.
- Staff photos taken without proper lighting, with inconsistent presentation, were never replaced.
- Social media guidance to share real, relevant moments from the actual work being done wasn’t followed either.
Then the site was made worse than the original
Some time later, I was contacted by a staff member attempting to install analytics tracking that had, in fact, already been correctly installed and working the entire time. Investigating what had actually happened, the picture wasn’t good:
- Changes had been made directly to the live site, no backup, no staging environment, no testing first
- Multiple plugins had been added with no clear benefit to the site
- The person making the changes had no digital marketing background
- The result: broken links, missing images, a non-functioning menu, and formatting issues across both desktop and mobile
- Content that had been driving real search traffic had been removed
- The site now failed Google’s PageSpeed Insights test entirely
- The Search Console data showed it plainly: a genuine growth trend in search visibility, reversed by changes made with good intentions and no due diligence.
I shared the real data with the client so they’d understand exactly what had happened and why, in the hope it would prevent it happening again.
The actual lesson
None of what went wrong here undoes what the original work achieved, the numbers above are real. Although this is one of the clearest examples in my own work of a pattern worth understanding: a website is infrastructure, not a one-time purchase.
Skipping the content plan, skipping genuine reviews and making untested changes to a live site each quietly cost real visibility and the final, avoidable mistake, an untrained team member editing a live site with no backup, undid a meaningful share of the progress in one action.
If you’ve built a genuine foundation and aren’t sure whether it’s being maintained properly, or whether recent changes might have quietly hurt your search visibility, get in touch and I’ll check the real data with you.
I build a genuine foundation and I’m honest about what happens when it isn’t maintained, results don’t hold themselves, and untested changes to a live site can undo real progress in an afternoon. If you’re not sure whether your site’s current setup is helping or quietly working against you, see how I could help.
