Cardinal Ritter Success Story
Cardinal Ritter Senior Services entered the 2025 holiday season facing a familiar challenge for senior living organizations: visibility at the exact moment families were making real decisions.
The holidays are one of the most critical windows of the year for senior living organizations. Families are together, parents are seen in person, and conversations about care, support, and next steps move from hypothetical to urgent. Cardinal Ritter Senior Services needed to be visible during those searches—and they needed it fast.
The goal was simple and time-sensitive: reach page one for the senior living and senior services keywords that matter most in their market before Thanksgiving, then build momentum through year end.
The Challenge
With the holiday decision window approaching, Cardinal Ritter Senior Services needed to improve search visibility while also addressing underlying SEO issues that were limiting performance.
Their objectives included increasing page one visibility for high-intent senior living and senior services searches in the St. Louis market, eliminating internal SEO friction caused by keyword cannibalization, and improving both organic traffic quality and conversion efficiency. Just as important, the strategy needed to create sustainable momentum—not a short-term spike that would fade after the holidays.
How TG Helped
To drive meaningful growth quickly, Timmermann Group implemented a multi-layered SEO strategy designed to remove friction, align intent, and strengthen authority across the site.
This approach combined technical SEO improvements, keyword research and mapping, on-page optimization, content development, authoritative backlink acquisition, and cannibalization cleanup. The work was executed using an agile sprint model, with meaningful updates shipped immediately in the first week rather than being delayed into future phases.
Keyword Research
Map Intent and Eliminate Cannibalization
Timmermann Group conducted in-depth keyword research focused on high-intent senior living and senior services searches within the St. Louis metro area.
Each keyword was mapped to a specific page based on intent, service type, and location. This process also uncovered patterns of keyword cannibalization, where multiple pages were competing against each other in search results. Those conflicts were corrected to consolidate signals, strengthen relevance, and give each page a clear purpose.
On-Page Optimization
Align Pages to How Families Actually Search
With keyword mapping in place, we implemented immediate on-page updates across priority landing pages and supporting pages.
This included refining page focus, improving alignment between content and search intent, and strengthening internal linking to reinforce relevance. On-page updates were implemented immediately, with additional refinements in weeks two through four based on early ranking movement.
Content Development
Expand Coverage Where Demand Exists
To capture additional demand, we developed new content and expanded existing pages around the services and programs families actively search for.
This content filled gaps, strengthened topical coverage, and supported both rankings and user understanding—ensuring Cardinal Ritter was visible not just for one or two terms, but across a broader range of high-intent searches.
Technical SEO
Removing Barriers to Indexing and Performance
We began auditing Cardinal Ritter’s Senior Services technical SEO foundation to identify issues that could block rankings or dilute performance. Barriers were resolved quickly to ensure pages could be properly crawled, indexed, and potentially ranked in search engines during the critical holiday window.
By addressing these issues upfront, we cleared the path for all other SEO efforts to take effect faster and more reliably.
Backlink Building
Strengthen Authority and Competitiveness
To support competitive rankings, we initiated authoritative backlink acquisition early in engagement.
These links helped increase trust signals and reinforced Cardinal Ritter’s credibility in search, supporting both newly optimized pages and existing content as rankings began to improve.
Results
Page One Gains Ahead of the Holiday Deadline
Within the first 30 days, Cardinal Ritter began appearing on the front page of Google ahead of Thanksgiving—unlocking visibility during one of the most important decision periods of the year.
Recent keyword highlights include:
- “st louis senior living” desktop: #2
- “senior living st louis” desktop: #3
- “st louis assisted living centers” mobile: #2
- “st louis memory care” desktop: #4
- “st louis senior care services” desktop: #7
Organic Search Performance:
- Engagement rate increased +5.9% year over year
- Key conversion events increased +30.5% year over year
- Session key event rate increased +141.7% year over year
Even as traffic volume fluctuated, organic visitors became more likely to take action—turning visibility into measurable outcomes.