Lead generation for a care home is the work of turning families' Google searches (the home's Business Profile, its website, its ads) into phone calls and visit requests, and then measuring how many of those requests become an admission. In the UK "care homes near me" gets 60,500 searches a month (Google Ads, November 2026), yet when we checked 90 care homes in four Italian cities on 14 November 2026, 54 showed no opening hours on their Google profile and 18 of 44 websites had no tap-to-call number, no form and no WhatsApp link on the homepage.
Families search. Many care homes leave no open door for them to call.
The problem is rarely the budget. It is the route: the family finds the home, finds no hours, calls at 6.30pm, nobody answers, and moves on to the next name.
The data we gathered for this article points to three mistakes:
- measuring website visits instead of phone calls, which is how most families make contact;
- treating every enquiry the same, when a two-week respite stay in August and a permanent, funded admission are two different journeys;
- buying clicks without knowing what an enquiry is worth, because nobody has counted how many calls turn into a visit.
Have you worked with a care home?
No, and we say so up front. None of our public case studies is a care home. What we do have is the method behind Contesini Consulenze: starting from zero, Google Ads brought in 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, and 68% became sales opportunities. Different sector (energy), same logic: count real enquiries, not clicks.
For this article we ran a new survey: where a family can actually leave a contact, across 90 Google profiles and 44 websites. You will also find the questions that qualify an enquiry, how searches move through the year, and how to work out the cost of an enquiry. Let's go.
When lead generation helps a care home (and when the waiting list fills the beds)
Lead generation matters most for self-funded places and for funded beds that are empty, where the family chooses the home. Where admissions come through a local authority or health board placement and there is a waiting list, the useful work is different: be easy to find and answer well, rather than buy enquiries.
The Italian data we use in this article sits in a market of 12,987 residential facilities with 425,780 beds and 385,871 residents on 1 January 2024, three in four over 65 (Istat). Dividing residents by beds gives about 91% (our calculation; Istat does not separate empty beds from beds awaiting an admission).
So does public funding make marketing pointless?
No. It changes what families search for. In the UK "care home fees" gets 880 searches a month and "care home vacancies" 590. Two ways in, two kinds of enquiry to handle.
Where a care home's enquiries come from (four search channels, and the phone ties them together)
A care home gets enquiries from four search channels: its Google Business Profile, organic results (where directories carry a lot of weight), Google Ads and its own website. In all four, the family's last step is often the same: a phone call. In our survey 77 of 90 profiles had a number, while only 12 of 44 websites had a form.
Each channel already has its own article:
- climbing the map and the directories is in our guide to care home SEO;
- what pages and documents to publish is in how to create a care home website;
- what a click costs and how to structure campaigns is in Google Ads for care homes.
Here we look at what happens after the click, because searches are not all equal: some are urgent, others are already a question about price.
| Search (UK) | Monthly searches | Average CPC | What the family is asking | Channel that catches it best |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| care homes near me | 60,500 | $6.01 | a home nearby, now | Business Profile |
| nursing homes near me | 14,800 | $6.33 | nursing care nearby, now | Business Profile |
| respite care | 8,100 | $10.88 | a short stay, with dates | dedicated page + ads |
| dementia care homes near me | 2,400 | $11.14 | a specialist unit | unit page |
| respite care near me | 1,000 | $13.10 | a short stay nearby | phone, Business Profile |
| care home fees | 880 | $2.52 | the price, before calling | fees page |
| care home vacancies | 590 | $1.60 | a free room now | phone, vacancies page |
UK clicks cost about six times the Italian ones: $6.01 for "care homes near me" against $1.05 for the Italian "casa di riposo vicino a me". That makes every lost call more expensive.
What we found on the Google profiles of 90 care homes (54 with no hours, 20 with no reviews)
The Google Business Profile is a care home's first door, because it is what appears for "near me". Of the 90 homes we surveyed in four Italian cities, fewer than half showed as claimed by the owner and only 36 displayed opening hours.
Method: on 14 November 2026, between 01:41 and 01:42 UTC, we pulled every Google Maps listing in the "nursing home" and "retirement home" categories within 12 km of Verona, Padua and Brescia and 15 km of Bari, using DataForSEO. Of 113 listings we kept 90, dropping clinics, hospices, home-care agencies, closed businesses and off-topic results. The data comes from DataForSEO's database, mostly updated in September 2026.
| City (Italy) | Homes | With phone | With website | Claimed | With hours | No reviews | Reviews (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verona | 23 | 20 | 19 | 11 | 9 | 5 | 3 |
| Padua | 20 | 14 | 11 | 11 | 8 | 6 | 5 |
| Brescia | 24 | 21 | 18 | 9 | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| Bari | 23 | 22 | 11 | 12 | 10 | 5 | 13 |
| Total | 90 | 77 (86%) | 59 (66%) | 43 (48%) | 36 (40%) | 20 (22%) | 6 |
The median is 6 reviews, and 20 of the 90 homes have none at all.
54 of 90 profiles show no hours. Of the 36 that do, 8 close before 6pm on every weekday and only 25 list Sunday hours. Families often plan after work or at weekends.
Only 26 of 90 have a description, the space to say whether there are self-funded rooms, a dementia unit or respite stays.
Who gets it right?
Centro Servizi Anziani Tiziano, near Padua: 217 photos, 91 reviews rated 4.6, open 9am to 7pm seven days a week, and a full description. Its homepage has a tap-to-call number and talks about availability and the waiting list.
Google Business Profile Help lets you set more than one set of hours for different services and up to two phone numbers on top of the main one. For a care home, that means separating visiting hours from the admissions office and giving enquirers a direct line. The rest of the set-up is in our guide to the Google Business Profile for practitioners.
Phone, form or WhatsApp: the ways in on care home websites (18 of 44 offer none)
On its website, a care home should offer at least a tap-to-call number and a way to request a visit. Of the 44 websites we could read, only 19 had a tap-to-call number on the homepage and only 3 mentioned booking a visit.
We downloaded the homepage of every website linked from the profiles from our own server (one page per group, for example Korian and Coopselios) between 01:46 and 01:48 UTC on 14 November 2026. The check is automated and covers the homepage only: a form on a Contact page is not counted.
| On the homepage | Sites | Of 44 |
|---|---|---|
| Tap-to-call phone number (tel:) | 19 | 43% |
| Clickable email address | 27 | 61% |
| At least one form that is not search (newsletters included) | 12 | 27% |
| Direct WhatsApp link | 2 | 5% |
| "Book a visit" or similar | 3 | 7% |
| "Places available" or "waiting list" | 2 | 5% |
| The word for fees ("retta") | 6 | 14% |
| Google measurement tools (Analytics or Tag Manager) | 22 | 50% |
| No tap-to-call, no form, no WhatsApp | 18 | 41% |
Four sites in ten make the family copy the number by hand, on a smartphone, which is where "near me" searches come from. And half the sites have no Google tools to tell them how many calls start on the website.
The right form for a care home (four fields, no health data)
A care home's form exists to get a call back, not to take a medical history. This is enough:
- name and phone number of the person writing;
- who the enquiry is for (parent, partner, other);
- type of stay: permanent, respite, day care;
- when they would like to move in (within a month, within three months, just looking).
Diagnoses, medication and care needs do not belong in the form. They are health data, a special category of personal data under UK GDPR: collect them on the phone or at the assessment, with the right privacy notice, not in a text box that lands in a shared inbox.
One missed call is worth more than a hundred clicks
A profile with no hours, a number you cannot tap, no call tracking: in the 90 homes we checked, these are the three places where families' enquiries get lost before they reach admissions. That is where we start: we review your care home's profile, website, form and call tracking together.
Book a strategy callHow to qualify a family's enquiry (six questions for the first call)
Qualifying an enquiry means working out in a few minutes whether the home can look after that person, on what terms and when. Six questions, always the same, written into a log.
- Who the enquiry is for, and who decides in the family.
- What kind of stay: permanent, respite, day care.
- How much care is needed, in broad terms (the detail comes at the assessment).
- Funded or self-funded: is there already a local authority or NHS assessment, or is the family looking for a private place?
- When: is there a hospital discharge in a few days, or are they planning for the coming months?
- How they found you: Google profile, website, ad, directory, word of mouth.
Sounds like paperwork? It is the opposite. With these six answers admissions knows who to call back today (imminent discharge, self-funded), who to invite for a visit (assessment under way) and who to point elsewhere (they need a unit the home does not have). The sixth question is what lets you see, at the end of the month, which channel brings admissions and which only brings calls.
The log can be a shared spreadsheet or a CRM (software for managing contacts): we compared several in our guide to the best lead generation tools. We use the same pattern for pharmacies , medical labs and funeral directors.
When enquiries arrive (respite in winter in the UK, in summer in Italy)
Family searches are not flat across the year, and the peaks differ between the UK and Italy. Knowing yours lets you move budget into the right months.
| Search | Highest month | Lowest month | 12-month average |
|---|---|---|---|
| care homes near me (UK) | 74,000 (Nov 2025, Jan-Mar 2026) | 60,500 (other months) | 60,500 |
| respite care (UK) | 9,900 (Nov 2025, Jan-Mar 2026) | 8,100 (other months) | 8,100 |
| care home vacancies (UK) | 720 (Jul-Oct 2026) | 320 (Dec 2025) | 590 |
| ricovero di sollievo, "respite stay" (Italy) | 1,000 (Jun-Jul 2026) | 590 (Nov-Dec 2025, Oct 2026) | 720 |
| rsa posti liberi, "care home vacancies" (Italy) | 880 (Jan-Feb 2026) | 210 (Oct 2026) | 590 |
In the UK, winter is the busy season: "care homes near me" and "respite care" both rise by about a fifth between January and March. In Italy, respite peaks in June and July, 69% above its low, as families plan carers' holidays.
One note of caution: "care home vacancies" more than doubled between December 2025 and the summer of 2026. One year of data is not enough to call that a season.
What an enquiry costs a care home (the sum to do before you spend)
There is no verified public figure for the cost of a care home enquiry in Italy, and the UK figures we found online come from agencies without a stated method. The cost is worked out from your own numbers: spend divided by qualified calls and enquiries, then by visits, then by admissions.
The starting point is the cost of a click: $6.01 for "care homes near me", $13.10 for "respite care near me", $2.52 for "care home fees" (Google Ads UK, 14 November 2026).
A worked example with stated assumptions: with £1,000 and an average click of £5, ads bring about 200 visits. If 1 visit in 20 becomes a call or a form, that is 10 enquiries at £100 each. If 1 enquiry in 5 comes to see the home, that is 2 visits at £500 each.
The 5% and the 1 in 5 are our assumptions: the real figure comes from your log after three months.
What do others say?
Asked the same question with web search on, ChatGPT gave its own range of £50-150 per enquiry from ads and quoted agency figures that we left out because they come without a stated method. Different sums, none measured: that is why the log matters more than the budget.
To measure properly, Google Ads can count calls from ads and calls from website visits as conversions, and keep only those longer than a minimum duration. Budgets and campaigns are covered in Google Ads for care homes; the general case is in Google Ads for small businesses.
If the site gets visits but the phone does not ring, read our article on the website that does not generate leads.
Care home lead generation in ChatGPT and AI Overview answers (what AI reads)
When a family asks ChatGPT or Google "which care home near Verona has private rooms", the answer is built from what AI can read: the Business Profile description, website pages, reviews and directories. You cannot buy a citation, but you can give AI something to cite.
Of the 90 profiles we surveyed, 64 have no description: the first text an AI assistant looks for is empty. And only 6 of 44 homepages mention fees, 2 mention availability.
AI tools break a question into sub-questions (funding, fees, specialist units, visits), as we explain in our article on query fan-out. A home that answers each one in writing, on the profile and on the site, is more likely to be named. The rest of the work, reviews and consistent details across profile and directories, is in our guide to local AI visibility.
Lead generation for care homes: frequently asked questions
It depends: if all places are funded and there is a long waiting list, the job is mainly to be easy to find and to answer well. If the home has self-funded rooms, respite stays or empty funded beds, lead generation helps fill them with the right enquiries, measured separately for each type of place.
No. Diagnoses, medication and care needs are health data, a special category under UK GDPR. The form should ask only for name, phone, who the enquiry is for, type of stay and timing; the rest is collected at the assessment with the right privacy notice.
It depends: there is no verified public benchmark. A click on family searches costs about $6 in the UK (6.01 for care homes near me, November 2026) against about $1 in Italy; the cost per enquiry is your spend divided by the calls and qualified enquiries you log.
Yes, if someone really answers in the stated hours. In our survey of Italian homes only 2 of 44 websites had a direct WhatsApp link; a tap-to-call number comes first, because near me searches happen on smartphones.
It depends on the market: in the UK, care homes near me and respite care peak between January and March (74,000 and 9,900 searches a month). In Italy, respite searches peak in June and July instead.
Care home lead generation in short (and where to start on Monday)
Families search a lot: 60,500 searches a month for "care homes near me" in the UK.
The channel that closes is the phone.
54 of 90 profiles do not say when to call.
18 of 44 websites have no tap-to-call, no form and no WhatsApp.
Six questions on the first call separate who to call back today from who to invite for a visit.
The cost per enquiry is measured, not estimated.
Monday's move needs no ad spend: add admissions hours to the Google profile and make the number on the website tappable. In the four cities we checked, doing both already puts a home ahead of more than half its neighbours.
If you want to build your enquiry path with us, start from our lead generation service or get in touch. Speak soon!
