What is a funeral SEO strategy?
SEO is search engine optimization. It means improving a website so that it appears higher on search engine results pages. In essence, a funeral SEO strategy is about what to do to become a top result on Google.
What Google wants
People use Google to find products, services, and all sorts of other information. But how does Google determine what searchers want? The short answer: they have devoted billions of dollars, tens of thousands of people, and analyzed mountains of data in attempting to solve this. Google wants to show you results that are actually about what you’re looking for. As Google puts it, they promote websites that satisfy user intent. Google uses a vast and constantly-changing number of metrics in order to rank a site. This can be frustrating for a business that is trying to perform well and drive organic (unpaid) traffic to its site. You’re constantly trying to hit a moving target.
The helpful thing is that Google has gotten quite sophisticated at determining user intent. Try asking yourself, “What am I looking for when I search for X?” That can be a great start when trying to make your website show up higher. Does your website have pages that target these keywords? If your website doesn’t have the information you’re looking for, you should add that content. Users, and potential clients, want to see rich content that answers their questions.
How well do you rank?
You should first assess how much work your website needs. Does your funeral home appear in the local 3-pack? If you’re ranking at the top of the first page for “funeral home near me,” that’s great. But you might be buried on page five for “cremation near me.” Determine how well you’re doing for all the services you provide. Try every relevant keyword. If you’re consistently below your local competitors on certain keywords, you should start there.
Easy to implement funeral SEO strategy
Search engine optimization is a niche field that employs a lot of proprietary software and specialists. That can make it intimidating to attempt on one’s one. But the worst thing you can do is nothing. As a funeral director, you should have a good idea about what information your clients want to know. If you frequently get asked about something or have to explain it to families, you should put that answer online.
Content-rich services pages
Make sure that you have dedicated pages on your website for each of your services. As a rule, each one should have at least 300 words of content on its topic, sometimes much more. When a family asks you to explain cremation, do you do it one sentence? Of course not. Neither should your website.
Have a blog
Your website’s CMS most likely makes it easy to have a blog and create posts on it. This is a great place to let people know about important developments in death care and the funeral industry. Do you have new grief resources to share? Are there new regulations that families are curious about? Are you partnering with a local hospice for a charity walk? This can be a great place to increase your reach and grow the number of potential customers who interact with your funeral home.
Your blog ought to be a resource about funerals, grief, and death. A content-rich website is great for SEO. (Users like to share links to informative posts on social media, which is also good for your funeral home.)
Know where you stand
Find out how well your website performs from an SEO standpoint. A number of free online tools can give you some insight into this. Does your website load quickly on mobile and desktop? Do all features load across different types of devices? Is your website indexed and crawlable? You might not be able to fix all of these problems yourself. But it’s helpful to understand where you stand and try to fix the most important issues first.
When should you call in a digital marketing expert?
SEO can be hard. You most likely didn’t become a funeral director in order to spend all your time on digital marketing. It might not be something you’re good at, and you likely have more pressing things to do with your time. If your funeral home can’t be found online, some serious SEO work likely needs to be done. An SEO expert will audit your website and determine what to optimize first. (The best marketing companies will provide you with a triage report. It will show what to do today and what to do in the long term.)
When you contact an SEO expert, they should design a plan that is tailored specifically to your funeral home and your market. The right marketing firm will do an analysis of your local competition and target their strategy accordingly. You might have a decent website and be in an area with only a few other funeral homes. A targeted approach to SEO might be enough to drastically improve your website’s search result performance. On the other hand, you might have a technically perfect website that doesn’t show up well in search results. That could be because you’re in a competitive urban market. You might need a more aggressive approach to SEO. Another likely possibility is that you did some SEO work yourself and got some results. Now you need some extra help to get more users to click on your funeral home’s website.
Whether you attempt it yourself or hire an SEO business, SEO is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website. Start developing your funeral SEO strategy today. SEO can help your funeral home serve more members of your community, and that’s what really matters.