Expert Funeral Home Marketing Content: It’s Not What You Think

Over the past few years, Google has upped the ante on expert content. The search engine wants authentic, quality content that speaks confidently into the searcher’s need and intent. But there’s a chance you’re over analyzing this expert requirement, and it could be hurting your online marketing.

What Google Means by Expert Content
According to Google, expert content is written by someone with real-life experience on the topic at hand.

Medical content, for example, probably shouldn’t be written by a part-time freelancer who has a secretarial desk job at a construction company. Unless the freelancer is writing after interviewing a doctor or doing extensive research and someone with medical knowledge is fact-checking. Google might consider the resulting article authoritative.

What People Think Google Means by Expert Content
Unfortunately, people take that obvious medical example and try to apply it everywhere. In the process, they create rules for “expert content” that Google doesn’t necessarily intend. Many marketers look for people with titles, credentials, or resume experience on the topic no matter what it is.

But Google’s pretty clear that “experts” don’t always need credentials. For example, a mom blogger with a ton of quality content on baking could write a product review of a mixer. Google would likely accept it as expert content because the writer has demonstrated hands-on experience.

Some Best Practices for Funeral Homes
Here are some potential guidelines you might put in place to help ensure authoritative, expert content without requiring a funeral director to write it all:

• Invest in ghostwriting. Pay quality freelancers or a marketing agency to create content you can post under the firm’s name or even your staff members’ names.
• Do fact check articles. Ensure someone who does have experience fact checks all articles.
• Link to authoritative sources. Pull statistics and research facts from government, educational, and industry association websites to use in your content and link back to them to demonstrate their authority.