Funeral Home Blogging: Optimal Post Length and Frequency

As the owner or principal executive of a funeral home, you might have read the subject line of this email and thought, “Blogging? What on earth does that have to do with me?”

That’s a fair reaction. Not a lot of funeral homes — at least not ones at the local, independent level — have blogs on their websites. It’s not the most obvious tool to use. It seems more appropriate for other industries and business types than for the death care industry.

But that’s no reason to count out a blog as a powerful tool for cranking up your website’s SEO and consequently supercharging its organic ranking in local search results. Actually, the fact that few funeral home sites incorporate blogs is all the more reason to consider one for yours.

The internet isn’t just the future of marketing for local businesses, including funeral homes. In 2018, it’s the present. That’s where people are going for pre-planning. That’s where people are going for at-need situations. To capture those contracts, you need to outpace local competitors online.

And while pay-per-click (PPC) advertising continues to increase in influence, many people still prefer to select service providers from organic (unpaid) search engine results. Ranking highly in local search is one of the top ways to generate both at-need and pre-need revenue.

To rank highly with Google and other search engines, your funeral home site needs content. You can do many other things to improve your website’s SEO, but nothing matters more than content. That’s why I say content is king. Frankly, it’s the entire royal court.

High-quality, original content conveys authority with the search engines. And the best way to increase site content is with a blog.

I realize that term makes business owners nervous. Who’s going to write this blog? What can we write about our specialty? How much do we need to write? How often?

And yes, it might seem trickier to come up with content for a blog when your specialty is death care (as opposed to other industries). It really doesn’t have to be.

Your blog can cover recent trends in the death care industry, albeit in a somewhat more general way, so it appeals to laypeople. But it doesn’t have to be limited to burials and cremations.

Consider the subjects related to death care. You can expand your blog to talk about healthcare and preventative medicine. You can include content on estate planning, probate issues and power of attorney. You can communicate instruction on how to write a will, how to avoid legal conflicts, how your particular state’s laws relate to one’s passing.

There’s lots of potential content there. And a good marketing professional can connect you with freelance writers who produce excellent content at reasonable prices, freeing you up to run your business.

That leaves the question posed in the headline: If you’re going to produce a blog, how often does it need to be updated, and how long should posts be?

Those specifics often vary based upon the particular industry. I’ve found that a funeral home blog doesn’t need to post as often as others. So keep it reasonable. If it’s too much of a hassle or expense, it won’t get done.

You want a post to be long enough to be valuable, so try for at least 450 words. Blogs also need to be updated regularly, so try for at least twice a week.

If you have the time and/or money to amp it up, start by increasing to three posts a week. But you don’t need the post length to increase much — you want to save original content for later posts.

For example, it’s far better to have 12 posts a month of 500 words each than six posts a month of 1,000 words each. And whatever you do, remember the old Ford slogan: Quality is Job #1. Integrate high-performing keywords into your posts, but always make it sound natural.

(Note: Ready to supercharge the leads you get from the internet and convert them into real-life clientele? In his free webinar, marketing expert Welton Hong delivers practical techniques you can employ today. Click here to register!)