Funeral Home SEO: What It Is, What It Isn’t

Are you regularly talking about how much traffic your funeral home website is getting or whether you’re showing up as the top spot in Google for search terms?

It’s great if you are, but you should also keep SEO performance in perspective. Search engine optimization is a necessary resource in your funeral home marketing toolbelt, but it’s not a magic wand you can wave to succeed at business goals.

What Funeral Home SEO Is

Search engine optimization is a broad term that covers all the actions you take to try to influence where your pages appear in the search engines.

It’s important because the top spot in search results gets close to a third of the total traffic, and around 60 percent of the traffic goes to the top three spots. If you’re not showing up in the first page of listings, you probably won’t see much traffic at all, because a whopping 92 percent of people click on one of those first 10 links when they search.

Funeral home SEO is what lands your pages in the top 10 (or more optimally in the top three) so you can attract new traffic and expand exposure for your company. Other benefits of SEO include:

• Targeting the right searchers (people who are interested in funeral home or death care services)
• Controlling the way your company is seen when people search (which helps control your online brand and reputation)

What Funeral Home SEO Is Not

SEO is a marketing tool, not a sales tool. it’s a fine but critical distinction, because many companies fall into the trap of chasing SEO metrics without tying them to business goals.

It’s safe to assume that you didn’t start a funeral home with the sole intent of getting massive views online. And while solid SEO does score you page views, it doesn’t convert customers or even cause them to engage with your company. Your onsite content—that’s the sales part—has to do that.

In short, funeral home marketing is a multistep process. SEO helps the right users find your pages, but you have work to do after that to show off your expertise, engage with visitors and persuade them to take the next step in the decision-making or buying process.