Funeral Home Website Marketing: Driving Local Traffic

You check your funeral home website analytics (you are doing this regularly, right?) and see a disturbing trend. A lot of the traffic coming from the search engines is outside of your service area.

If you provide funeral services in Dallas, TX, and see that 60% of your traffic isn’t even coming from people in the state of Texas, you may have a problem. Sure, a few of those searchers might be people with loved ones in the area who are legitimately searching for deathcare services locally. But most of that traffic probably ended up on your page in error.

When you find that your funeral home website isn’t driving traffic from the right geographical area, you can take a few steps to correct the issue:

1. Use Schema
Use markup language to ensure the search engine is more aware of your local service area. You can use coding to identify your business name, address, and phone number for the search engines, helping ensure bots correctly evaluate this information when they crawl your pages. You can also use markup to identify “area served,” making it more apparent to the search engines which consumers you’re targeting.

2. Claim Your NAP Data
Claim your NAP data (business name, address, and phone number) offsite as well. Claim your Google My Business profile and your listings on any review sites and social media platforms. Then, update the NAP data on those sites to ensure it’s identical to what is listed on your website. This helps build authority for that data in the search engines.

3. Localize Your Onsite Content
Analyze the copy on your website. If your copy could be used, exactly as is, for a funeral home anywhere else in the country, it may not be specific enough. Add local flavor by:

• Including mentions of local landmarks or streets. At the very least, you can include a page with specific directions to your funeral home.
• Address concerns specific to local residents. People along the Gulf Coast might need to know what to do if a hurricane threatens funeral arrangements, for example, or your city might have specific laws about deathcare that impact the timeline of services.
• Mention and link to other local organizations or events. You might include a blog post about your staff taking part in a local charity drive or create resource pages for loved ones with links to local florists, cemeteries, or other businesses of interest (that are not your direct competitors).