How To Look At Your Funeral Home Website The Way Your Families Do
July 17th, 2014
Perspective – we all talk about it, but how many of us really have it?
When you’re close to something, you just don’t see it the same way others do. That also applies to your funeral home’s website. You know what you intend it to do, but when did you last check that it was really working for client families?
Assessing your website with objectivity is hugely important for the success of your funeral home. In this guide, we highlight some of the major issues that affect client families’ experience on your funeral home’s website, and how you can address them.
1. Can They Find Your Funeral Home Online?
We’ve talked before about the huge, critical importance of search engine optimization (SEO) to your funeral home’s website. SEO is the art and science of tweaking aspects of your website to make it rank better in the search engine listings. In other words, it’s all about making your website easier to find online for client families.
Over the years, Google has refined its search algorithms to deliver better and more relevant results to web users. That’s very important for your funeral home because quality and freshness of content, relevance to what people are searching for, and social signals such as social media shares and external reviews will help those search engine bots decide when your content appears in response to a search. Get SEO right and you’ll increase the chance that your funeral home will show up in front of the right people at the right time.
Try this: search for funeral homes in your area (preferably when logged out of your favorite browser so that you don’t get personalized results) or use some of the search terms that you’d like families to use to find you. When you get the results check whether:
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Families expect to see these features when they look for your funeral home online. After all, don’t you do the same when you’re searching online, too? For some extra help with your SEO efforts, check out our article on search engine optimization.
2. Does it Work on Mobile Devices?
Here’s another experiment you should try: see how your funeral home website looks on a smartphone or tablet.More than half of American adults own a smartphone and 42% own a tablet (you probably own at least one of those yourself). People use those devices throughout the day and they also pay a huge part in researching products and buying services,according to Google’s research. Frankly, if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, your funeral home is losing out on some valuable business.
Use your smartphone or tablet to visit your funeral home’s website and see what kind of experience your families get. Find out:
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If your funeral home website doesn’t work well on mobile devices, families will find a website that does. For more information on the importance of having a mobile website, check out this article for more mobile stats and tips.
3. Does Your Site Engage Their Interest?
If families find your site online, then it’s important to think about how they feel about it. This is perhaps the hardest part for you to be objective about. But trust me, you’ve got to try. Remember, your goal is to keep families on your website so they’re interested in learning more about your firm and the services you offer (more on that in the next section). Most people can tell within a few seconds whether they want to stay on a website or not – see if your funeral home’s website passes the blink test. Look at your website for about 5 seconds, and ask yourself:
It’s worth remembering that online video has had a huge boom in the last year or so, especially among mobile device users. It’s an easy way to connect with families and show your relevance to them. Check out some of the subtle cues you can use to make your website more appealing in our article on thepsychology of funeral home website design.
4.Does Your Site Answer Their Questions?
Through some intensive research, we’ve found that there are three actions most families want to accomplish when visiting your funeral home website. First, they want to search for their loved one’s funeral service information; second, they want to leave condolences on asocial memorial website; third, they want to show they care by sending flowers or gifts. Does your site allow your families to complete these actions? Pretend you are visiting your site for the first time and go through the steps needed to accomplish these actions – how easy is it? If it’s not, then by the end of the test you should know what you need to fix.
What else do families want from your website?
Beyond that, families who visit your site arelooking for information on the values of the people behind your funeral home, the services you offer to families, your location and contact details, social proof such as external customer reviews and a reason to choose you (known in other areas as your unique selling point). Families also want to know how much a funeral service will cost them (transparent pricing is the best approach) and how they can celebrate a life lived with apersonalized funeral service.
In the end, it’s all about putting your website to the test to see whether your website makes this information easy to find.
Final words
Taking an objective, critical look at your funeral home’s website can be hard. But after all, if it doesn’t work for families, then it won’t work for you. We hope the questions above will help you identify areas where you could make your website even better for families so they have a better chance of choosing your funeral home, every time.
Ps. Want to know how your website is performing? Then put it to the test!
To get a free, in-depth website consultation with one of funeralOne’s Website Success Specialists, click here or give us a call at 800-798-2575, ext. 5 to schedule a consultation today!
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Highly dscriptive post, I enjoyed that bit. Will thesre be
a part 2?