7 Easy Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Funeral Home Website

If your website is online and nobody visits it, does your business really have a web presence? I know, I know… it sounds like that old “trees falling in the woods” philosophy, but it’s true.

In today’s world, having a website is make or break for your funeral home. It helps you educate families on your offerings, offers endless branding and marketing opportunities, and it helps you establish credibility in an online world.

But, before you can reap any of the business benefits of having a website, you have to get people to visit it first.

Here are seven easy ways to increase traffic to your website:

 

1. Use SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of getting your website to rank well on search engines. By appearing at the top of search results, your funeral firm opens up more opportunities to increase your website traffic – and in turn – increase your bottom line.

Here’s a quick tip – if you hire an SEO expert who is still talking about stuffing your website with suitable keywords or building inbound links from anywhere & everywhere, run…fast. That’s a shortcut to getting your website delisted from Google. Why? Because SEO changed forever in 2013. Search Engine Watch has a great summary of the key changes last year.

Now that you have a better idea of what SEO is all about, let’s take a look at some ways you can use SEO to increase your website traffic:

Help Google correctly identify your content by marking up your website’s structured data. According to Google, this involves “updating your site so that Google can understand the data it contains.” Thankfully, Google has provided a step-by-step guide to help you get started.
Incorporate long tail keyword phrases into your website content. This means instead of trying to rank for a term like “funeral homes”, you should be trying to rank for search terms like “funeral homes in Detroit, MI”. According to Google, longterm keywords are more valuable because they provide more specific answers to users’ questions. Need help incorporating long tail keywords into your website? Check out this guide to get started.
Create in-depth content that actually answers client families’ questions online (we’ll get to that later in this blog).
– Claim authorship through Google+ for all of your content. This involves creating a Google+ account and syncing it up with the content you create. It’s Google’s way of allowing businesses to show that the content you create is unique, valid and yours. Plus, when you claim authorship, your image will appear next to the content you publish online… gaining you some valuable real-estate on search engines. Here’s a quick guide to help get you set-up.

 

2. Start Blogging

By changing SEO, Google has sent another message: quality content is important. We believe that for a funeral home – or any business – the best place to create a repository of quality content is on your own blog. (And we practice what we preach, too!)


We’ve talked about this before, but it’s true… your funeral home can’t afford NOT to blog. A blog makes an excellent content hub that gives client families a reason to return to your website over and over again. In fact, research shows that companies who blog have 55% more website visitors than companies who don’t. If you’re ready to start blogging, check out our step-by-step guide to creating a successful funeral blog.

 

3. Produce Quality Content

If you’re already blogging for your funeral home’s website, you’re already taking part in a marketing phenomenon called content marketing. In the simplest of terms, content marketing “is all about creating and sharing something valuable to get the attention of your potential families”. There are a variety of types of content you can post to bring value to families, including:

– Blog posts
– Editorials/articles
– Case studies
– Videos
– Community events
– eBooks
– White papers
– Webinars
– Podcasts
– Research reports
– Press releases

Content marketing is a dynamic way to build your brand, attract attention, generate new leads and inspire loyalty. Not only is it a much more effective way to promote your business than advertising, but Google loves quality content. The more content you create, the more people that will link to your content, and the higher your funeral website will rank on search engines.

Before you get started with content marketing:

– Dig into your website analytics and see which content on your website visitors most respond to, using social media conversations as one of the benchmarks.
– Check out the keywords or questions they ask that bring them to your site (although Google has masked a lot of keyword data, you can still find some via Google Webmaster Tools, as Hubspot’s guide shows).
– Keep track of relevant news and memes so you can hook your content on that.

Need a kick-start to creating content? Use our comprehensive content marketing guide!

 

4. Add Video to Your Website

Video has been the big success story of 2013 and is likely to be even bigger in 2014, so adding video to your site is one of the best ways to bring some web traffic in. Consider the facts:

– 75 million Americans watch online videos each month (Uberflip).
– According to Comscore, web visitors who watch video spend an extra two minutes on your site, making them 64% more likely to buy (Tipping Point believes that figure is 85%).
– Adding video to your site makes it six times more likely that the casual visitor will become one of your client families.
– Video makes people more likely to share, especially on social media.
– Videos can give your funeral home a human face and inspire trust.

Mobile device users are also huge consumers of video content – and that’s a market no funeral home can afford to ignore. Video is more engaging, more appealing and is great for SEO.

How can you include video on your website? Here are a few examples:

Share some great eulogies that client families can use for inspiration.
Create a video walk-through of your facilities.
Showcase some of the personalized services that you have provided.
Add video testimonials from some of your happy client families.

Video Brewery also shares some key statistics on video marketing, with tips for how this can work for any business.

 

5 . Optimize for Mobile

Many of your website visitors now use mobile phones and tablets to search for and browse your content. Research from Google shows clearly that mobile device usage is growing. In fact, by the end of 2014, there will be more mobile devices than people and mobile browsing is on track to surpass desktop browsing.

Keeping these facts in mind, it’s pretty easy to see that you should consider making your website mobile-friendly. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re ignoring an audience so huge, it’s likely to impact your bottom line in a big way. Think about it… the more ways users can access your website, the more branding opportunities you open up. And while you’re optimizing your website for mobile, make sure your blog is mobile-friendly too!

 

6. Use Social Media

Social media is a major source of website traffic, referring at least 50% of the traffic of most sites. In fact, it’s so important that Google now includes social reports in both its Analytics and Webmaster Tools products.

Social media is useful for:

Helping client families find your business
.
Connecting with client families (more than 72% of Americans check social networking sites daily, according to Pew Internet).
Building trust, resulting in a 20% increase in spending.
Creating inbound links (and thus driving traffic) when people re-share your content to their networks.

In spite of this, only 47% of funeral firms are using social media. That means if your funeral home does use social media, it gives you a competitive advantage.

Which social networks should you use? It depends on where your client families are. With more than 1 billion active users, Facebook is a safe bet, but don’t ignore the other sites. Twitter is probably a better network for sharing your blog content, while Pinterest (which is a huge web traffic driver) is a great way to showcase creative ideas (such as personalized services) visually.

Need to jumpstart your social media efforts? Check out our recommendations on social media tools, and social media mistakes to avoid before you start.

 

7. Tap Into Social Memorial Websites

When a death occurs, your funeral home’s website is often the first place people will go to read the obituary, check service times or send a condolence. This is what drives most funeral home websites’ traffic. But what if you could tap into social media to drive more members of your community to your website? That’s where social memorial websites comes in. We’ve defined social memorial websites before as an online guestbook that “offers friends and family a way to have a social conversation about the loved one, even long after the service is over. Visitors can even light candles, leave a message of sympathy, share photos and videos or buy flowers and gifts.”

Social memorial websites, in my opinion, are the best way to drive traffic to your website. Why? Because you’re sparking a conversation in your community about someone’s life, right on your website. That means your community and the loved one’s family and friends will continue to come back to your website for generations to come. How beautiful is that?

A great example of this is Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Homes. They published an obituary for Harry Stamps on their social memorial website and it went viral as people worldwide responded to his heartfelt and humorous tribute. Not only did his social memorial website increase their website traffic ten fold, but it also received 6,420 Facebook likes, 1,422 condolence messages, 1,436 candles lit in memory of him, and 46 virtual gifts! Talk about the power of social media.

This is Harry Stamps social memorial website. To view it, click here.

 

Final words

At the end of the day, increasing your website traffic is dependant on one thing: value. With every step you take to increase your website traffic, ask yourself “Is this something that brings value to my potential families?” This will keep you from investing in things that are only in the name of website traffic, not value.

Once your website visitors know they can turn to you to answer their questions and help them solve their problems, you’ll know you’re offering the kind of value that keeps them coming back to your site time and again.

How does your funeral home keep your website traffic steady? Share your tips in the comments below!

Joe Joachim

funeralOne

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  1. Bellow Carson

    Great blog with relevant discussions.

  2. Bellow Carson

    great blog with relevant discussions.

  3. Funeral Blog. The official blog for the funeral & cemetery professions. » Blog Archive 8 Tips for Turning Families Into Customers

    […] both online and offline, and by showcasing success stories. As we mentioned in our blog on increasing traffic to your funeral home, creating video testimonials is even better. The more you connect with families via your website […]

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    […] All of this data could spark some content ideas… and give you a lot of insights for your SEO efforts. Try it out on your own! Here’s a great article on how to get started with Google Webmaster […]

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