5 Reasons Your Competitor’s Funeral Home Website is Better Than Yours

 

Do me a favor and go to your funeral home website right now.

Can you honestly say you’re proud of it?

If not, I have some bad news for you…

…your current website is probably turning business away.

Even worse, your potential families are choosing your competitors because of their funeral home website.

Here are 5 reasons why your competitor’s website is outperforming yours:

1. Your funeral home website is no more than an online brochure

Currently, 75.6% of U.S. adults are using the Internet. What are they doing on there? 88% of them are researching products and services online. Is your website providing the information potential families need to make a purchasing decision? If not, chances are they won’t find your website useful.

Most funeral home websites only include information on their history, staff and location. But unfortunately, that’s not want your families want to read about. If you don’t provide useful resources or information on your site, they’ll simply click on to someone else’s.

How to recover: Include information on the type of services you provide, and a library of resources for families such as what to do when a death occurs, funeral etiquette, etc.

2. Your funeral home website is full of unnecessary pictures

While a photograph of the smiling faces at your funeral home is nice, be careful. The purpose of images on your funeral home website is to showcase your services portfolio, increase online visibility, and make your site unique to your firm. With that said, make sure all of the images you put on your funeral home website serve a purpose.

Generally, adding images can drastically reduce the loading time of a website. If your site has a longer loading time, your website visitors are more likely to move on to your competitors. Moreover, search engines detect slow loading websites, and take into account the lag time of your site when ranking it in search results.

How to recover: Include images of unique services you’ve provided.

3. Your visitors can’t find your contact info or location

A study by the SMB DigitalScape reveals that 6 out of 10 small and medium business websites lack a phone number on their homepage. If you are among those six, you are definitely losing out to your competitors. Stanford Web Credibility Research shows that prominently displaying contact information on your website boosts its credibility among users.

How to recover: If you have multiple locations, don’t put all phone numbers on the top right corner- have 1 generic phone number that takes them to individual locations.

4. Your competitor’s site is benefit-driven

Marketing guru Seth Godin once said “you’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.” This means if your website doesn’t show the benefits of choosing your firm, what’s the point of having it? You should identify the Unique Selling Points (USP’s) that distinguish your funeral home from your competitors, and leverage them accordingly.

How to recover: Create a video that identifies your USP’s like this one. Research shows 52 percent of website visitors feel more confident about service providers after watching their videos.

5. Your website isn’t ranking on search engines

If you Google “Funeral Home’s in (your city),” is your funeral home listed on the first page of results? If not, it’s because  your funeral home website is not search engine optimized.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on Search Engine’s like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

There are a variety of factors that make your site “search engine optimized” (learn more about them here). If you invest in SEO, you’ll get more valuable traffic to your website, and ensure that when families search for funeral home’s in your area, they’ll find you first.

How to recover: Use Google Keyword Tool to define what keywords you should be incorporating into your site!

 More resources on funeral home websites:

Is Getting a Funeral Home Website a Good Idea for your Firm?
– How to Generate $1,000′s From Your Funeral Website (Without Doing a Thing)
– Is Your Funeral Home Website Hurting Your Business?
– How to Attract the Families of Today with Your Funeral Website

 

What small changes can you make to your funeral home website to make it better? Share your thoughts!

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  1. Robert Widdowson

    Great article, Krystal. Direct and unvarnished truth. Hopefully the message will register with people. The web is the new Gutenberg press. Its already changed our world extensively. And it’s not going away. You either respond progressively or you languish. The practical advice is spot on.

  2. Krystal

    Thank you Robert! Love your response… “either respond progressively or languish”.

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