Seven Must-Know Numbers for Funeral Home Search Engine Marketing

Do you feel like the top of the search results page is out of reach for your death care company? It’s not impossible to land in the lucrative top three results for relevant searches when you understand how funeral home SEO actually works.

Check out these seven stats and facts about the SERPs to learn how to create more SEO value on your pages.

1. Obvious results get the top spot regardless of other SEO factors. If someone in Dallas specifically searches for Restland Funeral Home, that business will get the top spot. Name recognition matters, and when you drive that with other efforts—such as paid ads, social media profiles, and a presence in your community—you increase the number of people who search specifically for your company when they experience a time of need. Just make sure the name touted locally matches what you have on the page.
2. Almost 50 percent of traffic goes to the top organic Google result. So landing there based on your brand is excellent news, but you can’t rest on those laurels. It’s worth chasing the top spot based on other factors, such as quality content and smart keyword research, so you show up for searchers that don’t call on your name specifically.
3. Close to half of the top results are featured snippets. Featured snippets are 40ish-word answers to commonly searched or asked questions. Incorporate these on your pages as a subheading that asks the question and short content directly below that answers it. Funeral home marketing lends well to this because you can explain concepts related to topics such as cremation, burial benefits, or preplanning.
4. Around a third of top Google results have relevant keywords in the H1 tag. It’s easy to include phrases from your keyword research in your H1 and title tags, so don’t skip this low-hanging SEO fruit.
5. Pages that earn a top-three spot in the SERPs tend to have word counts over 1,000. But quality still trumps quantity, so don’t wring 1,000 words of fluff out of a 200-word topic. Instead, consider building pillar pages that answer a group of related topics to get to word count.
6. More than 90 percent of all page-one Google results sport HTTPS designations. Security is a must in today’s market, especially if you’re asking for personal or payment information on your site. Some consumers won’t interact with a page that doesn’t have the HTTPS designation, and Google definitely favors it.
7. Pages landing in the top spot on Google tend to have an average of 1,900+ backlinks. Don’t let the number intimidate you; it drops to 400 or less for pages in the second spot and beyond. Death care companies can garner links from other domains by publishing relevant, helpful content that others are likely to share or link to.

Some of these steps are easier to accomplish than others, but by keeping them all consistently at the forefront of your funeral home marketing efforts, you can increase your performance in SERPs.