Three Quick Ways to Improve Your Funeral Home’s Local SEO

How much time have you spent recently on improving your local funeral home SEO efforts? If you the answer is “not much” or even “none at all,” you’re in great danger of being left behind in your market.

Great SEO is a huge help for “free” online visibility, but ranking highly doesn’t happen overnight. Regardless, certain “quick fixes” will get the ball rolling. Here’s what to do:

1. Focus on your Google My Business listing
The GMB is a completely free offering from Google, so don’t ignore it. Once you claim your listing, you can fill in (and/or update) all of your pertinent info. You also should take advantage of the ability to include profile images and videos, along with Google Posts (short blog posts).

Businesses that take the time to completely fill out their GMBs see a significant improvement in organic search results. It’s also another way for families to discover your funeral home. If you haven’t addressed your GMB yet, there’s no reason to wait.

2. Be consistent with your name, address, and phone number
Whenever your funeral home is mentioned on the internet (which is what we call a “citation”), that mention can boost your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Such citations add credibility to your brand.

However, you lose out on a whole lot of “SEO juice” if those citations don’t have consistent NAP info. NAP, as you can figure from the subheading above, refers to “name, address, and phone number.”

It’s incredibly important for those mentions to all use the same information, including the style and format. To ensure that’s the case, go through any and all directories, profiles, sites and other locations where your contact info is listed. Make sure you’re using the exact same name, address, and phone number in every spot. Keep an eye out for even tiny variances. The more consistent you are, the better your SEO.

3. Replace other sites’ broken links with your content
Another excellent way to rank higher is to obtain inbound links from other highly relevant sites. To make this happen, you could consider offering your own content to replace broken links on those sites.

When you’re surfing the web for death care content, make a note when you notice that a link to a funeral home is broken. Do you have a page containing content that fills the need the broken link had covered? One example could be a blog post on preplanning, replacing anchor text on the other site about preplanning.

If so, reach out to the owner of the other site and offer up your site as a replacement for the broken one. Many site owners will be receptive to this outreach.