Too many funeral directors unwittingly make a serious mistake when they post obituaries on funeral sites other than their own website. Although this may seem like a smart financial decision, they risk losing their unique branding, may not get listed properly on Google, and could lost a significant amount of online potential clients.
When you place your obituaries on a professional funeral website, you do save time and frustration, but at what cost? Here are some of the drawbacks to letting one of these so-called “professionals” do the work for you:
- You have no control over the design, the color, or the “feel” of the obituary.
- You are sending Google mixed signals as to who you are and which business you are.
- You lose potential clients because they cannot find your listing when they search.
- Your clients will panic when they try to find their obituary and it is under a different website name.
- Your obituaries will attract Google to the funeral hosing site instead of to your funeral home.
Branding is critical to promoting your funeral business. If you have your own website, you are in charge of the look and feel of the site. You select the design, colors, photos, and content. With most website building software, you can choose from hundreds of templates, so you don’t have to be a web genius, and you may keep the same color scheme and design throughout all the pages for continuity. You are in charge. The obituaries you place on your site are consistent with that design and intent. If, on the other hand, you decide to have a professional funeral website host your obituaries, they determine how your obituaries are displayed, and it may be contrary to your approach.
You want Google to work FOR you, not against you. With your own website, your URL will have the name of your funeral home in it. Google can easily find you and make your business listing show up high on the page when people search for you. But, if a funeral professional hosts your obituaries, conflicting messages will be going out to Google whenever anyone searches for your funeral home or for your obituaries. Google will not know which information to display.
I assume your whole goal of having a presence online is to reach more people than you ever could with traditional advertising. Displaying your obituaries on a host site may bring in a few potential clients, but not nearly the numbers that you could reach with your own site. It goes back to the fact that Google cannot distinguish your information from that of the host funeral site. This piggy-back approach sounds like a time- and cost-saver, but it really doesn’t benefit you. You miss out on being found by large numbers of prospective clients. They will get distracted and drawn to other funeral websites when they search if you do not have a strong web presence.
Your current clients will want to view their obituary. They will want to make sure that it displays correctly so that family members and friends can find out important details online. If there is confusion in locating their obituary because their obituary is piggybacked on another site, they may panic. They also may become upset if the site, and especially the page their obituary is on, has a whole different mood from the one you have portrayed to them. Consistency is the key to comfort. They are most likely already stressed by the situation. Finding that the obituary is not right, or not finding it at all, will be a heartbreak for them.
Your obituaries can solidify your funeral home brand name with Google. This is important. If you are continually placing original content in your obituaries, this constant new content makes the search engines happy, and you are most often rewarded by increasing your online visibility in search results. Search engines such as good don’t like sites that have static info that is never updated. Sometimes finding original content can be one of the most challenging tasks. Obituaries are your continued free source of original content for your site. Having original wording in your obituaries is a way to highlight your brand. If possible, avoid placing your clients’ obituaries on professional funeral sites. This wastes the content and keywords because Google will not connect them with your brand name.
Most funeral directors are experts in the fields of counseling, funeral directives, and guiding people through the process. They may or may not also have computer and Internet expertise. That is okay. It, however, is necessary to be aware of possible pitfalls when trying to get your business to be successful online. Sometimes the easy way, such as using an obituary hosting site, may not be the best way. Lots of resources are available online to help you get your own website up and running—and connected properly to Google—so that your funeral brand is well promoted, and your funeral home is easily found by potential clients.
