One of things that I have learned about how Google works is that it loves new content on websites. Many companies struggle to come up with new content – but not us – not funeral homes!
Why? Because we have online obituaries (in Google’s eyes that’s new content).
Great – we don’t have to worry about adding new content as Google will find the online obits – right?
Nope! As I study funeral home websites, many of them – actually most of them don’t get their obits “indexed” by Google.
Why? Some sites have the obits hosted on another domain (the sites from the casket companies do this), and others are buried deep within a database and can’t be found by Google (usually template-based sites). And for the funeral home web sites that have obits that do get indexed – it takes days or weeks – a long time after the funeral.
Why is this important? Well, if they are not getting being found by Google then people who use Google can’t find them. Furthermore, the more pages in your website – the more “Authority” Google thinks you have! So if your website was created with Google in mind (61% of Internet users use Google for searching for information) then you should be adding one new page to Google for every obit (call). 150 calls should equal 100 – 150 new pages per year! But when I check funeral home websites, most of them have 30 to 200 pages indexed by Google and some of these firms are 500 to 1,000 call firms.
In the video below I share with you a case study that I just conducted, plus I show you how to check to see how many pages you have “indexed” by Google and I give you some tips on how to improve your chances. Please let me know your thoughts.
More more details about being more “Google-Friendly” visit, www.FuneralFuturistWebsites.com for a Free Report.
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I really agree with your comments above. Many funeral homes aren’t aware of the importance of showing up on a search engine (google, yahoo, msn). This can mean a lot of lost business, not to mention giving families the ability to find the online memorial that they paid for and you created for them.
Many online memorial websites I’ve seen are poorly optimized for Google and the other search engines. Many sites are difficult to navigate, and leave important content hidden under many layers. Some sites are also heavy users of Adobe Flash, which is difficult for the search engines to index. The google “spiders” aren’t able to read the flash graphics, and as a result, many of those pages look blank.
In general, I think there are a lot of technology partners of funeral homes that seem to be doing a poor job of keeping funeral homes aware of important trends on the web!
Kevin Chen
email: kevin.chen at famento dot com
http://www.famento.com