Our 10 Tips to Improve Your Funeral Home Google My Business Listing

Google My Business is a great way to increase your funeral homes presence within search results, making it easier for families to find the funeral director best related to their needs. Within Local SEO (Optimising for Local Search Results), Google My Business is one of the key factors to ranking your funeral business or website higher. When searching for a funeral service provider Google My Business listings are the first thing you see displayed within search results. Here, we will suggest some tips to get started and improve your Google My Business listing.

1) If you have not yet done so, Sign up and Claim Your Listing

Sign up and verify your business. There are multiple methods to verify your business and website. Request a Pin, which is sent on a postcard to your address to complete the confirmation process. Confirm via phone. You’ll be given a unique pin to enter into your Google My Business account. Alternatively, you can verify your account with your email. Once this is verified, Google will recognise that your business is legitimate will start to rank your business higher in the search results.

2) Adding Business hours

Add your business hours, opening and closing times and change your holiday periods. As funeral directors, you are most likely open 24 hours, 365 days a year.

3) Listing the right category and services for your business

Proper category associations are one of the most important foundational ranking factors within Local SEO. Picking the right category can be difficult, especially now that Google no longer allows custom categories, meaning you will have to select from a predefined selection. We would recommend the following, Funeral Director, Funeral Home and Cremation Services. When choosing services:

• Cremation Services

• Funeral Arrangements

• Funeral Planning

• Memorial Arrangements

4) Add photographs

Adding photographs of the outside and inside of your funeral home,, staff and vehicles is a great way to help families gain a feeling for your business, they may have seen your business before and will be able to find you quicker than without reference. This also helps give a good first impression to new families finding you through search, sending a clear and positive message.

5) Ask for reviews

Reviews are one of the main ranking factors to consider when using Google my business. Ask for reviews from your customers and try and encourage and promote positive ones by providing your best service, reviews are a great indicator of how much trust to place in a funeral director and when a customer can see multiple positive reviews they can rest assured they are going to receive the best service at their time of need.. Incurring negative reviews and not keeping up to date on how your business is presented over search listings can be a big mistake, especially if you spend a lot on marketing.

6) Respond to the reviews

Getting reviews isn’t the only way to help improve your Google My Business listing, responding to reviews is a great way to increase customer engagement and one of the best ways to recover from a negative review is a well thought out – constructive response, showing customers, your business not only thinks their opinions are important, but you’re always interested in improving customer experience.

7) Use the Posts feature

Google has introduced a feature called “Posts” for Google My Business. The feature lets you create a single post to add to your Google My Business listing, with an image, an attachment and a button to interact with. This feature is a great way to increase your ‘real estate’ within search results. Posts typically last one week so make sure to update regularly. If you set the post type to an event then the post will last until the event has run its course.

8) Merge Duplicate accounts and listings

When setting up a Google My Business account, sometimes there are existing listings for your business. The best course of action to take is to claim and merge or delete the other listings, so there is only one listing for your business.

9) Consistent Citations

When considering how to rank your business within the listings, Google will crawl citations from other business directories for more information. The main factor it looks for is consistency. If you have listings with Bing or Yelp, make sure that your address and other details are 100% consistent across the broad.

10) Add services and products

Ensure you’re taking advantage of the services and products on Google My Business. This is a relatively new feature which allows eligible Google My Business accounts to list the services you provide, these are keywords that can help your business get found for the services you offer. The second feature is products which allow us to upload a picture, price picture, title and description. The products are visible to users when they see your Google My Business listing.