Families want to trust the funeral home that puts to rest their loved ones. To trust you, people need to know you. In the 21st century a website is a very valuable tool to help the public learn about your establishment. There are practical and technical ideas you can implement to accomplish this goal.
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Practical suggestions
Use your website to tell the public who you are. Every piece of printed material that goes out of your funeral home should have your web address printed on it, including business cards, letterhead, any advertisements, note pads, pens, etc.
Provide useful information to the public. In addition to describing who you are and why people choose your services, tell the public what those services are. You might also consider having a staff page on your website, complete with photos.
High quality photos of the exterior and/or interior of your facility helps visitors a great deal. People like to see that you take care of your facilities. Out-of-towners might appreciate seeing a few rooms before they show up at the funeral home, to get their bearings.
If someone from out of town has to spend the night they may or may not be able to stay with family or friends; it would be nice to have trusted local accommodations listed, with driving directions and contact information. Many people would like to contact a local florist, and your website can provide that information as well. And don't forget to provide driving directions to your location(s).
Use Email. If someone wants to visit a website they probably also use email on a regular basis. In many cases people prefer email to the telephone. You can also have your web address appear in your email signature.
Link exchanges are a great source of exposure. You can have a page on your website devoted to links to other websites. This is particularly useful if the other websites have a link back your site. This arrangement can mutually benefit your business and other industry supporting businesses, such as florists.
Update your website. Make sure the information on your website is accurate.
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Technical suggestions
You can make the most of your website by making wise decisions up front. If people cannot find your website it isn't very useful to them, or to you. You can do a few things to help the public locate your website; this means improving the ranking of your site.
Your website needs a clear and easy-to-remember address, called the Domain Name. This domain name is what you should advertise on your printed materials. A good domain name will also help search engines rank your website. If you don't know much about search engines, read on.
People use search engines all the time, such as google.com or yahoo.com, or many others. Search engines organize billions of websites by Rank. They observe traffic on the internet and organize domain names. If you followed the practical suggestions listed above you will have plenty of content for your website, and a good amount of content helps your website ranking, which means it is easier for visitors to find.
The more useful your website is to the pubic the more they will visit. High traffic is another factor search engines account for in ranking your website. In addition to the practical suggestions above you can generate a lot of traffic to your site by providing online obituaries, having information well organized and easy to find, and promoting your domain name. You can have information available exclusively on your website, and mention it in person or in writing, therefore driving more traffic to your site.
On a more technical note regarding information organization (also called Taxonomy), try to organize information so visitors to your website don't have to click much to find what they need. You may need to place more links and redundant links on your website to make things easier for visitors. A high number of links on your website also improves your ranking with search engines. But be careful not to overwhelm visitors with too much information or too many links.
Meta tags are another way of helping your website's rank. Though meta tags are not directly useful to visitors they can be useful to search engines. You can provide your webmaster with "keywords" related to your website, such as any words related to your industry, your location, the types of services you offer, etc. Try to provide at least 25 keywords; 100 keywords would be better, and more than 100 would be better still.
Email has more than practical concerns; there are also some technical issues you need to be aware of. While helping the public contact you via email can be very useful, avoid having your email posted directly on your website, either visibly or invisibly. SPAM is a serious problem for almost everyone. Have a "server-side" email form on your website for visitors to send you email. Also, you can post your email as a graphic image rather than text; this will not be detected by spammers but it will show your email to real visitors.
Avoid overload. Fancy graphics can look great, and many people use high speed internet connections today. However, many people still use a dial-up connection. You may need to consider this fact when having your website built/rebuilt. A graphics-heavy website with sound loads very slowly on a dial-up connection and this always aggravates an internet user. Too much information may also drive visitors to a competitor's website.
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A website is more than an advertisement for your establishment, many times it is the first impression. Sometimes it is the second impression, as when word-of-mouth brings your business to someone's attention. Your website can confirm the high praise of a friend or relative, if it is easy to use and a valuable resource for someone searching for a funeral care provider. What ever you can do to make a visitor's time on your website more convenient will encourage him or her contact you directly. Test-drive your own site. And, what ever you do, don't let the public think you don't care about your website.
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