June 2018

Page A14 JUNE 2018 FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS S ec t i on A FREE SHIPPING MEMORIAL MARKERS Call (800) 950-4061 3’x5’ NYLON U.S. FLAG Sewn Stripes & Embroidered Stars (Flag Only) Wholesale Prices • Dependable Quality on orders over $75! $ 10OFF $ 100ORDER Use Code FNMP10 $ 14 50 MEMORIAL CASES FLAG PARADE SETS revenue. Big 3 sides. 12 square feet. 24 private niches. 85 community spaces. Outstanding ROI . Your Wilbert Granite Choices provider can prove it. Find them at https://tinyurl.com/granitechoices or call 1.888.WILBERT The numbers don’t lie: 06-FHCN-BigRev-SmlSpace.indd 1 5/4/18 10:42 AM Achieving Top Organic Local Search Rankings By Welton Hong Welton Hong Internet marketing has evolved a lot in recent years. Businesses are employ- ing a spectrum of tools and techniques that didn’t even exist a few years ago. It’s a true sea change, because for de- cades before the current digital age, ad- vertising a local business such as a funeral home didn’t change much from decade to decade—at least since radio and tele- vision became ubiqui- tous. At any time, a brand- new innovation might change the game com- pletely. However, after all this time, one aspect of successful online mar- keting hasn’t changed: to be successful in 2018 and beyond, your funer- al home must rank highly in organic searches in your local area. By organic results, I’m referring to what everyone naturally thinks of as “search results”: the basic unpaid re- sults that occur when someone does a search such as “Glendale cremation” or “Fort Wayne funerals.” That’s differ- ent from paid results, i.e. pay-per-click (PPC) ads that also show up on search engine results pages (SERPs). A SERP will display both organic and paid search results. The latter, of course, are advertisements. You pay the search engine a certain amount to dis- play your ad prominent- ly. With PPC ads, you only pay the search en- gine when someone actu- ally clicks on it to reach your website. Local search simply means the process by which someone searches for a particular type of business in a specific geo- graphic area. However, the search engine almost always returns a list of local business- es even if the searcher omits the loca- tion, because today’s technology makes it easy for the engine to know exactly where you are. When I talk about ranking well in or- ganic listings, I specifically mean be- ing in the top half of the first page of search results when someone search- es for funeral homes in your area. In 2018, most people don’t even scroll down to the bottom half. And if you’re on the sec- ond page, you’re essen- tially invisible. More than nine out of ten searchers never make it past the first page on a Google SERP. In fact, more than 50 percent of searchers choose among the first three providers on the first page. In other words, you re- ally must be on the first page—and on the top half of it. For organic search re- sults, the order in which you’re listed depends on your business’s search en- gine optimization (SEO), which is largely—but not entirely—based on the SEO of your website. While the rise of paid ads has lessened the im- portance of organic re- sults a bit, they’re still critical to your funeral home’s success, especial- ly for at-need clientele. Some searchers still pre- fer to go straight to the organic search results in- stead of checking out paid funeral home adver- tising. In addition to ensuring you have excellent SEO, make sure to build trust with Google. The inter- net’s most-used search engine is constantly re- fining its algorithm to ensure the top results for any search are the most relevant to searchers. To build trust with Google, your website must have strong, rel- evant content; include lots of very strong about us information; link to relevant services and in- formation, have back links from those as well Continued on Page A16