Location-specific searches has grown in importance over the last couple of years. This is especially true for businesses, including funeral homes, as more and more clients are looking closer to home for services that they need.

In this post, we’ll talk about where your online funeral marketing efforts should be focused more on in terms of local SEO. Below are the top tactics your funeral home can do to dominate local search.

Visibility first and foremost

Here, we’re talking not just about dominating local search in organic results, but also in PPC. Your funeral home may rank top in organic search, but your competitors might be showing higher up with PPC, complete with images, extensions, social elements, and reviews.

In organic search, even if your local result show below the fold, you could still beat the competition if the result you’re shown for includes images and other pertinent information, like phone number, location, and email address.

You see, credibility and visibility trumps rank in some cases. So be sure to fully optimize your local page on Google+ and PPC campaigns for visibility first.

Take advantage of Google Places and Google+ Local

Now that we’ve mentioned it, Google Places for Business and Google+ Local results show very high in search. But the trick is to have your funeral home’s pages in these channels presented often and in the best way possible. How do you ensure that? By making sure that citations are in place and that it has enough high quality reviews. High quality reviews will be much more important than citations in the future.

To garner reviews, make your sure that you’re presenting high quality content as often as possible to keep your funeral home channels visible at all times for users who are logged into their Google account. You may also ask them to leave reviews, or you can ask client families to leave a review for your funeral home.

Don’t take the basics for granted

While local search is evolving, and the standards and technologies behind it are changing, the basics still remain valid. Sadly, many businesses take the basics for granted as they focus more on ranking.

Custom meta descriptions, one of the crucial basics in local search listings, are as important as ever. If done right, meta descriptions will allow your funeral home to attract new visitors, because they give you control over how you’re being perceived in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of meta descriptions as a powerful lead capture section that draws people in.

Another thing you need to take care of is the schema markup which is a powerful tool that draws people to click on your funeral home’s SERP.

By taking care of the basics, even if your local SERPs aren’t on the top, you could still garner significant clicks that could lead to more conversions.

Uniform citations

Citations are important then, and they are still important now. They indicate your trustworthiness to the eyes of searchers. However, this is an area where many businesses and funeral homes fail. Their citations aren’t uniform in various channels, thus costing them precious rankings in local search results.

Make sure that your office address, phone number, maps, and email address are uniform and presented in the same format in all directories and channels so that they properly reflect in local SERPs.

There are lots of tools available out there to help you manage your funeral home’s citations under one place. By taking care of your citations, you can be sure that they are presented in the exact format as your Google listing.

It’s really important that you get local search right right from the start. By taking care of key local SEO areas as described above, you can get your funeral home not only to rank well in searches, most importantly, to become more visible, which is more valuable in terms of building trust for your business.

We can help your funeral home rank better and become more visible in local search. Let’s talk today by calling us up at (800) 810-3595.