Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook once said that the Internet is defaulting to social. That may be already happening as social media marketing and SEO are becoming even more interwoven.

Social media marketing may be a strategy that many funeral homes aren’t yet fully taking advantage of. The truth is, if you want to increase your funeral home’s search ranking, visibility, and brand awareness, you cannot avoid getting active in social media marketing.

In this post, we’ll talk about how social media marketing can help boost your funeral home website’s search ranking. We’ll deal with some social media best practices that will help you get to the top of the search engine results pages.

Increasing your social media connections

The number of your funeral home’s social media connections, or followers, has a direct and significant effect on how your website ranks in search. But beware of how you increase your Facebook or Twitter followers. Do not buy followers, as Google has a way of determining the quality of your social media followers.

Increasing the number of your funeral home website’s Facebook and Twitter followers is a slow process, but one that is worth spending your time on. You can increase the number of your followers by consistently putting out high quality and useful content. Make sure that your content and website pages are easy to share on all social media channels. You can also take advantage of YouTube videos to demonstrate your expertise in the funeral business and to let people know where they can follow you on social media.

Encourage other sites to link to yours

Links still count as a huge indicator of a website’s popularity. The more external links your funeral home website has from other websites, especially from industry-related web pages, the more important you will become in the eyes of Google. Social media can help encourage other people to link to your website.

If you haven’t found out yet, for example, LinkedIn has quite a number of groups related to funeral and cremation services. Google+ also has a huge number of funeral and cremation communities. You can join these groups and communities and share some of your most important posts that you think might interest people in those communities. This way, you will be seen as an industry expert which could lead to other funeral and cremation experts to share your content.

Search-optimize your social media posts

For this you will need a pre-existing content from your blog or web pages. For example, you can share a video or blog post on funeral pre-planning. When posting this on Facebook or Twitter, frame it within a search-optimized description. This means including the keywords you are optimizing the post for, in this case, funeral pre-planning. This way, you will help the search engine spiders properly identify what the post is about and determine how your post should be ranked.

What’s great about social media posts is that they are usually timely, and timeliness is a major factor for how a content is ranked in search.

Make your content shareable

The more times your content is shared on social media, the better it will rank in search. Social shares, likes, re-tweets, replies, and favorites indicate your website’s authority and validate your funeral home in the eyes of Google.

You can influence shares by directly asking site visitors to share your content if they find it useful. You can also make it easy for them to share your content by adding social media share buttons where they are visible. They could be below the post title or at the bottom of the post.

Localize your posts

Posting location-specific updates on your social media pages also help in optimizing your funeral home website for local search.

One way to do this is to post an update on your social media pages whenever your funeral home gets involved in a community activity. You may also schedule posts informing followers where your chapels are located that include a map, address, and phone number, following exactly the same format as your other directory citations.

Make a point of regularly updating your funeral home’s social media channels, like Facebook page, Google+ page, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. This way, you will engage more people in the social media space and give a boost to your website’s search rankings.

We can help you optimize your funeral home for social and search. Talk to us today by calling (800) 810-3595.