As experts in obituaries and family notices, we know there is a growing demand for instant news in local communities.
50% of all traffic to our local news sites eg Manchester Evening News, Newcastle Chronicle, WalesOnline and YorkshireLive click to read funeral notices in their area whilst browsing local news.
That's a lot of people reading funeral notices online across the UK. Integrating Funeral Notices with your website allows you to provide this vital information to your communities too.
In this blog we explore the benefits of having notices on your website, how best to make use of the feature, and how to access this benefit you receive for subscribing to Funeral Notices.
This is the first obvious benefit of having notices on your website. Once a notice is published, you can advise families to view their notices via your website. They will tell their friends and family and suddenly you have people visiting your site pre-need.
As you know looking for a Funeral Director online only tends to happen when people are in immediate need of your services so to have a reason to attract a greater audience to your site is of huge benefit to you.
Suppose you have other services available on your website, such as funeral plans, memorial keepsakes, or jewellery. In that case, you should ensure these are in a prominent position on your page so your new audience is aware of what you can do for them. People consider their mortality when coping with loss so it stands to reason they might be thinking about their funeral and considering their plans.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) refers to the things/subjects people type into search engines such as Google and where your website features within the list of returned websites (answers). Now, you can pay to make sure you are at the top of the list every time, but there are things you can do for free to improve your position on the pages of websites the search engine supplies.
One thing sites such as Google like is external links on your website. Displaying notices on your website can help with this. Funeral notice providers such as ourselves have a very strong audience. In providing links to the website of Funeral Directors we publish notices for, on top of our audience numbers and changing daily content, our SEO results are fantastic - bringing us to the top of most related searches on Google.
Linking your website to another that has strong SEO in place such as funeral-notices.co.uk, will help your SEO results.
Once people in your local communities become aware that you have regularly updated notices on your website they are likely to return to your website again to look at who has passed away in their area. We hear time and time again that people turn straight to the funeral notice pages of their local newspaper and we know from our website statistics that people like reading notices online - we had 13.7 million unique users*, viewing 263 million pages, over 45.4 million sessions in 2023. By providing notices on your website you can also benefit from a returning audience in the same way we do.
• Make sure to let people know you display local funeral notices on your website - tell every family you speak with and ask them to let people know.
• To help ensure your funeral notice history truly reflects how sought-after your funeral services are, ensure you offer a notice with every arrangement.
• Encourage a collection for charity on every notice - the donation facility remains live on all notices for five weeks. Once published, we usually see a flurry of activity on notices with people wishing to make donations. You can encourage people to donate on a notice via your website by including instructions on how to donate in the wording of the notice.
• Make sure your notices appear as an infinite-scroll feed - whilst some Funeral Directors display their notices using a link to a page on funeral-notices.co.uk, the best way to present notices on your website is by displaying them as an infinite-scroll feed.
Take a look at this example:
Digital notices feed. The feed embeds on your website and can be customised to match the colours of your brand. If you'd like to find out more about the digital notices feed, please complete the form below.
Similarly, if you don't yet display notices on your website, complete the form below and an Account Manager will be in touch.
* Source: Google Analytics 01/01/2023-31/12/2023.
