On Tuesday, we shared a few of the specific mechanisms by which running a funeral home blog can improve your funeral home’s visibility in the natural search engine results.

But as you consider how these advantages might benefit your business, keep in mind that all blogging efforts are not created equal. To run a truly successful funeral home blog, keep all of the following guidelines in mind:

Tip #1 — Focus your funeral home blog posts on your customers’ needs

Perhaps the most difficult part of funeral home blogging is the regular challenge of coming up with new topics to post about. We’ve got a cheat sheet of 25 blog post prompts you can reference, but if you’re still struggling, keep this one simple rule in mind — focus on your customers’ needs.

What do your customers want you to write about? What kind of information would help them plan funeral arrangements or live better lives? Spend some time brainstorming possible answers to these questions, then select a single idea to build each blog post around.

Tip #2 — Post at least once a week

When it comes to funeral home blogging success, consistency is key. Not only does publishing regular content improve your overall website’s SEO, it gets your followers in the habit of checking your site regularly for new content. Every time these readers check back, they’ll get another glimpse of your funeral home’s name and branding, leading to top-of-mind awareness when they need funeral services or know somebody else that does.

Tip #3 — Write at least 350-500 words per post

For best results, aim for at least 350-500 words in every blog post you publish. Keep in mind that the more words you publish to your blog, the more opportunities you’ll have to rank in the natural search engine results for keywords that are relevant to your business and your community.

That said, don’t pad your funeral home blog posts just to meet some arbitrary word length criteria. If it only takes you 300 words to get your point across, focus on better writing — rather than standard SEO recommendations.

Tip #4 — Work keywords into your posts in a sensitive way

Depending on your firm’s level of SEO savvy, you may have a list of target keywords for which you want your website to appear in the natural search results. But even if you don’t have a list of phrases you’re actively tracking, you can probably come up with a few quick ideas, including keywords based on the following formulas:

• “funeral home [your city, state]”
• “funeral service [your city, state]”
• “cremation [your city, state]”
• “[your city] personalized funerals”
• “[your city] cremation costs”

Adding your target keywords into your blog posts can increase your chances of ranking highly in the search results for these phrases. However, you want to avoid shoehorning them into your content or forcing their inclusion in ways that don’t read naturally. If it’s possible to do so, incorporate them into your blog posts to improve your site’s SEO. If not, leave them out and find other ways to target these phrases on your site.

Tip #5 — Include images with your posts

When put to the test using eye-tracking studies, internet readers tend to pay attention to the images found on web pages before they dive into text. So if you want to increase the likelihood that your funeral home’s followers will pay attention to your posts, be sure to include at least one image every time you hit the “Publish” button!

There’s one important caveat to keep in mind, though, when it comes to posting images. Before you include a photo in your funeral home blog post, make sure you have the rights to do so. Don’t just copy any old image you find off Google Images, as this may be copyrighted material. Instead, purchase royalty-free images from sites like iStockPhoto or run a Creative Commons search to find images that can be used for free with proper attribution.

Tip #6 — Break up your posts with visual cues

Have you ever arrived on a web page only to be greeted by a large block of text that takes up the entire page? Chances are you click the “Back” button right away instead of trying to dive into such a dense piece of content!

If you’ve written out your 350-500 words as one paragraph, you’ll want to take a few minutes to format your blog post in a more readable way. Use section headings (like the ones found in this post), bulleted or numbered lists, bolded text, and paragraphs of no more than three sentences to improve your readability.

Tip #7 — Encourage engagement in every post

You’ve got the readers on your site — now make the most of their presence by encouraging them to take some type of action before leaving your post. A few different ways to do this include:

• Asking a probing question at the end of your post to encourage conversation in your blog’s comment section.
• Requesting that readers who enjoyed your article share it on their favorite social media sites.
• Including a call-to-action (CTA) that prompts readers to reach out to your funeral home in some way.

No matter how you choose to encourage engagement in your blog posts, following this and the other six tips above will help make your website a “go-to” resource for funeral industry information in your community. Make it a point to put them all into practice and you’ll be surprised by the results you see in terms of overall website traffic and future calls.

Download our free eBook called How to Create a Successful Blog for Your Funeral Home to learn more tips on creating a successful blog.