Digital marketing experts have long declared that “content is king,” and business owners have definitely taken notice. A Technorati report, Growth of the Blogosphere, revealed that there are more than eight million blogs online today, that a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds, and that 12,000 new blogs are created each day.

Clearly, business blogs are more popular than ever — and the funeral profession is no exception. If your funeral home website is missing this critical feature, read on to learn about the many benefits associated with business blogging.

Website Traffic

Your funeral home website serves an essential function: to make your services visible to families in need, to educate them about your business, and to provide them with a way to contact you.

That’s the idea, anyway. Unfortunately, this system doesn’t work very well without adequate volumes of traffic — a concern shared by virtually anyone with a website. Most funeral home owners strive to make it onto the first page of the SERPs (search engine result pages), and into one of the top positions — but very few know how to do it.

It doesn’t have to be a mystery. Blogging, like implementing SEO practices, can result in a major uptick in your search visibility, domain authority, and overall rankings. Each time you publish a new blog post, you’re actually pushing new content and pages to search engines for indexing. This is vital — especially when blog posts are published frequently and routinely — as search engines tend to favor websites that are consistently updated over those that remain unchanged.

It’s pretty difficult to optimize most of your website pages for “long tail” keywords (a longer, more targeted search string), but blogging gives you the opportunity to do that on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Many funeral homes have an active social media presence, but those without blogs are forced to share content from outside publications to stay relevant. Once you’re publishing original content, you can utilize social media to direct more traffic to it (rather than continuing to route traffic to other people and businesses). As a bonus, your social media followers are also more likely to engage with your content, as there is already a degree of familiarity and trust in your relationship.

Thought Leadership & Trust

Blogging also can help a funeral home establish trust and authority within their profession, across online communities, and in the minds of their families. Routinely posting thoughtful, well-researched, and even opinionated content can help you earn a reputation as a trusted resource.

Blogs of thought leaders answer the questions that customers, visitors, and even competitors have. If you create targeted and helpful content for each of your most valuable demographics, it’ll help you establish serious credibility — and that’s a powerful thing; once people consider you a resource, they’ll continue to return to your blog and refer it to people they know.

Content produced by thought leaders also tends to be shared more frequently and more widely, which further increases your funeral home’s overall exposure and visibility.

Relationship Maintenance

You continue to care about the families you serve long after services have concluded, and blogging is yet another way to maintain a relationship with them. If you know your families will make up part of your readership, don’t ignore them as an audience; make a habit of posting content they’ll find meaningful.

Your families will appreciate your concern for their continued struggle. You might even snag a few loyal readers and brand enthusiasts in the process.