When it comes to maintaining an online presence for funeral homes, there’s one aspect that’s often overlooked — the domain name. Imagine you are at a networking or community event, and after chatting a bit, I ask you to take a look at my website sometime and learn more about what I do.
Which is going to be easier for you to remember — and make it more likely that you actually visit? TerranovasFuneralHomeandCremationServices.com or JTFuneralHome.com? It’s probably the latter.
Domain names are a huge part of your funeral home’s brand. A good domain name increases SEO, helps drive traffic to your site, and adds credibility to your brand. And a bad domain name does the exact opposite of all that. Below we’ll outline the ways a domain name can either make or break your funeral home’s website, as well as the best practices for choosing the perfect domain name.
Do Your Research
Before even settling on a domain name for your funeral home website, you should ideally do a little research first. Start by checking the availability of your domain name. You also can check to see if your potential domain name violates any trademark issues here.
But don’t stop there. Look at what else is out there. Is your potential domain name too close to another funeral home’s web address? You want a unique domain name that helps your funeral home stand out from others. That leads to our next point.
Domain Name and Your Brand
Your domain name should be reflective of your funeral home’s brand and values. A recent article in Forbes says that your domain name “is the face of your company—in the form of a URL. Therefore, you should make sure it actually sounds like a brand.”
When it comes to choosing a domain name that stands out, consider using descriptive terms that showcase your brand. Which domain name sounds more like they provide funeral services?
- Terranova.com
- JTFuneralHome.com
Unless your funeral home’s name and brand are already well established in the area, you’ll want to use descriptive terms in your domain name. Why? These keywords can help push you up in search rankings. Which leads to our next point.
Domain Name and SEO
Domain names influence your SEO rankings, but (as with all things SEO) it can get kind of tricky. Having one, maybe two, relevant keywords does help. But you don’t want to stuff your domain name with keywords, because then it starts to hurt your ranking. Again, Forbes says to “avoid using generic keywords and phrases exclusively. Not only are they hard to remember, but domain names based solely on generic keyword strings don’t carry the same SEO benefit they used to.”
The ideal domain name is a mix of branding terms and keywords. For example, a domain name such as HartsFamilyFunerals.com is a lot better than something like FastFuneralServicesAndCremations.com.
Domain Names and Humans
Finally, the most important thing to consider when picking a domain name? Humans. We are prone to mistakes. And so your funeral home’s domain name should be as easy and intuitive as possible. Here are key things to consider when picking out a domain name that’s easy on our eyes and ears.
- Make sure it’s easy to spell. While Google is usually good about redirecting misspelled searches, a hard-to-spell domain name still presents the opportunity to lose out on traffic.
- Avoid hyphens and numbers. They not only make it more tedious to type in, but also hurt your SEO ranking.
- Keep it relatively short. Just because domain names can have up to 63 characters, doesn’t mean you should use all of them. Longer domain names make it harder for searchers to remember. The ideal length of characters in a domain should be about 8-15 characters long.
- Your domain name should be easy to communicate verbally. Imagine you are out somewhere and run into a family that’s interested in your services. But you don’t have a business card on you. You want a domain name that’s easy to understand in a conversation. That’s why simple, shorter domain names work best.
Try this simple test to see how your domain name stacks up. Call someone you know. Tell them your domain name over the phone and ask them to type it into a search bar. Were they easily able to understand it over the phone? Did they type it in correctly their first time around? This is the experience your potential client families will have when searching for you, so you want to make it as easy as possible for them.
Tools For Picking a Domain Name
Need a little help picking out a domain name? Check out these tools for generating the perfect domain name:
For more ways to improve your funeral home’s SEO, download our free eBook.
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