Transcript:

Hi I’m Samantha Ward and I’m the marketing manager at Frazer Consultants. I want to talk a little bit about online reviews and how your online reputation can have a huge impact on your funeral home’s marketing.

Responding to online reviews, whether they’re positive or negative, can make you seem more personable. They make you seem more human and really give you an opportunity to connect on another level with the families that you serve in your community. In addition to making relationships with families easier, it also really helps with your search engine optimization because, having those reviews connect back to your website, using keywords — there are a ton of different ways to utilize online reviews to bring traffic to your website through search.

When you get a positive review, you want to respond right away and thank the person for leaving the review in the first place. But you can take it a step further by including some positive keywords in your response. Thank them for using your funeral services if that’s a keyword that you use in your search engine optimization and include the name of your funeral home to make it easy for people to find.

When responding to a negative review, start by apologizing in a sincere and genuine way — even if you don’t feel like you did anything wrong. Instead of with positive reviews, where you want to use keywords so that people can find those reviews, with negative reviews you want to do the opposite. You want to completely avoid mentioning your funeral home’s name. You don’t want to mention what you offer such as funeral services or cremation services. And after you’ve made your apologies offer to move the conversation forward elsewhere. Instead of having that conversation directly on the review, it might be best to have them reach out to you through email or have them call you. So then you can have that conversation somewhere else.

To learn more about how to manage your online reputation, download our eBook about reviews and testimonials by clicking the link below.

Online Reviews and Testimonials eBook