This guide covers everything you need to know about keyword research. It’s impossible to rank #1 without knowing what you’re targeting. Researching terms that you want to rank for is a huge part of the process. It’s tedious, and time-consuming, but extremely important today. Find out all about the process of researching terms and learn how this helps you rank higher in Google. If the top of page #1 matters to you, then this article is a must-read.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research plays a crucial role in ensuring that your funeral home’s online content is easily discoverable by those seeking your services. Essentially, it’s about finding the right words and phrases that people commonly use when searching the internet.
By adding these keywords strategically into the website’s content, you boost the likelihood of your site appearing higher in search engine results, ultimately making it easier for more people to find and engage with your funeral home’s offerings.
Prioritize Customer Research Before Keyword Exploration
Before delving into keyword research, take the time to engage in customer research. Spending just ten minutes conversing with a real customer can provide invaluable insights into how people think and search for funeral services online, far surpassing the benefits and cost of poring over keyword data for hours on end.
Understanding the needs and desires of your potential clients should serve as the compass guiding your entire keyword research journey.
It’s common for funeral home professionals and businesses to immediately dive into identifying the most relevant keywords for their local SEO services without first conducting thorough customer research. However, this approach overlooks a crucial step: understanding your potential customers.
By conducting customer research, you gain valuable insights into their thought processes, priorities, and the language they use when seeking funeral solutions.
Here’s a valuable insight:
The ultimate competitive advantage lies in possessing a deep understanding of your customers that surpasses that of your competitors.
Why Keyword Research Matters for Funeral Homes
If customer research is the bedrock of marketing, keyword research is the cornerstone of effective search engine optimization strategies for the funeral profession.
Keyword research offers a vital avenue for tapping into the vast pool of online search queries, enabling you to comprehend the myriad ways people search the internet, the frequency of these searches, and where to concentrate your efforts to connect with the right audience and accomplish your funeral home business objectives.
How to Conduct Keyword Research for Funeral Home SEO
Mastering keyword research for funeral home page local SEO involves a blend of creativity and scientific analysis. Despite the advancements in tools, accurately predicting search demand remains an art.
Our approach involves identifying the entire spectrum of search queries within your potential customer base.
Here’s our methodology:
Step 1: Compile a List of Seed Keywords
Seed keywords serve as the foundational terms or phrases underlying various search queries made by individuals.
For instance, seed keywords for a funeral home might include:
- Funeral services
- Burial options
- Cremation arrangements
- Obits
Tip:
Utilize insights from customer interviews and positive reviews and analyze competitor strategies to generate seed keyword ideas, especially if you’re new to this process.
Step 2: Explore Keywords Using Ahrefs
Once you’ve identified your seed terms, it’s time to leverage a powerful tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to dive deeper into the realm of keyword possibilities for your funeral home.
Step 3: Utilize the Matching Terms Report
Within Ahrefs, we utilize the Matching Terms report to unveil how people search for topics related to death and funeral services.
This report meticulously sifts through Ahrefs’ extensive database of search engines with over 12.8 billion keywords, presenting us with a comprehensive overview of potential keyword variations. For instance, within the United States alone, we’ve uncovered over 5 million search terms aligned with our seed keywords.
In the Matching Terms report, we encounter two distinct modes:
- Terms Match: This mode showcases keywords containing all the words from your query in any order, broadening the scope of potential search variations.
- Phrase Match: In this mode, keywords containing your seed terms in the exact order they’re presented are highlighted, providing insights into more specific search queries.
For example, if our seed keywords include phrases like “funeral arrangements” and “memorial services,” the Terms Match report may unveil keywords like “arrangements for funerals” for families or “services to memorialize loved ones,” while the Phrase Match report may reveal terms like “funeral arrangements near me” or “memorial services for veterans.”
However, it’s essential to note that this approach may yield a considerable amount of irrelevant data, especially if the seed terms are overly broad.
To refine our keyword selection process without inadvertently excluding potentially valuable terms, we employ strategic seed terms that balance specificity and inclusivity. By fine-tuning our initial seed terms, we can streamline the keyword dataset, ensuring relevance while still capturing a comprehensive array of search queries.
For instance, by incorporating more targeted seed terms such as “traditional funeral arrangements” or “cremation services for pets,” we can significantly reduce the volume of irrelevant data while preserving the diversity of potential keyword variations.
But here’s the dilemma:
While narrowing down our focus upfront may seem like a logical strategy to minimize noise, it also risks overlooking valuable keyword opportunities that could drive significant traffic to your funeral home’s online platforms.
To navigate this challenge effectively, Ahrefs offers include and exclude filters, empowering us to fine-tune our keyword selection process with precision.
These filters allow us to weed out irrelevant terms like “wreck it Ralph” while honing in on the most relevant and lucrative keyword opportunities tailored to the unique needs and objectives of your funeral home.
Step 4: Refine Your Keyword Selection with Filters
Now that we’ve amassed a wealth of keyword data, it’s time to fine-tune our focus by employing filters to eliminate irrelevant terms and streamline and optimize our keyword selection process.
Include Filter
The “include filter” empowers us to narrow down our keyword selection to only showcase terms that contain our seed keyword(s) and additional terms specified by us.
For instance, if we add a term like “memorial” to our include filter, the tool will only display keywords that incorporate one of our seed keywords alongside the term “memorial.”
To simplify this process and save time, we utilize wildcards, which allow us to broaden our search parameters based on specific patterns. For example, instead of adding both “burial” and “burials” to our filter, we can simply use “burial*” to encompass both variations.
Once applied, this filter provides us with more targeted results aligned with our funeral home’s offerings and services.
Exclude Filter
Conversely, the exclude filter enables us to refine our keyword selection by excluding terms that are irrelevant to our objectives.
We often employ this filter to exclude categories such as special characters, states, cities, and other local terms that are not pertinent to our target audience. By removing these extraneous terms, we can focus solely on keywords that are most relevant to our funeral home’s service area.
Additionally, the exclude filter allows us to mitigate the impact of local competition by excluding certain local keywords, particularly in highly competitive markets where ranking in local map packs can be challenging.
The Anti-Local Strategy & When to Use It
While most funeral homes may not want to exclude all local keywords, there are scenarios where employing an anti-local strategy can be advantageous.
By identifying topics that can be targeted before local map packs dominate search results, funeral homes can seize opportunities to attract more customers earlier in the research process. This proactive approach enables funeral homes to generate leads and answer more inquiries before local competition intensifies, providing a competitive edge in saturated markets.
All Words & Any Word Modes for Filters
It’s important to note that each filter offers two additional options:
- All words: This mode includes keywords containing all the specified words in the filter.
- Any word: This mode includes keywords that contain any of the specified words in the filter.
When utilizing the “All words” option, the filter ensures that only keywords containing all specified terms are included in the results. For instance, if a funeral home specializes in specific types of cases and wants to target keywords related to “law*” and “train,” selecting the “All words” mode will exclusively display keywords containing both terms.
In contrast, the “Any word” mode includes keywords containing any of the specified terms, offering a broader selection of relevant keywords.
While the include filter allows for both “All words” and “Any word” modes, the exclude filter functions differently. Instead of offering these modes, the exclude filter simply removes terms containing any word specified in the exclusion list, streamlining keyword selection based on predefined criteria.
Step 5: Gather Every Relevant Keyword
At this stage, we take a different approach compared to many other funeral home marketing agencies. We believe in capturing every potentially relevant keyword related to your funeral director and industry. Why? Because it’s the only way to accurately gauge the full scope of your funeral home’s potential audience.
Typically, this results in the compilation of extensive CSV files containing hundreds of thousands of keywords. While this may seem overwhelming, we have a solution.
Step 6: Organize Keywords into Clusters
We’ve developed a specialized topic clustering algorithm tailored specifically for the funeral home industry. This algorithm processes the vast array of keywords, retrieves real-time insights from Google, and groups them based on rank and similarity in the search context.
This clustering approach allows us to manage the data more efficiently by consolidating related keywords into clusters. However, despite this organization, the volume of data remains substantial.
To address this, we’ve implemented a secondary algorithm that computes a personalized priority score for your funeral home’s domain. This score functions similarly to keyword difficulty but is uniquely calculated based on the characteristics of your funeral home’s website.
Step 7: Analyze Keyword Insights
With our keyword data clustered and prioritized, we can immediately kick off the analysis. This marks the transition from keyword research to content planning. A must-do for all funeral and cremation services looking to outrank their competition.
In this article in the subsequent section, we’ll explore how to devise a cohesive content strategy tailored to your funeral home, aimed at attracting the right kind of traffic to your website — traffic that is primed for conversion into clients.
Final Words
If you’re a funeral director and you own funeral home, then you know how important it is to win over the public. Local SEO helps grieving families find you online. It helps your website rank better on Google and ultimately leads to serving more families. Whether that means at-need or preneed, it works if you put the effort into making it work.