Funeral Homes Count Everything and Still Can’t Be Found

I used to open a funeral home’s traffic report before I opened its website.

Charts first. Visitors, sources, which page held people longest, all of it up on one screen while the homepage itself sat in a tab I hadn’t clicked yet.

It made me feel like the sharpest person on the call. It also meant I spent a few years diagnosing websites I’d barely bothered to look at, which is an embarrassing sentence to write about a decade of professional opinions.

Funeral homes cured me of that.

The trade that counts everything

84.5% of the funeral home websites I audited run analytics, against 58% of small business sites.

Someone inside these buildings decided a long time ago that guessing wasn’t good enough, which is how a trade nobody thinks of as technical ended up first of the 47 I ranked on that column.

They label things carefully too.

Google doesn’t have to dig a visitation time out of a paragraph when the page hands it over in a named field, and 77.8% of these sites do that with schema markup, where 70.5% of everything else I audited manages it.

So the machinery is looked after here, better than in almost any industry I work with, and that was not the discovery I expected when I started opening these particular files.

Now the two nobody gets to

A single page can answer to four different addresses without anyone ever deciding that it should, which is ordinary and invisible and happens on nearly every website I open.

The same obituary sits at one address with the name in it, another with a tracking tail stuck on the end by a Facebook share, and a third that the print button made.

Google keeps one of those and throws the rest away. The canonical tag is the line it reads before it picks, and 75.0% of these sites carry one against 84.9% across everything I audited, which lands the trade 46 of 47.

Leave the line out and the picking still happens. It just happens without you.

How many addresses does your own obituary page answer to this morning? I had to go and open my own site before I could answer it, and my guess was wrong.

What that costs, in people

Picture a cousin, three hours away, at nine on a Tuesday night.

She types a name into Google, she’s looking for a time and a street, and she’s got about four minutes before she has to go back downstairs.

Google shows her the obituary. Which copy of it, though?

Hand her the stripped one, the version the print button made, and she gets the words and nothing else. No phone number down the side. No map, no chapel, no hour.

So she goes back to the results and taps the next thing down, and the next thing down is one of those national obituary sites that carries your listing and sells flowers alongside it.

She never calls you. She was never going to buy anything from you either, so who cares?

Her aunt cares. Her aunt is the relative who telephones an hour later to ask which home is handling the arrangements, and your name is not the one anybody remembers by then.

And your analytics recorded the entire episode, faithfully, the arrival and the departure both. Nothing in that chart offers the smallest explanation of why.

I can count the calls that never came. That’s about the size of what a dashboard does for you on its own.

The other empty column

There’s a second thing she can’t do on most of these sites, and it’s simpler than the first.

She can’t check that you’re still the ones. 40.8% of funeral home websites link out to a social profile where 66% of small business sites do, and the trade sits 47 of 47 on that column.

So she does what any of us do with a question nobody will answer. She stops asking it, and she goes with the name that arrived carrying more evidence than yours did.

My own furnace quit on a Sunday night and I did the same thing. I rang the heating company with a photo on its page from that same week, and I hadn’t read a word on any of the three websites.

“We get our families by word of mouth”

You have said it to a salesperson at some point, and you were telling the truth. It still isn’t an argument.

The hospice nurse hands a daughter three names written on a piece of paper, and everybody in this industry understands that piece of paper. What does she actually do with it?

She types all three into her phone in the car, one after another, and by the time she’s back on the freeway she’s already put two of them out of the running.

Nobody in this business ever gets told they lost a family that way. She didn’t telephone to say she’d looked, and she certainly didn’t telephone to say she’d finished looking.

Why I think it splits like this

My guess is about who does the selling.

Analytics and schema markup arrive with the software. You bought an obituary system from a supplier, and your supplier shipped the counter and the labels already switched on, because those are the things a supplier can put on a slide.

Nobody sells a canonical tag. Nobody invoices anybody for a Facebook link either. There’s no product in either of them, so the job sits and waits for a person inside the building to notice it, and that person is currently standing at a graveside.

Worse than that, some of us argue against it. I once told a funeral director the little Facebook icon would look cheap in her own arrangement room, and she agreed with me because I was the expert she’d hired.

Half of what I do when I build a website for a funeral home isn’t design work at all. It’s the pile of small things nobody thought to charge anybody for. Most of what looking after a website actually involves is that pile, jobs with no invoice attached and no salesperson behind them.

That’s a guess and you should hold it loosely. The counting isn’t a guess: I sampled 1,290 funeral homes and audited 975 of their websites, and if you want the card I’ve been reading off, set the industry on my explorer to funeral homes and leave the city dropdown alone, because it prints every rate with the number of sites behind it.

Run all ten of my checks and the trade lands on 70 out of 100, 36 of 47, which is what you get when you’re excellent at the parts that came in the box.

Before you open the numbers

Whatever I say next, you’ll go and open your traffic report first, and I know that because I did exactly the same thing for years. The pull of a tidy chart is genuine and I’m not immune to it either.

Do it the other way tonight.

Open your own site in a window where you aren’t signed into anything. Search your business name, tap whichever result Google puts in front of a stranger, and read that screen the way a cousin at the end of a long day would read it.

Can she tell where the service is? Can she tell you’re open this week? Is there anything on that screen giving her a reason to pick up the phone in the next minute?

If the answer is no anywhere in there, your chart already knew and had no way of telling you. Send me the address and I’ll walk it properly, then say which of the two halves you’re missing.

Then go and open the numbers. They’ll still be there, and they’ll finally mean something.