Do you want better search engine optimization (SEO) for your funeral home and your obituaries? Of course you do! Here is a quick tip for improving your SEO.

Anchor text is a term that refers to the clickable part of a link on a website. In the following link, the anchor text is the word "here": Click here to visit our site.

To improve your SEO, you should ensure your anchor text includes the keywords for the destination link. If your anchor text is "here", like in the example above, you are not helping Google associate relevant keywords with the link. Let me give you a more concrete example. 

Suppose your local newspaper's website is going to link to your funeral home's website. That's great news, because more links mean better SEO! However, not all links are created equally. To get the most bang for your buck, the anchor text for the link should include your funeral home's keywords. 

Can you guess which of the following links for Urban Funeral Home is more beneficial?

Click here for the best funeral home in Ambler

Or

Visit the best funeral home in Ambler

The second option is better, because it associates the words "Ambler funeral home" with the Urban Funeral Home's website. That will improve Urban Funeral Home's rankings when someone searches on Google for "ambler funeral home" or "funeral home in Ambler."

Now let's apply the same concept to obituaries. How can you ensure the obituaries you provide your families show up prominently in Google when someone searches for that individual? The first step is to ensure that when you link to the obituary, you include the obituary name within the anchor text. 

Example: Visit the obituary for LeRoy Hans Munson

Understanding how your can utilize anchor text to target keywords is a great first step to improving your funeral home's SEO! See what I did there? :)

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It was announced recently that Legacy.com was acquired by a larger company, one that is heavily invested in the ad business. There was much discussion of this acquisition on other sites, and there seems to be a lot of confusion and misdirection regarding whether obituary hosting sites like Legacy.com and Tributes.com are good or bad for funeral homes.

The short answer is that these obituary hosting sites hurt your funeral home's web strategy. In other words: Own Your Obituaries.

We've discussed before the dangers of allowing others to represent your obituaries on your behalf. We've also covered 5 reasons why you should host your obituaries on your own site. But since so many folks are still being tricked by these large obituary hosting sites, I'd like to illustrate these problems with some concrete examples.

The two main problems with the large obituary directories are that they hurt your SEO and hurt your branding. Keep in mind that as social media further expands your viral traffic, these drawbacks become magnified.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your funeral home's website rank high in Google and other search engines for your key terms. If you have good SEO, you'll get lots of organic search traffic. With good SEO, people who search for obituaries, funeral services, cremation options, and other industry terms will come flocking to your site. 

So how do you obtain good SEO? There are many factors, but primarily you need to have good, original content as well as links back to your domain from other sites.

Guess what a good source of original content is: that's right, your obituaries! However, if the obituaries are not actually hosted on your website, that original content does not help your SEO!

The problem with the obituary directory model is that the obituaries do not exist on your funeral home's domain. To illustrate this problem, let's take a look at a funeral home website that uses Tributes.com. 

You'll see that the funeral home's real domain is www.merlehayfuneralhome.com. However, watch what happens when you click on an obituary from their listing.

The obituary itself (and that valuable original content) is hosted on the domain tributes.com, not the funeral home's domain. As a result, when this obituary gets crawled, Google attributes the content as being owned by tributes.com, rather than your funeral home!

Remember, the other main factors of good SEO are links back to your domain. Any site that links to this obituary will be linking to tributes.com domain, not the funeral home's.

That's a double whammy against your SEO!

Branding

Funeral homes, like any other business, spend a lot of time, energy and resources building up their brand. When a visitor comes to your website, the way your site looks and feels projects your brand. Your colors, styles, look and feel constructs your identity that consumers associate with your brand.

But what happens when the majority of your visitors (up to 75% or more) go to an obituary that does not project your brand's colors, look and feel? Well, you just lost all that branding!

That is exactly what happens when your obituaries are hosted on another site. Take a look at Merle Hay's website branding.

Now compare that to what a visitor to their obituaries will see. It looks and feels like a completely different site! The layout, colors, background, and user interface are all different. This inconsistency disrupts the brand's identity that so much effort put into building!

We are not trying to unfairly bash any companies in this industry. We are simply hoping toeducate funeral directors on how their technology choices can influence their business. Hopefully these points help shed some light on the impact of owning your obituaries on your funeral home's website versus outsourcing them to an obituary directory.

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The Funeral Innovations Facebook Power Rankings gives an inside looking into how your funeral home's Facebook Page compares against others in the industry.

Curious about which funeral home Facebook Pages are tops? Below you'll find the top 10 funeral home Facebook pages, as scored by the Facebook Power Rankings. 

The rankings are updated monthly with the latest scores, so be sure to get your funeral home's Facebook page ranked as soon as possible. Best of all, the rankings are free!

Top 10 Funeral Home Facebook Pages - April, 2012

1. Carson Celebration of Life Center
Maquoketa, IA
Learn everything you need to know about funerals and more by calling our toll-free information hotline at (888) 843-6110, or view us on the web at www.carsonandson.com.

2. Oakcrest Funeral Services
Algona, IA
Helping Families Celebrate a Life Lived. Serving the communities of Algona, Bancroft, Corwith, LuVerne, Renwick, Titonka, Wesley and Whittemore.

3. St. Therese Mission
ST. THERESE MISSION is a complex wherein special pilgrimages, celebrations, religious, cultural and environmental events will attract both Catholics and Non-Catholics from all over the world.

4. Burnam & Son Mortuary and Cremation Services
Bowling Green, KY
Burnam & Son Mortuary is a full funeral service establishment that demonstrates professionalism, dignity and compassion while conducting the highest standards of care in the disposition of human remains.

5. East Lawn
Sacramento, CA
East Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries

6. Maquoketa Area Obituaries
Become a fan of "Maquoketa Area Obituaries" & get obituary updates. It's sponsored as a public service by the Carson Celebration of Life Center in Maquoketa. Call our toll-free info. hotline at (888) 843-6110; or visit www.CarsonAndSon.com.

7. Williams Funeral Home
Columbia, TN
Our funeral home staff is available to address any questions or concerns you may have. You can reach us by phone at (931) 388-2135

8. Chapel of the Chimes Hayward
Hayward, CA

9. Fred Hunter Memorial Services
Hollywood, FL
As the only family-owned and operated full service funeral home, cemetery and crematory in Broward County, we at Fred Hunter’s Memorial Services are dedicated to meeting your needs.

10. Cress Funeral and Cremation Service
Madison, WI
The three things that Cress Funeral Service values most is Service, Service and Service. We define Service as Love and Concern in Action.

Want to see the next 10 in the list? Check out the full rankings now.

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We have had the pleasure of working with Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries, one of the largest and most distinguished Jewish mortuaries in the country, on their custom new web presence.

Mount Sinai is based in the Los Angeles area, with unrivaled parks and properties in Hollywood Hills and Simi Valley. Their memorial parks and mortuaries are absolutely breathtaking - see for yourself!

Mount Sinai came to us looking to revamp their web presence. Their existing site was not performing well within Google searches, and the navigation made it difficult for visitors to find what they were looking for. Additionally, the most important part of their site, the obituaries, were un-engaging and difficult to find.

We worked with Mount Sinai to design and deploy a beautiful, custom website that effectively reflected the unique nature of their brand and clientele.

We took into account many unique considerations when designing their custom web presence:

• Provide a classic look and feel with a modern touch
• Integrate colors and design that expressed their Jewish heritage
• Integrate simple, straightforward navigation and content layout that is easy to consume for visitors of all ages
• Display easy-to-find contact information for immediate assistance on every page
• Provide engaging, dynamic online obituaries with enhanced Facebook distribution

Another unique aspect of Mount Sinai is their clientele's expectation of privacy. Because of their stature within the Jewish community, particularly in the Los Angeles area, they serve the families of many prominent figures. As a result, the expectation of privacy is very important. 

This creates a challenge when designing a website that is intended to be both accessible and engaging. However, we were eager to work with Mount Sinai's staff to find a balance between privacy and accessibility.

We achieved this perfect balance through several techniques. First, you'll notice that photos of the deceased are rarely used - we do not display the deceased individual's image on the home page obituary listing nor on the obituary itself. 

Further, we provide the Mount Sinai staff the ability to enable or disable visitor tributes, photos, and videos on the online obituary. Some families they serve prefer to only list their loved one's service information, but not include an obituary or the ability to leave tributes. This was a unique feature developed for Mount Sinai's community.

Most of all, we are proud to work with a firm as distinguished and historical as Mount Sinai, and we are fortunate to have learned more about their unique Jewish community.

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If your business falls behind your competition on Facebook, you may never catch up!

 

But do you even know how well your Facebook Page is doing? 

 

Funeral Innovations is announcing our Facebook Power Rankings, a free service which analyzes your Facebook Page and ranks its performance versus others in the funeral industry. This shows you exactly where your page ranks and who is beating you.  

 

Just click the following link to get your free ranking:

http://funeralinnovations.com/power-rankings/ 

 

Don't miss out!

• Discover if your competition is beating you on Facebook
• The size of your fan base is only half the battle - see if your fan engagement is falling short
• Learn how to improve your Facebook presence to win more customers in your market
• Get monthly updates sent straight to your inbox to ensure your Facebook strategy is working, and if it helps you move up the charts 

 

Don't risk falling behind! Get your free Facebook Power Ranking now:

http://funeralinnovations.com/power-rankings/ 

 

Have questions or want to improve your Facebook rank? Contact us now - we'd love to chat. 

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It was inevitable. Ever since Facebook released the new Timeline layout for personal profile pages, we knew it was only a matter of time before the Timeline came to Facebook business pages. And that day has now come. 

Today Facebook announced that it has enabled Timeline layouts for Facebook Pages, and you have 30 days to prepare before it's pushed to your page automatically! Want to see an example? Click here.

What does this change mean to you?

Layout 

The layout of your Facebook Page will now be dramatically different. Check out the before and after shots of the Fred Hunter's Facebook Page below. You'll notice the big new "cover photo", as well as the timeline format of the content. This will be the first thing your visitors will notice.

Before:

After:

Cover Image

The cover image is the attention-grabbing banner of the new timeline layout. Be sure to choose a photo that gets your fans' attention and represents your brand well. 

But be warned: Facebook has strict rules for the new cover image. You cannot include your website address, email address, mentions of the words "Like" or "Share", or any call to action. Since Facebook can revoke your Page, it's important to heed these warnings and not cross this line of self promotion.

Setting your cover image is easy, just click "Add a Cover" and upload one from your computer or choose an image already uploaded to Facebook.

Curate Your Timeline

With the new timeline, you can highlight, edit or delete content you want to emphasize or remove. So go through your timeline and click the star to highlight your best posts, such as those that are visual or important. Starred posts will show up as full width.

Tabs

Your application tabs, such as the fan-gate and microsite will still exist, however by default all visitors will go straight to your timeline view. 

Admin Panel

As the Facebook Page admin, you'll see a new Admin Panel at the top of your page. This gives you a quick look into some of the stats and updates taking place on your Facebook Page. In the admin panel, you'll also see a new feature: private messages. This will you to have private communications with your fans, to answer questions or provide them help without leaving your Facebook Page.

The new timeline for Facebook Pages is a game changer for funeral homes! It completely changes how your fans will interact with your page, and makes quality, shared content even more important. If you already publish good, engaging content to your Facebook Page on a regular basis, you'll love the new timeline because it'll make your Facebook Page look even more beautiful and your fans will stay on your page longer. 

Do you have questions on the new timeline? If so, we'd love to hear from you! Just contact us today.

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We're excited to announce the release of Carson & Son's brand new funeral home website! Carson & Son is a Maquoketa, Iowa funeral home with whom we have partnered for several years in various respects. We've recently worked closely with Don Carson to design and construct a one-of-a-kind web presence to differentiate their unique brand. 

Carson & Son is a progressive firm, and was among the first funeral homes to embrance the concept of "Celebrations of Life", rather than focus simply on death and mourning. They now offer a suite of One Last Time Events, (including One Last Round®), which are personalized celebrations of life that honor the deceased individual's unique life lived. 

When we began designing his new web presence, Don knew he wanted a look and feel that reflected his firm's progressive nature. It was critical that the design be modern and unlike any other in the industry. In fact, Don wanted a web presence that didn't even look like a funeral home website at all!

Rather than dark and subdued, he wanted bright and welcoming. Instead of static and old, he wanted modern and dynamic, with videos, slideshows and engaging elements. I think you'll agree that his new web design is a home run!

Browse around Carson & Son's website and you'll notice the beautiful touches, large and small, that make Carson's site different.

• Bright, welcoming colors within the background, text, images and buttons
• Beautiful obituary listing, easy to access right on the home page
• Interactive, informative, and engaging slideshow of services
• Intuitive and easy to use navigation from every page
• "Pet Passings" - full fledged obituaries for pets
• Custom blog, showcasing local news and events
• Unique cornfield background design, which highlights Carson & Son's heartland roots
• Full Facebook integration to drive viral traffic

Facebook

Don also wanted to harness the marketing and communication power of Facebook. We worked with Don to create an elegant and effective Facebook strategy, starting with his uniquely designed Fan-Gate and custom, interactive Microsite. Using the FI Copilot, Carson & Son's Facebook wall remains active and engaging.

The result has been one of the fastest growing Facebook Pages we've seen, already with over 150 new fans since launching from scratch!

We're proud to say that our partnership with Carson & Son has resulted in a new web and Facebook presence that ranks among the best and most unique in the entire industry!

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Facebook Pages don’t grow by themselves. In order to grow your fan base, you must take action to promote and market it. Once you do, your Facebook Page will prove to be an invaluable marketing tool, each and every day.

Follow the tips below and your fan base will be growing in no time!

Note: To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

1. Invite Your Friends

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But this is where you must start! There are two ways of inviting your friends directly on Facebook:

1. The “Invite Friends” link on the right side of your Facebook Page lets Page admins select a bunch of friends to invite at once. 

2. The “Share” link on the left side of your Facebook Page lets anyone share the page to their personal profile, with an optional message. This is actually more effective than the invite friends method above, since sharing it to your profile makes it more noticeable to your friends.

2. Promote on Your Website

Add the Facebook “like” or “recommend” button to your website, so visitors can become a fan with a single click, without leaving your site! You can construct the code for this button from Facebook:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

3. Add Your Facebook Page to Your Email Signature

You can set this up in just a couple minutes, and it’ll continue to pay dividends by promoting your Facebook Page to everyone you email through out the day!

4. Hook to Twitter

Why update your posts in two places each time? Synchronize Facebook with Twitter, so every time you post to your Facebook Page, it’s automatically tweeted to your Twitter account!

It’s extremely easy to setup: just to go http://facebook.com/twitter to synchronize your accounts.

5. Add Facebook to your Business Cards

Each time you hand out a card to a colleague or community member, they’ll have your Facebook address in the palm of their hand! 

6. Add Facebook to Your Obituary Notifications

We send thousands of obituary notifications on behalf of our clients, each day. And every email contains a link to their Facebook Page.

7. Get a Vanity URL

By default, your Facebook Page’s web address (URL) will be long and obscure, with a bunch of meaningless numbers and letters. Fortunately, Facebook lets you shorten it to something easier to remember!

Facebook used to require you to have at least 25 fans to get a vanity URL, but now every page can!

Just go to http://www.facebook.com/username to choose a shorter address for your Facebook Page.

Just one word of warning: once you set your username, Facebook will not let you change it!

8. Facebook Comments

Replace your blog’s comments with Facebook comments to gain more exposure and distribution. Every comment that is left is also optionally shared to the user’s Facebook profile, providing more distribution back to your blog!

Additionally, any comment you add is also posted to your funeral home’s Facebook Page, engaging your fans. You can find the comments plugin here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

As an added bonus, Facebook Comments dramatically cut down on spam, since it requires a valid user account!

9. Fan Gating

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page’s wall is a huge lost opportunity? If they don’t fan your page the first time they see it, they’ll probably never return. 

Fan Gating is a technique to show a custom splash page to non-fans, encouraging them to “like” your page and become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. Fan-Gating has been shown to increase your fan conversions by up to 300%! 

10. Share Good Content

Sharing good content is the single most important way to succeed on Facebook. The reason is that when your fans engage with your posts (like, comment, or re-share), two important things happen:

1. Subsequent posts by you will be shown to them more prominently by Facebook.
2. Your post will be exposed to your fan’s social network, thereby promoting your page to new potential fans! 

In other words, good posts result in more growth.

Want More???

 To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

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At the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference in Las Vegas, we had the pleasure of presenting to the audience on how funeral homes can go viral on Facebook. We described the basics of setting up a Facebook Page for your funeral home, and presented some tips for growing and engaging your fan base. 

We were floored by the response! We were amazed at how many funeral directors recognized the value of Facebook, yet before the presentation, they were still unsure of how to take advantage of the opportunity.

Make no mistake, Facebook is a huge wave washing over this industry, and those who "learn to surf" are going to succeed at the expense of those who don't. 

Check out the presentation slides below. To access exclusive tips for improving your Facebook presence, just fan the Funeral Innovations Facebook Page and download our whitepapers: 

1. 20 Funeral Insider Tips to Get More Facebook Fans
2. 15 Tricks for Funeral Homes to Engage Their Facebook Fans

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The end of another year means another opportunity for a year-end list! Here's you'll find the 5 most popular Funeral Innovations blog posts of 2011. If you missed any of these, be sure to read up on them to stay on top of the industry!

As a bonus, I've included a short summary of what made each post imporant and why it was particularly popular in 2011.

5. Top 5 Reasons Why Your Obituaries Should be Hosted on Your Website

Many companies sperad misinformation to take advantage of funeral directors, particularly when it comes to the value of obituaries and search engine optimization. This article busts one of those lies and educates funeral directors about why it is critically important for your obituaries to be hosted on your own website, rather than through a 3rd party site or iframe.

This article was particularly popular because many funeral directors can relate to how companies within this industry try to take advantage of them. Educating and empowering funeral directors on the importance of having the obituaries on their website was very eye openeing to many folks.

4. SEO for Small Funeral Homes

Small funeral homes have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), since their funeral home website naturally has fewer backlinks and less authority within Google. Fortunately, this article offered several tips that can drammatically help a small funeral home's SEO, and increase the amount of organic traffic they attain.

This blog post appealed to many funeral directors because the tips for improving SEO, while targeted towards small funeral homes, can actually improve the performance of any funeral home website!

3. Announcing Remembrance Codes

This year Funeral Innovations became the first company in the industry to use QR codes as a way of memorializing your loved ones. Funeral Innovations released a new way for these small barcodes to be scanned by people's cellphones to be brought to a loved one's permanent online memorial. While many other companies have since followed our lead, we were the first to put the QR codes on monuments, to link the physical stone to the online memorial. We now are using QR codes within service folders so service attendees can quickly access to the funeral home's mobile website and leave a tribute.

Read the article to learn more about how Remembrance Codes work. This article garnered a lot of attention because it introduced a new concept of using QR codes within the funeral industry, that has since been more widely adopted by others.

2. Leaders vs Followers in the Funeral Industry

In 2011, Funeral Innovations became the industry's leader in Facebook for Funeral Homes, offering custom Facebook Pages for funeral homes, including powerful fan-gating techniques and Facebook Microsites, full-fledged tabbed websites right within Facebook. Our new approach to Facebook for funeral homes, along with our beautiful designs gained us a lot of attention. Our competitors were caught off guard by our offerings and scrambled to catch up, in some cases copying our designs and marketing a little too closely! But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we are indeed humbled by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception to our Facebook solution.

A little controversy is always good for getting attention, and this post was no exception. Published at the end of 2011, it quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog, receiving a huge amount of viral traffic through Twitter and Facebook. 

1. Top 25 Funeral Companies and Funeral Homes on Twitter 

In advance of our presentation on social media for the funeral industry at the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference, we compiled a list of the top funeral homes and funeral companies on Twitter. Little did we know just how popular this list would become! It has driven an enormous amount of viral and organic visitors, and continues to be one of our most popular posts ever, even a year after it was initially published! 

This post became popular for several reasons. It's particularly useful to know the top funeral companies on Twitter, especially with so many funeral homes now recognizing the value of social media. Additionally, many people who are searching for top funeral companies are coming across this post, and it has consistently ranked as one of our most trafficked organic results. 

And the good news is we'll be compiling a new list of top funeral companies in social media in 2012. So keep your eyes open for that!

What's Coming in 2012?

We hope you enjoyed all the amazing and exciting developments from 2011. We encourage you to continue returning to this blog for education, insights and announcements of the latest innovations in the funeral industry. We promise you that 2012 will be an even bigger year than the last!

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There are 800 million people on Facebook. Are you getting their business?

FI Social Sites helps you harness the viral power of Facebook through its powerful "Fan-Gating" technique and Microsite. Learn more below, contact us to get started, or See A Live Example Now

Fan-Gating

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page's wall is a lost opportunity? If they don't fan your page the first time they see it, they'll probably never return.

Social Site's "Fan-Gating" shows non-fans a custom splash page to convince new visitors to become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. We'll help you increase your fan conversions by up to 300%!

Microsite

Engage your Facebook Fans! Social Sites offer an exclusive microsite, a full-fledged tabbed website right within your Facebook Page.

Drive Customers

Let your Facebook Fans pre-plan without leaving Facebook. Social Sites' offer Facebook-customized pre-planning widgets embedded within your Facebook Page.

Learn More

Contact Us for pricing or to get started today!

Like Us on Facebook to get exclusive "20 Secrets for Gaining More Facebook Fans!"

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At Funeral Innovations, we've always had a friendly relationship with Ryan Thogmartin, founder of Connecting Directors. We've demoed our products to him, and he's praised our web based solutions' simplicity and effectiveness. We've even spent money advertising on his website.

So imagine my surprise when I received an email from his mailing list on Friday, promoting his Facebook solutions, with his headline copied directly from our Facebook Marketing Page!

Here's the headline used on our Funeral Innovations Facebook marketing page, which I wrote over a week ago.

There are 800 million people on Facebook. Are you getting their business?

Now look what Ryan wrote in his email on Friday, a full week after we published our page!

There are 0ver 800 million People on Facebook. Shouldn't you be getting their business?

Wow, pretty similar, right? He changed a few words, but took the rest verbatim. At first I chuckled at his lack of creativity. But as I continued to read his email, it was apparent that he stole much more than a simple headline.

For our Facebook Fan-Gating technique, I wrote the following:

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page's wall is a lost opportunity? If they don't fan your page the first time they see it, they'll probably never return.

Social Site's "Fan-Gating" shows non-fans a custom splash page to convince new visitors to become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. We'll help you increase your fan conversions by up to 300%!

Now let's see what Ryan wrote:

The main goal of your Facebook Page is to get visitors to click the "Like" button! Sending a first time visitor to your Facebook Page's wall is a major no no and a huge lost opportunity.

With Disrupt MG's custom designed landing pages a first time visitor (has never "liked" your page) will be directed to a custom landing page that guides them to click the "like" button, giving you marketing exposure to them. Our custom landing pages will help increase your "Like" conversions by up to 300%.

At least he had the sense here to change a few more words. But still: "lost opportunity", "marketing exposure to them",  "increase conversions up to 300%". He even ripped off our stats!

It gets worse. Not only did he copy the marketing material I wrote myself, but he also directly copied our actual product! 

Take a look at the beautiful custom Fan-Gate we created for Fred Hunter's Memorial Services Facebook Page over a month ago:

Over a week ago Ryan became a fan of the Fred Hunter's Facebook Page. He must have realized how great our Facebook Pages looked because lo and behold, he showed off his new design, which looks almost exactly like the one we created for Fred Hunter's (just less polished)!

Can you spot the similarities? They are hard to miss. Same style arrow pointing to the Like button, vibrantly graphical background, logo with the soft glow. Granted, we didn't invent these techniques, but out of all the ways you can design a Facebook Page, it's amazing how closely he copied ours. 

Here are some more "tells":

See the nice looking ribbon technique we use around "Become a Fan"?

Looks like Ryan decided he likes our ribbon as well!

Guess who else has a new-found fondness of semi-transparent white boxes, vertical listings of 4 benefits, and the value of "Community News"!

Of course, he even separated the benefits with opaque white lines. I wonder where he came up with such a small detail.

Apparently our Facebook pre-planning widget got his attention as well. Funeral Innovations was the first to release a Facebook-embedded pre-planning widget. In fact, we put it right within our customer's tabbed Microsites on Facebook. Now, we'll gladly admit we did not invent the concept of a pre-planning widget. But there a million ways you can construct and word the pre-planning form and questions. Ryan couldn't figure out how to put the pre-planning widget in a Microsite like ours, but he did manage to steal the wording on our pre-planning widget verbatim!

First look at ours, which we created over a month ago.

I love competition. I started my career at IBM, spent time living and developing a startup in Silicon Valley, and enjoy nothing more than pushing ourselves and our competitors towards more and more innovative solutions within the funeral industry. Competition is the lifeblood of innovation. But Funeral Innovations would never, ever blatantly copy our competitors' products or steal their marketing material. That is not competition, that is not innovation, and that is not how we were raised. 

So as you choose who you place your firm's reputation with when working on a social media solution, you must ask yourself:

• Does your technology partner share your firm's values and morals?
• Does your technology partner innovate or do they copy others?
• Do you want to align your firm with a leader or a follower?

Note: I've reached out to Ryan to seek an explanation but he has not responded to my emails.

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Magic Videos by Funeral Innovations were already the fastest and simplest way to generate beautiful tribute videos and engage obituary visitors online.

Magic Videos are the first and only solution to automatically publish tribute videos to the online obituary without lifting a finger. It is the first and only solution to let you use photos submitted by the family and friends from the online obituary.

Now, Magic Videos have become the first and only solution to automatically publish videos to your Facebook Page!

Why is this such a big deal? Because videos shared on Facebook have over 200% engagement versus text only status updates. And videos shared on Facebook have twice the reach of photos. In short, sharing tribute videos to Facebook can drive more traffic to your website and more fans to your Facebook Page.

It all boils down to this: in under 5 minutes you can generate a beautiful tribute video, have the video and its photos automatically published to the online obituary, and now have it automatically posted to your Facebook Page!

Be sure to fan our Facebook Page. We've got some big, exciting changes coming!

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Magic Videos by Funeral Innovations are the easiest and fastest way to create and publish tribute videos. If you are unfamiliar with Magic Videos, they let any funeral director generate beautiful tribute videos online in literally minutes. 

What makes our videos so magical?

First of all, any photos posted to an online obituary are automatically available for use in a Magic Video. That means family and friends of a deceased individual collaboratively contribute the photos to be used in their tribute video. The funeral director can then easily add more photos through a simple drag and drop interface.

But the real magic occurs next. Once the photos are loaded and a song is chosen, a funeral director clicks "Submit." By the time he or she is done with their cup of coffee, the video is rendered and published straight to the online obituary! Not only that, but any new photos used for the video are published to the photo gallery of the online obituary as well. The video file is then available for the funeral director to burn to a DVD to offer to the family or play at the service.

Think about that for a moment: within minutes, not only can you generate a gorgeous video tribute, but also have the video and the photos published to the obituary without lifting a finger! 

Oh, and did we mention that the Magic Videos arecompletely web-based, meaning there's nothing to download and you can generate videos on any computer anywhere in the world?

Having photos and videos on your funeral home's obituaries are important for multiple reasons:

1. The obituaries become much more engaging to the visitors
2. More content drives more traffic to your funeral home's website
3. Rich, beautiful obituaries shows that your funeral home values permanent, online memorialization, helping differentiate your brand

Want to see a Magic Video in action? Watch Savitri Jeethan's tribute video.

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After reading this article, I realized just how far some companies will go to spread misinformation and take advantage of funeral directors' trust and lack of web experience. 

The article is titled "Traffic vs Visitors" and attempts to convince a funeral home why it's ok to host their obituaries on a 3rd party site instead of embedded directly in your funeral homes' website.

It is critical to your funeral home's online success to host the obituaries on your own website, rather than on a 3rd party obituary providers'. It results in more traffic, better SEO, more leads, increased sales conversions, and increased revenue. It allows the obituaries of the families you serve to benefit your funeral home, rather than some other company. And with today's technologies, there is no technical reason you should be using iframes or a 3rd party obituary host.

Our customers have seen up to 15,000 visits for a single obituary! To claim that amount traffic (times thousands of obituaries) has no value to the funeral home demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding modern web strategies. In fact, these obituary providers know exactly how valuable that traffic is, which is the reason they choose to keep it on their own site rather than the funeral homes'!

So to help set the record straight and educate you on how your funeral home can succeed online, here are the top 5 reasons why it is critically important for your obituaries to be hosted on your website within your funeral home's domain. 

1. SEO, aka "Google"

An average funeral home gets between 30-50% of their traffic from search engines. Much of that traffic results from people searching for a particular obituary, and the rest of it is for potential customers who are searching for a funeral home in your area. 

If someone searches for "funeral home in iowa city", how does Google (or another search engine) decide which to show first? Here are some ways your funeral home SEO is calculated, but the main criteria is popularity. What makes a website popular? Other sites linking to pages on that site. And can you guess what pages other sites are most likely to link to on a funeral home website? Yes, the obituaries. 

In other words, if the obituaries aren't hosted on your site (and your domain), then you aren't getting credit for any of the links, and as a result Google and other search engines will not consider your website popular. So the next person that searches the web for a funeral home in your town will see your competitors' website come up before yours. You've just lost a sale! 

2. Branding

Most funeral homes, like other small businesses, spend a lot of money on branding and marketing. It's important for your firm to project a single vision and voice, so potential customers understand what you stand for and why they should use your services. It's so important that businesses spend tens of billions of dollars per year on advertising!

If your obituaries do not project the same look and voice as the rest of your website, you are losing a branding opportunity. The visitor to your obituary no longer associates it with your funeral home. Therefore, your obituaries not only need to be top of the line in terms of user experience and engagement, but they also need clearly link that experience with your brand. If not, your obituary visitors (which is up to 80% of your web traffic) are using your resources without you receiving any credit!

While some 3rd party obituary providers put your name on the obituaries they host, that it not enough. The obituaries should be part of your funeral home's brand, and thus need to be fully embedded in your website.

3. Control

If your obituaries are not on your website then they are out of your control. The links found on the obituaries likely point back to the obituary provider's website, and are put there in order to benefit your obituary provider, not you. Any link on the obituary that does not point back to your own website or services is potentially stealing away traffic and conversion opportunities. If a visitor clicks a link that takes them away from the obituary, they will likely not come back and they will certainly be unable to visit any other part of your website at that point. Again, a lost sale.

Even worse, if you don't control your own obituaries, someone else does. And they might put tracking cookies or even ads and content on the obituaries or their linked-to pages that you or the families you serve don't approve of.

4. Monetization

If the obituaries are hosted on your website, you can control the monetization options. If you want to sell flowers, goods or services on the obituaries, that's a way for you to make money from the service you are providing. If you want to keep the obituaries free, that is up to you as well. It all comes down to your funeral home's approach and how you want to balance serving families with increasing your revenue. We advocate both approaches!

However, if you do not control the obituaries, guess who is likely trying to make money from them in your place. Yes, the obituary provider. Many obituary providers put ads or try to sell flowers, goods, and services within their obituary directories, or even worse, right on the obituary itself. In our view, the obituary and its content is the property of the funeral home, and if it's going to be monetized, that money should rightfully go to the funeral home!

5. Mobility

At Funeral Innovations, we pride ourselves on partnering closely with funeral homes and providing the best customer service in the industry. In fact, our customers are so impressed with this approach that they have never left for another provider!

But what happens if a funeral home wants to leave whomever is providing their website and obituaries to find a better provider? If the obituaries are hosted right within your website, then the old provider will work with the new provider to seemlessly transfer the obituary data and there will be no negative impact on your brand or SEO. All of your existing obituaries will still be found right on your site.

However, if your obituaries are hosted outside of your website, then you will be shocked to discover that the obituary provider was poaching your traffic and search engine optimization all along. Since the obituaries were hosted by them, not on your site, you will have very few pages indexed in Google's search engines. You will realize that the obituary provider is your competitor, not your partner. In that case, you are trapped and the obituary provider knows it. Therefore they have little incentive to keep up with the competition and as a result, they become old, slow and stale in comparison.

Conclusion

As the funeral industry's reliance on the web continues to accelerate, your firm's online success depends on you optimizing your web presence. You literally can't afford to be giving away your most precious online asset: the obituaries.

If you aren't sure whether your obituaries are optimized for the web today, give us a call and we'll be happy to review your current web strategy with you.

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Our company is barely over 3 years old. We are a small (yet rapidly growing) business and we're proud of it. In fact, our competitors would be shocked to learn just how small we are!

If your funeral home is looking for a provider of websites, online obituaries, social media, and DVDs should you trust a small company likes ours, or follow a safe route with one of our much larger competitors?

In order to answer that question, it might help to review this short quiz:

• Do you want to have direct contact with the company founders?
• Do you want to have a voice in the product development and creation of new web solutions?
• Do you want to stick with the status quo, or be on the cutting edge?
• Do you want to work with a company that can execute, adapt, and innovate quickly?
• Do you want to stand out among your competition?
• Do you want to be a partner rather than simply a customer?

If you found yourself answering yes to these questions, then you understand the advantage of working with a small company. And if that is not convincing enough, consider this fact: No funeral home who has tried Funeral Innovations for a couple months has left to a competitor!

How do we manage such unmatched customer satisfaction and loyalty? It's because we are small! We listen to our customers so that they are partners in the process. We use their feedback to improve our products and develop new solutions. We give them direct access to the company co-founders, so they have a voice and know their ideas are being heard. And instead of simply saying that we are innovative, we prove it by continually releasing the most unique, cutting-edge new solutions in the industry.

So the next time a big web provider tries to convince you that a small company can't suit your needs, ask to speak with their founder and find out how quickly they are innovating. Because your business can't risk falling behind the speed of Funeral Innovations.

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Previously we explained how Google's new +1 feature allows Google users to vote on search results that they find particularly useful. The votes are then used by Google to promote the pages in the search results of other people in your network.

Yesterday, Google released new +1 buttons for websites, allowing webmasters to put the voting button right into their website to make it easier for Google users to vote on their page. 

Today, FI announces that we've already integrated the Google +1 buttons in all of our supported obituaries! In addition to the existing Facebook recommendation buttons we already include, the new +1 for Obituaries will make it easy for visitors of an obituary to promote and share it within their network of contacts. 

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Remembrance Codes are an exclusive offering developed by Funeral Innovations that creates a permanent link to a deceased individual's online memorial via a 2-D barcode (or "QR Code"). This one-of-a-kind remembrance makes it easy for the family and friends to visit the online memorial and leave memories, without having to remember a long URL or typing a Google search.

For funeral directors, Remembrance Codes drives additional traffic to the online obituary on their website, and creates customer loyalty and buzz when the Remembrance Code is displayed in a cemetery, or in the family's home. 

Remembrance Codes are available to be installed within a glass case on the granite memorial, or as an elegant, framed keepsake in the family's home. Funeral Directors have also been printing Remembrance Codes right on the service handouts to allow service attendees to quickly read and write tributes from their mobile phones!

The St Paul Pioneer Press, one of the premier newspapers in Minnesota, recognized the unique value of this technology and the benefit provided by the funeral directors who use it. They talked to us about Remembrance Codes and published a very fascinating article.

I talked with one of Funeral Innovations' customers, Roberts Family Funeral Home in Forest Lake. Owner Kelly Roberts told me the QR codes used in memorial folders have been well received, once attendees figure out what the codes are (many have no idea).

"I've had to explain what it is," Roberts said. Once they understand, "They say, 'Oh, wow, that's neat.'

"They see it as a unique way to remember and honor their loved ones, from here on out well into the future," he said. "People who attend the memorial will keep the folder knowing they can go back to access the memorial" via the QR code.

Be sure to read the full article here.

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There are 600 million people on Facebook. We send them to your website.

Funeral Innovations believes social networks are transforming communication faster than any other technology ever has. That's why we've created the best, and easiest, Facebook integration in the industry.

Facebook made easy

Funeral Innovations' Facebook integration makes it simple and automatic to tap into the power of social networks. If you already have a Facebook Page for your funeral home, we connect it to FI by pressing a single button. The rest is automatic.

Don't have a Facebook Page yet? We'll set one up for you!

Publishing obituaries

When you publish an obituary, we give you an option to "post to social media."

1. When selected, the obituary is published to your Facebook Page, including the deceased individual's name, obituary, and a link back to your site.
2. The obituary is then promoted to the News Feed of all your Facebook Page's fans, meaning they'll see it the next time they log in. If they re-share or "like" it, it's distributed to their entire network.
3. We include a link to your Facebook Page in every obituary notification email.

Sharing obituaries

Every obituary on your website contains multiple ways for a visitor to share it.

1. By simply clicking "Recommend", the obituary is shared to that person's Facebook profile
2. By clicking "Share", the visitor can share the full obituary to their entire social network

Sharing tributes

Every tribute left on your funeral home's obituaries contains hooks for "viral" distribution.

1. Each tribute is automatically shared as a comment to your Facebook Page
2. Upon sharing a tribute, the visitor is given the option of publishing the tribute to their Facebook wall, thus sharing it with their entire social network.
3. Every tribute notification email includes a link to follow your funeral home's Facebook Page.
   1. Nothing is shared or published on behalf of the user without their consent
   2. Facebook users and their friends will not be spammed or annoyed by excessive publications
   3. The Funeral Home is the admin of their Facebook Page and has full control over the posts and comments put there


 

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Measure the results

FI Analytics will show you in realtime exactly how many people have viewed each obituary and where they came from. This helps you see the effect your social media campaign is making!

  

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What we believe

Social networks provide powerful distribution channels, but without proper design, can become spammy or annoying. Funeral Innovations designs all of its Facebook integration keeping respect and integrity at the forefront.

Contact us by clicking here to learn more.

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