A funeral home review usually arrives weeks after the service, from a son or a daughter once the paperwork is done, and it almost never mentions the casket or the price. It describes how your staff behaved during the worst week of somebody's life.
Book a free consultation →Two different people find you through search, and they read your reviews for opposite reasons.
One is at-need. Somebody died a few hours ago. It is usually an adult child, often in another state, on a phone before the rest of the family is awake, looking at three names and trying to work out which one will take care of this. She has never done this before. She reads the newest reviews first, and the ones with a director's name in them.
The other is pre-planning, and that person is in no hurry at all. They come back over weeks, they compare price lists, and they read reviews looking for one thing: whether anybody felt pushed.
What gets written about a funeral home does not look like what gets written about a contractor.
Where those reviews do their ranking work is a separate job, covered on local SEO for funeral homes. What the reader lands on once they decide to look you up is covered on websites for funeral homes. This page is about the reviews themselves: getting real ones, catching them, and answering them.
Most review systems are built for the trades. A job wraps, a text goes out that afternoon, one tap, done. Point that at a funeral home and it is worse than useless. We build the same machinery and run it on a different clock, with a person deciding every send.
Two different decisions get confused with each other here, so it is worth separating them. Skipping a family because of what they went through is a judgment about circumstance, and your directors already make it whether or not a vendor is involved. Sorting families by the review you expect to get back is a different thing entirely. That one has a name, review gating, it is against Google's policy, and we will not build it for you or for anybody else. What a family thinks of you never decides whether they get asked.
The pieces we build to support that are small and specific: a one-tap link a director can paste into a personal note or send from a phone, and a plain record of who has been asked, so nobody gets asked twice and nobody gets missed. None of it sends on its own.
This is where a well-meant reply does more damage than the review did.
Say a review claims the flowers went to the wrong church, a name was misspelled in the obituary, and there was a charge nobody approved. Two of the three are wrong and you have the file to prove it. Do not.
What survives all of that is short, and short is correct. Acknowledge the person. Own the part that is genuinely yours to own. Give one name and one phone number, and move the rest off the internet. Every reply is written for strangers who will never meet the reviewer, and calm beats thorough.
Where your state association or your attorney has a rule about what a firm may disclose, that rule wins. Ours is narrower and easier to remember: say less.
We draft, a director approves, you post. Nothing appears under your firm's name that somebody there has not read. The date on a reply is public, so how fast it goes up is part of the job too.
Google is the profile everybody watches. In this field it is not where most of the writing happens.
Monitoring means somebody finds out in a day instead of a month. That is most of the value on its own, because a reply posted the same week reads completely differently from one posted in March about a review from January.
The profile itself, the categories and hours and photos and service list, is Google Business Profile work. Related, and not the same job as the reviews sitting on top of it.
There is no monthly reputation subscription here and no price per review. Scope and price are settled before anything is built, so what you are looking at is a list of what gets built and done, not an open-ended retainer you have to take on faith.
For a funeral home it usually gets billed one of two ways, and both use numbers already published here.
If your situation fits neither, we quote it flat after a free consult rather than putting a made-up number on a pricing page. If you want to know what sits behind a monthly figure like that, how much SEO costs walks through it.
Three things are not for sale at any price: a rating target, a promised number of reviews by a date, and the removal of an honest one star. Nobody can deliver those, and a shop willing to fake them for you would fake them for the firm down the road next year.
We have built this machinery before: a one-tap review-request tool for a New Jersey glass and mirror shop. That business could not be less like yours, and its timing, a request sent as soon as the work is done, is close to the opposite of what a funeral home needs. That is the point. The machinery is ordinary. The judgment about when to use it belongs to your directors, not to a schedule a vendor set.
Orlando-based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008. We are not going to hand you a roster of funeral homes or a rating we lifted off one of them, because that is not proof of anything you can use.
What you own, start to finish: your Google Business Profile, the reviews on it, the tool we build, your site, your content, and every account involved. If we stop working together you keep all of it, and nothing gets switched off.
The general case for this service, including the shortcuts we refuse and why, is on the reputation management hub. The wider marketing picture for this audience sits on the funeral home page. Would you rather look at something than read about it? Ask for a free mockup, or call or text (407) 694-2055.
It can be, weeks later, from the person who served them, once. What is not right is a scripted blast, a code on the counter during the week of the service, or a reminder chain. Plenty of families are glad to say something when the worst has passed and somebody asks like a human being. Some should never be asked, and a director should make that call one family at a time.
There is no correct number of days, and anyone selling you one is guessing. A reasonable habit is to wait until the practical work is finished, the certificates, the claims, the thank you notes, and then have the director who served that family reach out once. Keep it apart from your aftercare program, so grief support mail and check-in calls never arrive with a request attached.
Reply anyway, briefly, without naming the other organization. Say that a funeral involves several parties working to one schedule, that you are sorry it went the way it did, and give a name and a number. Flag it with Google only if it actually breaks their policy, which a misdirected but honest complaint usually does not. Then fix the vendor relationship privately, where it belongs.
No, not even when the reviewer used the names themselves. A public reply that confirms who died and that they were in your care puts a private matter in front of everyone, including relatives who never agreed to that. Thank the reviewer, address the substance in general terms, and move the specifics to a phone call. Say less than you think you are allowed to.
Ask for Google. The tribute wall fills on its own from people who attended, and those notes are condolences written to the family rather than an account of your work. They are worth moderating and worth keeping. They also sit on a page you control, so a stranger discounts them. The review that helps the next family compare three names sits on your Google profile.
Yes, and the low volume is the reason rather than the objection. When only a handful of reviews exist, each one carries more weight with the next reader, and a stale profile stands out faster. A slow trickle of recent, real reviews from families who genuinely wanted to write one does more here than a large pile would in a high-volume trade.
Yes. The request link and the record of who has been asked can be built on their own as a custom tool, scoped and priced before any work starts. Most workhorse tools run $1,500 to $4,000, and a request setup like this one is among the lighter of those. Tool Care upkeep is $75 a month per tool if you want it, and you keep the tool either way. There is no reputation subscription and no per-review price.
Reputation Management services · Funeral homes: industry overview · SEO for funeral homes · Local SEO for funeral homes · Websites for funeral homes · Google Business Profile for funeral homes · Social media for funeral homes · What should you pay? (free tool)
The free consult opens on the same screen she will see: what the newest review says, whether anybody answered it, and how long it sat there first. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected].
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.