Thanks for the note!

You are correct – you are the exception as you guys at Life Story Network get it. It’s all about engaging people on your site and Life Story does that very well.

I just want to make sure that it didn’t sound like I was against the newspapers and / or Legacy having online obits – just when they won’t allow funeral homes to direct people to the funeral home’s website.

Unfortunately, I hear too many funeral directors say, “Our newspaper has online obits, so we don’t need them on our site.” Besides being able to exponentially increase the number of pages of you website and get the traffic numbers like you do; they are allowing the newspaper to serve the family instead of doing it themselves.

In ten years, there will be funeral home websites with 30 pages still, and then there will be sites like yours with thousands of pages – who will Google think is the authority?

Thanks again Dale for sharing – keep up the great work!

…Hep

Legacy does have a big hold on a lot of newspapers. Our papers here in Michigan allow us to put our URL’s in the obits. But they also require us to pay an additional fee on top of the regular obit fee to fund their participation with Legacy, so our obits are actually listed on 2 sites; ours and Legacy. The only way I agreed to this is that in our local paper, Legacy is not allowed to sell, link, or display any of their stuff (flowers, fancy guest books, etc.) on my obits.

I feel that it’s important to have my obits listed online at the newspaper’s site in addition to my site to make it easy on the consumer. I figure the more places people can find me the better.

Plus we keep our newspaper obits to just the basic info, with very little fluff, because we write a complete Life Story with pictures and a video and post that all on our site. At lifestorynet.com we have 80,000 unique visitors a week who spend time on our memory pages and are really engaged there. I’m sure most funeral web sites don’t have those kind of numbers.

Dale Clock