How to Market a Memorial Business in the UK

The gap between your words and theirs

If you make memorial jewellery, your website almost certainly says “cremation ashes jewellery” or “memorial keepsakes”. Perfectly accurate. It is what the trade calls it, what your suppliers call it, and what your competitors call it.

The daughter holding an urn is typing “ring with dad’s ashes in it”.

If you run a natural burial ground, your site says “natural burial” and “ashes interment”. The family is searching “bury ashes under a tree” or “woodland burial near me”.

If you do memorial firework displays, you have optimised for “memorial fireworks”. They are searching “put ashes in fireworks” because that is what he said at the pub eight years ago and nobody has forgotten it.

The words are close enough that you would never spot the problem by looking at your own site. They are far enough apart that Google shows them somebody else.

I made exactly this mistake myself

I should be straight about this, because it would be a bit rich to write the above and pretend I got it right.

I built a directory of post-cremation memorial services. I spent months researching and adding companies, writing descriptions, sorting everything into categories. Then I looked at what I had actually named those categories.

“Eco Memorials.” “Digital and Legacy.” “Art and Glass.” “Aerial Scattering.”

Not one person grieving has ever typed “eco memorials” into Google. I had built the whole thing in the language of the industry I was trying to translate. My page headings said “Browse Memorial Services”, which tells a search engine nothing at all about what is on the page.

The two categories I had happened to name in plain English, “Scattering at Sea” and “Memorial Diamonds”, were the only two performing properly. That was the moment it clicked.

So I rewrote the lot. “Woodland Burials, Memorial Trees and Eco Urns” instead of “Eco Memorials”. “Jewellery Made with Ashes” instead of “Jewellery and Keepsakes”. Same businesses, same information, different words on the door.

If it can happen to somebody whose entire job is thinking about this, it can happen to anyone.

How to market a memorial business that families can actually find

Read your homepage as a stranger would. Not as the person who built it. As somebody whose father died three weeks ago, who has been handed a container of ashes, and who has no idea that your entire industry exists. Does your opening line use a word they would say out loud? If the first sentence contains “bespoke”, “keepsake” or “memorialisation”, it probably does not.

Write down the phrases your customers actually use. You already have these. They are sitting in your inbox and in your memory of phone calls. The way people describe what they want in a first enquiry is precisely what they typed into Google half an hour earlier. Use those phrases as your page headings.

Sort out your Google Business Profile. Most small businesses in this sector have one half-filled-in and never touch it. Complete every field, add real photographs, pick the right category, and keep the description in plain language. It is free and it is often the first thing a family sees.

Ask for reviews, carefully. Reviews matter enormously here because families are trusting a stranger with something irreplaceable, and they have no way to judge you otherwise. Asking is delicate but not impossible. Leave it a few weeks, keep it short, make it easy, and never chase. One line in a follow-up email is enough.

Be findable when they don’t know what they want. This is the part people miss. The single most common thing I hear is not a specific wish at all. It is “I don’t care where my ashes go, I won’t be here, the kids can do whatever they want with them.”

Think about what that means for the family. No instructions. No starting point. They are not searching for you, because they do not know you exist. They are searching “what to do with ashes” and then browsing whatever comes back, discovering options as they go.

Those families will never find you through a targeted search. They find you by being shown a list of possibilities they had not considered. Which means directories, guides, comparison pages and articles are not a nice extra in this trade. For a large share of your potential customers they are the only route in.

Build referral relationships. Word of mouth does most of the work in this sector, and it moves between businesses as much as between families. Funeral directors, celebrants, hospices and crematoria all speak to families at exactly the moment your service becomes relevant. Most of them would happily point people your way if they knew you existed and trusted what you do. That is a conversation and a coffee, not a marketing budget.

What I would not bother with

Paid search advertising on grief-related terms is expensive and easy to get badly wrong. The keywords are competitive, the clicks cost more than you would expect, and a poorly worded ad in this context does real damage to how you are perceived. If you have money to spend, spend it on making your own website say the right words first.

I would also skip anything that requires you to post constantly on social media. It has a place for credibility, so that somebody checking you out finds a page that looks alive rather than abandoned. It is not where these customers come from.

The short version

Your customers do not know your industry exists. They know a sentence someone said to them, or they know nothing at all and are looking for ideas.

Meet them at both. Use their words on your website so the ones with a specific wish can find you, and make sure you appear in the guides and directories that the ones with no instructions are browsing.

Celebrated Lives is an independent UK directory of post-cremation memorial services. Listings are free, and businesses can manage their own entry. If you provide a service that helps families do something meaningful with ashes, you can add yourself at celebratedlives.co.uk.