Understanding Paid vs Map vs Organic Listings on Google

For my wife’s birthday, I took her out to eat at a Mexican restaurant, but we don’t eat out a lot, so I wasn’t sure where to go. The first thing I did to find a good restaurant was to pull out my phone and Google “Mexican food near me”. I then looked into a few of the options that popped up; I visited their websites, I checked out their menus, and I read a couple of reviews. A few minutes later, I had chosen a restaurant and we were heading out the door.

Does that process sound familiar to you? Have you ever been looking for a good business, jumped on Google, done a little research, and then made your decision? If you have, then you fit in with 87% of all consumers who turn to Google to find local businesses.

While the funeral home industry has held onto its roots of old school word of mouth and relying on repeat families longer than most industries, more and more families are turning to Google to find funeral homes. In fact, we’ve used Google’s database to do research on hundreds of cities in the country, and we’ve found that in most cities, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people who turn to Google every month looking for a funeral home in their area.

As the trend continues to grow, it is becoming more and more important for funeral homes to be visible on Google. I’ve talked with dozens of multi-generational funeral home owners who have neglected their presence on Google and have slowly shrunk in market share over the past 5 to 10 years to the point that they are now doing half or one-third the amount of calls as they were doing previously. So how does a funeral home stay or become relevant on Google? In this article, I’ll explain the basic types of listing on Google and how to work on each one.

There are 3 major types of listings on Google: Paid, Map, and Organic Listings.

Paid Listings

Paid listings or PPC (pay-per-click) are when a business pays Google to have its business show up at the top of the search results. For example, you can run a PPC campaign so that each time a family in your community searches “Funeral home near me” on Google, your paid listing shows up at the top. You pay Google a small fee for putting your listing at the top.

To the right are some examples of paid listings when I searched “funeral home near me”.

The biggest benefit of paid listings is that they show up at the very top of the search results. Most people only look at a couple of options before making a decision, so showing up at the top ensures that you are taken into consideration. When I was choosing a Mexican food restaurant for my wife’s birthday, I researched the top 3 or 4 options and made my decision. I didn’t research 10 or 12 of them, and I definitely didn’t scroll down to the 20th option available and look into that one. Paid listings (a.k.a. PPC) can be very powerful because they leapfrog you to the top positions.

The other main benefit of paid listings is that you can get results pretty much right away. It does take several months to fully optimize your campaigns, but you can start getting decent results as soon as your campaigns go live.

In addition to getting results quickly, you can also target any place you want. For example, we have a client who lives in a small town 45 minutes away from a big city. Since his town is small with not a lot of calls, we target the big city and generate calls from families that normally would have no way of finding him.

The biggest downside of paid listings is in their name. They’re “paid”. Meaning you have to pay Google each time someone clicks on your listing (there is a different kind of paid listing called LSA or Google Guaranteed, where you pay for each lead instead of each click, but the concept is similar).

If done poorly, paid listings (or PPC) can be a great way to light your money on fire and never see it again. Costs can add up quickly without generating any meaningful results. However, if done properly, paid listings can be a great way to legally print money, where for every $1 that you put in, you get $3,4,5…or even $10 back.

Map Listings

Paid listings show up at the top, but right below them are map listings.

You may have heard the buzz phrase “3-pack” before. The 3-pack is the businesses that show up in the top 3 spots of the map listings (as shown in the image). To access the other map listings, a family has to click into “More businesses” below the 3-pack and then scroll down to find them. The majority of clicks and calls go to the business in the 3-pack, so it’s important to try to show up in the three pack in as many places as possible.

A huge benefit of the map listings is that they are free; unlike paid listings, each time you get a click or call from your map listing, you do not have to pay Google. Not only are they free, but map listings show up above organic website listings, meaning they get much more traffic, visibility, and business.

While map listings are free, it’s not as easy to show up at the top of map listings as it is to run paid listing campaigns. Google takes dozens of factors into consideration when deciding where to rank your funeral home on the map listings. Some of the factors are out of your control, such as your funeral home’s physical location, but there are many factors that you can optimize to get your funeral home into the 3-pack of the map listings.

Organic Listings

Organic listings show up below paid listings and map listings.

Another common buzz phrase in the marketing world is “SEO”. SEO stands for search engine optimization and technically refers to how to make your business’s website show up in the top results on the “organic listings” (as shown in the image).

Similar to Map listings, organic listings are free, so once you are ranking well, you can get a lot of traffic without having to pay Google. However, for funeral homes, your organic list rankings are less important than your paid listings and map listings. This is simply because paid listings and map listings show up above the organic listings. So the number of families who make it all the way down to the organic listings is much less than those who see the paid and map listings. Nonetheless, in the long run, it will still pay off to invest in improving your organic listings.

The average human attention span is estimated to be 8.25 seconds, which is shorter than a goldfish’s attention span. Therefore, it is important to show up at the top of Google listings so families can find you before they lose attention and settle for a different funeral home. Taqueria 27 (the Mexican food restaurant we went to) earned my business because I was able to find them when I needed them. If they were not one of the first few options that I found, we likely would not have gone to them and would have found another restaurant to go to.

At FirstCall Marketing, we recommend that all funeral homes work on building their “Triple Threat”. The “Triple Threat” is when your funeral home shows up at the top of (1) the paid listings, (2) the map listings, and (3) the organic listings. Showing up well in all 3 of these areas on Google will drastically improve the amount of visibility and phone calls that your funeral home receives.