The situation
A good website that assistants could not quite read
Elliotts Funerals serves three communities from three locations, on a website we built and host. When we ran our visibility audit across the funeral homes we look after in August 2026, Elliotts scored 61 out of 100. The gaps were not design or content. They were the things machines need: a clear statement of who the firm is, where it is, what it does and how long it has served, in a form Google and AI assistants can read.
What we did
One block of structured data, added properly
- Wrote the entity block: the correct schema type for a funeral home (there is no FuneralHome type, so we use ProfessionalService with the right additional type), each location, service area, founding date, associations
- Emitted it through the site’s one schema emitter, with the cache flushed so crawlers saw it the same day
- Kept the offer markup honest: only prices the pages actually display
- Re-audited the next day
In our words
Nothing on the page changed for a family. Everything changed for a machine reading it. That is the whole lesson.
Gareth Bissland
Digital Strategy and Technical Lead, HumanKind
What changed
61 to 79, and a fleet-wide rollout
The score moved from 61 to 78.95 in one day, almost all of it from that one block. We are now rolling the same pass out across the 22 funeral homes we look after in New Zealand, measured against a control group so the result is evidence, not anecdote, and publishing what we learn. If you want to know where your own site stands, the audit is free.
