If you have ever asked a developer to "add schema" to a funeral home website, there is a fair chance they went looking for a FuneralHome type and, finding none, used LocalBusiness and moved on. That is understandable. It is also why so many funeral websites tell machines almost nothing useful about what they are.
This post is the fix. It is written for the person who looks after your website, and for funeral directors who want to know what they are asking for.
The gap in the vocabulary
Schema.org is the shared vocabulary search engines and AI assistants use to understand what a page is about. It has types for dentists, plumbers, florists and car washes. A FuneralHome type was proposed in 2014 and rejected, and it has never been added.
So there is no exact word for what you are. The generic fallback, LocalBusiness, is true but says nothing. A florist is also a LocalBusiness.
What to use instead
The correct pattern is a specific type plus an "additional type" that points at a definition machines already know:
@type: ProfessionalServiceadditionalType: the Product Ontology entry for funeral home, and the Wikidata entity
Q1466031 ("funeral home")
That combination says: a professional service business, and specifically a funeral home, in the terms Wikipedia and the knowledge graphs use. It is unambiguous, it validates, and it is what we now put on every site we look after.
Then the fields that actually separate you from the firm down the road:
- name, and one name only, matching your title tag and your Google Business Profile
- address for every location, with the postcode, and areaServed for the suburbs
and towns you cover
- telephone, the number a family should call now
- foundingDate: the year you started serving families
- memberOf: your association memberships
- sameAs: your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, any directory listing
- openingHours if you keep them, and a note that you answer calls around the clock if
you do
One block, on the home page, emitted once.
What we measured when we did it
In August 2026 we ran our visibility audit across the funeral homes we look after. One of them, a three-location firm on a site we had built, scored 61 out of 100. The design was fine, the content was fine. It had no entity block.
We wrote one, added it through the site's schema plugin in an afternoon, flushed the page cache so crawlers saw it, and re-audited the next day: 78.95. The same pass is now rolling out across the 22 funeral homes in that fleet, with a control group of sites we are deliberately leaving untouched, so that when we say "this moved the number" we can show it. The case study has the detail.
Two honest caveats. Google documents how it uses structured data; how AI assistants use it is less documented, and we say so. And a good score on an audit is not a family choosing you. It is the machine being able to tell them you exist.
Four rules we follow, and you should too
One emitter per site. If your SEO plugin prints schema and a second plugin also prints schema, you now have two conflicting descriptions of your firm. Pick one. We use SEOPress across our fleet, and we switch off everything else.
Never mark up a price the page does not show. It is tempting to put your prices in the structured data and keep them off the visible page. Search engines treat that as deceptive, and it is. Offer markup only for prices a family can see on the page.
Events only with a real date and time. A funeral notice with a confirmed service is an event. A tribute page with no service date is not, and marking it up as one produces nonsense in search results.
Match your names. The name in your schema, your title tag, your Google Business Profile and your Facebook page should be identical. One firm we audited used three variants across its own site. Pick one.
If your website is on WordPress
Your SEO plugin can carry the entity block; SEOPress and most of the others have a place for custom JSON-LD. Turn on structured data output first (in SEOPress the master switch is off by default), paste the block, then clear every cache your host runs. If your site uses our free Funeral Suite plugin for pricing packages and staff, the data for Offer and Person markup is already structured and ready to emit.
If you would rather someone did this for you, it is the first thing we do in our SEO and AI visibility service, and the audit will tell you whether you need it.
The block, as a starting point
A minimal example, with placeholder values. Replace every value with your own, validate it with Google's Rich Results Test, and remove anything you cannot honestly claim.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "ProfessionalService",
"additionalType": [
"http://www.productontology.org/id/Funeral_home",
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1466031"
],
"name": "Your Funeral Home",
"url": "https://www.yourfuneralhome.example/",
"telephone": "+64 3 000 0000",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "1 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Town",
"addressRegion": "Region",
"postalCode": "0000",
"addressCountry": "NZ"
},
"areaServed": ["Town", "Nearby Town"],
"foundingDate": "1952",
"memberOf": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand" },
"sameAs": ["https://www.facebook.com/yourfuneralhome"]
}