The funeral home schema checklist

What schema is, in one paragraph

Schema markup is a small block of structured text inside your pages that names things machines care about: this is a FuneralHome; its name, address, phone; its hours; its service area. Search engines and AI assistants read it directly, no interpretation needed. It never shows to visitors; it exists so nothing about you has to be guessed.

Here is what one looks like, whole. This block sits invisibly in a homepage and answers, in one place, most of what a machine wants to know:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FuneralHome",
  "name": "Cedar Lane Funeral Home",
  "telephone": "+1-555-014-2200",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "418 Cedar Lane",
    "addressLocality": "Fairview",
    "addressRegion": "OH",
    "postalCode": "45501"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday", "Sunday"],
    "opens": "00:00",
    "closes": "23:59"
  },
  "areaServed": "Fairview and surrounding counties"
}

The names and numbers are invented; the shape is real. If reading it feels technical, notice that every line is a fact you already publish somewhere — the markup just says it in the one dialect machines never misread.

The checklist

A funeral home site needs surprisingly little to be well-marked:

FuneralHome type on the homepage (not just LocalBusiness) — with name, address, phone exactly as they appear on your Google Business Profile. Geo coordinates and service area. Opening hours, including whether you answer around the clock — “available 24 hours” is a fact machines love and families need. Each obituary marked as a page about a person, with dates. And a real FAQ page — genuine answers to what families actually ask, in plain words an assistant can quote.

Taken one line at a time:

• FuneralHome, not just LocalBusiness. The generic type says “a business exists here”; the specific one says what kind. It is the difference between being findable and being findable as a funeral home — the query that matters.
• Name, address, phone — character for character. Copy them from your Google Business Profile, not from memory. The markup’s value is agreement, and agreement is exact.
• Hours, honestly. If a person answers your phone at 3 a.m., say so in the markup. “Open now” is one of the first things an assistant checks before recommending anyone for an urgent need.
• Obituaries as pages about a person. Name, birth date, death date as structured fields — the same facts the page already shows, restated for machines. Your website platform may already do this; it is worth asking.
• Services as events. A visitation on Thursday at ten, at your chapel’s address, is an event with a start time and a location — marked as one, it can surface directly when someone searches the name.
• A real FAQ page — content first, markup second. Google retired the FAQ rich result in 2026, so FAQPage markup no longer earns a special place in search. What still works is the page itself: genuine answers to what families ask — “what does cremation cost here,” “what do I do when a death happens at home” — in plain words. That question-shaped content is what an assistant quotes back, with or without the markup.

This is an afternoon of work for whoever maintains your site, and it is one-time work — the markup rides along quietly from then on, updating only when the facts do.

Consistency outranks cleverness

The markup’s job is agreement: site, Google profile, and directories all stating the same name, address, and phone, character for character. “Smith Funeral Home” in one place and “Smith Funeral Home & Cremation Services” in another splits your identity in half. Pick the canonical form and repeat it everywhere.

The exercise is worth doing on paper once. Write the exact legal-ish string you want to be known by, then hunt down every place a variant lives — the site footer, the Google profile, the state directory, the old chamber-of-commerce listing — and bring each one into line. A machine cross-checking your identity should find one spelling, one address format, one phone. Boring agreement is the whole trick; there is no clever version of it.

How to check your own site

Paste your homepage into Google’s Rich Results Test. If it reports nothing at all, your site is speaking only to humans — which, this decade, is speaking to half the room.

Two checks, ten minutes, this Monday: the Rich Results Test for what Google can lift, and the schema.org validator for whether the markup parses at all. Print what they report and hand it to whoever runs your website with this post attached. When both tools read back your name, type, address, phone, and hours without a warning, this piece of the housekeeping is done — and it stays done.

What markup won’t do

One honest note, so no vendor oversells you: schema is hygiene, not a growth lever. The best evidence we have — a 2026 study of nearly two thousand pages that added markup — found no meaningful lift in how often AI assistants cited them. Markup keeps a machine from getting you wrong; it doesn’t get you chosen. Do it because a funeral home mistaken for a florist is a real cost — not because someone promised it would put you at the top of ChatGPT. The things that actually move AI visibility are duller and harder: a complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews, and question-shaped content on your own site.