Sereni runs over 50 funeral homes across Belgium. While arranging funerals is the heart of the business, they don’t stop there. They also support local homes with tools and services that make their business easier behind the scenes.
We’ve been working with Sereni for a few years now. The goal? Build a shared digital setup that houses all of their current and future websites. Our solution was practical: a set of modular, brand-aligned themes that each funeral home can tweak to suit their style. Color palette? Layout? They decide; within a clear framework that keeps the Sereni brand intact.
On top of that, Sereni gives its local teams access to central content, like blog articles, that can be shared directly on their own sites. No extra writing or uploading. Just useful, relevant material, ready to go.
Funeral homes websites evolution
Our collaboration started in 2021. 4 years, 54 websites live and hundreds of advertising campaigns later, Sereni is stronger than ever.
Setting up the foundation for advertising
When it comes to advertising, we’ve built the foundation on focus and fairness. Google Search is our main playground. Because it’s where people go when they need answers, fast, and that’s exactly where every Sereni funeral homes needs to show up.
Instead of lumping everything into one giant account, we give each funeral home their own dedicated Google Ads setup. That’s not just a nice gesture – it’s strategic. It gives us room to adjust budgets, targeting, and messaging based on local needs without getting buried under a tangled mess of campaigns.
Avoiding cannibalisation: smart structure, clear boundaries
With dozens of funeral homes active under the Sereni name, the last thing we want is for them to compete with each other online. That’s why we’ve designed a campaign structure that keeps overlap to a minimum and results sharp.
Local services campaign
Each funeral home gets a campaign targeting services + city (e.g. “funeral home Ghent”). These ads only appear in the local area relevant to that home. This makes sure their visibility stays strong in the places they actually serve and doesn’t interfere with nearby locations.
Brand campaign
This campaign runs nationally but targets only the undertaker’s own brand name. No city names, no generic terms, just pure brand protection. It helps keep competitors from hijacking their name, without stepping on anyone else’s toes.
Location-focused campaign
These campaigns also run across Belgium, but the keywords are all city-specific (e.g. “funeral home Antwerp”). Since each city is treated as a unique search term, and we’re careful about how we assign these, there’s no internal competition between funeral homes. Everyone gets their own slice of the map.
Google my business campaign
This one’s all about leveraging the power of each funeral home’s Google My Business profile. We optimize listings with up-to-date info, regular posts, and targeted local offers, which boosts local search rankings and engagement directly from Google Maps and local search results. This campaign ensures the homes stay front and center in their neighborhoods, enhancing trust and visibility in the moments that matter most.
Using the map gaps as opportunities
Speaking of slices and maps: we didn’t just use the campaign structure to avoid overlap, we also used the gaps to our advantage. In cities where Sereni doesn’t currently have a funeral home, we spotted a clear opportunity.
These “white spots” on the map became prime real estate to promote Sereni’s additional services. Think funeral insurance, flower arrangements, pre-paid plans, and even consolation gifts. By running targeted campaigns in these uncovered areas, we’re building awareness for the wider Sereni offering, and planting seeds in regions that might one day be part of the network.
Handling budgets as pros
Budgets aren’t based on gut feeling or guesswork. We assign them using hard data: the population size of the area a funeral home serves, how big their team is, and how much business they can realistically take on.
This way, we’re not flooding a small team with more leads than they can handle. Or starving a bigger one with too little. It’s balanced, fair, and rooted in logic. No special treatment, no politics. Just a smart system that makes sure every euro works at the right scale for the right team.
High level wins
In two years we went from “nice local presence” to nation‑wide visibility: impressions are now running at roughly 8x the FY22 level, and the current year is already pacing ahead of last year with months still on the clock.
Clicks kept step early (about 4x growth FY22 → FY24) and then levelled off as we tightened match types and Quality Scores. Six‑figure click counts are now the norm, not the outlier.
We jumped from a few hundred completed actions in the first year to well north of six‑thousand last year . FY25 is set to edge that record again.
What the ratios tell us: even as we opened the funnel wider (CTR naturally dipped once we cranked up reach), the conversion rate kept improving. In plain English: we’re finding more people, but we’re still sending the right ones to the undertakers’ doors.
Budgets scale on hard data, not on “feels,” so smaller homes aren’t drowning in leads they can’t service, and bigger teams aren’t left hungry. That balance is why the whole network keeps rising without anyone stepping on a neighbour’s toes.
Organic efforts
Crucially, instead of letting all the funeral homes compete for the same broad keywords – which would be like stepping on each other’s toes – we smartly optimized for hyper-local keywords unique to each location.
It’s like carving out exclusive territories where each home could dominate without internal competition. This approach turned what could have been a chaotic keyword free-for-all into a smooth, strategic win-win that boosted rankings for everyone in their own neighborhoods.
We zeroed in on local SEO for every funeral home, ensuring they showed up right where it counts: in front of their own communities. This wasn’t a set-it-and-forget-it deal; quarterly audits kept our strategy fresh and focused, backed by actionable proposals. The client was fully on board with implementing improvements, and that collaboration made a serious impact.
The results speak for themselves: organic visibility and engagement didn’t just tick upward, we talk about incremental growth. What started as steady growth turned into a powerful, sustained surge of traffic and clicks. This wasn’t a one-off spike; it was a consistent wave of progress fueled by the client’s readiness to act on insights.
Four years in, this isn’t just a marketing success story. It’s a system that works. We’ve helped Sereni go from a scattered local presence to a coordinated, national digital force. Every piece of the puzzle (ads, SEO, content, structure, budget) was built to scale without causing chaos.
