Service Corporation International: Scaling Digital Performance
In a deeply personal industry like deathcare, digital marketing isn't just about clicks and rankings, it’s about being there with absolute clarity and compassion when families need you most.
Service Corporation International (SCI) needed to modernize their digital presence across the board. They wanted to breathe new life into an underperforming 42-site regional SEO program, drastically lower their paid media costs, and build custom digital tools that would make a difficult planning process easier for families. By outperforming their existing agency in a head-to-head matchup, we earned the right to scale a unified, high-performing digital engine across every single one of their markets nationwide.
Industries Served
Services Delivered
The Client
Service Corporation International (SCI) is North America’s largest provider of funeral, cemetery, and cremation services, operating trusted national brands like Dignity Memorial. Their business is entirely built on trust, empathy, and world-class service during life’s most challenging moments. They provide the exceptional, deeply respectful care and beautiful facilities for families; our job was to make sure their digital footprint made finding and planning those services as seamless, transparent, and comforting as possible.
The Challenge
When you manage thousands of individual funeral homes and cemeteries across the country, digital sprawl becomes a massive headache. SCI’s digital marketing was split, inefficient, and bogged down by expensive per-market microsites that drove up their Cost Per Lead (CPL). They needed a partner who could prove they could do a better job managing their localized SEO, clean up a bloated paid search architecture, and build proprietary online tools that allowed families to explore options and estimate costs from the comfort of their homes.
The Approach
We knew we had to earn their trust with undeniable data, so we stepped into the ring and took on a head-to-head pilot before taking over the full portfolio:
- The Agency Showdown: We launched a hyper-focused SEO strategy built to go directly against the incumbent agency's 42-site program. We proved our model drove more organic traffic and qualified leads, winning the right to roll our SEO framework out to every single SCI market across the United States.
- Streamlining and Building for Conversion: We completely dismantled their messy paid media setup. We replaced hundreds of costly, individual regional microsites with scalable, high-performance landing pages that drove down ad spend while pushing lead volume up. At the same time, we sat down and built The Dignity Planner, an online planning tool alongside a custom pricing and granite-estimator system to give families instant, transparent answers.
Key Takeaways
- Consolidation Lowers the Cost to Win: You don't need a thousand scattered websites to win local search. By replacing regional microsites with a centralized, scalable landing page architecture, we drastically reduced SCI's paid media operating costs, lowered their CPC, and dropped their overall Cost Per Lead.
- Earn Trust Through Local Precision: Transitioning a massive national brand's local search presence is delicate work. Winning the initial head-to-head pilot gave us the exact blueprint needed to smoothly roll out a high-performing SEO program to all SCI markets nationwide, boosting lead volume and click-through rates (CTR) across the board.
- Helpful Digital Tools Drive Massive Revenue: When you build digital tools that actually solve a customer’s problem, the business wins. Designing and launching the transparent pricing and estimating systems on TheDignityPlanner.com directly generated over $1M+ in revenue, proving that helpfulness is the ultimate conversion strategy.