MAKE YOUR CHURCH WEBSITE SEARCH FRIENDLY
Helping people find your church should be one of your priorities as a pastor or leader.
So how do we accomplish this? Well one of the main ways people will find your church, is locating it on an online search. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways people can find your church but having an online presence that search engines can pick up will be one of the ways people locate your church. It is said that over 90% of online experiences begin on a search engine. That means if someone is visiting your city for the first time trying to locate a church, or a member has invited a friend most likely they are going to go online to confirm your service times and location before they show up in person. Because of this you want your site to be easy to find on Google and other search engines. I want to give you a few simple suggestions that will help your website be more accessible and easier to find online.
The first things you should do is sign into the Google my Business account. You should be able to set up your business by clicking the link below and verifying your business through a mailed postcard. Check and make sure that all your information is entered on Google my Business. This will include all the basic information about you. You want to make sure your name, address, and phone number are listed and that you have at least two good photos you can add to your account. This step alone will help people find you when they are searching for you on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9wQpkxA8ds
https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
2. Post High Quality Photos of your church onto your My Google business account and Social Media.
You will want to post photos that show the culture and atmosphere of your church. Your unique photos are what sets your church apart from other places. It’s the people that count so as much as possible try not to use any stock photos but rather capture great moments at your church.
So many cell phone cameras’ can take great pictures and if you look around there’s often one person in your church that has the skills and will be willing to take pictures if you ask them. If you’re not sure who to ask to take good pictures take a look at your members social media and you’ll find out not only who’s interested in photos, but who can take great photos. You can also always hire a photographer if you don’t have anyone and in many cases this is the best option. This small investment will give you plenty of great photos you can use on your social media, website and for events. You want casual smiling pictures of different aspects of your church. Try to capture photos of each main area of your church. – Children’s ministry, families, worship etc.
3. Gather High Quality Reviews
You can improve your rankings by having high quality reviews. Think about how often you will look online and search great food near me. We do this so often that we don’t even think about it. We ask Google to tell us where the best food is and it shows us results based on reviews people have given. Through your google my business account you can create a custom link where people can give a review of your church. You can also ask some of your key leaders to help give a review. They can be honest and tell why they enjoy going to your church. If you’re unable to locate the review generator in the my business account you can take advantage of the one that church marketing university offers.
Church marketing university. – Free resources. – Google review link generator.
https://churchmarketinguniversity.com/church-google-review-link-generator/
4. On site Key Words
You may have heard of SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. One of the key things you can do is make sure the words and phrases people are searching for are on your site. If you’re a church in Oakville, then you should have that on your site. Making sure you have the keywords written on your webpage ensures that when Google is looking for a site that matches someone’s search, your site will come up. If you have someone that knows how to install a plugin on your website you can download this one to insert your keywords in the background of your site. Your city, state, and keyword are an absolute must in the title tag. Check out these two popular plugins for adding keywords on your website.
Seo Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/meta-tag-manager/ or you can install a paid version which will simplify your onsite meta tags. Install the word press plug in Yoast Seo plug In
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
5. YouTube
YouTube is the worlds second largest search network and its also owned by Google. When people search in Google often YouTube results will show up in that search so if your church is not posting its sermons to YouTube that would be a good first step. The next thing you should think about is making sure your titles will correspond to what people are actually searching for on the internet. Its probably not often that people will be searching for your exact church name but they are looking for answers. Nona Jones in her book from Social Media to Social Ministry says how your videos are titled and categorized is highly important because people use YouTube to learn how to do things or why things are done in a certain way. She suggests instead of posting a sermon on forgiveness with the title Forgiveness December 31st 2019 worship service you should post how do I forgive someone who has hurt me? Making these small changes to your titles will help people find your content when they are looking for answers to certain problems or issues in their lives.
6. Link Building
Part of having your website come up in the search is trust. These search sites are giving a reference. Think about when you have been asked to give a reference for someone. You realize that their experience with that person is highly affected by what you put in your reference. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Why would these search engines trust your site?” Well one way to answer this question is to build trust by them seeing your site referenced by other people. This is called link building and it is something that can really help your website come up when people are searching online. I have broken it down to two parts, one is external links and the other is internal links. For external links you are going to want to start by doing the following. Take a moment and search “church in your city” on Google. You will see several sites pop up that are linked to a third party sites. The good news is, most if not all of these, will let you list your church or organization and list your information for free. So do yourself a favor and search online for your catch phrase. Make sure you check out the first four – five pages and see what additional sites come up. Then mark them down and begin working on making sure your site is listed on each of these sites. This first step in link building will be to make sure your site is up on bigger websites that gives you clout online The sites that will most likely come up are yelp, yellow pages or a local church or organizational directory but take note of any other unique or localized ones that come in your search. A few other ideas for link building is asking your denomination to list you on their website. Jacek Obolewicz Director of TechChurch gives this suggestion for link building “Reach out to other organizations to see if you can write an article for them and include your website.” This simple suggestion could be a key to help people to not only find your site, but connect with the vision and heart of your church. This can be done in different ways by sharing about a mission trip or giving a testimonial about the organization or writing an article for any group you are associated with. It could also be an article that a local online blogging site or newspaper might be interested in posting. The main thing is you are helping to build up credential and clout online by your site being referenced multiple times. The first time I ever heard of Elevation church which now has over 1 million subscribers was not from searching largest church or fastest growing church but it was reading an article about generous churches. The article provided a link to the various churches and that’s how I started to know about this church that is now known around the world. Your link building can be done naturally and through relationship with those that you are already partnering with.
The last thing you can do with link building is add internal links If your website is producing content, one thing you can do is link back to older articles or reference past sermons. You will often see this done on sites, but may not have noticed why it’s done. One reason is that it helps with search engine optimization. Try to include 3-4 internal links to older articles when you publish a new ones on your site. This can be done slowly as you add new content to your site.
