churchrelevance.com

When people Google your church, what do they find? Many churches are lucky if they can even be found using a search engine. Yet other churches have the unfortunate problem of being surrounded by numerous links of bad publicity and negative opinions.

Jim Kukral of MarketingProfs:DailyFix explains that:

Google can help determine perception by dissemination of negative reviews and commentary about your brand. I define perception as a part of marketing, not brand. In other words, I believe you cannot fully make a judgment on a brand until you experience it first-hand. Everything up until that moment of experience is marketing/perception.

In other words, bad press and negative opinions hardly affect those who have experienced your church already. However, this negativity will affect the perceptions of every potential guest that considers visiting your church.

It is the same concept discussed in Church Relevance’s April 2006 newsletter, Design is Credibility - strangers to your church will judge your church by the quality of the design and marketing materials used to reach them and by third party opinions including Google search results.

A few tips on how to avoid negative search results include:

1. Watch what comes out of your mouth. You still need to stick to your guns when it comes to God’s Word and expect some persecution for preaching and living what it says. However, don’t say something stupid or offensive from the pulpit because you wanted a few laughs from the congregation or because you decided to go off on a rabbit trail of personal opinion that doesn’t have to do with Scripture. There are churches which have made those mistakes and consequently suffer some bad publicity at the top of their Google searches.
2. Emphasize the good. Learn the art of public relations and send out press releases whenever your church is doing something newsworthy. It is a great way to build awareness in your community about your church and even attract a few new guests, but good publicity can also create some great news stories to be found the next time someone Googles your church.
3. Improve your website behind the scenes. A good website is not just in the aesthetics but in the coding as well. Search engines read HTML text so do not expect a 100% Flash website to be easily found. CSS websites (a type of HTML code) are very search engine friendly, and a well-coded CSS website will greatly help your church climb to possibly the first listing in search results.
4. Consider some Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is as Wikipedia describes “is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.” This can get very expensive if you hire someone. However, if you are already a little web savvy, read The Ultimate SEO Checklist by SitePoint to begin learning how to do-it-yourself.

Also, keep in mind that different search engines give different results. Check out all the major ones. It’s not the end of the world if you have bad search engine rankings or even negative publicity. It happens. But if you can do something about it, do it.