Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss the future of church websites over a video conference with Cleve Persinger and the team at The Chapel (Libertyville, IL). I spent some time sharing my thoughts on effective SEO church marketing, and Cleve was kind enough to archive the talk for your enjoyment.
[pardon the rocky audio]
To sum it up, optimize your church website content by using the keywords that are most often searched by the people your are called to reach. You can research these keywords with Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
For Discussion:
- What is your church marketing SEO strategy?
SEO is SEO. 90% of the ebooks and websites say the same thing.
The key to effective SEO is to figure out what keywords you want to rank for. Who cares if you rank #1 for friendly church mycity if nobody ever does a search for “friendly church mycity.”
Track your webstats and find out how people get to your site. Not only will this tell you what to compete for, it tells you what people are looking for.
This is basic web marketing that the church is now doing via connection cards and surveys but webstats are invaluable.
One more (off topic thing). Track your sermon downloads and take note of the titles. You will see a trend in what people want to learn about. Don’t track your downloads? Its like having people complete connection cards and throwing them away after you count them.
Good advice. I agree very much with what you’re saying. We try hard to optimize our site for a wide variety of keywords, in the hopes that people will find that our church fills a need that they didn’t realize a church could even do — children’s sports, fitness, music programs, etc. In the last year, users have found use using about 17,000 different search queries. It’s wonderful.
Related: The Chapel has a solid site, but a few quick fixes could make a BIG difference on their overall SEO:
– Fix their canonicalization (www vs. non-www)
– No H1 tags anywhere
– Title tags should include city/state. Most queries churches want to capture are location based.
Kent, I really like what you had to say here. I especially liked that you did not emphasize optimizing for “church” and your city which is about as far as most seo for church websites goes these days.
One thing I would add to what you said is that churches should be focusing on telling the stories of the people in their congregations. These stories then become effective content to bring searchers to and natural candidates for seo.
I worked on a church website years ago (which alas, is no longer available online) in which we profiled five different people in the congregation (the goal was to eventually profile everyone) - a teenager with leukemia, a former member of an Indianapolis 500 championship race team, a former devotee of Eastern religion, a man suffering from hepatitis-C, and an actor/musician whose life and personality was very relevant for the culture of our area. We created profiles, interview transcripts, and listings of their favorite links. Eventually, we planned to include video snippets of interviews as well. With large sections of the church website devoted to specific topics, our hope was to use these sections to draw people to the site through search engines.
Those sections could also be used in other forms of marketing. For example, we thought about renting a mailing list of people in our geographic area who had subscribed to a popular auto racing magazine and mailing them an invitation to visit the section about the person who had been a member of the Indianapolis 500 racing team. Once you have the content, there are lots of possibilities.
Thanks again for focusing on this important subject.
Frank, I really like the profile/stories idea. I’ve been thinking along these lines but hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to do. I think this is going to be a direction I’m going to be pursuing very soon. Thanks for sharing!
SEO is definitely important for churches. I still think the priority should be to target keywords used by people searching for churches.
When a person searches, they are only going to click on those search listings that they think will provide them with the information they’re looking for. So, if someone is searching for “church in your town” you want your church to be at the top of the listings.
There’s nothing wrong with targeting phrases relevant to the community like the local fair or convention center, but if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to provide information that is helpful to fair-goers or convention attendees. If you don’t then people will not click to your site. Or if they do, they will quickly leave because it’s not helping them.
They key is, don’t try to bait-and-switch searchers. Provide great relevant content that searchers are looking for.
Am enjoying reading your posts. Thanks.
Tim
Hi,
I’m on the web ministry team at Lebanon Church of West Mifflin, PA - near Pittsburgh. I actually the person who started this topic on webmasterworld back in 2008. Since then, I’ve taken much of the knowledge of that thread plus other research that I’ve done, and applied it to our church website with great success. To help other churches and Christian organizations further their online ministries, I have created a webinar and Powerpoint presentation outlining the techniques that I utilized to increase traffic to our church website.
In this webinar, learn how to build links, utilize keywords, and take advantage of various search engine optimization strategies. Click here to view the Webinar (6 part series) on Youtube. Click here to download the Powerpoint PDF version of the document from our website. I hope that you find these resources to be useful and encourage you to check back at our website, http://www.lebanonpc.org for more free technical resources and information regarding our events, programs, and ministries.
Hope this helps!
God Bless