Hi
everyone, my name is Kurt and I’m the Director of Marketing Services at
OurChurch.Com. My job is to get websites listed in the search
engines
and get them to rank well for the targeted keywords. Paul
Steinbrueck
and I were discussing the blog the other day and thought, “We’ve been
talking about how to have a useful and effective church website, but
how effective can a website be if people can’t find it?” So we
decided
I should make my blogging debut with an article about how to best get
people to find your church online.
For more and more people, the quest for a local
church begins with a web search. This includes people in your area,
people about to move into your area, new believers looking for their
first church, people who have drifted from God and are looking for a
way to reconnect with Him, and people who are seeking God for the first
time. In fact, in many places people are more likely to search
online
for a church than they are to use offline guides like the phone
book.
This can be a great advantage for you. After all, in a phone book
you
are just a name, number and address. If you cough up the
additional
fee, you may even have a small ad. But with your website, a
visitor
can learn everything about what your church has to offer, where you
are, when services are and even see the people of the church or listen
to a sermon. You can’t put all of that in a phone book!
Think Locally.
When considering what terms you want to show up for in the
search
engines, think about the geographical area you serve. Sure it’s
temping to want to become the number one search engine result for
“Baptist church” or “Lutheran church,” but what good would that really
do? After all, when a person finds your church by searching for
“Catholic Church,” what are the chances they are within driving
distance of your town? But if your website is number one for
“Non-denominational church in Statesboro, Georgia,” the person
searching for that term is probably in the Statesboro area and can come
to your church the following week. Also, Google, MSN and Yahoo!
all
now have a local search feature, which is becoming more and more
popular. So being well established locally in the search engines
is
becoming more and more important.
So what do we do?
Here are some helpful tips to ensure people looking for a
church online can find your church:
- Put the location and denomination of your church
in your website’s Title tag. For example, “First
Presbyterian Church of Paduka, Kansas” This is an important part of
ranking well for local search terms.
- Put the location, denomination, and other
defining information in your website’s description tag.
Here you want to include the same info as the Title tag, but you can
also include other close cities and your county. In large metro
areas
especially, it is not uncommon to have parishioners from several of the
surrounding metro area cities. Many search engines display the
description tag in their search listings, so be sure to make the
description readable, and include descriptive information about the
church that will catch people’s attention. It shouldn’t just be a
jumble of keywords and phrases, but very concise, keyword-filled
sentences. After all, people will read it.
- Put your location, denomination and other local
search terms on your homepage.
This will further help you rank well for the local searches. This
information should be presented to your visitors on the page in a way
that makes sense and is helpful to your visitors as well as the search
engines.
- Register with the major directories and search
engines.
Don’t just wait for the search engines to find you; that could take
months! Registering with the search engines can greatly speed up
when
you will listed in the search engines.. Also, some search engines
and
directories do not search for websites, but rather wait for you to
register with them. If you’re not sure how to do this, there are
companies like OCC that can do search
registration for you.
- Register with Christian search engines and
directories.
Many Christians prefer to use Christian search engines to support
Christian businesses and organizations and to avoid the more worldly
things you often stumble across in the major search engines.
Unlike
many of the major search engines, who search to find websites to list,
nearly all Christian search engines and directories require you to
register with them. This can be a challenging and time-consuming
task,
which is why OCC developed a Christian
search registration service.
- Contact city and county website managers and
request links. Nearly all city and county websites list
the churches in their district. This is another place people go
to find a church.
- Contact denomination and association website
managers and request links.
Even if you aren’t ranking very well in the search engines you can
still lead people to your website by getting a link to your local
church on your denomination or parent organization’s website.
Some
people will search for the specific denomination of the church they
want to attend and then use the denomination’s official website to find
a local church. This will not only help people find your church,
but
will make your denomination’s website more helpful to people.
- Put your website address on your church’s outdoor
sign.
Today many people want to find information about groups before they
have to make contact with them. They’d rather look you up than
just
pop in. Putting your website’s address on your church sign allows
them
to become more familiar with your church. It also can give people
information during the hours when no one is actually at the church to
give it to them.
- Put your website’s address on your phonebook
listing and in any advertising you do.
This again gives people a chance to learn more about you and for you to
convey a lot more information than you can in the phone listing or
advertising alone. Also, many phone books are also online now, so
their link to your website will help you to rank better for local
searches.
- Finally, avoid search engine tricks to rank well.
I’ve seen a lot of webmasters try to trick the search engines into
ranking them well. The webmaster isn’t necessarily trying to be
deceptive. Maybe they don’t want to display certain information
to
their visitors, but they know it would be good to put the information
on their site to rank well in the search engines. Or they are
just
trying to be creative and don’t realize it’s a “no-no.” So, no
hiding
text behind graphics, making the text the same color as the website’s
background, making the text so small no one can read it, or simply
putting a bunch of keywords on your page for the sake of putting a
bunch of keywords on your page. The search engine people know
about
these tricks and don’t like them. Simply put, don’t do it.
Just
include the important keywords in a natural way that is helpful to both
your visitors and the search engines.
Search engines are a great way to help you reach many people
with
whom you may not otherwise come in contact. The tips above will
help
get people to your website. The rest is up to you. Of
course, once a
visitor finds your site you want to be sure it’s welcoming
and provides the information a visitor is looking for like service
times, a map, beliefs, Sunday school/child care options, and other info
about your church.
Have a great day and God Bless!
Kurt Steinbrueck
Director of Marketing Services
OurChurch.Com
