Did you know that 17 million people search the internet for information on a church last month?  If you do not have an internet presence you will loose potential members.

Google Places is the best way to reach people who are looking for a church.  What is Google Places?  Places is a local directory that shows local listings.  Places such as your barber, favorite restaurant, hotel and church all have a Google Places listing.  The odds are real good that Google has already created a Places page for your church.  When someone searches for a business Google usually knows were they are located and serves up local results in addition to the national search results.

Here is a partial list of the number of people who searched for various words last month:

Search Term	Number of searches per month
Methodist Church	1,220,000
Methodist	2,740,000
Christ Church	1,500,000
Baptist Church	4,090,000
Find a church	18,100

We can't tell exactly what people were thinking, but we do know they are searching.  Sadly less than 10% of churches have claimed their listing on Google and updated their information and without relevant information people will quickly move onto the next site.

Google Places is THE best way to reach people who are going online to find a church.  Watch the video below and if you want more information, click on this link and I'll see you on the next page.

Facebook

If you have set up a Facebook fan page and are making regular posts Google will index this information so when someone does a search your information will show up.  When you post to Facebook make sure you list the church and address along with the information. 

For most churches Internet marketing and your website go together.  It is your website they will generally find and visit first so a little planning will go a long way.  If you are looking at putting up your first website or changing your website set down your goals before even starting set it up.
I think that a church website should include the following:

• Good design
• SEO (Search engine optimization) friendly
• Current content
• Videos and pictures
• A calendar of events
• Links to other sites that are part of the church (youth, etc.)
• A way to easily keep content current

Books have been written on several of these subjects but I'm going to give you the express tour.

Good Design - It doesn't have to be stunning but a good clean functional design will help people find what they are looking for.  I personally do not recommend that most churches design their own website.  Unless you are big enough to have someone on staff all your information will have to go through one person before it gets on the web.  This generally causes a bottleneck and what you end up with is a nice design that is not kept up.  Every week you are going to have content that needs to change and the more people that can access the site and make changes the better your site will be.

The second is unless you are hiring an experienced web designer who understands SEO you'll end up with a nice site that no one visits.  That's a problem with to many churches, let's not make the same mistake with our website.

So what is my recommendation?  That depends on your budget.  I personally have built a dozen sites using Front Page and Dream Weaver but for a church I recommend a company that provides templates that you can customize.  There are several advantages:

• Multiple people can keep the website up to date.
• Generally better search engine optimization
• People entering information do not need to know HTML.

Pay per click or Google Adwords

When you search for something you'll see two sets of results.  In Google the organic results show up on the left hand side and the paid results show up on the right.  You might be wondering why anyone would pay for the search term?  The reason is that the organic listing takes time to show up and in many cases is very competitive.

With a paid search within minutes you can be up and getting potential visitors to your site and with local search (sometimes called geo-targeted search) you only pay for people who could easily drive to your church.   Think about it for a moment, you only pay for search terms that are relevant and then only if they live within the area that you specify.  (Ok the technology isn't perfect but it is pretty good).

At Wall Printing we can manage your Google advertising but we also recommend you take a look at Zurvita.  They have an excellent managed pay per click program and are committed to serving God.  The statement below comes from their about us page:



In Perry Marshall's book "Ultimate guide to Google Adwords, How to access 100 million people in 10 minutes" he gives the following tips:

• Make sure you are bidding on the right keywords.  Google provides a nice tool to help you find keywords.
• Make sure you are linking to the relevant page.  For example if you are running an ad for your VBS program don't link to the home page but to the VBS page of your site.
• Take a look at your competition.  Type in "church, city, state" or whatever keyword you want to add along with city, and state and see who comes up first.  You can look at their keywords by using the Google tool above and clicking on "generate keywords by website" and then typing in the number one website.  You can also find a lot more information about them by going to Alexa and putting in their site.
• Make sure you put two different ads up for each campaign and check back regularly to see which one is getting more clicks.  Then take the one that is not getting as many clicks and re-write it to see if you can beat the first ad.
• Local ads on Google can be a very effective way to reach out.  The competition is limited and the pricing is very reasonable.
• If you are advertising for a particular search term make sure you have a web page that is relevant that is relevant to that term.  It will not only save you money on your clicks but also make your page more relevant to your visitor.
• Ask for your visitors names and email addresses.  Each page of your website should have a form that asks for their name and email address.  This gives you the opportunity to continue the conversation with your visitor.
• Use Google's free conversion tracker to make sure your website it accomplishing the goals you set down. 

If you would like to discuss ways to increase traffic to your website and visitors to your church contact us by filling out the form below.

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