Growing Churches
Helping churches reach out to their communities
 
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Need help with setting up your Google Places page?

We can help your church set up their listing and help improve your ranking so you show up higher in the search results.  The cost is $350.  Here is a list of the services we perform:

  • Update all your information on Places
  • Add photos (10 supplied photos)
  • Add videos you have on YouTube
  • Create one video using photos provided.  To see sample click here.
  • Optimize your page so it ranks higher and will therefore get better traffic
  • Check your citations (listings on other web pages) and add more if needed.  Citations are used by Google to determine how high to rank your site.
  • Provide links so your members can write about their experiences with your church.  People visiting your page would like to know this prior to visiting.

Set up my Google Places page
First Name *
Last Name *
Email *
Phone *
Street Address *
Street Address 2
City *
State *
Zip Code *
Additional information

How to set up your Google Places page


The first question I'd like to answer is why bother to set up your church's Places page.  Here is a little information from my church.  The full report is listed below.

  • 521 people saw our page last month.
  • 152 clicked through to our website
  • 8 clicked on the maps page for more information
  • 52 asked for driving directions to the church
That means that 212 people who saw our Places page got more information.  What makes it even more remarkable is that at the time of this report our church was not on the front page of Google.  Is that worth the effort?  We don't track how many visitors came from Google Places, but we are getting a lot of new visitors.

So ready to get started?
The steps below will assist you in setting up your Google Places should you decide to do it yourself. 

  1. Go to Google and search for your church including the city and state.  If you show up with a Places logo, Google has already set a site up for you and all you need to do is claim and update it.  To do that click the business owner? and then edit my business listing.
  2. Enter your basic information such as email address, website and categories.  You can add up to 5 categories.  We recommend that you use the Google External Keyword tool to determine which terms people might search for get the most traffic.
  3. The description is also very important.  You are writing for people who are visiting your site and also for the Googlebots that index your site and then serve it up when people search the internet.  Make sure you include your keywords in the description.  You will end up adjusting this over the next few months as you review the results that Google is giving you.
  4. Hours of operation and payments are pretty straight forward.
  5. Next is an option to include photos and videos.  We recommend that you upload both photos and videos.  Before uploading the photos name them your keywords.  Google cannot read a photo, but it will understand that you have included your keyword in another spot. 
  6. There is a section to add other information.  You can put information on regular events such as youth group, choir and children's programs.
  7. You can also post information about your upcoming events and you can add coupons to your site.  Since most churches don't use coupons, be creative.  You can do all kinds of things with the coupon section.

Listed below are a sample of two Google Places pages.  One that has not been filled out and one that has.  Which one would you click on?
The graph below is an example of the statistics that you will be able to see when you log onto your Places account.