Truth - People search the internet for information on a church before
visiting. If you do not have an internet presence you will loose
potential members.
Truth - It is not that hard to get listed.
You are not trying to be in the top ten listings in the entire country
but only in your home town. I'll show you what steps need to be taken
to make sure you are seen.
There are two ways to show up in
Google (or Bing or Yahoo) The first is organically and the second is a
paid search. Organically means that Google has indexed your site and
found content related to the searcher's query. A paid search is just
as it says you pay to be shown for a particular keyword.
I'll be
talking about both but we'll start with how to be found organically.
This will take some time but I want you to know it will be worth the
effort. Here are 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 looking for but we do know people are searching and they won't find you unless you put some effort.
Since Google is the largest make sure you are listed with them. It is free to set up your
local listing. There is even a video showing you how to do it. Once it is set up ask church members to rate your church. Google generally lists sites by relevance and then by reviews so a number of good reviews will not only get you ranked higher but the reviews will also influence other people to check out the church further.
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).
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 too 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.
