Churches more or less are embracing this idea that they need to have something up on the Internet. They have been told of good things to come if they make the commitment and so do put a little website up with service times, directions to their church, and a bio page about the church staff. Some church, after a few months of no results, they move on to other marketing ideas to draw people in to the worship service. Others investigate how they can do things better. We want to give all of these forward thinking people some practical tips that can yield results right away.
For those that do not speak “tech talk,” do not fear. We will speak in laymen’s terms for you. Just know that a lot of geeky-ness is backing these tips and have worked very successfully in the past. For those that like the nerdy talk, we have links to articles that further dive into the talk.
Keep It Fresh
One update that happened to Google recently and Bing is duplicating is the “freshness” score. If you are updating many of your pages on your website regularly, you get to be higher on Google results. So if someone looks for “a church in New York, New York,” you have a better chance of getting your website to show up on the first page if your church is in New York and you are always updating little parts. For churches that have an actively updated blog, even if it is sharing the sermon from last week, you are LEAGUES ahead of everyone else. (High Grade Design)
Talk About Churchy Things Often
People are looking for answers online and will literally write out questions into search engines. Here are some examples.
- “Is God bad?”
- “How can I be a better Christian at work?”
- “Am I going to hell?”
What if you wrote on a blog about those kinds of questions? Better yet, what if you wrote out your sermon every week online for people to read? That would probably generate a TON of traffic. Reformat it into a five-day series that has discussion questions in the end. It wouldn’t take more than an hour to restructure the text and you can make wonderful connections online. (Bufferapp Blog)
Let The Computer Do The Work For You
There are only a few SEO experts out there and even in that core group of people, none of them do it well 100% of the time. Instead of trying to become an expert at something like this, allow your platform to work for you. Many churches are turning to WordPress and the plugins directory has a seemingly endless supply of SEO tools that make it so much easier for you to write great content. Some WordPress plugins I’d recommend are WordPress SEO by Yoast, SEO Friendly Images, and W3 Total Cache. (Tentblogger)
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