Church SEO search engine optimization for ministry

Church search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your church or ministry website visible in search engines such as Google or Yahoo, usually for the purpose of raising awareness to people outside your congregation.

In the case of a church, a website is generally been created for the purpose of serving the congregation. Church SEO, on the other hand, is typically used to reach out to prospective members and non-members. There are a number of elements that will help you improve your website’s ranking in the search engines and make it easier for people to find you.

Here are five of the top ones:

1. Understanding Your Target Demographic.

This is important because your web site needs to “speak” to your intended audience. With church sites, you generally have two groups that you want to reach:

1. Friends and congregation; the folks who currently attend your church
2. People who don’t go to your church, but want to find it

The first group is usually familiar with your church and will use the church name to find it online. The second group doesn’t know about your church and are likely to use geographical, denominational and other demographical information when searching for a church online.

Now that you know what kind of searches potential people will use, its time to take a look at what specific keywords people may use.


2. Effective Keywords

It is important to try and pick keyword and phrases to use in your title, meta-tags, and content that your target demographic is searching for. Keywords for churches generally fall into four different categories

1. Name
2. Language / Ethnicity
3. Denomination
4. Region

Each category may have additional subsets of keywords. As it pertains to regions, you may choose to specify your city, and the larger metropolitan area. (i.e. - If your church is in the greater Los Angeles area (Pasadena, Santa Monica, Northridge, etc.), you may want to include "Los Angeles" as well as your particular city in your keyword choices.

The goal is to select words that people would use to locate your church. You want to include words from all for categories to describe your ministry and include them prominently in your web site content.

3. Comprehensive Website Titles

Many church sites only have their church name in the title. I suggest you create a title with all of the effective keywords listed above. Here are a few examples:

“Sonrise Christian Fellowship: A Foursquare evangelical Christian church in Simi Valley, CA serving Southern California and Greater Los Angeles”

“Welcome to The Place, A Seventh Day Adventist Celebration Church in Newberry Park, CA serving Ventura County”

While it’s tempting to say something witty or use your slogan in the title, save that for the web page itself. The higher purpose of the title is to give the search engines better information so that you can be indexed properly.

4. Home Page Content

As it pertains to SEO, there is greater flexible with the words in the body of your web page as opposed to the title. What you should work toward however, is the placement of as many of your effective keywords (see item #2) as possible in the first 200 to 300 words of text. The closer the words are to the top, the better.

Don’t stop at the home page. As many of your web site pages as possible should be search engine optimized for specific keywords that are relative to the subject of the page..

5. Reciprocal Links

One of the ways that the search engines rank websites is by the number of other web sites that have links to it. Get your church listed in appropriate directories such as Yahoo Local (http://local.yahoo.com/), the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org), the AOL YellowPages (http://yellowpages.aol.com), etc.

Also, entice the members of your congregation who have websites to create links from their home pages to the church web site. Every link you can acquire will give that much more credence to the search engines when they calculate your ranking.

Lastly, when linking your site from elsewhere, use the same principle and the strongest keywords from item #2 above: Specifically, your church name and a brief description from one or two of the other categories such as denomination or region.

Good luck!

Xavier
LeMond is a former
corporate executive turned entrepreneur. He is founder and president of Secured
Office, a faith-based consulting firm that provides marketing services
for christian organizations. He is actively involved in showing how specific
church marketing and
church seo campaigns can be a
positive force for capturing the attention of people in the communities they
serve.

LeMond
offers a free report that reveals 12 effective strategies for making a ministry
more visible. Visit his site now to receive a free copy and discover how
effective Christian outreach can be when done properly.