Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What comes to mind when you think of SEO for your church? Well, I think it represents one of the biggest opportunities that churches have to reach more people and see more visitors walk through your doors. Let me tell you why.
You're listening to the reach, right? Podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow.
Hey, guys, I'm Thomas.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: And I'm Ian.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And today we are talking about SEO for churches. And I want to give you a few quick tips that will help you improve your SEO performance and hopefully lead more people to Jesus. We were joking about that before we started, Ian, that, like, some of these tips that we have, it's hard to imagine. Like it could be, but someday in heaven maybe we'll be having extra jewels in our crown because we optimized our, our metadata descriptions or something like that. It's just impossible to imagine that. But it's so funny. This is something that actually matters, like doing SEO and making sure that your church is visible. I have seen it over and over again. I've seen churches grow when they do this and they grow with new people that are making decisions to follow Jesus. And it's not like we can trace it back to because we optimize this meta description, that person came to Christ, but it's something that it does move the needle, I think. So it's such an important conversation to me. There's a lot of low hanging fruit there for churches to see more visitors by doing a few things well. So I think it should be a good conversation for us today. Yeah.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: And to put it plainly, SEO has a lot with just being. To do with being more visible online. Do you want your church more visible online when people are looking for churches? And by the way, a lot of those people looking for churches, yes, they do need Jesus, obviously. So, yeah, so it is something that definitely is relevant. And so let's jump right in. I'll tackle the first. Oh, go for it.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Let me just say one thing first before we jump in. I want to kind of talk for a second about what we mean by SEO. Because for so often, like when you go onto your church website providers website, whether you use a template website or a custom one, they'll probably have some kind of a feature list. And in that feature list they'll say something to the effect of SEO optimized or something like that. Right?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: And I just want to say, like, for anybody who is new around here or new to church marketing, that is like such an exaggeration that it is. It's just off the charts. What a big exaggeration that is. And everybody, it's not just churches like, it's a. Yeah, I'm sure that if you got onto squarespaces or wordpresses or wixes or Weebly's or any of these major providers of websites for companies out there, people just want to see a check mark by SEO optimized.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: I'm going to tell you today, that means absolutely nothing like that. Zero. It means less than nothing. In fact, I think it's just a way to help people feel comfortable when they don't understand what we mean by SEO. What it actually is is it is a whole, there's literally hundreds of small tweaks that you can make to the way that you've set up your site that will help hopefully increase your rankings on Google. If it was just a matter of buying the right hosting package from your website provider, everybody would do it. And then the most bizarre things would be ranking and Google would be a worthless search engine because they would just, they would be beholden to whoever says they're SEO optimized. So it is a, it's not easy, like, to really do it well, there's very competitive keywords out there. But I think for churches, we want to talk about eight things today that actually move the needle for you. So there are little things that you could probably do in most of them in a few minutes to help you actually see some growth in this area, which will therefore lead to more people visiting your church and I hopefully more people added to the kingdom. So there's my speed.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I'm glad you expounded on that before we jumped in, Thomas, because I get that question pretty much daily with our services.
When I talk to people about our services here at reach. Right. Which we do a lot of SEO work.
That is, the question I get is, will it be SEO optimized? And like, well, what does that mean? That means a lot. Well, I usually will say, well, there's a lot when it comes to SEO, so let's just talk about what that means for your church. So. Yeah, and so good, good stuff there, Thomas. We'll dig into the first one. Here's where it starts. And I think most people understand this. This is, speaking of what I talk to churches about, one of the first things I talk about is you want to use relevant keywords. Well, most pastors, ministry leaders know now that people will be doing Google searches and searches online for something church specific or church oriented in XYZ city. Right. So this means doing research, finding what words and phrases the people you're trying to target are using. Is it someone looking for church events? Are they looking for Bible study groups? Are they looking for Bible teaching churches or just multicultural churches or whatever? There's all sorts of different ways that people do keyword searches and you really gotta be aware of what they're doing. And it varies from place to place and area to, from city to city and area to area. So. But that's, that's a good step number one.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is, I think it should be obvious that, you know, if you want to do well with SEO, you need to do, you need to know your keywords that you're targeting. But the challenge for so many churches now is that while they are churches, they may not be called.
Their name might not include the word church. Case in point, I'm the executive pastor at a church called New Hope is the name of it. So it's not New Hope Church. We never use that kind of moniker on things which from an SEO standpoint makes us harder to find than the church around the corner. We have a church right next to us that is called, you know, it's called Hawaii Kai church is the name of it. And so they rank naturally very well for people searching for churches in Hawai'I kai because that's literally their name.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Right? Their name, yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: So you have to be aware of this, especially if you're a church that does not have city name and or church in the name of your church. You need to really be careful about these kinds of things because I have seen so many times, I'll run across a website where their entire homepage doesn't even use the word church on it, which is the primary thing that people are going to be looking for when they're looking for churches. There's a lot more to be said about keyword research. We've done lots of other episodes about it. We could link to some of them down in the description below if you're watching us on YouTube and we'll put some other links on the post if you're on our site now. But what you need to know is that, I guess if you take one thing away, use the word church in your name. So for my church, what we did to mitigate this, we just, our title on our site is new hope, a church in Hawaii Kai. We'll say that a church for you in Hawaii kai and is Honolulu or serving is Honolulu, something like that. So those are the terms that we use and it helps us to kind of get over that hump. Lots more to be said about this, which is about beyond the scope of this podcast episode. Right. But yeah, do check out one of our episodes about keyword research and some things churches should be using. There, there. So next up is you need to write strong headlines. So headlines are important for a couple of reasons. One, you want to make sure that you have your keywords in your headlines. So a lot of times churches will have a kind of a fun, playful slogan that they want, which is good, but you still want to have the name of your church and the word church, I think, in your headline somewhere. But then remember, the purpose of a headline is to draw someone into your site. So it needs to be engaging enough that they'd want to click on it. So I think the kind of the big thing here is that your strong headline should include the word church, ideally towards the beginning of the headline, and you want to have your name in it somewhere. And then you can usually squeeze in a few words of kind of a tagline or something. But it can't be something, you know, it can't be your whole mission statement. You don't want those kinds of things on there. So. Yeah, but strong headlines are important.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. And I think that's a good segue to this next one, which is implementing subheadings. So you have your headline, but then you need a sub heading, if you will. So this is going to be a good way to make your site rank higher and make you more visible. So, and it also helps just readers, it helps break up your content. It's kind of funny as we're talking about this, thinking of a newspaper, right? So you have, obviously a newspaper, you have a headline for whatever it is, and then under that you have a description that kind of backs up in a summary of that heading. So having clear titles. Good. Again, more keywords, all of that having title tags, maybe you can speak to that a little bit more, Thomas. And some of those things that go into a subheading.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So in general, when you're writing on your website, you have different kinds of heading levels. So the terminology, and I don't want to get too htmle on this conversation here. So there's all kinds of resources out there for it. But when you're doing on the Internet, you want, you have h one that's kind of the title of your page, which we just talked about. And then you have lots of subheadings. So you think about it as an outline where you indent and it goes from ones to a's. And b's to lower to roman numerals. That kind of goes down that way. So you have h two through h six, h two, h three, h four, h five, h six. You want to use these kinds of structures and then you want to be sure to include your keywords, in this case, church, city names, other things that people might be searching for, including those in your subheadings, your h two, h three, those kinds of things. So, yeah, being really clear about that and using structured format is so important. I also will say if you're writing for the Internet, you will be penalized if you have large blocks of texts. So I would really never have more than 150 words or so under one heading. That's the most you should have. But just, if you think about it like nobody, if you get onto a blog page and it's just a title, and then there's like 1500 words of content broken into paragraphs, but even then it's kind of all in one big blocks with five or six sentences per paragraph, your odds of someone reading it are really, they become much more slim. You want to break that up for the Internet. You want to write short paragraphs with short sentences and lots of different subheadings so people can navigate around easily and they read differently online than they do in books. So I think that's something to keep in mind.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for expounding there.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Yep. All right. Am I next? Yeah, I am.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: You're next.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Incorporate internal links. Yeah. This is something that you want to keep an eye of. This is a really important strategy, I'd say. Remember, every time someone gets onto your site, one of the goals you should have is to keep them on your site for as long as possible. And one of the best ways to do that is by offering relevant links in your content at the end of your content to drive them to other pages on your site. Yeah, this is important for SEO cause it's a big signal to Google. If they're staying on your site for 3 seconds, it's a bad sign. If they're staying on your site for seven minutes, that's a really good sign that they have found really engaging content. And Google's algorithm is gonna look and say, well, I'm going to start sending more traffic to this site because everybody seems to love it and they want to stay on here for a long time. So that's their goal, is to give relevant search results. And that's one of the things that they use. One of the best ways to do that is linking to other pages on your site. So I would make it a goal here at Reachwrite for every time we do a blog post, we have a rule for our writers. You have to have five other pages that you link to in the content of that blog post. So if anybody wants to read more, they can do it. So for this conversation, I already mentioned, when it comes to keyword research, it's beyond the scope of this conversation. You can check out some other video or some other post that we've done on this topic. And our blog and editing team is going to kind of get those appropriate links in there as we do it. So have a system in place to make sure you're linking lots of things. I would absolutely use this on every sermon that you do. Certainly there's other sermons that would be an interesting tie in to the sermon that you just finished doing. And so find links to those other sermons and put those in there to kind of keep people on the side and keep them engaged. That's the strategy behind that.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: Well, what I think is cool about that too, is that there's a double benefit to this. Number one, when you do that, it increases your rankings and Google will reward you and you'll be more visible, but also you're just providing resources to the people that you're serving.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, so they're getting more content, discipling them, bringing them closer to the Lord in what you're doing at your church. So, no, that's good stuff. This next one's a big one. Make it mobile friendly. It's funny, when I was looking at this, when we were talking this over, I was like, gosh, isn't this a no brainer? By now I will say that most churches that come our way and that we run into online, they have a mobile responsive website. Now that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good mobile experience, but I still do run into a good chunk. There are still a lot of churches out there that don't have a mobile friendly website where the term is responsive, meaning your website responds to a mobile device and formats itself there based on the device it's being pulled up on. Your website is. And so Google actually will penalize you if they recognize your website as not mobile friendly or mobile responsive. So that will hurt you in your rankings. So most certainly that's a no brainer, is to not only have a mobile responsive website, but one that gives people a good mobile experience, because that's where, quite frankly, most people are browsing and going to your church's website from.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. I think most people are on a mobile device, not on a desktop. So absolutely create all your content with mobile in mind first, and then think about people that are on a desktop experience. It is very hard to please Google with mobile optimization. One quick tip here is making sure your site loads very quickly. That's one of the biggest parts of the mobile experience for Google, remembering that people are on wireless Orlando, you know, 4G or 5G networks, those kinds of things. So you want to make sure that things load quickly. And yeah, that's kind of one of the biggest things you can do with that. So next one is using alt text for images.
I don't want to get too technical again here, but what that means is that when you load an image onto your site, which your site should have lots of images on it by default, your phone camera or your actual camera that you would use whatever you're using for photos, they're going to have a long string of numbers and IMG underscore and stuff as the name of the file. And if you don't do anything about it, that's the only thing that Google's going to see when they see that image is it says, well, that's IMG 354-4722 right? Yeah, that's useless. Nobody's searching for those kinds of terms. What if instead you actually put in alt tags onto your image to help Google figure out what this image is about and use some of your keywords? So instead of that long string having pictures of people hugging in your foyer, you could title and use alt tags like people finding home at First Baptist Church or finding community at First Baptist Church. So people typing for community churches, they may be shown your site, because Google knows your site has something to do with community and churches and that's the stuff that they're searching for. So this is not a huge one. I wouldn't say it doesn't like, it's not. Don't expect, oh, I put an alt tag. So now we're going to rank number one. I think this is one of those like, you know, once you've done the other things, it's something to do to kind of get you an extra 1% boost on top of things. But it is something just, it's not a hard thing to do. Just, yeah, it doesn't make sense to have like long strings of numbers in IMG as your title. So make sure you get those figured out.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Nothing much to add there. Like we said, we don't want to get too technical with that. So next thing is kind of technical too but important, optimize meta descriptions. It's so funny, you and I, we revert back to this and we reminisce about when we started working together at the first church web development company years ago. What, over 15 years ago? My goodness. And even then, even just without things being advanced and as technical, now, we'd get the question, do you guys do meta tags or meta descriptions? And so these have been a thing for a while. And just like a lot of pastors and ministry leaders now will ask about SEO optimization and those things. These meta descriptions have been out there for a while, and I. Basically, they're a brief description of your website's content, right? So under the title tag and search results. And this can be technical and. But you want a clear, compelling meta description. And what is it, Thomas? About 150 to 160 characters that are important keywords. Maybe you found.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: Yeah, most sites have a tool to help you and it'll stop you when you've gone so long, when you're.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Let me chime in on this. So there was a time when you and I started where your meta tags were, what decided your ranking? So if you put your, you stuffed your keywords like, you know, great church, awesome church, best church. You know, those things. You just had a meta tag that said that, your meta description said that. Then Google would say, well, this must be about great churches. And so I'm gonna send people here looking for churches. Not the case anymore. The only function a meta tag has now is it's something to help people click on your link when they see it on a Google search. So just to be really clear, so when you do a Google search, the first thing you see is the title of the page, and then below that, you'll usually see, like you're saying, 150 characters that were the description of what the page is about. And so if yours just has like a bad string of information or a sentence that doesn't make sense, then it's something that people are less likely to click on it. But a good meta description that kind of piques their interest or maybe asks a tough question that will make them more likely to click on it. And over time, that can raise your rankings, because Google notices. Well, every time I show this, people seem to keep clicking on it over other ones, so let's bump them up higher. So that's what it actually does. Now that's good. Here's the secret is nowadays there's almost like Google rarely uses the meta description that we provide, and instead it usually will choose to use a meta description from your content. So usually the first sentence of your content on the page, but sometimes if that doesn't really line up, they will use your meta description. So this is another one of those, that's like a one percenter, right? It's like it, it's not like you rank number one if you do this, but I think it's something to help you get that little extra boost if you implement subscriptions. Right?
[00:20:32] Speaker B: That's a good way to put it. Yeah.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Awesome. Let me wrap it up. Last one. And this is one of the most important is update things regularly. This might sound odd to you like, cause I don't know, churches that go in and update their past sermon pages or something like that with to add new content or freshen it up or do those kinds of things.
I think that's an action. Pretty cool strategy. If you wanted to do that, you could really focus on the SEO on. I would recommend updating. This is going to sound counterintuitive, but updating the pages that are actually performing well, especially if it's one of those broad reaching pages. So let's say you did a sermon on tithing. You know, what is tithing?
Why you should do it, those kinds of things. And for whatever reason, you're ranking like number, let's say you're ranking like number 15 in the world when people are looking for the truth about tithing. Something like that. Right. What you could do is you could go back for that sermon that you did two years ago and try to think about a little bit. Use some more keywords maybe. What are some questions that people ask when they think about tithing? One cool thing you can do is you write tithing into Google. Scroll down to the bottom of that first page and you'll see something that says people also ask or people also search for. And those are key terms that from Google you probably want to include on that page or answer some of those questions that are on there. So do some of those things and juice up maybe a sermon that's done well historically. I think you'll see some results there, certainly on your other pages. So your ministries pages, your about pages, making sure you kind of freshen things up there, keep them up to date. I think that goes a long way. So yeah, doing updates, that's part of our strategy. When you have a blog at church or. I know, for reach, right. We, every week we're updating two or three different past blog posts to kind of bring them up to standards. We realize the things we just were doing some we were prepping some to be updated this week that we wrote. You and I wrote these back when you and I were the primary blog.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Writers, even for start back in the.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Day 2016 blog posts and the advice you gave in them was terrible because it's something that was great for 2016, but for today, it was just bad advice eight years later. So we just recognize, yeah, we got to update these things and we're hopeful we'll see a search bump as we do that, too.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Google wants fresh content and we'll always reward that.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Well, you just put it. That's what I was going to say to close it off was that, you know, it's funny, every church knows and every church that I talk to that, hey, we got to keep their, our website up to date. And, and this again, is another one of those double benefits. By doing all the things you just mentioned, not only will Google reward you and will you get a boost in visibility, but again, you're also serving your members and people that are following your content well. So again, a double reward, uh, with it. So, no, it's good stuff.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Cool. That's awesome, Ben. Good. Anything to add as we close?
[00:23:33] Speaker B: No, you can do it. This is, you know, one of those more technical topics here and. But like you said, it's low hanging fruit. There's some things that are easier to pull off with SEO compared to other SEO strategies. We can help course churches. We can help you with it if it's difficult to do, as it is for many churches, but most certainly worthwhile. And as we joked about at the beginning of our call, it will help add people to the kingdom. And so most certainly, yeah, if I.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Want to leave you with one kind of takeaway. So I know we gave you a lot, and if you're implementing all of this and, like, you know, don't feel overwhelmed with, like, oh, I have to update every sermon we've preached on our website, and obviously it's a huge undertaking. Those are things that move the needle a little bit. Just do the first one. Like, yeah, focus on using your city name and the word church on your homepage of your website. That's something that will move the needle for you and get you better results. So start there and then kind of continue down this journey. I can tell you that the cool thing about SEO is that as a. I'm an executive pastor now. Before that, I was a pastor of a relatively small church. It was 40 or 50 people when I started pastoring there, and we grew quite a bit. But our secret sauce was getting this stuff right. And our little church of 40 or 50 people was consistently ranking number one and number two when people were searching for churches in Madison, Wisconsin, is where this was. And when we did this right, we were, there were mega churches around us that were below us on all the rankings. So even small churches, you get this stuff right, you put some effort into it, you can see results, and that can really be the lifeblood of visitors your church needs there. So hopefully this has been helpful for you. If it has, it would mean to a lot to us if you would hit that subscribe button. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe to the podcast. If you're listening to it anywhere you do listen to it. If you have any questions on SEO, we do respond to every single comment that is left on any platform that you put it on. We'd love to kind of start the conversation. Any questions on SEO, do let us know down in the comments below. Thanks guys for being a part of the reach ride family, and we'll see you next time.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: See ya.
