Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 It's my firm belief that most churches have a front door problem. Now, a lot of churches think their problem is on the back door. It's people that are coming and not getting connected and then finding their way out of the church. But in reality, you need a lot of people coming through your doors in order to keep growing as a church. And in today's episode, we talk about how you can open that front door wide. And the key is through local search. We hope this conversation helps your church to reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast. You're listening to the read-write podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 2 00:01:01 I'm ready to get <inaudible>.
Speaker 0 00:01:05 Hey guys, welcome to the reach right podcast episode number 67. I am your host Thomas Castello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas. Hey, not too much, man. Excited for this conversation here today. We're gonna be talking about, uh, how your, you can make sure your church is found locally, how your church website is found locally. So, uh, this is a conversation that actually comes to us from the requests line. We talk about it each week about how, Hey, if you have other topics you want to talk about or want us to talk about, uh, let us know in the comments while we got a comment. And just recently that said, Hey, I wish you would talk more about how we can be found on local searches and those kinds of things. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today.
Speaker 0 00:01:46 I think that's so important now. Um, you know, we've been in this business and industry for long enough to remember when mailers were the main things that churches would do to be found locally. What was the company that we always would talk about? Where people, whether it was outreach marketing. Yeah. They, and they're still around, but it was, uh, what was the name of that one? It was, oh man, they were, they didn't mailers for churches on yet, but outreach was definitely the really well-known one. There was another one that there was truth media truth advertising. It was a truth advertising. I think it was. Yeah. I think that might've been it. I don't even know if they exist anymore, but yeah, if you're from truth advertising and want to let us know, let us know in the comments there, but yeah, so it used to be mailers and door hangers and all those kinds of things and like anything else in the world right now, it's all gone digital, right?
Speaker 0 00:02:35 So if you want to be found it's, uh, your first step is getting digital marketing, right? We've based our whole company on this is helping churches do digital marketing, but it probably starts with social media and getting search engine stuff. Right. And we think the key to this is really nailing local SEO is what's really important. I think if you want your church website to be found in local searches, you have to get local SEO. Right? So tell us what we mean by that, that we, and when we say local SEO, what are we talking about?
Speaker 3 00:03:06 So what everyone's doing these days is they're Googling everything from their phones. Most of the time, Googling from home, uh, from desktops, laptops, tablets, and all of that. Uh, but someone, when they do a search churches near me, uh, or I'm an Austin churches in Austin, you know, just like people do lunch near me. That's one of my favorites, lunch, lunch, and see which restaurants pop up. But what that means is that churches still now, now, even since, you know, the pandemic accelerated churches, not just reaching people locally, but you know, having following, you know, a preacher in Texas can minister to someone in New York and all of that. And there's different campuses statewide that are just all on, uh, or nationwide rather than are all online campuses. So there's value to all of that. But, uh, still churches would prefer mostly to reach people in their local area that can make a drive to their church. And so what everyone's doing is they're Googling, uh, and what's going to come up is, uh, if they're Googling for a church or, you know, doing a search for a church, what's gonna come up, are the churches that are nearest to them in their area. Um, and so that's what we mean by, by being found by local SEO, right?
Speaker 0 00:04:23 Yeah. There's, I think it's probably important. We've done a whole podcast episode on this, about the anatomy of a Google search. So usually when you do a Google search, the very top thing is going to be ads. So you'll see two or one to one to three ads, it'll say ad right next to it. And there'll be a listing. Uh, we can help churches with that. And churches can take advantage of the Google grant to get on there. The second part is what's called the, the map pack, right? So usually it's a map, uh, and it has a few little pins on it. And then there'll be a listing of usually three of the most relevant organizations that are local when someone has a local intent search. So if you search it for plumbers in Austin, it'll show the three most relevant plumbers in your area there.
Speaker 0 00:05:09 If you search for churches in Austin, uh, it'll come up with the three. What Google thinks are the three most relevant churches that are most likely to be helpful to this specific church here. So what we're talking about is how do we show up in that search? How do we show up in that map pack, which is the most important ones I just got back from a trip to New York. Uh, my, my wife and I, we spent four or five nights in New York, had an absolute blast, but I can't tell you how many times I did a search like that. A local intent search and in New York, like local means within a couple of blocks. Like you, if you want to go to a, to a restaurant and it's three miles away, it may as well be in another. Sometimes it is another state. If it's three miles away, it's a New Jersey.
Speaker 0 00:05:54 If that's the case. So we use a lot of local intent, like restaurants near me. Uh, we looked for, um, museums in our area or parks near us, those kinds of things. And so the, the fact is that whether people are traveling or they've been in an area for a long time, when they're looking for a church, this is the kind of search that they're going to do. And if you want to show up, you have to do some very specific things. Here's what we've found is that even the largest churches, if they don't take this seriously and they don't do some of these steps, they will not show up in these kinds of searches. You could be the best preacher in the world. You could have a great worship team, but if you don't get these few things, right, you might be invisible in these kinds of searches.
Speaker 0 00:06:36 And here's why this matters is that I think you and I have known this for a while. While a lot of churches think they have a backdoor problem that people are coming and they can't get them plugged in. I think the vast majority of churches have a front door problem. They're just not seeing enough people come in their doors in order to be able to grow, because you're always going to have some natural attrition in churches. There's people that are going to move there's people that are going to pass away. Sadly, there's people that are going to not like your decision on vaccines, or they're not going to like what your church does about masks. And there's all kinds of reasons. And people leave churches. That's just what happens. And so if you don't have a wide open front door with a steady stream of people coming through it, you are not going to be able to grow as a church.
Speaker 0 00:07:22 And this is by and large, we talk the churches all the time. This is a much larger problem than people going out the back door. The front door problem is bigger than the back door one. So we want to help you solve it. And I think the way to do that is through getting serious about being found on local searches online there. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you cover the first step? Yep. We'll do so the first thing you have to do this, if you haven't done it already, the good thing is it's easy is you have to claim your Google, my business listing claim, your Google, my business listing. So what this is, is what we talked about, that map pack before, where you have those three listings of the most relevant organizations that is not a link to your website out of the gate, that is a link to your Google, my business profile.
Speaker 0 00:08:07 So it's your, your basically, it's like your, like kind of like you have a Facebook page for your church or a Facebook page personally, it's your Google page for your church? It actually came out of Google. Plus you remember that used to be, Google's attempt at doing a social network, that group into me too, but it grew into Google my business. And so what it is is it's your church's profile on there. And it has a lot of your important business information and, uh, your phone number and name and address and email address and website and service times and all that kind of stuff is on there. But the first thing you have to do is you need to take the time to claim this. Now, some churches think you don't have to do this because Google, a lot of times will already have your information just because you've, they've done all kinds of scrapes and they look at information that's on Facebook and other places on your website and they've deduced what all your information is, but it is vitally important that you claim this information and lay hold of it and be able to get in there and do what you have to do.
Speaker 3 00:09:07 Yeah. Yeah. That's good. And, uh, I, you know, I don't have much to add to that. I think that's a good segue to the second one because I, and here's why the next one is optimize your Google, my business. And the reason why, uh, this I'm mentioning it this quickly is because most churches I talk to, they have claimed that not all of them, a lot of them still are what what's that? Oh, I didn't know I needed to do that, but, uh, most of them have, have done it, but they haven't done the best job. And so what we mean by optimized your Google, my business is that there's a lot of steps, detailed steps to take when you optimize, you know, your Google, my business listing. So, uh, you know, anything from, and we'll go into detail a little bit about this, but it's not just church information, but it is going to be your service times address, but it's also going to be things like pictures. Um, we could, you could even do video within here too. There's ways of doing that. Um, and there's extra steps to be taken in, which takes some work. And I think that that's, you know, step number one is easy to claim the Google, my business listing, but step number two, takes a little bit more work to, to go into detail to optimize it. Yup.
Speaker 0 00:10:20 Yeah. I, I think I don't want to give the impression that it's hard. I don't think it's hard work. It's stuff that you probably have. I mean, it's, it's not hard to put your service times in and it's not hard to enter your web address and, you know, you want to make sure we have a thing here called the nap, the name, address, phone number. You want to make sure that that's in there and it's exactly right. Uh, that's really important to have on there. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Uh, but, um, yeah, I think the optimizing, let me talk about why, I guess that's important is that what Google does is it delivers your, your results. And when it does, it takes a lot of measurements on how people respond to it. So if, if you show up in that map pack, and let's say they put you in the second position there, uh, and they noticed that when they do that, people are more likely to click onto your church's profile and go to your website or call your church, or, uh, comment on your images or add a review or do all those kinds of things.
Speaker 0 00:11:19 Then Google says, well, people engage most with this profile. Let's show this one first, next time. Uh, let's, let's put this one on the top of the list. So what Google is going after is engagement and they're measuring that. And so the more you can engage people and the things that engage them are things like videos and pictures and good content and your about description and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, the more you can engage people with that, the higher you will rank in general. So you want to spend the time and we're not talking about weeks or anything like that, but you could probably get this done. If you have the photos done, you can probably get this done in about an hour or so. Just really spending the time to write the content, upload the pictures, put in a caption, just make sure you got every little piece of detail you can in there to give the user the best possible experience and give them the best impression of your church. Uh, so spending the time to optimize this is really important. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:14 Good, cool points.
Speaker 0 00:12:15 Good. The next one, I'll get it. The third one is that, um, you need to claim your local directory listings claim your local directory listings. And this is the hard one. I'm just going to be honest and say that this is the challenging part. Uh, let me talk a little bit about what we're talking about here is so, as I'm sure our audience knows there are dozens and dozens and dozens of sites out there that list local businesses and carry their information. Uh, there are so many that we think of. So things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn, and those are the social network wads and there's things like Yelp, there's TripAdvisor, there's yellow pages, there's all those, but that's just scratching the surface. There are dozens and dozens more, there's literally a hundred depending on your category and what kind of business you're in.
Speaker 0 00:13:07 There's hundreds of these different kinds of directory listings out there. And what we have found is there are 77 of them that are four that are valuable for churches. Uh, so 77 different sites out there that are kind of like the Google, my business, where you can set up a profile, get your contact information, service time, sometimes descriptions, photos, all that kind of stuff out there and on them. And, and what is important. And part of the way that Google ranks organizations, when they put them on the local search, uh, in the map pack, there is how many different organizations are linking to them. How often do they appear in some of these local directories? They use that as a way to judge, well, this might be an important organization or an important church or an important business. And so if you want to show up on those local searches, then you need to make sure that you are in every single directory that you can get your hands on. Yeah. Which is hard to do. So I don't know. What do you have to add talking to talk about the difficulty and what's the church to do?
Speaker 3 00:14:13 You know, it's so funny. I was talking with a pastor yesterday and talked about these, about 77 different of these websites and getting information entered into there. And he was just like, I don't have the time to do that. And I said, neither die. I was like, yeah. You know, so who wants to that, that I would pull my hair out. I mean, there might be a rare genius or talent out there that, uh, that would enjoy, uh, going through that type of tedious work. But, and it's not just, it's not just tedious. It's, it's just finding these and being knowledgeable about where to go with these based upon what your organization's all about. And, um, so yeah, it's, it's very, if churches have a hard time updating other things online, this is where the heavy lifting comes in. This is where it's good to get some professional help.
Speaker 3 00:15:01 Uh, and so, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's funny and we've, and you know, like we said, there's some that people have heard of when I mentioned, you know, Twitter and Yelp and, you know, most pastors and ministry leaders have heard of that, but we've when we started doing research and learning more about this years ago, you know, we found that there was very bizarre, funny ones out there that no one, I never knew of a website called eight coupons or a pick me pick me Bose. And if I even said that one, right. So it's just really, um, it's tough to find these and then do the work.
Speaker 0 00:15:36 It really is. And there's, there's lots of ed, you know, there is different value. Like I'd rather, if you had to choose one or the other, do your Facebook page before you do your eight coupons profile, right. So it's, it's, you know, there's different value to these, but the more the merrier. And so, um, here's the other rub, is that not only do you have to get on there and claim all of this information, the challenge is that this information has a way of changing on its own. Just like if you get on to, um, a lot of these sites, you get onto Yelp and you haven't claimed your Yelp listing, you're probably on there already. Your church's probably has some kind of a listing on there where they have your address and phone number and website and all that stuff, because they're scraping the internet and finding this content.
Speaker 0 00:16:19 And so what tends to happen is even after you claim your Yelp listing or your eight coupons listing, they're going in, they're still scraping the internet and they're making changes to it. So I'd see at any given month of those 77, that are out there for churches, maybe 6, 7, 10 of them, they may change the information you have on there and have the wrong information, which actually it actively hurts what you're trying to do and found being found in local search engine. So all that being said, um, I don't think any church has the time any church leader has the time to go and do something like that. Like you said, we don't have the time to do it. So you almost certainly want to use a service to do this. And I think that a service to do this is worth every single penny that you would pay that kind of a service.
Speaker 0 00:17:07 I know our church that I pastored in Madison, Wisconsin, we got really serious about this and this and a few other efforts we did in SEO, our little church of a hundred, 125 people started growing crazy because we would see 10, 12 people every single week coming in and saying, they found us on local searches and they were searching for something else and found us because of ads. So there's lots of different ways to this. So you, you definitely want to pay someone to do this because there is software that makes it easier. That software isn't necessarily easy for a normal church to you. Don't want to learn that software. So we recommend doing it. There are companies out there that do that kind of stuff. Uh, we partner with, uh, one called Yext. Uh, they help us with a lot of this work here.
Speaker 0 00:17:53 There's another one called bright local. Uh, but uh, these things, they, they can be time consuming even using that. So if you want a full service option, we have some ways we can help you with that too. We'll have some details in the description there, but, um, get out there and get your listings claimed. However, you have to do it. Whether you pay someone or you have a, you, you don't take a lot of time to work on writing sermons and you can just, uh, do this in your free time, then do that, I guess. So. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:18:20 So again, boring, boring, tedious stuff, but very important because at the end of the day, it's going to help a church reach more visitors and more pencils. That's what the end goal is. So good. Next one I'll cover is ask for reviews. We've, we've talked about this in previous podcasts, but, uh, you can't beat you. You have not because you ask not, uh, so you can't be afraid or apprehensive, or just, you know, ignorant to asking for online reviews because these give you more visibility and help you rank higher. Uh, when, you know, if, if, if I don't know, I'm thinking of an example of a pastor's meeting someone at the end of the service or, or any ministry leader there says, Hey, you know, um, you know, a visitor says, Hey, we had a great time here today. God touched us in this way.
Speaker 3 00:19:07 Easy transition to just say, Hey, do you mind kind of going online and giving us a review and nothing wrong with that. And it's very valuable. And I know we, this is something that, you know, it could seem maybe a little awkward for a pastor or ministry leader to ask for at a church, but it's very valuable. And, and I think, again, if your church is doing a good job and not, everyone's happy, who's visited your church, I'm sure. Uh, or my church, uh, but, uh, the ones that are, why not ask for a review, it's kinda like asking for a testimony, right?
Speaker 0 00:19:38 Yep. Yeah. You're exactly right. I think that what I've found is that most people are happy to do it. They will. If I was asked by, uh, someone at our church, Hey, could you write a review of this or someone's business or something like that. That's a friend of mine, someone I like and appreciate I would gladly do it. Right. And I think there's something about it because it's a review. It feels like, um, it feels like it could be negative sometimes, right? So obviously you don't go ask people that hate you or, or people that think you're preaching something wrong to go give you a review. So I'm not, we're not saying that, but people that are want to share good stories, ask them to go out there and do a review. I think, think about it like as a testimony, like it's a, it's a modern way of doing testimonies and we all believe in testimonies.
Speaker 0 00:20:22 I think we need to equally believe in reviews and helping churches do that. So, um, a couple of notes on this, uh, number one, I think that there are different sites out there that handle reviews differently. So Google, for instance, they want as many reviews as possible and they encourage businesses, churches, organizations, to solicit reviews. So Google, it celebrates the idea of you saying, Hey, from the pulpit, Hey, if you like it, go ahead and share a review on Google. If you want to say something like that. So if you've got 25 reviews on the same day, Google would be thrilled about that. Other organizations like Yelp, they are, they ask you to not do that kind of thing. So if you got 25 Yelp reviews in one day when you only had one before Yelp is going to say, okay, these guys are obviously soliciting for reviews and they're going to filter all those out.
Speaker 0 00:21:14 And they're probably going to, you'll take a hit on their platform if you do that often. So you want to be careful with where you do it in general though, most sites, not Yelp, most sites are okay with you asking for reviews, asking customers to give feedback, asking church members in this case to give feedback. So that's the way to do that there. And then yeah, if you get reviews, it's important to respond to them, whether they're positive or negative. We did a, we did a whole episode about how to handle bad reviews, which is you want to, uh, the, the brief synopsis is don't get into a fight online, don't respond and give people more opportunity to give more feedback. And you want to apologize if you can and move on and not have to have address it anymore. So that's the strategy with that.
Speaker 0 00:22:02 But in general, and here's the thing I'll say too, even bad reviews help you show up in local searches. I don't want too many of them. So if I'm a church and I have one and a half stars, and everybody says how terrible we are, well, that's probably not good for you, but you know, people expect to see some people don't like you, some people love you. And if the I'd rather have, if my choice was between three positive reviews or a hundred reviews, and 10 of them were somewhat negative and 90 are positive, I would always take the hundred reviews because this is a volume play. You want lots of people talking about your church. And I said, it helps you get up in those rankings there. Yes.
Speaker 3 00:22:40 Same reason you do that for a product you are buying online. I know when I look at Amazon, if I'm buying something on Amazon or something online, I'm looking at the reviews and if there's no negative reviews or just a few, I'm kind of suspicious, this is really a good product. Because first of all, you know, how many people have actually bought it. If there's not many reviews, you know, it's the same principles, different again, where churches are not, you know, it's not a business per se, but same thing. And I honestly think if you're doing something right, as a church, some people will, will be offended. I know Jesus offended a few people back in the day. He would've got some bad reviews. Oh,
Speaker 0 00:23:20 Jesus. See what
Speaker 3 00:23:22 The farracies in the Sadducees commenting on the negative reviews. Right? So a lot
Speaker 0 00:23:27 Of that, a lot of pilots.
Speaker 3 00:23:28 So, but anyway, so it's good stuff. So once you bring us home,
Speaker 0 00:23:32 That's it. The fifth one is you need to speed up your site. Uh, this is just good advice, no matter what, not just for local search engines, but, uh, for just in general, a fast site does better on search all over the place. So if you use Google ads or the, the $10,000 Google grant, uh, you'll get better results. If you have a fast website, uh, if you are doing a lot of just organic search, so you're writing a lot of articles or your sermons show up. If they load fast, you'll get better results. But it also really matters when it comes to local. SEO is you have a fast website. So, uh, there are a couple of key things you can do to make sure that happened. The biggest culprit is using images that are, are videos that are not sized properly. Uh, so you remember that when you, if you take a file right from your camera or your phone, it's probably going to be like 10 megabytes is how big the image file is going to be on your phone.
Speaker 0 00:24:28 If you slap that on your website as is, and don't compress it, make it smaller, change the image size. Well, that's going to take like, it'll take like, uh, take 10 seconds for one image to load the average church website. It's going to have a dozen images on the homepage. So you're talking about over a minute of load time. If you're not careful, so pay special attention to your image size. We also really recommend using a DNS server, like a cloud flare, which will help speed up your site. It'll get through the DNS portion. We don't get too technical, but, uh, ask your webmaster, your person who does your website to look into something like CloudFare flare to help with caching, uh, which is basically it has a Google remember some of the things on your website. So it delivers it faster to people. It kind of holds it in its memory.
Speaker 0 00:25:17 So it gets loaded quicker, uh, and then using cloud for, for DNS, just to make a lot of the backend stuff go really quickly. So site speed plays a huge part. Google will tell you that over and over again, this is especially true on mobile devices, which is where the majority of searches are taking place. Now is on a phone, not on a desktop computer. So speed is even more important on mobile devices. So you gotta take that stuff seriously. Uh, if you have a webmaster, it's probably not something I think that most people that aren't trained can do anything about. So if you don't know a lot about web development, uh, it probably will take a little bit of research and learning, or you hire someone to help you with that, or your web person can do it for you. Uh, so yeah, something you can look into.
Speaker 3 00:26:02 Yeah, no, that's all really helpful Thomas, for sure. And I think that, you know, I've seen this overlooked often with churches, you know, it's, it's sometimes quite a feat for them to just get their website finished. You know, they get all the, but they get all the photos taken, they get the images uploaded or the video backgrounds uploaded and all that. And then they forget those technical details that, you know, even though they may have a great looking site or, you know, online presence, uh it's, it's just, you know, you didn't take those extra steps and that's really important to be visible and also not playing it too cheap with your hosting. I know, you know, fast hosting fast hosting makes a difference and plays a role in this as well.
Speaker 0 00:26:43 Yeah, I think like, so you can find, you know, $3 hosting and that kind of stuff there and hosting isn't expensive. If it's, if it's done, if it's done right, it doesn't have to be hundreds of dollars a month or something like that. But man, it might be worth the, the, the incremental increase in costs for the amount of people you'll see on search engines, they get, it's not a huge investment. Do your hosting. Right. Don't skimp on that area. That's really good advice. Yeah. Good. That's good. Awesome. Well, good. I hope this has been helpful to our audience. I know that this is something that a lot of people really want to know. So we want to thank the, uh, the church that, uh, sent over this request. That does mean a lot to us. Uh, if you have other ideas or things you want to hear us talk about in this podcast, we would love your feedback. It's something that we want to know what, what you're thinking about and what you're needing to know more about when it comes to digital marketing and church technology and where those two things intersect there. So, uh, if this has meant something to you, let us know in the comments, uh, share with your friends, subscribe like this video, do all those things that you do. Uh, that does mean a lot to us. Thank you so much for being a part of our retried family. And we hope to catch you next week.
Speaker 0 00:27:55 Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out online and reach right studios.com. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week.
