Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Well, it may not be that glamorous link building is really important for churches that want to raise their prominence online. If you wanna reach people, link building is one of the keys. And in today's episode, we're gonna tell you all the ins and outs of how your church can become masters of link building online. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:29 You know, how, how, how
Speaker 0 00:00:34 You're listening to the reach, right 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 as my co-host Ian Hyat, we're here to help your church see more visitors and grow
Speaker 2 00:00:56 To ready to get,
Speaker 0 00:01:00 Hey guys, welcome to the reach, right. Podcast episode number 105. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always as my co-host
Speaker 4 00:01:09 Ian Hyat what's up Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:10 Hey, I'm much man. Excited to talk to everybody talking about link building secrets for churches and ministries. Uh, so an episode devoted to the art of link building online, I think it should be a good conversation because churches don't really think about it much. Right. And it's really important. Uh it's it's actually really, really important to be thinking about these things. If you want to have more reach online, uh, link building is something that we gotta do, right.
Speaker 4 00:01:37 You gotta do it. It is very important, but yeah, I can't imagine most pastors when they're planning their sermon, they're also just thinking of, oh man, I also gotta tend to link building. So yeah, this could be a forgotten, forgotten, and not even thought about thing, but if it's done well and right, it can lead to you reaching more visitors at your church.
Speaker 0 00:01:54 I, I agree. And I think that it's something that we, we wanna make it practical. Right. So we understand that most of our audience isn't gonna hire a link building specialist on staff. Who's gonna be their only job is building links. But yeah, I gotta tell you this,
Speaker 4 00:02:08 Something more form a committee for link builders. <laugh>
Speaker 0 00:02:11 I don't so well maybe some of our Lutheran audience might try something like that. <laugh> yeah. We love you Lutherans. Thank you guys. That's right. Uh, you know, we, we just in fun. Uh, so, but, um, the, uh, the committee to build links probably isn't necessary, but we do wanna give you some practical ideas so that you can incorporate a little bit of link building. So I gotta tell you this, uh, we do this a lot at reach, right? Yeah. Uh, and as much as we do it, I gotta tell you that I am approached all the time. Like I, I probably on average get about eight emails a day. I would say of people trying to do link building with us. And so usually it's kind of spammy, they're sending me messages saying, Hey, I write a blog all about meditation and yoga. And I thought your blog would be a perfect fit for ours.
Speaker 0 00:03:00 And I say, no, in fact, we don't really, uh, we don't think that would be a perfect fit as like a link building partnership or something like that there, but there are occasionally times there's a lot of great ministries out there that we've shared links with. There's denominations that we've done some of this work with. And so that has over time helped us to rank for a lot of really important search terms at reach. Right. I know I've also pastored a church where we did a lot of this and people would link to us and our small church of 150 or 200 people. We became the most prominent church online in Madison, Wisconsin in my time there, because we did a lot of this. So if you're serious about reaching people online, you probably ought to be serious about link building. So I think it's just an important thing, uh, that I have a lot of, uh, I don't know. I, I naturally have a lot of experience doing for yeah. Our business and for our church. I think it's gonna be a good conversation to have
Speaker 4 00:03:51 You do. And, and even though, you know, I do talk about this with, uh, many churches and, you know, not, not super in depth, but, uh, it definitely is addressed in a lot of our consultations, but yeah, you've worked hands on with our SEO and search engine marketing team. And, uh, so yeah, if it's okay, Thomas, I can maybe even, almost essentially interview and ask you some of these questions cuz uh, yeah. I th I think you'll be able to kind of, uh, dig a little deeper into it. And, uh, so I, I think the first question, natural question is what is link building? <laugh> let's answer that one first.
Speaker 0 00:04:23 Yeah, let's get that outta the way. Just so we're clear about this. So link building, uh, is this art of getting more websites out there linking back to your church's website? So yeah. Getting, um, whether they be directories and things like social media accounts linking back to you, those are valuable, but the most valuable ones are other websites out there linking back to your church. Yeah. And this could be to your church homepage directly. It could be to a great sermon that you preached on a specific topic that other people liked. Uh, there's all kinds of ways to do this, but in essence, it's trying to build the authority of your church website and make Google think that your church is a very prominent and important one. Yeah. Which helps in your ranking.
Speaker 4 00:05:10 People are referencing it and, and linking
Speaker 0 00:05:12 To it exactly. Right. Because they're linking to it. Yeah. So it is the strategy that we as church and leaders in our organizations can engage in to try to get more and more people to link to us, uh, and build our prominence online. I think that's kind of in a nutshell, when we talk about link building, that's what we're talking about. The process of getting people to, to help, uh, getting people to set up their website to when they click on something, they say this guy or this church is the expert on this topic. Yeah. Uh, go, go there. If you want more information, that's what a link really is.
Speaker 4 00:05:43 Yeah. Now that's good. And we've said already that this is very important, but maybe a lot of churches don't understand how important it is. So what's so important about link building.
Speaker 0 00:05:54 Yeah. So link building is still the key factor that Google uses in determining how important any organization or any website is. Uh, so if you want to appear on Google searches, there are all kinds of things that are important and there's all kinds of ranking factors we call them. Uh, so, uh, those are things like the keywords that you use on your site, uh, how fast your site loads, we've done many episodes on yeah. Some of the different strategies for doing SEO on your church website. Yeah. But I would still say that the chief one, the probably the most important one, uh, is getting links from other, uh, other websites that are on that same kind of a topic there. So, uh, it really is something vital. If you want to show up on, on searches all over the country or all over the world.
Speaker 0 00:06:43 Also, if you wanna show up on local searches. So right now that's the most important kind of searches. If you wanna listen to last week's episode, we talked all about local search engine optimization. If you wanna appear in that map pack, when people look for churches near me or churches in Fairview, or they type something like that in one of the important factors in that is making sure that lots of people are linking to you because that's how Google assesses, whether your ministry is a prominent one. Or if it's something that is just kind of a, all by itself, isolated kind of a ministry, and they will give you more play and more rankings, uh, if you are showing up and you're very prominent and the way they judge that chiefly is by how many links you have from other places out there. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:07:25 Yeah. No, that makes sense to me. And I think you broke that down in, in layman's terms, so to speak, but, uh, that totally makes sense. Now I know that there's different kinds of links and you and I have worked on that and have discussed that, uh, are there some basic types of links that churches should be aware of?
Speaker 0 00:07:42 Yeah, I guess so, uh, there there's three different types of links there of different value, I'd say. Uh, so, uh, I guess the three are that there's external links, there's internal links and then there's inbound links. So we'll talk a little bit about those. So, uh, every church website should really have a lot of internal links. And what this means is links on your web website linking from one piece of content to another yeah. Some other place on your website. So you want to have a very rich web of links that takes people to all kinds of content. So for instance, if you get onto our website and look at this podcast, I'm gonna look at this for just a second here. I mean, there, there's probably 10 different links to other places on our website. Yeah. Uh, that people can go because we think if you're looking at information on how you do link building, you might be interested on information about how to do local SEO or how to do, um, Google ads at some point, or yeah.
Speaker 0 00:08:41 You wanna know more about keywords or we've done other content around these same topics. Yeah. Same thing goes for a church. If you're gonna do a message. And you're gonna mention in that message, uh, that we talked about forgiveness and you have a whole nother message on forgiveness. You can link off to that link, to that past message. Yeah. You could link onto the message on giving. You can link to all these cuz you you've done hundreds of messages. Yeah. Over time, you'll build up a really large library. And so you want lots of internal links on your own website to help Google kind of navigate your content and figure out what is the best page to show on this website when someone searches for, uh, giving, uh, or someone searches for, uh, how to GI, how to handle forgiveness. Right. If someone searches for that, here's the chief page, because here's the thing you're gonna mention forgiveness 30 times, uh, in a couple of years of messages out there. So Google wants to know what's the most important page on this website or what's the best one when it comes to talking about forgiveness. So that's what internal linking does. Then there's external links. What this means is links from your church website onto other websites out there. And you may think at first, well, why would I link off to other people that just gives them more credibility and that's okay. They
Speaker 4 00:09:57 Leave my website and right.
Speaker 0 00:09:58 Yeah. They can. Yeah. So, so a couple things I'd say about this number one, it's okay to use, uh, a type of link that is like a, um, an it's a link that, but you have it open in a new tab. That's one way to solve that problem. When you have links to other websites, maybe make it. So it opens another tab and they don't actually leave your website. But Google is looking to make sure that you are linking out to other places to make sure that you're not just trying to spam a lot of content, a lot of links on there, but you're actually linking to other authority type websites on these different topics here. So think of it this way. Every time you do any kind of a piece of content on your church website, you should at least try to have one, maybe two external links to kind of talk about your, your sources.
Speaker 0 00:10:42 That's something that Google looks for and thinks that it kind of has made this decision. That good content is gonna be well researched. Yeah. And well, research content is gonna tell you what your sources are for any of this information. So if you link out to other places, that's kind of like the, the bibliography, if you will, that we used to have to do when we were kids on our papers and things. Yeah. When you do a bibliography, that's what a link is and it kind of adds some authority to your actual post there. Uh, and it helps you kind of build that credibility with Google. So that's good. There's internal links, there's external links. And then the gold one, the one you're really looking for that's inbound links also known as back links, right? So this is when other websites out there, they decide that you are the authority on this topic.
Speaker 0 00:11:30 Yeah. And they send a link to you. Uh, they say that this particular message on forgiveness, uh, is a really important one. And so they link from their site onto your message about forgiveness. And then it really can kind of get things snowballing for your church when you do those things. So that is really the gold standard. That's how Google measures, how important your website and how often they're gonna be linking to it. That's really one of the chief ones is can we get other organizations, other domains that are not associated with your church? Yeah. Can we get them to link to you? That's really where you start to it's,
Speaker 4 00:12:06 It's almost like referrals, right? If you, you're absolutely a plumber. We've talked about, uh, we used the example of a plumber when, uh, someone, when we talked about that in our SEO podcast. But, um, you know, if you're getting more people sending people your way, because you're trusted and you've provided a good service, it's, it's viewed kind of the same way, isn't it?
Speaker 0 00:12:26 Yep, absolutely. Yeah. I think that it's, uh, it's their, they're looking for that. So, um, yeah, it, it really is a, a way of giving a referral to you. And the more referrals you have, the better off you are in person and the more better off you are online as well.
Speaker 4 00:12:39 That's good. That's good. So there's good and bad links, right? Uh, what, uh, what's the difference between a good link and a bad link?
Speaker 0 00:12:47 That's a good question. So people wised up to this idea. They, they kind of noticed a while ago that Hey, Google really thinks these links are important. This is something we probably oughta put a lot of emphasis on. And so people started to make websites that were just dedicated to linking off to their other websites. Okay. So if you, uh, bought a domain, for instance, that was best churches in austin.com and then all you did was link to first Baptist church of Austin or whatever it would be. Uh, if you just kept linking to that one place, it used to be that that could get you results that you could actually game the system. But here's the rule is that Google is much smarter than any scheme you can come up with nowadays. Yeah. Uh, and sometimes people falsely believe that, Hey, I I've seen this work before.
Speaker 0 00:13:36 Sometimes they do work. These kinds of schemes that people can pull off on things they can work sometimes, but you will get caught at some point. And then once you're caught, then you're in real deep water at that point because you're flagger. Yeah. Because you're, you're, you're basically cut off from Google search at that point. And so if you get blacklisted and then you're not only not ranking on well, but you're not ranking it all. And Google won't show your website anymore because it seems really spammy to Google. That's when you start to get into a lot of trouble there. So it's important that you really, when you're looking for these inbound links or these back links, that you're getting them from good sources, not from really spammy ones, there are still people out there you could get onto fiver.com and sign up for a service where someone will give you a thousand back links at high domain authority.
Speaker 0 00:14:23 We'll talk more about that in a second, but you can get a lot of what they claim are really good back links do not under any circumstances fall for any of that. Do not pay someone to get you a bunch of back links like that because you will get into trouble and that will cost you in the long run. So here's the kind of links that we're going for is you want ones that are relevant from places that are relevant to you. So right. If you are a church and you happen to have someone at your church who is an electrician and your electrician just links off to your church on his website to do you a solid, yeah. He just, all of his posts about electrical, current and services for, uh, for putting in electrical or installing lights or whatever it would be. Yeah. But he links to your church all the time. For some reasons, Google is gonna know, Hey, there's something fishy going on here. So doesn't relate. Yeah. Doesn't relate. Now, if it's a local homeless mission and your church serves there a lot, that's a relevant kind of a link and you guys can kind of, it can, or if
Speaker 4 00:15:21 You're wouldn't, it also be, wouldn't it also be if you're a denomination, if you're a part of a denomination and you link off to the denominational website.
Speaker 0 00:15:29 Absolutely. And if they link back to you, that's really good. They look back to you. Of course. Yeah. If they're referencing your content. Yeah, absolutely. Those are the kinds of things that we're looking for. So, uh, relevant, uh, links, those are important. Um, high domain authority links. So let me explain a little bit about what I mean about high domain authority links. Google has a very complex, and they're still a little bit tight lift about how they solve this question or how they answer this question, but they have a, a, a ranking system that's called domain authority, uh, which is how important the website that's linking to you, how important that website is. And that's derived by how much content they have, how old the domain is, how much traffic they get, how many links are going to them. And so it's this big web of, of kind of a, a, a equation that it uses to figure out how important it's.
Speaker 0 00:16:20 Yeah. But that score is called your domain authority. And so what's important is that you get lots of websites that have a high domain authority linking back to you. So usually what this looks like is larger organizations are more valuable than small organizations. Yeah. So if there is a brand new church that just started, maybe you just planted a church for instance. Yeah. And they link back to you as they're sending church. Well, that's still good. That's not bad to have that, but don't get under the impression that that's gonna be something that's gonna totally bump your rankings as much as having a, um, what's famously really good is.edu domains. So if you could write a post for, uh, a local college, for instance, or your Bible college that you went to, and it has a.edu address linking back to you, those are like gold.
Speaker 0 00:17:11 Those are very high domain authority type links usually. Okay. So the more prominent the site that you're having a link coming from, the more valuable it is to your church. So, uh, that is something that is really important. Uh, I guess finally, I'll say this too, it's important that you don't use any kind of link building schemes that are out there. So Google will pick up on these. So if you kind of call all the local churches in the area and say, Hey, you link to me, I'll link to you. And we'll just kind of call it to do a little handshake. <laugh> that's called a link exchange kind of a thing. Yeah. Not usually a good idea. Sometimes it just happens. Naturally. I like to link to organizations. I like sure. They like to link link to my organization. So it just happens. It's not gonna kill you, but don't think that if I just do a link exchange with everybody, that's gonna build my rankings on things there. So kind of know that difference. You want to focus on high domain authority websites, but not engage in any kind of link building schemes or anything like that.
Speaker 4 00:18:07 Okay. That's good. No, that's really insightful. So, um, I guess the next one, you know, we should talk about is, uh, keywords and anchor text. I mean, I think everyone's heard of keywords. I think anchor text has become something that people are thinking a little bit more when it comes to this now. So your thoughts on that.
Speaker 0 00:18:24 Yeah. Let's talk about what we mean by that. So a keyword, that's the term that people are searching for when they're looking for your content. So usually that's things like in a general sense, it's things like churches near me, uh, or churches, uh, in New York, those kinds of things. Uh, but sometimes people are searching for much more specific keywords. I'd say often they are. So they're looking for things like, uh, divorce ministry in New York, uh, or, um, summer camps for kids in Wyoming. You know, those kinds of things they'll do very specific terms. So those are the keywords we talk about that. Um, you want to be using those on your site, but when it comes to link building, what's really important is your anchor text. Um, so what we say, when we say anchor text, it's when you make a link on a site, the way you usually do it is you highlight some text and then you say link that text out to this particular page.
Speaker 0 00:19:19 But one of the, the mistakes that churches make sometimes is will, will ask people to use Ang well, ask people to link to us, but they'll use a link, like click here, uh, as the link, right? So, oh, they'll write, Hey, if you want to know more about forgiveness, my friend, Joe, at first Baptist, did a great sermon on forgiveness. Click here, click here is the link. That's the part that's blue on the actual page. There that's the anchor text. That is a huge no-no. You want the anchor text to be the exact key word, cuz that's what Google is gonna associate with that content. Now having it be click here is better than nothing, but you always want that anchor text to be something that is relevant to what people are searching for. Okay. So in general use message on forgiveness or sermon about forgiveness or how do I forgive my friends? That is a better piece of anchor text. That would be a much better choice for someone to use. If you're asking someone to build a link on your site there
Speaker 4 00:20:16 That's good. That's good. So, well, I guess lastly, after we've talked about all of this, I mean, how do churches and ministries engage in, in doing this effectively building links,
Speaker 0 00:20:26 Right? Cause you don't wanna do it the wrong way. You don't wanna do a of schemes. And, but there, there is some effort you can put into it just to say, just because you're putting an effort to it doesn't necessarily mean that it's something that's gonna get flagged or get you in trouble there. So here's a few ideas of things that we've done. Uh, I've done as a pastor of a church. I do it as reach, right? Uh, we, we do this and these are proven to work. So number one, I'd say reach out to other faith based organizations, uh, in your community, um, or in, in your denomination, uh, do these kinds of things, uh, where you're kind of working together on stuff. So when you, and you can kind of do something for them too. So don't be afraid to link out to your friends again, having external links, it kind of, uh, it builds your authority because it makes Google think that this is a well researched piece of content.
Speaker 0 00:21:14 They didn't just make this up. They actually did their research and they learned about all this. So you wanna link out to other people, but connect with other organizations. If you're doing work with a homeless shelter, linked to them and they'll link to you as some of their partners or churches that, that work with them and they'll start to build things that way. Um, another idea, I think one that's really important is get your, get your content out there on sites other than yours. So if you go, most pastors preach at other churches or at conferences or at events, would you do that? And it's recorded, make sure that they link back to your church with a good piece of anchor text when you did that sermon at another place, or if you wanna write a post for another church or for your denomination, for instance, I'm a part of it denomination called Foursquare.
Speaker 0 00:22:00 And I was offered a chance a few years ago to write something for our weekly blog on our Foursquare website. And it linked back to our church and it kind of built our credibility because yeah, that's a very high domain authority site. A denomination is much larger usually than a local church in their website relevance. So that was a really valuable one to, to get in there. So that's a really good way to do it. So look for ways to write content, to preach sermons and always ask people to link back to your church when you do those kinds of things there. So, um, get involved in local news stories. So if you're able to be interviewed as kind of a, um, a local authority or someone that's really involved in the community yeah. Whether it be for TV or for the paper, whatever it would be.
Speaker 0 00:22:45 Just do that and make sure they link back to your church website. Yeah. When they do those kinds of things, here's something I've learned about reporters over the years is that once they have gone to you one time for some information or some kind of an interview, you're easy to go back to a second time. If they feel like that's someone I could always ask for a, a comment. I could always ask Ian to, to gimme some feedback on this. He'll give me something cuz a lot of times they're up against really tight deadlines. And so right. They'll look to do that. And they'll be a go-to you could become a go-to resource for some of those kinds of people there. So yeah. Uh, that's really big. Um, you need to make your own high quality blog at your church. That's another one that's really important.
Speaker 0 00:23:23 Yeah. We have done episodes and blog posts all about the values of blogging. Uh, it is really hard work, but I think that it is so valuable because what you're doing when you're blogging is you're creating lots of really good content that people out there love to link to. You have members of your church that, um, would link to you on Facebook or on Instagram. Uh, they would link to you in other places you have, uh, all kinds of people when they're, when they're searching for topics and you start to show up on search engines and they find your blog post helpful. They'll be very quick to link to it. So this is kind of, uh, strange, but the best way to build links is to make content that people want to link to. I should be kind of obvious, right? <laugh> if, if I make good content that people want to link to and I'm authority on this topic, people will be more likely to link to it there.
Speaker 0 00:24:17 So, um, lastly, I'll say this to your social media presence. Those are also links. So when you link to your post from Facebook or from LinkedIn or any of those sites, Google sees those and it doesn't rank them as high as a really high domain authority post to do it. But when it sees those links on YouTube, uh, videos, uh, or on LinkedIn or wherever it would be, it counts all of those also as links that are coming into your site. So don't be afraid to, when you are posting on social media or your members of your church are posting on social, encourage them to link back to your church whenever they're thinking of it there. So
Speaker 4 00:24:52 That's good. That's good. I like what you mentioned with the blog we've we saw in blogs were first a thing, uh, years ago, you know, every church jumped on it and then they were like, oh my gosh, I just can't keep up with it. But if you can, uh, they're worth their weight in gold for sure. So
Speaker 0 00:25:07 Yeah. It's hard work cuz I mean, putting out good pieces of content, like so for us at reach, right, we do 2000 words of content every week. A 2000 word blog post is several hours of work and editing. Yeah. And writing and research and all the things that go into it. And so it's a lot of work. I mean, so it's a big investment and I think for churches, you may not have to do quite that much there, but you wanna do 800 or a thousand words and yeah, you want it to be well researched. And so it's a few hours a week of, of actual work to do this kind of stuff. So we have some good ideas. We will put a link in the description <laugh> and in the post here. So you can check that out. That's an example of internal linking is what we're talking about with that.
Speaker 0 00:25:44 So, uh, you can do those things. So then I hope this is helpful. Um, I know it's something that church you're not waking up every morning as a leader of the church. Yeah. Thinking about how do I get more links, but I think if you put in a little bit of effort into this, it can get enormous dividends and it can turn your church into the one that is the most prominent in your community. That when people look for churches or think about churches and anything, church related online, that your church starts to make an appearance. And when people are ready to come to a church that yours will be the first one that they think of. And that's what it's all about for us. So I hope this has been helpful. Yeah. If it has let us know in the comments down below, if you have any questions on link building strategy or anything, we, we do do our best to get to every one of the comments that people put into any of our episodes here. So do drop us a line on there. If it's been helpful rate, review, subscribe, like do all those things that helps us get the word out there about this, uh, and, and link to us too. We really appreciate that if you wanna link to the RET right podcast, that would be great. So thanks guys for being a part of our reach, right family, and, uh, we hope to catch you next week.
Speaker 0 00:26:49 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 at 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.
