Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 If your church wants to reach more people online, local SEO is one of the most important things you can do. And in today's episode, we're gonna break down how your church can do a simple, but highly effective local S E O audit. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast. 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 well. Hey guys, welcome to the reach, right. Podcast episode number 104. This is your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always as my co-host
Speaker 4 00:01:05 Ian Hyat, what's up Thomas,
Speaker 0 00:01:07 Hey, now much man, excited to chat today. We're be talking about a local SEO audit, how churches do it and how they can boost your website ranking. So it's all about local SEO today on the reach right podcast, an important conversation, right.
Speaker 4 00:01:20 Very important. And I think more and more pastors ministry leaders are familiar with that term. You know, you and I have been doing this for years, working with the churches and then maybe about, you know, five plus years ago, you'd say pastor, you know what SEO is and why that's important for your church. And they'd say, no, what is that now? You know, when we ask that question, um, I would say most pastors have some sort of an understanding about SEO or they know what it is in general. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 0 00:01:46 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it probably is helpful if we start out today, we're gonna talk mostly about how a church can do an audit or take a look at your own local SEO results and kind of see how you're ranking and see where you can improve and do some of those things. But I think before we jump into that, it might be helpful to talk about what we mean when we say local SEO, um, SEO of course, standing for search engine optimization, uh, and what are the different kind of disciplines within SEO, uh, and why local SEO might be the most important one for churches. Uh, so, um, I guess I'll kind of kick us off here. There there's a few different kinds of search engine optimization. There's the traditional, which would be called like an on page or like a global SEO. Um, there is managing and mastering your Google AdWord and kind of advertising, uh, search advertising, and then there's local SEO. Um, so, and I guess maybe you can kind of walk through some of those distinctions between those three things and maybe it would be helpful to think of it in terms of on a search engine report or like a, what we'd call a search engine results page, the different areas of a search engine result page. Maybe you can te to us a little bit about that, Ian.
Speaker 4 00:03:00 Yeah. Yeah. So I think everyone kind of, when they think about SEO and, and a search page, like you just said, they think of like, when they Google, Google something, what comes up. Right, right. And, uh, I think the number one, what comes up is what's called the Google map pack. Right? So that is, um, basically it's a, it's a list of locations based on the, the address, the name and address, phone number, the location of whatever it is you're searching for. If, if you're doing restaurants near me, you see those, uh, pop up in, in that list. And, and then you can click, you know, the top three typically are what come up. Um, so again, the example we would use for churches is, so if someone does churches in Austin, Texas, right. Um, it's gonna be top three, uh, based on where you're at and where you're searching from where these churches are located, those top three come up and then, you know, there's a more places link. Um, so that's the first thing is the Google map pack. And then you have usually above that, if there's an ad, like you just said for a Google ad, those pop up, typically above that map pack. And then you have all the other stuff like below, which are like, you know, Yelp listings and all the other stuff. Um, you know, usually it says like top 10 churches, uh, or it, you know, uh, in Austin, Texas and so on. So that's usually, what's all visible on that first page, if that's what you were asking.
Speaker 0 00:04:29 Yeah. Yeah. Here's how I would distinguish it basically. So at the top, usually there's the ads. So these are people that paid to be on the top of the search results when someone does a search for a church yeah. Below that you usually have the map pack. And this is important because it's basically a Google search with a emphasis on local intent. So people that are looking for something near them. So this is common. Um, if you're looking for, um, if you have a plumbing issue at your house yeah. Uh, and you need someone to help with that. Google doesn't want to just show you results for plumbers that are all over the country, because if you are in Florida, a plumber in Wyoming, isn't very helpful to you. So they try to figure out when there's local intent. Uh, and that's what the local search is. And then below that you'll have the global search results. So it's something where if someone looks for churches, you might get churches that are nowhere near you, or it talks more about the history of churches or right, right.
Speaker 4 00:05:25 What
Speaker 0 00:05:25 A church is, or the Wikipedia entry for churches, those kinds of things are, what's gonna appear usually in the global or the on page search results. So for churches, because most of us are still operating local, uh, expressions of church. Now some of our audience probably has online and they're, they're really focusing on online search. Right. That's important too. But for most churches, the local expression is still the most important way that we do that. Yeah. And so a local search is really important when someone looks for churches in my area, my hope is that my church would come up and then people can kind of experience our website and we can link them to that and local SEO and really focusing on that is the way that we do that.
Speaker 4 00:06:07 That's it? Exactly. No, that's, that's, uh, that's a good way to explain it, just to kind of simplify it. Um, so being visible, uh, for people looking for churches in your area is very important for a church.
Speaker 0 00:06:17 Yep, absolutely. So, so now that being said, there is like local search is different, like ranking on there is different from how you would do that when it comes to the global searches. So the global searches, they were much more keyword focused, whereas local searches, they are more focused on, uh, proximity, uh, and where you are and your prominence and how important your organization is and whether or not it matches the search term. So we'll kind of break this down a little bit when it comes to ranking on a local search. What Google is trying to do is they're trying to figure out, are you in that area? Are, are you close to the person that's searching? So if you're a block away from a local church, chances are, if you do a search for that church, Google would like to show that if the church is prominent now, right.
Speaker 0 00:07:05 There's something that, that, that's a key word I wanna focus on as prominent. So yeah, if you are a very large church, for instance, maybe you're the local megachurch. Yeah. There's a chance that Google will try to give your ministry more ranking in the area. If you have a really big website with lots of content on it, they might show your church, even though you're 10 miles away from a, someone who has a church within a mile from them, because they deem your website to be very prominent and your ministry to be a prominent one. Yeah. There's lots of ways that it, it does that. We'll talk about some of the ways that it does it, but it's usually things like, are you listed in a lot of directories? Uh, do you have a lot of reviews for your ministry? Does your website have lots of links going to it? Some of those kinds of things will dig into a little bit. Yeah. So it tries to measure your prominence a little bit. Uh, and then it does take a look at kind of your location and whether or not it matches the search terms there. So, uh, that's kind of how I'd say local SEO and search engine terms kind of go hand in hand with that.
Speaker 4 00:08:06 Yeah, no, that's, that's good. I think. And, and using that word prominence and, and, you know, uh, all of those various things that need to be in place for you to be prominent online. It makes me think of what I hear from a lot of churches. They don't want to talk about competition like that you're in competition with, with other churches, right. It shouldn't be a competition at the same time. You know, it, you do want to be visible, you know, I mean, you would be, you know, up upset if you were a, um, I don't know, Lincoln Ridge Baptist, and only first Baptist, uh, keeps coming up and you can't be seen, um, you know, you also want to be seen as well as the first Baptist church, right.
Speaker 0 00:08:44 It is tricky. Right. Cuz we're on the same team. I think like, you know, it's, it's there. Um, you know, most of us are doing the, the same work and we're trying to reach people with the gospel. And so it, it is weird to think about it. Um, you know, whereas with plumbers, the example we used before, yeah. I want more business than all the other plumbers. Yeah. Uh, but in the end, as a pastor of a church, I don't really, I, I wanna, I wanna be used by God. I I'd love for people to get connected to my church, but really my chief goal is they get connected to a church that's teaching and preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. So right. It is kind of a, a, a tricky thing. We don't think of it in terms of competition. Right. But I think it is important that we do get the word out there because while we're, we're maybe competing in search with other churches, we're also competing with, uh, all kinds of other things that people can be doing on Sunday. And, and here's, here's something that I found is when I was pastoring a church, one of our best keyword that we ranked for was things to do in Madison, Wisconsin. That was something that we would consistently rank for. Yeah. And then we were competing against farmers markets and other events that were happening there and right. I absolutely wanna win that battle with the gospel. So absolutely. I think that was something that was really,
Speaker 4 00:09:51 You know, I love a good farmer's market. Right. Absolutely. But yeah, that God think the gospel that that's, uh, that food is more important. So yeah, that's it.
Speaker 0 00:09:59 So, well, let's dig in, let's talk a little bit about how a church would do a local SEO audit. And as a disclaimer, before we get into this, I wanna say the easiest way, uh, to do a local SEO audit is to go to reach right studios.com/local SEO and put in the name of your church and we'll do a local SEO audit for you at absolutely no charge. There's no cost, there's no catch, uh, we'll send it to you. And, uh, that's the easiest way to tackle one of these here. So do that take advantage of that free resource. We built that tool so that it does all of these things. So you can get a really good assessment of where your church ranks in these areas there. So again, free and no cost, but if you wanted to do it yourself and kind of take a look at some of the factors that we dig into, when we do a local SEO audit, uh, we can kind of go through some of those here now. So why don't you kick us off and, uh, tell us what the first step in doing a local SEO audit, what would be the first step in that, Ian?
Speaker 4 00:10:54 Um, so the first thing is, uh, your P consistency, right? So that, that term P um, that's maybe a little less, uh, of a known acronym compared to SEO, but it's a part of the SEO picture that stands for your name, address, and phone number. Correct. And you having that consistent across the web. Um, so, um, that might sound like, uh, uh, a no-brainer, uh, yeah, we, we know our church's name, address, and phone number. We, you know, that should be online, but it, it gets screwed up often, doesn't it? Right.
Speaker 0 00:11:31 Yeah. It's so strange how this happens, but like with the internet, things tend towards chaos, I would say. So in general, if you just leave things on their own, you start to get inconsistent results with your name, address, and phone number. So here's what we mean by this is that every time your church is ever referenced online, it should always be referenced the exact same way with the exact same phone number and the exact same address, because yeah. Google uses that as a factor of measuring the consistency. Yeah. In how we talk about your church and, and how it's being talked about online, and it always associates that name, address, and phone number with your church and it helps to boost your rankings. Yeah. So what tends to happen is that if you pastor first Baptist church of Austin, Texas, for instance, yeah. Uh, if, if sometimes it's written as FBC, Austin, right.
Speaker 0 00:12:23 Or FBC, Austin, Texas, or first Baptist, Austin, or first Baptist church, Austin, there's all these different ways that our church might be referred to online. Those are all in Google's mind. It's hard for it to distinguish. And sometimes it'll think that this is like 11 different churches. There's first Baptist church. There's first Baptist. There's first Baptist, Austin. There's all, these are all different organizations. And so it kind of sends confusing signals when it's trying to rank and figure out how prominent your church actually is there. So what you need to do is you need to do an audit of your site, uh, and then all kinds of other linking sites out there and make sure that every time any directory or your site yeah. Or social media platform, every time it refers to your church, that it uses the same name, address, and phone number.
Speaker 0 00:13:10 And I'm talking about really specific. So like with your phone number, if sometimes you have parentheses around the area code, and other times you have dots between the numbers and sometimes you have dashes, those can all be confusing signals. So yeah. Be very consistent in the way you write your address, your church, name, your phone number and make sure it's the same across all platforms out there. That's one of the most important things we do when we run our automated local SEO audits for churches. Yeah. It checks your P consistency. So step one is make sure you're really consistent on that.
Speaker 4 00:13:44 Yeah. And, and doesn't it, isn't it funny how many churches we know they have acronyms. They, I just spoke with the church yesterday that, uh, they were VA something like valley Ridge assembly, and, uh, they've branded themselves as V. So, you know, if someone goes online and says, oh, we went to V church, uh, on Sunday, uh, and we loved it or whatever, but just because they spelled that and said that online, it, it screws all this up. So it's really important.
Speaker 0 00:14:10 Yeah, absolutely. It is. So next thing, I guess in doing an audit, I'd say the second step is really dialing in your Google business profile. Yeah. And make sure that's really set up well, um, if you're not familiar with that term, so up until a couple of months ago, it was called Google, my business. Yeah. Uh, they changed it just recently to Google business profile, same thing. Uh, but what this is, this is <laugh>, it's funny. They they've been through so many different name iterations. Uh, this is what Google plus was. If you remember maybe eight or nine years ago. Yeah. Google brought out Google plus, and everybody was trying to think, maybe we should get away from Facebook and do Google plus instead. And so I had a Google plus profile. They kind of canned the personal level of it. Yeah. And it turned into something mostly for organizations and businesses.
Speaker 0 00:14:54 And so Google business profile is what it's become today. And really, this is just a place where you can get all of your key details about your church, really set in stone. This is kind of the gospel for Google when they think of what your church is, this is the reference that they're gonna use of what the absolute, actual name of your church, your location, your business hours, your website, your social media links, photos of your church, videos of your church. Yeah. All these things go into your Google business profile. So getting that real dial really dialed in and making sure that that's consistent and doing an audit of how you look there. I think that's really important. So you can just go to, um, you can just Google the name of your church and it'll take you as long as you've claimed your Google business profile. It'll take you to a link for it and you can verify all your information on there. So yeah, that would be the next step. I'd say
Speaker 4 00:15:44 You said a good, uh, word, um, in doing this, it's getting it dialed in. Um, I talk to so many churches that most churches have actually taken this step to get their Google business profile set up, but they don't go through it in detail and get it fully dialed in. There's a lot of steps and a lot of things to, to make sure you've done. Right. So it's not just a getting in there and a couple little things and you're done. Yeah. Um, so there's some, there's some detail to it.
Speaker 0 00:16:09 I'd put an emphasis on, on the pictures. Like I think photos are super important because you gotta remember when someone does a local search, if you really dial in your Google business profile, that's what the results are gonna show when someone sees you in the map pack. And so yeah, if the, if the pictures are just a, you know, some funny snapshots at the back of people's heads in worship, uh, or, you know, uh, a picture of a, of a potluck table, uh, from your last event that you guys had, that's not gonna be something that someone says, yeah, I wanna make sure I come to this church, but if it's engaging pictures of people, the term we uses, we're trying to do pictures of people caught in the act doing the values of your church. Yeah. I think that's the kind of imagery you want to use on there. So getting all those things really figured out, and maybe even doing some updates on your Google business profile. Yeah. That really helps to boost your rankings. There that's
Speaker 4 00:16:59 Good stuff. Yeah. Easy to kind of set it in, forget it, but, uh, worth doing an audit for. So next one that's really important. I'll tackle is, uh, getting reviews and testimonials. Uh, this might seem a little awkward or, uh, may, um, make pastors uncomfortable, maybe asking for reviews, online reviews and testimonials, but you know, it really is important. Google looks for these things. And, and honestly, I, you know, I, I think it's not too tough to ask for this. I mean, you probably want to be careful the way that you do it. And, and, uh, it's probably something better to, to ask, uh, your, uh, people who have visited the church for the first time or members that AF you know, during the service or after the service, you mention it rather than having your staff go on there and pretend to, to, to do you don't want to, you know, be dishonest with it. Of course. Um, but these are very important. So asking for people to say, Hey, you know, and it could be as easy as you saying, did you enjoy this service today? What did you like about it? Could you go online and give us a shout? It makes us more visible to people looking for churches in the area, nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 0 00:18:00 Yeah. Just think of it as the way we do testimonies. Now this is the online version of testimonies and they're, they help people kind of, uh, associate some level of credibility with your church. Yeah. And so, anyway, we can do that. I think it's really valuable. So, um, as to the idea of asking for it, I'll give a little bit of advice on this is that I think in general, you should ask people to do reviews of your church. Um, Google, they explicitly state that you should be soliciting reviews. They want you to ask people to give you reviews. That's totally within their terms of service. And so don't feel like I'm gaming the system. If I ask people for reviews, right? You are encouraged to do that. Restaurants are supposed to do it. Plumbers are supposed to do it. Churches should be doing it too.
Speaker 0 00:18:41 So ask your people to do it. Yeah. Um, other platforms, specifically platforms like Yelp, they discourage you from soliciting reviews. So if they notice that you've, you've got one review over the last six years, but then off after one Sunday, you get 14 reviews at your church. Yeah. They're gonna start to flag that and say, well, you know, maybe there's some kind of gamesmanship going on here. This isn't quite legit. So know your audience. I would argue that Google reviews are now the most valuable, especially when we're talking about the map pack, but any review site, whether it be Facebook reviews or Yelp reviews, they're all valuable in kind of building your credibility there. So, uh, asking people to do reviews, I think in general is a good idea just when it comes to Yelp ones, exercise a little bit of caution, but these are so important. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:19:28 That's a good differentiation.
Speaker 0 00:19:29 Yeah. Uh, next one up, I think it's important to look at directories and citations. Uh, so this is, uh, where online, there are several, uh, dozens I'd even say yeah. Of relevant directories that organizations can be listed in. Uh, so these are very common ones that we know of. Like your search engines, Google and Bing and Yahoo. Yeah. Uh, things like Yelp and yeah. Facebook and Instagram. And these are, they're all function as directories where you can have a church account, your church has a name, address, phone, number, those things we talked about before, there's also all kinds of other ones that you don't even think about. Like there's, uh, directories like Postmates and eight coupons and, uh, yellow pages. If you know, data
Speaker 4 00:20:16 Axle, I saw data axle
Speaker 0 00:20:17 Data axle. So there's, there's ones that we don't even really pay much attention to, but they are still directories that are online and Google still references them. And this is about your volume place. So the idea is it's important to get your church listed. It is many online directories as possible. You focus on the really prominent ones. You're yeah. You're obviously Google and Facebook. Yeah. And Instagram. And, uh, those, you know, Yelp, those kinds of things are really important. Right. But then the more the merrier, when it comes to other directories, now there are services that do this. This is a service that we offer. We have, we help churches get onto 77 different directories. We keep those directories up to date, but making sure that your NP, like we talked about your name, address, and phone number are consistent on those and that your church has an account. And as listed on as many directories as possible is really an important, uh, and great way to kind of boost your local SEO rankings there.
Speaker 4 00:21:12 Yeah. No, that's good. Good. I'll get the next one. Uh, which is also very important and maybe kind of forgotten is your website speed. Yep. Determines, uh, how, how strong your SEO and your visibility and your rankings go. So, um, I come across so many, you know, we evaluate websites on a daily basis. I come across so many sites that just load slowly for various reasons. And, uh, you wanna make sure that your website speed is, is good. And this also comes with having good website hosting. Um, but yeah, you got, it's a, what is the, the tool that Google provides where you can easily go do this is, um, there it's page speed insights tool. Is that what it is? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's exactly right. Okay. So
Speaker 0 00:21:53 Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Google tells you how fast they think your website is and how fast things are running there. And so if you are able to, to use that tool, it'll tell you exactly how they see your web presence, and then you can, uh, kind of make the necessary adjustments. So if I were to give two places that people should take a look at when it comes to their page speed, there's two big things you can look at. Number one is your image size on your site? Yeah. So in general, this is one of the biggest mistakes we see is that churches use images that are too large or too high quality for web browsing specifically for mobile browsing. Yeah. Uh, page speed is even more important when it comes to mobile browsing. So I see this error a lot is that people use, they they'll resize their images like in their actual dimensions on the site, but they won't actually change from like the very large, even like raw image size that they started with there.
Speaker 0 00:22:48 So yeah, your images should never be more than a hundred, 150 kilobytes on a website. Uh, and sometimes I run across churches that have 700 kilobyte images and that's just way too big. It takes, you know, five times as long to upload something or to download something like that. So it slows down your page speed. So that's item number one, that that's probably the easiest to correct. Secondly, and this is something that should be a no brainer, but not all hosting is the same. Uh, so when you choose your web host, page speed should be one of the most important factors in choosing one. Yeah. And so there are lots of hosting options that are $2 a month, $3 a month. Yeah. And they advertise unlimited storage really. Yeah. Is so true that you get what you pay for in this area. Yeah. And it is important that you really try to, to work that and find it doesn't mean you have to be the most expensive kind of hosting, but know that when you're doing a $2 a month host, you're not gonna probably get the kind of page speed that you need on that there.
Speaker 0 00:23:47 Right. So I think that's really important as well. One little bonus one too, is I think you probably wanna look at where you have, this is a little bit on the technical side, but your name server set up. So I would strongly recommend there's no cost to this, but I would strongly recommend that churches look at a service like CloudFlare, uh, that kind of provide your DNS service for you there. And it just really helps you to speed up your requests quite a bit. It can knock off as much as 25% of your load times on things. So wow. A service like CloudFlare flare, we use it for reach, right. Um, doesn't cost anything. So, uh, we don't have any kickbacks or any kind of, it's not a sponsored, uh, placement or anything in this episode we recommend Cloudflare's a really good solution for something.
Speaker 4 00:24:26 There you go. That's good. Yeah. So last one. Well, at least,
Speaker 0 00:24:29 Yeah. I'll wrap us up with a on page SEO. Uh, so this still does matter. OnPage SEO is really important. And what we mean by that is the actual content that's on the pages of your website. Yeah. It is very hard to rank in a local search. If your church website has no content on it. Uh, if, if you, every time you put up a sermon, you just have a title of the sermon and then you have a video of your sermon, but there's no text in there. It's really hard for you to rank, uh, yeah. For those search terms that are on there. So you can't just ignore what we would call on page SEO. So take some time to think about what are those key words that people are looking for in my community? Well, it's gonna be things like churches in Honolulu or churches near me or churches in my area.
Speaker 0 00:25:15 Um, Christian ministries in my area. Yeah. Youth ministries in my area. So these kinds of search terms, don't stuff them onto your website. Don't just kind of put them anywhere. Yeah. It used to be, you could totally game Google's algorithm. I remember that at the bottom of your site, people would just list churches in Austin, churches in round rock churches in Georgetown churches. And Flickerville, they'd put all the sub communities there. Yeah. And then they'd do church and churches and Christian churches and every variant. Yeah. That doesn't work anymore. You have to do it in normal human speak. Uh, and yeah. Uh, if you're in English speaking area, you want to use normal, conversational type of English. Right. Conversational Spanish. If you're a Spanish speaking church or whatever it would be, but use your keyword and focus a little bit on what's called your on page search engine optimization. That helps to build your rankings as well. Anything to add to that. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:26:06 No, I think you, you hit most of it. And I would just say, yeah, Google is wised up to, um, like when you said there a lot of, lot of, not just churches, businesses alike tried to game the system and just throw all of those key words and those, um, those titles on their website, you just, you can't do it anymore. And you wanna, uh, Google's just really smart and they know a lot and you just want to add here to good practices there. So that was good.
Speaker 0 00:26:29 Yeah. That's exactly right. So I'll end with this too. Again, this is a lot of work and I would strongly recommend that you take advantage of our totally free local SEO audit. It's all automated. So we've built this whole system so that it sends it right to you. Uh, it does take, you know, it's actually doing and crunching a lot of numbers. We use a lot of our SEO software to kind of pull the ranking. So I know you do these a lot for, uh, for people, how long it takes, what, 30 minutes or so usually Ian to get
Speaker 4 00:26:55 It. Yeah. Yeah. About 30, 30 minutes. And it'll notify you when it's finished, so you can start it and walk it
Speaker 0 00:27:00 Doesn't take them 30 minutes. Right. If you do this audit, you, you put in, you fill out the form in about 30 seconds. Correct. But then the actual software has to do its work and it really is crunching, uh, numbers and information and algorithms and doing reports and audits. So it does all of this for you, but yeah, if you were to do all this stuff that it does yourself, it would take you 30 days, uh, 30 days
Speaker 4 00:27:22 A much,
Speaker 0 00:27:22 Yeah, yeah. Much better solution. So
Speaker 4 00:27:24 Good point of clarification there. Yeah. All you have to do is go on our website and put your info in there and then it'll notify you when the report's done. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:27:32 So it does it just based on your church and name too. So you don't even really need to enter a lot of your information. You just put in your church name. So first Baptist of Austin, uh, it will see what the internet is saying about you. And it'll do a local SEO audit. So reach right studios.com/local SEO. Uh, there's a big button on there. Go ahead and click that. It'll get it for you. I hope this has been helpful for you. Yeah. On kind of some of the things we think about when it comes to local SEO and how to do an audit, uh, if it has been helpful, let us know when the comments below, um, let us know kind of how you're thinking about local SEO. Uh, that would be really helpful to us also like subscribe, do all those things. It helps us to get the word out there about the reach right podcast. We wanna thank you guys so much for being a part of our reach, right. Family. And we hope to catch you next week. 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 for wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week.
