Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we unpack nine SEO mistakes that most churches make. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:21 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 is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help you your church see more visitors and grow well. Hey guys, welcome to
Speaker 0 00:00:49 The <inaudible> podcast. Episode number 46. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost
Speaker 2 00:00:57 Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas. Hey,
Speaker 0 00:00:59 Not too much. Ian excited for our conversation today. We're going to be talking about nine SEO mistakes that most churches make. I think it's going to be an important conversation, uh, SEO or search engine optimization. Uh, that is something that is more important today than it's ever been. And I'd say it's harder than it's ever been today to, uh, because, uh, there's been more and more content created out there. And each time we make new content, it makes it, uh, Google has to do more to figure out where things rank. And so it's really important for a lot of churches. So, uh, you've seen the growing importance I'm sure for churches, right?
Speaker 2 00:01:37 Yeah. And, and pastors and ministry leaders are understanding the importance now more than ever before there used to be. I think we mentioned this in the last POS podcast that, Oh, you know, maybe four or five years ago, you'd say, are you familiar with SEO pastor? And they'd be like, no, but now a lot more than they know what that means. Uh, they know how important it is to rank, but it's still something that I'd say is still very new to most websites.
Speaker 0 00:02:02 Yeah. I think it is it's churches. Most churches. Yeah. I mean, so every website, whether you're doing SEO or not, you're, there's some level of search engine optimization that takes place whenever you build a website and just how you build it and everything. But I'll say this too is there's lots of different forms of search engine optimization. We're going to focus on a couple of them today. Uh, for churches I'd say probably the most important one is local search engine optimization. Especially if you're a church that isn't, uh, fully in on digital or your main expression is still your Sunday morning in-person experience that local SEO service. Uh, that's something that is probably most important. That means getting your church to rank when someone puts a search into Google and then your church would show up in that map pack. Uh, so those first three results there.
Speaker 0 00:02:53 Uh, but we did a podcast episode on that a few weeks ago. If you want to go back and check that out and you certainly can, uh, today it's more of a broad approach of those mistakes that we see churches making most often because we see the same things over and over again. And you know, of course these are services that we help churches with, but, uh, we want to be a resource to those churches that want to go out on their own and try to figure this out. And hopefully this information is helpful, these mistakes that we're seeing. So I'll go ahead and kick us off. Um, the first mistake that we see most often I'd say is slow load times, uh, slow load times on a site. The Google has been very upfront about this, that probably one of the most important parts in their algorithm and where they rank sites is site load times and site speed.
Speaker 0 00:03:38 Uh, so this is not something you can just ignore. Uh, it is something that, um, you probably want to take a hard look at, uh, just on your own site. You want to do some testing, uh, do some measurement on those kinds of things. Uh, and a site that loads slowly will perform much worse than a site that doesn't. So there's a few reasons for this, but I'll tell you the one that I see most often. Maybe you have some ideas on this too, Ian, but the reason for slow load times in most cases in my experience is, uh, using images that are too big or not compressed enough. Uh, that's really the big issue. So, uh, those churches that this is something that churches did all the time as they, they used to have this a full screen slider image, right? So when you first got a site, it would be a giant, maybe a slideshow of different things happening or events and sermon series. And those things I'd say that those are kind of, those are probably a bad idea in most cases now. And one of the chief reasons for that is because big images take a long time to load slow down your site and therefore make you less likely to appear on searches. So, uh, what else do you have to add to that EMR?
Speaker 2 00:04:50 Yeah, no, I think we're in a time right now on church websites where also one of the more popular features to have instead of that slider is like a video background and kind of a montage where it shows, you know, images of life happening on a Sunday, baptism, whatever kids having a good time. And this is actually a very good thing. A lot of some churches they ask me, should we do that because isn't that going to affect our load time? And it can, depending upon the file size, I know we have ways where we help that not be something that greatly impacts, you know, churches load times that it has a lot to do, I think with file size, but I know our teams more familiar with those nuts and bolts, but that's something that I hear a little bit more these days is just that, Hey, we'd like to have one of those videos, but isn't that going to like slow down our side and there's ways around it.
Speaker 0 00:05:44 Yeah, that's exactly right. So I don't want to get too technical on the ins and outs of how to do it, but yes, file size does play a part. There's a function that you can set up on your site called lazy loading, uh, which it only loads the content that is needed when it's needed. So it gives your, it gives Google the impression of a much faster load time. And it's not like we're tricking Google, but it's, we're, it's loading the information. Basically it tells Google that the site is fully loaded at this point, but there are some other things that we still need to load. And so the way those videos work is usually there's text or logos and stuff above them. It loads all that content. And then it loads just enough to get the first couple of frames of the video going, or even like a still image.
Speaker 0 00:06:32 And then it's ready to go. And so Google recognizes it that way, kind of getting around that load time problem. So, um, I'll, I'll have to say for someone who's maybe a, uh, is not a really technical person that's listening to this. The, the main point here is that load time is important. Uh, you need to really focus on that, make sure that that's something you don't just, um, uh, don't I know that sometimes having big images that are really high resolution and quality, they look great, but will cost you to do those kinds of things. So, um, you know, work with whoever your developer is your designer and work on a solution that really gets your load times down. That's really an important thing to do.
Speaker 2 00:07:09 Yeah. Make sure you address that I'll tackle the next one. And this is that churches don't have enough enough text content. And this kind of sounds funny at first glance because it's, you know, we recommend a simple approach and we've seen so many bad church websites that have, you know, pages that go down for miles and miles with too much text content. But so since now the trend is to go simple. Sometimes you can go too simple and not have enough text on your website. And it's important. Google is looking at the amount of words on a site. I think it's 300 is kind of the cutoff point. So you want to have at least 300 words of text on a page
Speaker 0 00:07:53 That's valuable. Yep. Yeah, you're exactly right. I think that, uh, the, the fact is is that as smart as Google's Agra algorithms are, they're still not great at looking at what is in the content of images like what's happening there. Like they can probably tell you if images are similar to one another and they can find, you know, a specific things about what an image is, but for complex topics. So let's say you wanted to search for a topic like how to do SEO for my church. It's hard for them to get that in an image or even more so for this video that we're recording right now, or audio, if you're listening online, if we put this on our website and didn't include any text in this post, Google is not smart enough to, to analyze all the content of this video and figure out where it ranks amongst all the, uh, content out there for SEO, for churches.
Speaker 0 00:08:45 Right. So it's important that you always include that you use the right number though. Um, I think that is an absolute minimum. And here's the rule is that if you want your content to in search engines, you need to have a minimum of 300 words of content. Uh, so, and how much content should you have? Like what is a better number? 300 is like the really, really low and minimum, I think at a, you should really shoot to be more in the six or 700 range. We've done a lot of independent testing of our blog posts at reach, right? And we found the magic number for us is 2000 words. Uh, so that's a pretty good sized post. That's a lot of, I mean, that's a 10 to 15 minute read on most of our blog posts there and it takes a lot of work to do that.
Speaker 0 00:09:30 But the, as a general rule, more content is better. Now there's some limits. I will say that our best performing post or one of them at least is a 7,000 word posts of the top 100 church websites of 2021. That's one of the posts we have that performs best. And it's an enormously long, long posts, but in general, Google likes long form content. More. So the point here is that, um, if you're wondering if you have too much texts, the answer is probably not. Uh, if you're wondering if you have too little texts, the answer is probably, uh, the more that you can put on there, the better you'll rank on search engines.
Speaker 2 00:10:08 Yeah. One more thing I'll add to that as a, an easier place to be able to do this on your church website is where your sermons are at where your archives sermons are at, because they're, you would upload your video or your audio. And the reason why it's easier for churches to pull off enough keywords there is they're really already creating that content. Usually a pastors already typed out his sermon notes and a main points and scripture references and those types of things. So if you already have that, it could be as simple as really kind of copying and pasting for lack of a better term there, but uploading that in there. So you're not having to recreate it, but that's a good idea, I think for churches in an easier place for them. And of course, once you get information on your about page and ministry pages that stuff's not changing, but as far as the changing content where it's easier to keep that amount of keywords would be in that, that sermons area or media area of your website,
Speaker 0 00:11:03 It's exactly right. That's well said here, let me hit. Number three. It's a, the mistake we see is that it's not creating new content. And we see this all the time, just because we, we help lots of churches, launch websites with some of our services here. We do web development projects all the time. Uh, and there's this idea that once a website is launched, that it's done and that's just something I think churches need to move away from, you know, yes, maybe the heavy design portion is finished, but a website is never really done, right? Like that's, that's something, this is a place where your content, the things that your church is putting out there where it lives, this is the place where everything you create, you should be creating new content all the time, because you're already creating new content. You're doing sermons each and every week, you're hosting events.
Speaker 0 00:11:52 These are all pieces content. So, um, if you are under the impression that a search engine, a website can rank in search engines by making content once and then just leaving it, uh, that's just not the case because, uh, the way we say it in the search industry is that content degrades over time. Uh, so, um, these posts that I was talking about, like that 7,000 word posts about church websites and other posts we've written, they're probably unless we're updating it, which we can talk about that more. But, um, unless we're updating it, they're going to rank less. They'll rank lower next year that may do this year. Uh, if everything stays the same, now there's always some exceptions to these kinds of rules. It depends on what other people are doing out there. But, uh, generally speaking, if you're not making new content, you lose ranking. So what do you have to add?
Speaker 2 00:12:41 Oh, not, not much there. I think we've talked about blogging before. That's a place where you can also create new content and that again is something you have to count the cost with. It's something you got to keep up with regularly, but that's just one other idea of where you can create new content. Because as I just mentioned on our last point was just that, you know, a lot of times it's hard to create new content on your about page or your ministry pages, because those things are staying the same, but that's one other area where you can create new content and it's yeah, I think the point is, is don't think of your website as a set it and forget it type thing. So it's good. Octaga the fourth one in which is not including your nap. So when your site's missing your nap, which is name, address, and phone number, that's what that acronym stands for that you would think is a simple thing to have your church name, address, and phone number.
Speaker 2 00:13:35 But we've seen that, uh, you know, not as often just left out completely, but I think what we seen more with that is that it's not consistent and it's not on your website enough. And when I say consistent is that you may have, um, you know, let's just say you're Lansing Baptist church. And then, uh, you have on another area for your name Baptist church of Lansing or something like that. Um, and so that actually hurts you, even if you kind of, because we know so many churches, they, even if they're called first something, they call themselves different things on a Sunday, even if their name is, is technically spelled out as something else, they shorten it usually, or just have a different way that they say it internally. So that sometimes translates on their website. And then that actually hurts you for, for search engine rankings as well.
Speaker 0 00:14:31 Yeah, this seems so strange, but it really is true that it has to be like consistent. And we mean this, like literally it needs to always be exactly the same. So, uh, the ways that I see this things kind of some pitfalls I see here is with your address. So get his name, address, and phone number, if on your address, you're on North <inaudible> and you just put <inaudible> or you leave off the end period, or sometimes you write North and not end period, or just add without the period. Like it's just important. If you, if you catch this, you need to be completely and always 100% consistent. Uh, so if, sometimes you spell out the word Texas in your state name, sometimes you put T X, uh, so those are differences. And what it does is it makes confusion for Google in trying to figure out where is this place located?
Speaker 0 00:15:26 And it makes, uh, some, some difficulty in finding that. So being always 100% consistent with that same thing for phone numbers, if you put it sometimes with parentheses around the area code sometimes without, sometimes with periods between the numbers, sometimes with dashes, just be really consistent on that over and over and over again, always the same way on your site. And that will help you. This is especially important for that local search engine optimization. So this is how Google feeds that, um, the results for when people search for churches near me or churches in my town, that's how you come up on that map pack is by getting that right among other things that you can do out there. What are the things that churches ought to do is get that same information in the same format submitted to other listing sites. Uh, and there's like, there's dozens and dozens of those out there that you can submit to.
Speaker 0 00:16:20 Uh, so that's something we help churches with as well, but, uh, getting your nap, write your name, address, and phone number. Sounds like it's the simplest bit of advice, but it is a mistake that we see all the time. I would say on sites, let's say, well, number five, let me hit that. It's link spamming link spamming. Uh, it is never a good idea, uh, to get, to try to get other people, to link to your website where it doesn't make sense to link to your website. Right? And we see this really often. It used to be that the reason why people do this because it used to work, right? So you used to be able to just have a few friends, uh, make you used to see like a site roll or something on the side of a site where they would link to all their, their friend, churches and organizations they partner with and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 0 00:17:06 Um, we see this as, uh, people try to comment on our blog all the time. And, uh, every day I'm having to delete maybe 10 spam comments from churches that are writing on our blog. And it says the same thing. Every time it says, uh, something, something, something church, they are the church for people in this town and in this city. And they just write that same thing over and over again. And they have a whole bunch of key words in there, but see, this doesn't really work anymore. And here's the danger you run is even if it does work, I think actually you could make a case that it does work a little bit. You could get some results if you really get spammy with your links, but the moment that Google catches you, they start to put some hits on your site and they say, you know what? Let's, let's put a Mark on this and keep them lower on the rankings. And then you're really in trouble then anything else you'd do after that, it starts to really hurt you. Uh, so you want to be really careful with links, spamming, and then this might be a good segue to number six, too. It's in that same, same vein. You go ahead and hit that one
Speaker 2 00:18:08 And that's keyword stuffing. And that just means that you're, you're taking, what do you think are valuable keywords or the same keywords and just dumping those over and over again on your website. So again, something that used to be more effective. So if it's like churches in Austin, Texas, and you're just putting that all over the place and throughout the website, you might think, Oh wow, that's going to help us rank when someone looks for churches in Austin, Texas, but again, Google's smart to that. And they're getting, you might get away with it for a little while. Right. But once they, once they find you out, same thing for kind of linked spamming, you kind of get flagged and demoted there. And then you got to kind of dig yourself out of the hole.
Speaker 0 00:18:50 Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. This did use to work this work even better, uh, in the past where you could just stuff, a bunch of keywords, you used to be able to put keywords in your meta-tags, which is a kind of invisible words that tell Google what the page is about. So you used to be able to do this, uh, and you would just write churches in Austin Church in Austin, Austin, churches, Austin, church, Austin, Texas church churches in Austin, Texas, you would just have these same keywords and you just have a bunch of words at the bottom there that don't even make sense. They're just listed all these locations and Google has become much more sophisticated and you can't gain that system anymore so that people can find your church based on just that kind of keyword stuffing practices. You're exactly right. That that will get you, um, checked.
Speaker 0 00:19:38 It'll get you banned. In some cases, if you keep doing these kinds of things in the search engine world, we have these things called white hat and black hat processes. So black hat means it's things that you do that are like shady that can get you in trouble. They may work a little bit and we don't do any or advocate any of those kinds of practices. Uh, white hat stuff is right within Google's guidelines. And so what would be in Google's guidelines? Let me say this. If you want to do some kind of a project like this, I would encourage you to make a landing page on your site for each location. So let's say you're a, you're a church that's right between Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota. Uh, so the twin cities you're right between the two and you have people from your church, half of them live in Minneapolis, half of them live in St.
Speaker 0 00:20:24 Paul. Well, it might make sense to have a Minneapolis, uh, church landing page and a St. Paul Church landing page that has similar content, but it just uses the keywords in proper English in normal good well-written fashion. That really makes a big difference. And I'll say this here too, is that Google is smart enough to know that you are writing a way that is for humans and not for computers. Uh, this is one of the big things is it's looking for kind of an eighth grade reading level. Uh, that's where you want to be targeting with most of your content. Uh, and if it's written for people, it will know, and it will, it'll, uh, punish your site accordingly. If it's not, let's put it that way.
Speaker 2 00:21:05 Yeah. Reminds me of when you're asked if you're a robot when you're filling certain things out online, so that's good. Awesome. Why don't you tackle the next one,
Speaker 0 00:21:14 Number seven. It's not using meta-tags that we talked about this just a second ago, but meta-tags or meta information. This is the stuff that is not usually visible to the human eye, but it kind of tells search engines what this content is about. So the places where I see this skipped over the most is when it comes to the images that you put on your site. Uh, so sometimes this will be called like all tags or things. Sometimes when you hover over an image, you'll see a little bit of text that comes right by that that would be kind of those alt tags are meta-tags that are there, uh, search engines, see that content and it helps them figure out, you know, what is this picture about? So if you have a picture of young people at your church, having a blast at camp, um, make sure you get things like youth ministry in, uh, in St.
Speaker 0 00:22:03 Paul, that's a good tag for an image like that. That's not keyword stuffing if you do that. But if you call it the tag youth image in St. Paul St. Paul youth ministry ministries for youth in St. Paul, if you did those kinds of things, that is the stuff that they go to back to the last point, but meta-tags are really important though, because it helps Google kind of makes heads or tails of what to do with that information, with things that aren't text. It helps them kind of decipher what's going on with that. So,
Speaker 2 00:22:33 Yeah, it sounds like it's kind of like identification, right? It helps Google and, and, and the crawlers, so to speak, to identify, uh, that image or content. Um, so, uh, I guess, think of it as kind of like part of the foundation of your house, right?
Speaker 0 00:22:48 Yeah. That's good. And I'll give this one other piece of input on this here too. So another thing that meta-tags do is when you do a search, um, imagine you just put in churches in Austin, uh, or churches in Georgetown, you might say there. And so you put that into a search engine, and then you think of what the results look like. You'll see, uh, a, a name of a church. Uh, so it'll say a celebration church in Georgetown, uh, and then below that there's a description. Now that description, if there's not one available to Google, they will just pull whatever the first bits of text are off of your website, but right. In most cases you want to edit that. And what that does is it, it, it kind of, uh, think of it as a way that you're selling your link to whoever just did that search and encouraging them to kick on it.
Speaker 0 00:23:37 So to click on it. So you can actually write in there, you can write in what your church is about, but I think like a, you know, that you probably have about 20 to 30 words of space there, you have to think of a really quick way to inspire someone to click on that, because what that description does is it, if you continually are the one that people always seem to click on, then Google's going to start to think, well, you know what, people really like this content, they seem to click on it a lot. Let's keep showing this one more and that'll help you rise and rankings, right?
Speaker 2 00:24:08 Yeah. So even though we said, it's kind of something that's done internally and behind the scenes, it's also a way to kind of visit visibly brand yourself a little bit too. So, because it does show up on, on the outside searches. So great. I'll tackle the next one here, which is a skipping links. So not linking people in your site into meaning to other areas of your website, right. And not linking them out of your website. That's really important. I know we do it on, on all of our article articles that we write. And if there's a, if we, you know, cite someone as a source or a resource, we're going to link out to their website, um, and the same thing on your church website, um, and there's internal linking and external linking is really important that you link people out and again, make sure it's something relevant to what you're talking about.
Speaker 2 00:24:58 And you're not going to link someone out of your church website to the PlayStation five store or something like that. So, um, you're going to want to make sure it's something that's relevant, but if you're talking about a new series, if you're kind of, if you have like an events landing page and you have your new series, you have this event from there, you obviously can link someone out to your sermon archive page. Cause that that's where it fits internally. Um, if you cover a sermon topic and you referenced CS Lewis, maybe, you know, link out to that website and net content and source. Um, so, um, that's kind of in general what it is, right?
Speaker 0 00:25:35 Yeah, that's exactly right. I think, uh, with the external linking Google likes content that is authoritative, uh, and that it cites its references basically. So think of it kind of like go back to school, uh, and the way that you use to site things when you were in school and you had to make sure you cited all of your references and where you got things. So Google likes that kind of content, and it gives preference, uh, with internal linking, what that does more is it helps Google, better navigate your site and figure out what content is about and linking off to other places. It just kind of, it also helps users get there. They stay longer on your site and it helps Google realize that, well, this person went to seven pages on this church website and they stayed on here for 11 minutes. This must've been really good content.
Speaker 0 00:26:22 Let's show it more. Uh, but I think both of them play a really important part. Um, I did a little research on our numbers. I told you, we have about 2000 words is our average blog post. Here. We have an average of seven external links on every one of those posts, looking off to where we got that information, where the staff comes from. So seven external links and 17 internal links. So sending people to other sites now we've written hundreds and hundreds of posts at this point, and there's lots of content on there. And we have all these podcast episodes and all this stuff to link people to. So this will tend to grow as you create more content, but the more of that you can have the better, there are some limits, but I don't really see churches getting to those limits. Like, um, sometimes it starts to Google will think it might be spammy if you have like over 50 links, uh, from what I've seen.
Speaker 0 00:27:17 Uh, but you know, we have, uh, one of our best performing posts, again, that top 100 church websites. It links out to a hundred different church websites and we still rank really well with that. So it's not a hard cap, but you know, I think lots of links is really important. It's good. Cool. Nothing more to add on that one, let me finish this off then. Uh, number nine is using other people's content, uh, in parentheses without, without citing them. Uh, that's really important not to do that. So a quick way to reduce your ranking, uh, is to use content that's already published by other people and not cite them properly, not give them a link saying, Hey, I got this from Joe, or I got this from Christ church down the road there. And sending that, sending a link back to that way to show where it came from.
Speaker 0 00:28:04 If you think it's okay to pirate somebody else's blog post and put it on your site, or even, um, you know, like here, here's a common one that I see churches do, and I understand why, and I kind of get it. But, um, if you're part of a denomination and your denomination has a specific belief set, um, make sure that you have those beliefs on your site. So yes, do that, but also make sure you cite where that's coming from, where the, where the beliefs are, are linked online. And so if you got these things from your denominational website, well, it's a great chance for you to put, uh, put some importance back on them, but then also put it on there and make sure you give someone a link. So it kind of serves that last one is it gives you the, the, um, the juice from linking to other people. It makes your content feel more authoritative because then you'd know where it came from. But, uh, just make sure you do that. If you do not do that, Google's going to take a look at your content and say, this guy is just scraping a bunch of content off of other sites, pasting it on his, and they're going to start docking you on that. So when you do those things, make sure you link off to where the content came from.
Speaker 2 00:29:14 Yeah. I think all of these things to kind of wrap it up is, is that, you know, Google, when they're looking at all of this, it's, it's really kind of just, are you doing the right thing? Uh, you know, they're, they're looking at healthy practices and, uh, and honestly when you're citing other people's content and you're, you're making sure that you're, that you're being unselfish, right. You're not taking it for yourself. And so that's what we all want in ministry, right. We're supposed to be doing that. So, no, it's kind of sounds corny, but think that when you
Speaker 0 00:29:42 Start thinking other than just you're in goal, uh, and then you, you know, you start thinking and that's, that's a healthy thing to do. And then you're, you're referencing other, uh, areas and providing more resources for people. And so on. Well, we, one of our first sites that we did at, at retried you'll remember is that was, it was my church's website. Right? We did that. And how many times did we see people that, um, that the exact same site that just people found a way to scrape our content, scrape our images, even, um, I even saw one that had pictures of kids from our church, like inside our waivers, they were on their website. And it just, you know, we have to send one of those, uh, mostly polite emails that say, Hey, knock it off. That's not right to do those kinds of things.
Speaker 0 00:30:32 So, but I think you said it right. I think all of these elements we talked about today is just if you do it right. And I think what it is is it's, there's lots of ways that churches try to take shortcuts or people in general, not just churches, but people that are trying to search engine Optima, optimize, they take shortcuts for what has taken years and years of work. We've been blogging consistently at retried. And we have a ton of traffic because we've been doing it for five years, week in and week out without any breaks. And it just keeps it's something that we do. It's part of our culture of creating content here. And after a while, you really start to get results and those results do tend to snowball, but don't try and skip any of the hard work. And you'll usually wind up being okay. Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll leave it at that for today, guys. Thank you so much for being part of our retried family. Uh, if this has meant something to you or it's been helpful, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review, subscribe, like comment, do all those things. Uh, thanks for being part of our retried family. And we'll catch you guys next week.
Speaker 1 00:31:37 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 <inaudible> 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.
