Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we discuss eight simple SEO tips for churches that anyone can do. SEO or search engine optimization is an essential part of every church's digital strategy. But many church leaders think it is something that only tech gurus can do join us. As we talk through the eight tips that even a web novice can tackle, we hope this conversation helps your church reach more people.
Speaker 1 00:00:37 You are listening to the read-write podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow. Hey guys, welcome to the
Speaker 0 00:01:06 <inaudible> podcast. Episode number 36. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian. Hi, what's up Thomas? Hey, not too much. He isn't excited for our conversation here today. We're going to talk about eight simple SEO tips for churches that anyone can do. Um, so it's, uh, it's something that we're trying to make this really for anybody who, whether they know much about SEO or not, even if they don't know what SEO stands for. Uh, hopefully these tips will be helpful to them and we can kind of talk people through that. So, uh, should it be a good conversation for those that don't know, a SEO is a internet abbreviation for search engine optimization. So optimizing your church website for search engines so that you can be found more. And our goal today is to make this a very non-technical, uh, conversation. Um, we, SEO can be very technical. There's lots of technical parts to it. Uh, but I'd find that the vast majority of it is they are, there are things that are not that technical it's things that really anybody that administers a website or can get in there and make edits to a page on your website. You can probably do all of these things here. And I would say that this stuff is more important than it's ever been in this rise of digital church that we've been experiencing. So what say you, what do you think?
Speaker 2 00:02:26 I, yeah, absolutely. And I'm hearing more churches when you, when you just mentioned, if you don't know what the SEO, uh, acronym stands for, I'm finding that more and more pastors do know what it means. I remember in years past, uh, I would say, are you familiar with SEO and what that means pastor? No, they would say no. Now I'd say about probably, uh, you know, 70, 80% of them do. Uh, and, and they, and you're exactly right. Uh, not just because of the pandemic, even shortly before that things have become more competitive online with people doing searches and for different kinds of churches in certain areas and so on and so forth. So yeah, I think a lot of churches are understanding now that, Hey, we got to find a way to be visible online and stand out in the crowd, so to speak. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:03:12 Yeah. I think it's great. It's really, uh, the internet is the great equalizer for so many things that even small churches can do this. Uh, and it's something that I, as someone who's pastored, small churches and put a little bit of effort into SEO, you can see enormous results from it. Uh, my church that I pastored last, we were, Oh, a hundred. We grew to maybe 150 or so. And, uh, in that time we went from being invisible on search engines to being one of the top two or three church churches that would show up in a medium-sized city of Madison, Wisconsin. So, uh, it really was something that paid huge dividends, putting a little bit of effort into this. And so, uh, we want to give you guys some of our secret sauce on this. Some of the things that we know, uh, we're not going to get too technical on it, but I do think that, uh, if you're, if you're worried or maybe thinking maybe this isn't for me, or maybe this doesn't matter to me, um, I do think this is something that this is how people are finding churches.
Speaker 0 00:04:09 And even more importantly, now this is how they're finding content right now. Uh, so, um, it's one thing when we think about search engine optimization, I think a lot of times churches think how do I get the name of my church or our church's homepage to be the thing that shows up when people type into a search engine, uh, churches in Honolulu or wherever you live, they type in that kind of a phrase. And that's good. You, you want to try to get some of those kinds of search terms, but I would say even more important are some of the more random searches that are all over your site. So in churches, we're making content all the time, right? So we're, we're preaching sermons and almost every church is putting their sermons online. We're making other content on our websites a lot of times. And here's the thing is people are searching for a lot of that content they're looking for, uh, how do I better parent my kids and how do I love my husband, or what should I do?
Speaker 0 00:05:03 Uh, when my son is, is looking at things online that he shouldn't, they're typing in these kinds of things into search engines. And if you think a little bit strategically about some of the content you put on your website, not just your home page, you think about the content. I think you could really could get ahead and get eyes and get people to see your teachings on these kinds of topics here. So that's what it all comes down to. And we'll just kind of dive in here to the top, uh, the top eight, but we see eight simple SEO tips for churches that anyone can do. So I'll tackle the first one, if it's okay with you, I'll hit it. The first one is add text to your sermons online. Uh, so adding text to your sermon. So one of the Cardinal sins that I see a lot of, uh, church websites doing is they will upload a sermon each week.
Speaker 0 00:05:49 Typically churches are pretty good about this. Now they'll have their sermons on there, but they will have just the video, uh, or the audio mostly video nowadays. But some that still do audio, just the audio, uh, may be they'll have the sermon title in there somewhere. And that's it. Uh, and this is wasting such an enormous opportunity, uh, for search engines because as smart as search engines, are they still, aren't great at figuring out the content of what you're saying in your video and in your MP3, your audio clips. They're not really great at figuring out what the content of that is. They're much better at reading text that is on individual pages there. So a better solution beyond just maybe sticking your video or embedding your video on there is getting at a minimum, some text into, into the website there. So if you're someone that preaches, uh, by a manuscript, this is really easy to do, right?
Speaker 0 00:06:46 So you just take the manuscript that you preach from, and you should include that with your video and put that in the word for word manuscript right there into the, into the sermon page, basically. And that way search engines will see every bit of content you put out there. Uh, and it really makes a big difference on top of that. For some churches, it's actually getting less and less expensive to do transcription services online. So there's people that will transcribe entire sermons for Oh 10 to $15. You can find some solutions online to do that for a 30 to 40 minute sermon. They'll give you a full transcript. Usually it's mostly, error-free, they'll usually get rid of most of your ums and UHS and that kind of stuff that you have in there. And you can put that right on your site, and then you have that content on there. But I would say at a minimum, uh, churches should at least have a few paragraphs of kind of a synopsis of what this message is about. Um, the target is at least maybe a few hundred words on each sermon page, but getting texts in there is an easy thing that every church could do. I think it makes a huge difference. So what do you have to add to that, Ian?
Speaker 2 00:07:52 Yeah, no, you covered a lot. And I think this is just, it's more manageable than maybe the average pastor thinks now, unfortunately you hit the nail on the head at the beginning, what you were saying there. I see on a, you know, I see a ton of websites every day. I see unfortunately, most of them, and I hate to say it probably about maybe 88 to 90% of them don't have this on there. Uh, and so I think that it's, but it's, it's more manageable than a pastor thinks because even if you don't go by manuscript, most pastors, they are there, they have sermon notes right there. They're writing out their messages. Uh, they have that usually saved on some sort of a word document or something like that. They have, they have sermon points, they have scripture references. They have actually, even if they weren't thinking too much about it, key words that they've already, you know, developed it by just writing out their sermons. And this could be as easy as you just sending that to your media person, to all those, just copy and paste it onto your website or the sermons area of your website. And there's a little bit of reworking you can do in there. It's not just a simple copy and paste, but, but churches are already creating this content because pastors are doing a weekly message. So it's not like they have to, you know, totally change and add some new workload to what they're already doing.
Speaker 0 00:09:10 Yep. I think this will pay dividends to whatever you put into it. You'll get out of it. Uh, so at a minimum, I mean, you could just copy and paste your, your manuscript or your notes or whatever that would be. That's, that's probably a good starting point. Uh, I think it's probably worth it to have someone from your church spend 20, 30 minutes a week. Just kind of cleaning that up a little bit, uh, making sure the textbooks, right. Uh, getting some subtitles in there, some of those kinds of things, uh, headings, that kind of stuff in there. So, but yeah, this is really an easy one that I think any church can do. Uh, we're talking maybe an hour, an hour a week at the most is what it would take an additional work to make this happen. And it probably isn't the lead pastor that's doing it. It's probably someone from your tech team that's able to just get this done for you. So, yeah, that's a good place to start.
Speaker 2 00:09:56 Good. All tackle too. Um, so this would be also use titles. People are looking for, and since we just kind of came off the subject of sermons, uh, let's use that one first, but, you know, instead of some, I don't know, Christian Christianese link the title with different things. That mean that are a little more internal. Do you have an example? Like what you said? So if your message is how to have more joy in your life, how to have more peace in your life, um, you said one thing, uh, you said how to, how to be a better wife to my husband. I think my wife was just doing that search the other day. She doesn't listen to this podcast. So, but, uh, no, but something like that is actually a better title because I think you've got to kind of put yourself in the mind of someone doing the online search. What would I be looking for if I was depressed and I needed more joy, I, you know, I wanted more peace in my life. I would say how to be less depressed or how to have more joy. You just gotta kind of think generally like that and kind of put yourself on the person who's doing the searching out there. Um, do you think that's accurate?
Speaker 0 00:11:01 I think it is because we have this habit in churches of giving ourselves kind of gimmicky and creative names. And I'm all for that. I think from a, from a public speaking standpoint, I think that makes more sense, right? To have something that's catchy like. So if you're talking about peace, a you might call it something like five keys to peace or something, um, uh, peace that passes understanding or, um, you know, uh, passing time with the Prince of peace or something like that. You might use some kind of an alliteration and I'm all for the creativity, but the problem is nobody's searching for that. Nobody is typing, passing time with the Prince of peace into, into Google. You get maybe one search a year for something like that. Whereas people say, um, we'll type in, how do I find peace? Or how do I have peace in my marriage?
Speaker 0 00:11:47 They'll tie in some of those kinds of things. And then you'll start to show up. So, absolutely I think having thinking about your titles and here's some advice I heard just say that at another podcast, I caught this, they said one of the best ways to do this is just using the tool that Google already gives you. You know, when you start typing a search into Google, it'll start to give you some recommendations of what people are likely to search if they've typed in that beginning part there. So if you type in something like, um, piece into Google or how to find peace, then it'll start to give you some other key words and things that go along with that. And you can start to think about some of that stuff for your title there. So there are, there are paid tools you can use to get good titles like this. But I think just if you think about it naturally and ask yourself when I'm titling a sermon or titling a blog post or whatever it would be, think about what would I type in if I was looking for the answers we talk about in this and maybe be okay with using a more generic, uh, but a more generic page title that might just kind of make sense there a more generic sermon name. It makes sense for a search engine world.
Speaker 2 00:12:53 Good. That's good. Why don't you talk about the third one? It's possibly a transition to that.
Speaker 0 00:12:57 It goes right to this, uh, this next one is used generic page names. This is something that we've been fighting with churches about for a decade. I would say Ian is helping them think through the way people think online, uh, is they, if someone is new to your church, they don't know all of the creative names that you have for all of your ministries. And so if your, um, if your youth ministry is called fireside crew, something like that, maybe you have a clever name for your youth ministry. That's great. You know, have a great clever name for your youth ministry, but just know that nobody is typing. Where's the nearest fireside crew to my house because nobody knows what a fireside crew is. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:13:41 But they are arguing that search. It's probably not for a youth group. It's there to troll.
Speaker 0 00:13:45 Yeah, probably. So what they would type a parent would type in youth ministry, mere Austin, Texas, or a student group near Austin, Texas, or church students ministry they're typing in those kinds of things. So when possible, it's almost always better to use generic page names, generic, things like that on your site. Not that I'm not saying you have to be generic, but you need to use generic names like this on your site because people, first of all, people that get onto your site won't know what that means when they're trying to click it. But I think from a search engine standpoint, it's really important that we're using specific names when it comes to our ministries and those kinds of things. What do you have to add to that
Speaker 2 00:14:26 Much? I think you covered a good amount. And, um, I think though, another thing to remember with this is that it's okay to take, I think of when I look at a website page, so it's okay to have, it's good to have kind of a generic heading, but then you have some content to elaborate, you know, the deeper meaning of what that ministry is. So again, if it, you know, if the page is a, you know, youth group or whatever, that's really, uh, but then you go into the content and then you explain that it's fireside you at fireside. Here's what we do for youth. And here's how your youth benefited and grow and so on. So that's just a good reminder to say, even if we're getting a little bit generic in general, with some of these that, you know, you can still, you're going to have other content that explains and goes deeper.
Speaker 0 00:15:13 Yeah. Thanks for saying that. It's not to say that you can't name your, your ministries, these things. That's great. Right. I think if you're creative with that, please do a lot of times churches that the trend I like right now is having a consistent naming convention for all of your different ministries. So we saw, we talked to a church recently where they had a, it was, I forget the name of the church, but it was a, it started with a B. And so they had B students and be kids and they had be adults, be men, be women, that kind of stuff. And so that was their, their naming convention. That's all good. But making sure you, you are very clear about what the purpose of that page is and using a title that people might search for. That's really important.
Speaker 2 00:15:53 That's good. That's good stuff. Well, I'll tackle the fourth one here. And I like that. This is just been a constant reminder that we've tried to give to pastors over the years is that it's really great to blog. Having a blog is something that, uh, is very valuable when it comes to SEO and making your web presence more visible to people out there. And now what we do struggle with this as has been for years now, you and I have seen, you know, gosh, I guess when blogs really Rose to popularity, maybe seven, eight years ago. And every pastor we heard from was saying, Hey, we really can you help us get a blog going? We know we got a blog, let's get this blog going. And, and they get the blog going, that'd be on the website. And then we'd see maybe a couple blogs first month, next one, one, and then third month they're gone.
Speaker 2 00:16:42 And so I think what pastors run into and still do, uh, our ministry leaders are like, whoever's at your church, helping in this area or can help in this area is that they're easy to get in place. Like we're saying, these are easy things that we could do for SEO. This one takes a little bit more work. This one takes time. You can't just get a blog up there and just have one a month. Um, I mean you could, and it could be mildly effective. Um, but uh, it's going to be, it's something that it takes some work, but it's well worth it. Uh, and you can probably elaborate on some of the benefits of it, for sure.
Speaker 0 00:17:20 I was, uh, we have some partners that help us with some of our blogging work and things that retract. We write our content, but we have people that do some editing work and some of that stuff for them. And they asked me just this week for a review of their service and to talk about some of the numbers. And I was absolutely blown away, blown away by the growth we've seen in our search engine results. As a result of blogging, I'll share. I don't know if I've even told you this yet, Ian, but when we started blogging, uh, as a company, as retried, we saw 380 visits per month on our, on our, on our website, basically from search engines 380 visits per month. This is about four years ago to today. We had over 50,000 visits from search engines last month. Uh, and that is just in, in that time in one month period there from search engine.
Speaker 0 00:18:14 So, and really almost all of that content is on blog posts. And most of those blog posts are just, they're not about reach right retried, right? They're about just topics that pastors care about. Like this kind of a topic here. We have probably 10 different posts that get more into the details of search engine optimization. So, uh, this is, we've said this before. This is the low hanging fruit, I think for so many churches out there. And I don't want to undersell it. I don't want you to convince anybody that blogging is a 10 minute a week job. It's not it's hours, probably a week to do something like this. I think I encourage everybody. If you're going to do it, make it a goal to do it at least weekly, at least once a week, having a new blog post, get out there. But listen, if you are writing about topics that people care about, if you're writing about spiritual topics that people are asking you as a pastor, you, you do this consistently.
Speaker 0 00:19:05 You will start to see traffic. You'll start to see people showing up on there. Um, I talked about this a few weeks ago, about how I once wrote a post, a post on our church website that has reached a hundred times more than any sermon that I've ever preached in my life is this one blog post, right? So it's really amazing that, uh, that the power and the reach that blogging can have. And I think it's probably the easiest thing that most churches can do to start to see some more traffic. And really, I think the thing to remember too is traffic. It's, it's easy to think of it just as numbers, but these are real people representing real souls who are reading real content and having real life change.
Speaker 2 00:19:44 And, you know, that's that I think is the, the, the thing to end on. That's a, that's a great thing because I don't remember, we've told this story before, and you remember this when we were doing ministry together and pastoring together, um, I wrote a blog and I was very elementary at blogging. It was probably the, maybe the second blog that I've ever written, um, and a nurse, uh, like a mutual friend and a friend of my mother's, who was a nurse ended up getting onto our church's website and reading that blog. And then I, and then reached out to me and we had a conversation later, and she just mentioned how, you know, you had this weird blog title that says sin is fun. And so that grabbed a hold of me. And then she started reading about how, yeah, on the surface it could be fun and there could be some fulfillment, but here's the damage it does.
Speaker 2 00:20:34 And then she said, I totally agreed with you. I saw blah, blah, blah. Something happened at our, at our work. Uh, and something very unprofessional. Didn't hurt many people, uh, as a result of sin. And this was something that led her closer to the Lord. We, we got to have a conversation about that. And so I think that's the thing at the end of the day. Yes. People, like you said, they could think of just numbers and traffic, but these are real people that are, you know, looking for spiritual answers and certain topics that can bring them closer to faith.
Speaker 0 00:21:02 I had, I'll share one quick story about a blog post that I wrote once I had a guy call our church after he read one of our blog posts, uh, and just helpful for me to put some like faces to this. And so it's not just, it's not just numbers that we see on screen, but this guy calls the church and he talks about this blog post he read. And he said, after I read it, I just kind of got the words of that, that Carrie Underwood's song kind of going in my head, I felt like someone was saying that Carrie Underwood's song, Jesus take the wheel is what it was in saying to me, this is so true. And I can't believe it's even happened. It's not my style at all. I didn't mention it in the blog post, but he said that, and I just, I just wanted, I just felt myself kind of, I was praying that word, that song I was praying and telling God to take the wheel of my life. And this guy led himself to the Lord from a Carrie Underwood song and my blog posts. It was really kind of amazing to see all of that come together there. So I think it's, it's awesome to, to remember again, that these are not just numbers that we're seeing when these, this traffic represents a real people that God cares about every single one of them there. So, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:22:08 And I think you just mentioned that because that was your favorite song for like, I couldn't get it out in my head. That's right. Well, a lot of people couldn't get out of their head. Yeah. So, but, uh, well good. Why don't you tackle the next one on that note?
Speaker 0 00:22:21 Yeah, it sounds good. Uh, number five is ask your friends to link to you. Uh, this goes to one of the biggest keys to search engine optimization. Um, the term in the search engine world is called backlinks. Uh, but literally it's just a, a link is what this comes down to it. So, uh, on other websites, Google tends to rate how important your website is by looking at how many other websites link to your website. So what they think as well, if hundreds and hundreds of people seem to be linking using the word faith to this sermon that this pastor did about faith. Well, maybe the sermon is one of the, kind of the key leaders are thought leaders when it comes to ideas around faith, right? So that's the way in principle that it works. So, um, there's all kinds of people that have tried to gain the system.
Speaker 0 00:23:10 So it's not just as simple as a hundred links means. That's the most important one. It's not that easy. There's many, many factors, but to this day, one of the biggest factors is how many people link to your website and how good are those websites? So an easy solution to help with this is just to ask people to link to your website, wherever it's appropriate. Now this isn't just asking everybody to link to you for no apparent reason. Um, you can't just ask every business owner in your church. I mean, you certainly can, but there's not a lot of value to maybe a plumber linking to your church website to talk about plumbing or something like that. If the keyword is champing ministry, perhaps, perhaps he has a plumbing ministry, and that makes sense there. But so this is you're looking for appropriate links. And so I think the obvious way to do this as every time you maybe as a, as a church leader or a pastor, let's say you partner with another church, or maybe you speak as at another church, or you do ministry at other church and they're making an event for you, right?
Speaker 0 00:24:14 They're saying, Hey, uh, pastor so-and-so is coming out to our church this Sunday for, uh, for the weekend. He's going to be speaking with us when they make the event or they have the announcement on their site, make sure they're linking back to your church's website, make sure that it has a link there. And you know, it's a little thing, but these things start to add up. And so the more of that kind of linking that you can see happen outside of your church website, the more Google starts to think, well, these guys really are an authority on, on preaching, on spiritual topics, on everything that people are linking to you about. And so Google starts to recognize more and more. It's a long-term game, but they recognize more and more that that's what you're doing now. This does not mean I don't this isn't to say, go out there and just find every link that you possibly can. Don't go and find a friend and make him link to you 500 different times on his website, because that's what we would call black hat strategies, which will wind up getting you banned on Google. And you don't want that because then you become next to invisible. If you break some of those kinds of rules there. So do it appropriately do it when it makes sense. Uh, but I think it's a really easy thing. A lot of churches can do.
Speaker 2 00:25:22 Yeah. That's good. Nothing more to add. I think it's actually a really good, uh, transition to the next one. And this is, instead of having people linked to you, linked to yourself, and this was actually, uh, maybe a little bit easier, maybe takes a little bit less work than the prior. Um, so this would be, you know, within like a page of your website, you know, where, um, you, uh, approach a sermon topic and maybe you preached on that same topic a year ago, you can link to that message or, uh, perhaps it's a topic that you're blogging about. And then there's an Kerry new Hoff article out there to link to. That was also within another post that you had. So this is all kind of interlinking within certain pages of your website. Um, and this is, yeah, like I said, a little bit more easier to do.
Speaker 0 00:26:09 Yeah. Yeah. I think this is you, you have full control over it, right? So you can link to whatever you want to on your own website. And I think linking is in the search engine world. This is called internal linking. So you want external links. So people outside of your domain, your website linking to you, but then you want lots of internal links. So basically Google will look at your site and they crawl it. They, they basically, they have bots that go and they click on every link in your website. They look at where everything goes and they kind of follow those to their logical conclusion. It Briggs, after a while, it starts build this really big web of all the different places you can go. So like within our website at reach right on every blog post, we probably linked to two or three or four outside sources for every blog post, all of our research and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 0 00:26:57 And then on top of that, we have lots of, lots of internal linking. So if we mentioned online giving we'll link to our post, reviewing the top online giving providers, and if we mentioned pastor's compensation, we'll link to our post about the ultimate guide for pastors compensation. And we always find ourselves linking to things on streaming and that kind of stuff. So building this web of content is really good. So for churches, I think what they're going to do a lot of times you'll find that sermons build upon one another. So if you ever maybe reference a topic within your sermon in all of those, remember we talked in the first one about adding text to your sermons. If you have texting your sermons and you find that you mentioned at one point, um, freedom from addiction, and you preached a series on the freedom of addiction from addiction, well link in that text over to your freedom from addiction, and then it's good for Google and it's good for users to kind of find more content, keep them on your site for a longer period of time. So I think that's really a big thing. That's
Speaker 2 00:27:56 Good. Awesome. Did you get the next one?
Speaker 0 00:27:58 Yep. Number seven is ditch the image slider ditch that big image slider. And so, so many of us are guilty of it. I've pastored churches that had the big image slider that was all the rage in 2008 nine, having a big image. Usually it was highlighting some of your upcoming events. Sometimes it was just big pictures, but the, really the reason behind this more than anything is it is a bad user experience to see a bunch of events and those things in a big image, but the big sin with this is that it actually slows down your site because what, what your web browser has to do when someone gets on your church website is they're going to have to load all of those images before they can fully display the entire website there. And so what that does is it slows down how fast your website loads, and that has become one of the biggest ranking factors when it comes to search engine results is how quickly does your website load fast websites?
Speaker 0 00:28:57 They show up better on search engine, slow websites, new poorly. Uh, so getting rid of that I think is an enormous step. Uh, in lieu of that, there's some ways you can do things like video backgrounds, which we love. And the nice, even though those are big files, because they're video, you could actually set those up in a way that they don't have to fully load before the page is considered fully loaded. So there's some workarounds to that kind of a system there. Uh, but just as a general rule, it's 2021. When it, with the image sliders, uh, their day has come and gone,
Speaker 2 00:29:28 It has, and it's, there's still such a temptation and a desire to have him and we consult churches regularly to do away with them. And, and you kill two birds with one stone, you covered the SEO benefits very well. So what I'll just add to that real briefly is just that, you know, we, it is 2021 and people are even more impatient there. They're seeing online ads all day long and they're going to sites all day long in different areas. And, and no one, you know, unless they're already really bought into your church and organization, they're not going to camp out there and scroll through everything. And like you said, be interested in all of your events and they don't even know if they want to come to your church yet. Right. So people are even more impatient, they're coming by way of mobile traffic. And so you want to just quickly get them engaged there. And it also, again, helps you with SEO there. So
Speaker 0 00:30:17 Yeah, exactly. Right. Tackle number eight, forest finishes off.
Speaker 2 00:30:20 Yeah. So last but not least is use short URLs. Uh, and it's kinda funny. Uh, the first thing that came to mind with this is just like we consult churches to not have some huge lengthy domain name, um, where I've seen, and this is not picking on Weebly because they do some good stuff. Um, we're not anti Weebly, but, um, I come across so many of these do it yourself or Weebly sites that say first Baptist of spring, texas.weebly.biz. And, and it's just this long lengthy URL, but the same can be said for any other URL when it's super lengthy like that, you know, no one's looking for that. And instead, let's just say, you're providing a series on marriage, right. You're doing a series or a seminar on marriage, um, have something that is in instead of slash long and lengthy just that slash marriage help or slash worship or slash prayer or something like that. Um, your thoughts on further elaborating on that? Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:31:23 I think the magic number is probably two to three words for those URLs. So in general, here's what you want your domains to be like. So let's say for a sermon, for instance, you probably want it at, uh, your church.com/sermons/the three-word title. Um, so that, that would be a good, a good way to think of it. Um, I think the reason for two or three words, the chances of you ever ranking on search engines for one word, like, so if someone types in Bible faith, Jesus, you know, it's going to be hard for, you know, first, first Baptist church of Podunkville, uh, to show up on something like that, right. It's you have to have a lot of really good Jesus content on your website to rank higher than whatever that, you know, the bible.com or one of those kinds of sites there. Right. So I think you're, you're better off probably looking at some longer terms.
Speaker 0 00:32:22 Um, like, so this is what you would get into what we'd call a long tail keyword. So not just if you're looking for people searching for Bible related stuff, so you might be better off looking at something like encouraging Bible verses that might be a better kind of a URL. So slash sermon slash um, encouragement for the sick or something like that, or faith building devotions or something like that would be a better URL. But I think the mistake a lot of churches make is having the entire title of the sermon being the URL. So you probably just want whatever your keyword is to be in the URL. I think if you have the title of your sermon is 12 ways to grow your faith in 2021, that's a bad URL. You don't want slash sermons slash 12 ways to grow your faith in 2021 as your whole URL though, because no one will ever type it in and it kind of mixes up what the key words in that sermon might be there. So as a general rule, and this gets a little bit on the technical side, but you want to keep it about three words long would be what I would shoot for and try to make that whatever the keyword or the key idea behind your messages there for your, your URLs, for those of you don't know, URLs, are those domains, the things at the end of your domain there, that's kind of the whole thing is called your URL.
Speaker 2 00:33:48 Yep. That's good stuff, Thomas. I don't have much to add. I think, uh, in closing, we hope this encourages pastors ministry leaders, to know that you can do this stuff. Even though we said, we knew we tried to keep this less technical as possible. There is some technical aspects to it, but it's all stuff that's really doable. If you're willing to just sit down and spend a little bit of time.
Speaker 0 00:34:09 Yeah. For further reading too, on this, we have a ton of blog content we've put out there about SEO tips for churches, we'll practice what we preach and put some of those links in the description here. So you can get over to it and see some of that content. If this has been helpful for you or your team there, uh, we just want to thank you so much for being part of our retried family. Uh, and if you would leave us a rating or review a subscription, that kind of stuff would really be a huge help to us hit the like button if it has been helpful. Uh, and we just want to thank you for being a part of the retried family, and we'll see you guys next week.
Speaker 1 00:34:43 See ya.
Speaker 0 00:34:47 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
[email protected]. 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.
Speaker 1 00:35:13 Yes, <inaudible>.
