Speaker 0 00:00:00 Well, everybody wants to see more website traffic because the more traffic you have on your website, the more people you're able to reach. And in today's episode, we'll be talking about five things you can do if you have low traffic to turn that trend around. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the rewrite 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 Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow
Speaker 2 00:00:50 Ready to get ready to get
Speaker 0 00:00:57 Well. Hey guys, welcome to the Reach Wright podcast, episode number one 19. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my co-host
Speaker 3 00:01:04 Ian Hyatt. Hey, Thomas.
Speaker 0 00:01:06 Hey, man, we're having a good conversation today. You're talking about low website traffic and some things that we can do to fix it. When your website traffic is down, you need to get serious about that and try and do some things to turn those things around. Uh, and as I'm thinking about this, like, uh, the question comes to me like, why are we talking about this? Right? Why does, like we primarily serve churches and ministries? Yeah. Why does website traffic matter? And I wanna guess start off the conversation before we get into the meat of how do we fix this website traffic problem. The question is, why should churches care about how many people get onto a church website? Yeah. Maybe you have a short version of that answer, and do you have anything to say
Speaker 3 00:01:48 About that? I have a short version. First of all, at, at first notion you, it could sound like something technical and you can forget that the reason why you want a lot of traffic on your website is to simply reach more visitors. That's what it's all about. That's what this is gonna help you do.
Speaker 0 00:02:03 Yep. Yeah. I think that with, with the exception of bots, you have to remember that every number on those reports of how much traffic you're getting on your website, they have souls like the, there's souls behind that. It's not the number itself. There is a person represented by that who matters to Jesus, and it's people that we should be trying to reach. So yeah. Uh, really getting traffic on your website, whether they're getting there to look at what time your services start, or they're getting on there to listen to a sermon or they're getting on there to read a blog post, or they just wanted to get your phone number so they can call you and complain. Whatever it is, There's something actually good about those people getting onto your website. Yeah. They're taking a step closer to, in their relationship with Jesus, no matter what they are doing on your site.
Speaker 0 00:02:50 So, Right. We can think of traffic a as small as each one may be, as, as insignificant as it may seem, right? That each one of those hits on your, your website, every minute spent on your site, all of that traffic, I think it actually matters. And it's, it's about reaching people and growing churches is, uh, kind of the key to growing churches is reaching more people. And so, yeah, that's why we talk about this here at Reach, right? So that's the name of our company. We exist to help churches reach people the right way. That's right here in 2022. The right way is online because that's where so much of life happens. Uh, we are not big proponents of just getting people online and making them online only members, right? There's some case to be made for that, but that's for another episode. But really, we think this is a step that so many people are gonna take before they fully give their life to Jesus or take that next step in their relationship with Jesus. So that's why it matters.
Speaker 3 00:03:43 That's, it does matter big time. And why don't we kick it off. We got five things here that steps that you can take to get more traffic, and these are things that you can carry out. We're gonna even give you guys some, some to dos and things that, uh, some takeaways to go ahead and make this happen. So I'll tackle the first one. Your website is slow, that's keeping you from getting more traffic. So there are a ton of slow church websites out there and check out this statistic. 40% of people, um, a abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. And I'm not surprised by that stat because people are impatient and they're also coming by way of their phones. Uh, and they're even more impatient when they're browsing from their phones. And most of traffic is coming from mobile, uh, to your website.
Speaker 3 00:04:33 So, and there's several factors that can determine, uh, that why your website is, is, is slow. It could be the size and number of pages on your website. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, we've said this before, we're big on, there's a saying in the web world, content is king, but you also want to have that fine balance of not having too much content and pages and those things to bog the site down. Um, videos and, and, and media, depending upon how that stuff is sized, what you're doing with that. Which, cuz we know those things are vital on a church's website, videos and media. Um, but need to make sure that stuff's carried out. And then also, uh, lastly, one other thing would be poorly coded themes or plugins. If you're playing it with a cheap theme that's not developed well, uh, and the plugins are outta date, um, that can affect your, your, the slowness of your website.
Speaker 0 00:05:27 Yeah. Yeah. Here's what I have found is that, um, I I'm kind of in two worlds, right? So I I'm a marketer, That's what I, I do. Yeah. You know, that's what I'm good at and that's what I do is what we help churches do, Right? We started out, you and I doing specifically websites for churches, right? That was our, our bread and butter. We worked for another company that did websites for churches, uh, Reach, Right? Started out as our first product was helping churches with their websites. And one of the things that I learned about websites is that looks sell websites. Yeah. The way a website looks is what determines whether or not someone's going to buy a website. So, so many people that sell websites and so many people that look at websites, the first thing that they look at is what does it look like?
Speaker 0 00:06:11 Is it good? Yeah. Is their big video and with good reason. You know, you, your first impression is of enormous importance on there. Yeah. So, but the longer I've been in this industry and been helping churches and building our own business here at Reach, right? I have learned like really the meaning of that statement. The content is king, uh, content meaning video and images and text and everything altogether. Yeah. But it really is about what we're saying on the site. And so the, the pitfall I see so many churches falling into is we get so caught up in that exact right image, uh, getting our, our brand exactly right and our brand colors and getting those perfect photos and having that awesome intro video and getting all those things. And that's all really good. But you, you really need to pay attention e just as much to what you're saying, what's on the site, and like the technical quality of those things there.
Speaker 0 00:07:04 So that's good. Um, it, it really is important. So don't, don't, uh, miss this. I think the big takeaway on this is that content is king and content doesn't just mean big photos and big sliders, right? And big videos that take a long time to load those can actually hurt you, even though they might make a good eye impression, they might be reducing your traffic. So I wanna plug two tools. We don't have any sponsors or anything tied to these tools or anything, but there's two things that I would say that churches should look at. Um, first of all, I guess kind of a tool, like a third one maybe, but you probably ought to consider your website platform. We highly recommend WordPress. Uh, we actually have videos and other content around why WordPress is king. Uh, and part of that is site speed. It is bar none the best when it comes to site speed.
Speaker 0 00:07:53 So you wanna be looking at that. But two tools, if you are on WordPress, there is a program called Smosh or WP Smosh. And what it does is it takes all the files, all the media you load onto your site, and then it automatically optimizes it so that the exact right size file is being shown. And it's not, there's no extra loading on it. There's not, Yeah. It reduces the file size to make the load times just better for your site there. So that's one thing. And then the biggest recommendation I have is no matter who hosts your site, or no matter what your site is built on, look and see if you can use CloudFlare. CloudFlare, uh, is a DNS service. Yeah. I don't wanna overcomplicate this here right now. You can dig into their website and learn more about CloudFlare and how they work there, but for no cost, they have a free account you can set up, uh, it can actually increase a lot of sites by 30 or 40% in their load times or decrease their load times, I should say. Yeah. Uh, just because it actually serves things up in a much, uh, quicker way and their, their tech stack is just amazing. So go check out CloudFlare, see if you could make a few quick setting changes on your site and get it to run through CloudFlare. You don't have to pay 'em anything. Yeah. You keep your host and everything, but run it through CloudFlare. You'll probably see a pretty sizable decrease in your load times there. That's
Speaker 3 00:09:11 Good stuff. That's good stuff. Awesome. Once you tackle the next one.
Speaker 0 00:09:14 Yeah. The next one is you have low traffic because your website is hard to navigate Oh. Way. And we see this one all the time here at Reach, right? Yeah. Uh, because I think what churches do is over time churches grow and they add new ministries and new things come up and sometimes someone will ask, Hey, can we put something about this on the website? Right? And the answer is, Sure. Let's just give it a new page. Yeah. And that new page, where do we put it? Well, it goes right there in the navigation. And so, Right. How many times do you see these church websites that are even like small churches, they're 75 people or something like that. Yeah. And you open it up and on the top there is this navigation with like 14 items on it. Yeah. And then each one of them has a dropdown Right.
Speaker 0 00:09:56 That has 12 items under that. And then the worst of the worst is when you have a, like a third tier of dropdown where you kind of go down and then you go to the side and then you then another further. And like it's your, your navigation needs to be simplified. And here's the, what I point to is that if you take a look at some of the largest churches out there, look at a church like Elevation Church, right? They only have a few items in their top level navigation. Yeah. And they don't have big dropdowns. Right. They have 10, like tens of thousands of people that are associated with their church and they're able to manage it without having extensive long, what we'd call like mega nav dropdowns to just confuse people. Yeah. Really what you need to do is you need to hone your message down to the five or six things that you want people to make sure that they find when they get on there, your, your big highlights. And that's what you want your navigation to look like. And from there you need to bake in and find other creative ways to link to other parts throughout your site. Right. But in general, as a general rule, simplification is going to help you with your website traffic as opposed to adding more navigational complexity. That's right. Simple is always better.
Speaker 3 00:11:07 Yeah, absolutely. And again, we've mentioned again, not only are people impatient, over half of people are coming from phones and mobile devices. So that means that, you know, they're looking for stuff quick, they're not looking with their thumb to go through all of those different little links and Right. Also hear us the right way. Even if we're recommending between, you know, four and seven different items or whatever in your main navigation, that doesn't mean you have to cut out important content. Again, we don't recommend tons of busy pages and all of that, but even though if someone goes to one item in your navigation, well once they click there, you can have other ways for them to click out to another page mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, and you know, but it just didn't have to be accessed through some big busy dropdown menu.
Speaker 0 00:11:52 Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that, you know, the reach right website, we have 400 different pages and content pieces and podcast episodes and stuff and Yeah. You know, some, some of them are really, we, you know, we're proud of some of these episodes we did, but yeah, we gotta, we can't put every one of them on our main navigation there. You need to find other ways to categorize your information and work on your site structure that way.
Speaker 3 00:12:14 That's it. Next one I'll tackle is, uh, your site isn't mobile friendly. If your site's not mobile friendly by now, it's time to wake up. Uh, because <laugh> mobile responsive design is the, the kind of the technical and key term that you need to make sure your website is, It needs to be mobile responsive and respond well to mobile devices. So when they're being pulled up. So, um, that is a, an absolute must. So if you don't have a mobile responsive theme or website, make sure that that is thing number one for you to do. Cuz here's the thing we've seen now, al already, well this was several years ago. Google will flag your website if it's not mobile responsive. Um, so it'll actually de mote you in the search engines as well. Um, so that is, uh, that is paramount to make sure that, uh, that that your site is mobile responsive.
Speaker 0 00:13:08 Yep. Uh, 60%, that's the global percentage of traffic that's happening on mobile devices. Uh, we have a link to the stat that's in our show notes here, or in the description, wherever you're watching or listening to this here, you can read more about that. But 60%. So if your site is desktop friendly but not mobile friendly, you, you're making a terrible strategic decision because 60% of your traffic, you're going after the 40 to get to, to, and, but you lose the 60. I know that Jesus like leaves the 99 to get the one and all that kind of stuff, but when it comes to website traffic, you don't leave the 60 to get the 40. You want to focus on the, your biggest opportunity there. So really you should be doing both, though. It should be both desktop friendly and mobile friendly. Um, I think this is a function a lot of time of designers, uh, when designers design, they usually are designing the desktop version first and then they make sure it looks okay on a phone. Yeah. And we try to get away from that at reach right here. We actually, Yeah. Well, we design on computers. We are designing in a mobile view as the first way that we're designing and then making sure the desktop version lines up with that there. So you wanna make sure that you are completely mobile friendly and the mobile experience is better than your desktop experience if you wanna reach the most people. And
Speaker 3 00:14:30 That's not to say you're not gonna still have a nice, uh, desktop. We make sure when we build websites that it's still gonna look good on a desktop, but you wanna make it obviously a mobile first approach just based on the way that people are, uh, browsing now. So that's good.
Speaker 0 00:14:43 Yep. Absolutely. So, all right, next one is you need to make sure that you are using your keyword effectively. Uh, and this is something that I think very few churches even think about. Like keywords is something that, uh, you know, it's something that's more for SEO people, right? Right. Technical people, that kind of stuff. I just want to make content. I wanna design a website. And in a perfect world, you could just write about what your church does and the things you want to say, and it would have all the right keyword in it and you would rank in those kinds of areas. But we Google it just doesn't work that way. And, and I wanted to say this is that this has been our secret sauce at reach, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> since our beginning. Uh, so we have paid attention to the keywords that people are searching for, right?
Speaker 0 00:15:30 And we make content around those kinds of keyword. Yeah. Uh, and when we do that, we actually see it increase in traffic there, Right? And there's one, there are a couple ways to think about it. You, you could kind of, uh, think about it in a, in a unhelpful way and say, Well, I don't wanna make, I don't wanna make content for machines to read. And that, and we don't want that either. No, good Google is much smarter than that nowadays. They're not looking for robot talk and just stuffing in keywords over and over again. Right. Please hear us. That's not what we're saying. Do not do that. In fact, you don't want to be doing, you don't wanna be stuffing in keywords. But think about it this way, when you think about keywords, what you're asking yourself is what are people looking for on the internet?
Speaker 0 00:16:10 What are they searching for? And how can our church, uh, and by proxy, how can Jesus help them in that situation to answer that question? So if you find that, obviously a lot of people are searching for churches near me in their community, you want to be using key words Yeah. That have things like churches near me in those results there so that you can answer that question that people are searching for. So yeah, really it's just people are out there and looking at keywords. It's you asking, Hey, what do people want our church to do? Right? Yeah. What, what do they want us to answer? What are they looking for from us? That's what keyword research is there. So, um, as far as helpful things that you can use, uh, there are two things I would say that you should take a look at.
Speaker 0 00:16:53 Um, again, if you're on WordPress, we highly recommend that you use a plugin called Yost. Yeah. Um, there is a free version that does 90% of what the software offers, and it's gonna be enough for the vast majority of churches you could pay for a premium version like we do. Uh, but we really major in this area here, but what it does is it actually takes a look at all of your content and it makes sure that you're using the right keywords the right way on everything that you do there. Yeah. Um, so you wanna be doing that, uh, something like Yost, we really highly recommend that. Yeah. Um, there's another, uh, plugin that you can use and it actually is a tool called Surfer seo. Something to make note of. What surfer does is you can actually put in what keyword you want to target.
Speaker 0 00:17:37 So let's say you're gonna do churches near me, Uhhuh <affirmative>, and it'll tell you through AI exactly how to write the content, the text, so that you can do the best, you have the best shot of ranking, that's cool, whatever, whatever that key word would be there. So it'll say, Hey, you need to use the word church, uh, four more times, uh, but you're using near me two times too many. So reduce that, add this, here's a couple of other words that are similar that you want to add into this same post. It really is a cool tool. They have a few free options. There's some trials there. There's a paid option with that too. So again, we don't have any sponsors with any of this here. Right. This is just something that tools that we use that we think might help, uh, churches out there. Then there are tons of other keyword research tools out there. Yeah. Uh, one of the ones is, uh, the Google keyword Planner. That's something that a lot of churches can use totally free. Google wants you to be doing this, so we encourage you to use some of those tools. It will help boost your traffic. Anything to add to that?
Speaker 3 00:18:32 No, not much. I, I mean, these, these tools are not only cool, like you said, but they're not as, it, they're not hard. Uh, it sounds like a technical thing, but they really do walk you through it. So, um, yeah. I think, uh, it's something easy that, uh, churches may think would be hard. So yeah, I
Speaker 0 00:18:47 Think what they do, these tools, they are there to take things that would be hard and make them easy. Like so, Right. If you were trying to edit your site's html, your code to fit in keywords and make sure you get all that right, which is the stuff that Google sees, that's very hard and nobody has time for that. So you wanna use these tools because they help you make all of that possible. And, um, yeah, the proof is in the pudding. We've helped many churches excel here, our own organization we see this day in and day out. Yeah. Uh, just the impact of choosing the right key words and what that'll do. Uh, I'll say this one thing too before we kind of move on to number five here. I have found that one of the mistakes that so many churches make is that saying of content is king.
Speaker 0 00:19:30 Yeah. Yes. Imagery and yes, video, those are content, but really Google is still best at reading text. And so you need to make sure that your pages are not just giant slide shows of lots of people with a few different heading tags. Yeah. You want to actually have text, and I'm talking hundreds of words on every single page of your website. Uh, so your homepage, if you make the mistake of just saying like there's, you know, just one blurb that says a church for people like you, and then there's links to all your ministries and things, you, you need to take the time to give a description of, Hey, what is youth ministry? What do you mean by, uh, church services? Yeah. And what happens at those? Talk about those things with keywords and air on the side of having more text as opposed to less text. I, I know sometimes just images can look better. Right. But getting text in there is really vital.
Speaker 3 00:20:22 No, that is, That's good. Those are good points. So, well, I'll lead us home with this last one. And you did say something there. Content is king. So last but not least, we say your website has poor or poor or, you know, outdated content. Right? Um, so poor quality content or outdated content. So, uh, we've seen so many churches kind of set it in, forget it. You know, they, they get the main pages set up on their website about us ministries, Um, you know, give events, sermons, and those are good pages to have mm-hmm. <affirmative>, all of those things. But you need to be making sure there's regular fresh content on your website. So things like blog posts, uh, of course a blog, you gotta count the cost when it comes to that. You can't just get a blog on there and, uh, do a post once a month.
Speaker 3 00:21:11 You, you gotta make sure you can't, you, you spend time. We would say, uh, at least a couple of posts a week. So you do have to count the cost, but it is most certainly worth it. Not only does this help your site speed, it just helps you with SEO and visibility in general, uh, and provides people with helpful content. And then photos, obviously you want photos to be up to date and not outta date. Keeping those fresh videos. Do you have a welcome video on there that's maybe, um, five years old? It's time to update that, you know, you need to update, uh, other videos and of course events, keeping events and sermons up to date. Those are the two biggest things we would see. Those being the two easiest things to manage. And probably the two most common things that you want to keep up to date, but there's, there's more than just those.
Speaker 0 00:21:58 Yeah. How often do we do a consulting call with the church yet? And we get on there and we're looking at their pictures and you pictures of kids and children's ministry and they say, Oh, well he graduated last year. I know she's a yeah, she's a nurse now and you know, that kind of stuff. <laugh>, how often does that happen? So yeah, notorious for this of like, skipping over some of these updates. You need to probably take a hard look at least. I mean, I would encourage once a year, take a hard look at your photography, uh, and video content. I know it's hard work like having to get all photos taken and, uh, optimize them and get 'em in there, but I think it's probably worth it to do that. Yeah. At a minimum every couple of years you need to be refreshing your photography and video. It's a, some of those kinds of things cause things just change too much in that kind of time. Absolutely. You know, and case in point, if you're using photos from two years ago, everybody's wearing masks. Uh, so you gotta you gotta get rid of that right now, so.
Speaker 3 00:22:50 That's
Speaker 0 00:22:50 Right. That's right. It's time to move on from that there, unless that's kind of the way your church rolls and, uh, you guys are still in masks and Yeah. Mask it up baby. So yeah, there you go. Um, I, I have found that updating other content, uh, here, here's kind of my encouraged strategy on that. Take a look at your site and hopefully you're using Google Analytics or something like it to measure how much traffic you're getting. And I would always start with the best performing pages. Yeah. So a lot of times that'll be the homepage, but maybe you have a sermon you preached and you it it really does well, for whatever reason Google picked up on it and yeah, it is the number one recommended message or maybe it's number three for people that search in a specific topic, uh, you know, the, uh, the prayer of Daniel or something like that.
Speaker 0 00:23:33 Yeah, Right. Maybe that you, you're the number one rank on that and you get 20 visits a day for people looking for prayer of Daniel on Google. Well those are really good candidates to take a look at them and see if you can, can improve on the content there. Now you're not gonna go out and rerecord the sermon in most cases you're not gonna rere it and put it on there, but a lot of times you can take a look at the text that you have that you wrote about the sermon. Maybe you just have a title and a three sentence description of what the message is about. But maybe you can add more to that. Maybe you can add some, uh, other content with key words to help bring more traffic onto that specific page. Yep. We try to do these things for our best performing content.
Speaker 0 00:24:13 I'm actually working on one right now. Just today before this conversation. We have a blog post on the best church management software systems out there. It was about, uh, a post from a couple of years ago that's performing Okay. But we think it can do better. We're gonna try and expand on it, add some of the new church management software companies that have come out, do some deeper dives into things, fix up the links. We're gonna just improve on it and hopefully we'll be able to rank higher, get more traffic and help more churches find the right kind of fit for their church management software. So the same thing goes for our churches out there. Yep. You know, you want to help people find where they fit in your church, what they need to know about Jesus. And so when you can create content and then refresh that content with new up to date stuff, you'll reach more people to answer that question even more. So that's the idea behind it. That's
Speaker 3 00:24:59 Good. Good stuff. Good stuff at Awesome. The end of the day, this is all stuff to help you reach more visitors. That's really what this is all about. You know, you think of it that way and that's why it's worth the, the effort.
Speaker 0 00:25:09 That's what we do here at Reach Wright. We're about helping you with that. So, hey, I'll put this quick out, out here really quickly. Um, we just do this to help churches and so we don't want to spend this time selling, but if your church is looking for some help in the website department, uh, we eat, breath and sleep this stuff, so That's right. Feel free to drop us a line. Uh, there'll be a link down here in the description where you can see how you can learn more about how we help churches with their web presence, but it also entails how we help them with SEO and Yeah. Some of those kinds of things too. So really it's a full service kind of option. We have lots of options for churches of all sizes there. So if this is outside of something you want to tackle and you want someone else to help you improve and get more traffic there, we'd love to have a conversation on that.
Speaker 0 00:25:49 So, uh, we'll leave it at that this week. If this has been helpful to you. Yeah, please rate, review, subscribe, let us know in the comments below. That's probably what helps us the most is having a comment. Maybe you have a question about, Hey, what can I do to improve my speed in this area? Yeah. Or does this actually work for Finding Keyword? We're we try to answer every single comment that comes in on our, uh, videos at any place that you're watching or seeing this here. Uh, so do let us know in the comments there if it's helped you. Uh, we're thankful for that. So yep, thanks so much for being a part of the Reach Right family and we'll catch you next week.
Speaker 3 00:26:22 See you.
Speaker 0 00:26:25 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 4 00:27:00 You.
