When people search for churches in your city does your church website appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing? No? Studies show that most people use search engines to find what they are looking for, including churches. If you aren't on the first page, you are missing out on visitors. Learn more about Church SEO at CMO University
About Church Marketing Online
Church Marketing Online is dedicated helping churches reach the people in their communities through the Internet. We do this by explaining search engine marketing for churches, discussing social media and how it can be used by churches, and facilitating conversations about other online church marketing ideas. The CMO blog is here to educate, discuss Internet evangelism and outreach, and offer church growth resources.
Are you loosing visitors before they even walk through the church doors? Most churches are and here’s why…
One of the most powerful types marketing messages is a recommendation. We often think of these recommendati0ns as happening in person, but thanks to reviews, they don’t have to be. These local review sites like City Search and Yelp, as well as the local listings in Google , Yahoo, and Bing, all give people the ability to rate an organization and leave a review.
A good review takes a listing to a whole new level. Now you are not just letting people know about your church, you are including a recommendation. This makes people much more likely to decide to visit. It also can give people a glimpse into the personality of your church as the reviews talk about the different aspects of your church and its ministries and their effects on people’s lives. It gives your members the opportunity to tell people about your church. If you do not have positive reviews on your church’s listings (if you even have listings), then you are loosing visitors before they even step into your church. Read more…
This is a game changer. Google can be a great source of traffic for your church’s website, especially traffic from people with whom you and your church members would not otherwise come in contact. Google has now revised their search results once again in a significant way. As discussed in this post on Christian Web Trends blog, “Google Shakes Up Search Results with Social Media“, Google is now including social results, pages your friends share and the people you follow tweet about, directly in your search results. This can be a huge benefit for your church.
It’s been a debate in the church for as long as marketing was a concept. Should the church engage in marketing? Why would a church even need to market itself? Isn’t marketing inherently evil?
This is one of the first articles in the Church Marketing Online University series because if you think marketing is useless, not for the church, or just plain wrong, then you certainly are not going to pay attention to the rest of the information in the series. Check out the updated article, “Is Marketing Evil”
Your church is local, so shouldn’t your listings be local? All the major search engines now have local listings. Google has Google Places, Yahoo has Yahoo Maps, and Bing has Bing Local. In addition, there are a slew of local review sites like CitySearch, Yelp, and Insider Pages as well as several Internet Yellow Pages, like yp.com. These are all places where people can search for churches in a specific city or geographic location and these are all places where your church should be listed.
So, How Popular Is Local Search? According to an article from USAToday, “ComScore has Yelp attracting 26.1 million users, followed by YP.com at 24.8 million, Idearc’s Superpages at 17.3 million, Citysearch’s 14.3 million and Yahoo Local’s 13.3 million visitors.” Comscore also indicates that Google got 178 million visitors and Google says that 20% of their traffic is local searches. So, that puts Google’s local search traffic at 35.6 million visitors. That’s a lot of search traffic. Read more…
I came across this interesting post on the Church Marketing Sucks blog about poll of church members/staff and their church’s activity on Facebook. The sad result was that only 37% said their church fosters regular interaction through Facebook. Not good. Considering how many millions of people are on Facebook, a real opportunity is being missed.
Videos can be great church marketing. People like to watch videos and with social media videos can spread like wild fire. With that in mind, I thought I’d post a fun church video for Friday afternoon.
Your church probably already has a website. Are you using the website to bring new visitors to your church? If you are not being intentional about it, you may be missing out on a lot of visitors.
In this article we look at how local search has replaced many of the old ways people used to look for a new church, like using a phone book.
Alright, you’ve made your virtual “yard signs”. So, how do you go about getting people to use them so they don’t end up in your virtual “storage closet”. Here are 5 tips for handing out virtual yard signs: Read more…
Shortly after Church Marketing Online launched back in 2008, we created Church Marketing Online (CMO) University. CMO University is here to serve as an educational resource to pastors and church leaders who see the potential for the Internet to be used for church evangelism, outreach and marketing online but don’t have to time to sort through thousands of secular search marketing websites and try to apply the principles to church ministry. Think of it as Church Marketing 101.
It’s been a few years since we first published CMO University, so in the coming weeks we will be updating and enhancing the CMO University articles. We encourage you to follow along, make comments, ask questions, and share your experiences.
Are you ready to get your “doctorate” from Church Marketing University? We’re starting today with an introduction to CMO University:
Are you loosing visitors before they even walk through the church doors? Most churches are and here’s why…
Shortly after Church Marketing Online launched back in 2008, we created Church Marketing Online (CMO) University. CMO University is here to serve as an educational resource to pastors and church leaders who see the potential for the Internet to be used for church evangelism, outreach and marketing online but don’t have to time to sort through thousands of secular search marketing websites and try to apply the principles to church ministry. Think of it as Church Marketing 101.
