When people search for churches in your city does your church website appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask? No? Our Top Church Search Rankings service can put it there. It includes local search engine optimization & local directory registration, and should be a part of your church evangelism, church outreach, and church growth strategy.
Church Marketing Online is dedicated helping churches reach the people in their communities through the Internet. We're using a 2-pronged strategy. The Top Church Search Rankings service provides search engine optimization to church websites so they appear at the top of the search results when people in that community search for a church. The CMO blog is here to educate and discuss Internet evangelism and church outreach.
Do you want to know how to use the full potential of the Internet for evangelism, outreach, and to grow your church? Read articles on church marketing, web evangelism, Internet ministry, search engine optimization, and more. Discuss ideas, tools, strategies to reach your community online. Check out CMO University.
You’ve performed keyword research. You optimized your website for the search engines. You have even started a link building campaign to gain untold numbers of relevant, inbound links. So, you’re done right? Wrong. It’s time to see the effects of all this work, re-evaluate the optimization, and plan your next move. Read more…
If optimizing a website is like giving your car a tune up, link building is like putting in a bigger engine. Simply put, there are going to be keywords that are out of your reach if all you do is on-page optimization, especially if your church is in a large city. Link building is needed to bring those keywords into your grasp. Links are like votes for your website. The more votes your website gets, the more important the search engines think your site is. That causes then to move you up in the search results for the keywords you are targeting and can get you ranking well for keywords you can’t currently rank well for. So, what is link building and how do you do it? Read on my friend. Read more…
Are the pages of your website optimized for the search engines? On-page optimization is the essence of search engine optimization and the key to targeting the keywords that can make your website a success. Read more…
Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.
Why is Keyword Research Critical? Read more…
(This article has been submitted to the 3rd Annual Marketing Pilgrim SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Scholarship Contest. When you click to “read more” it will take you to the rest of the article on the Marketing Pilgrim site. Please tell everyone you know who has a website about this article. Not only could it help us win the contest (the 5 most-read articles make the finals), but we think the parable will give anyone a website a clearer understanding of the 4 keys to maximizing the visitors a website gets from search engines.)
At a small college a group of incoming freshmen marketing majors gathered for their first class. As the wise, old Professor of Search Engine Marketing made his way to the front of the room, one of the students asked him, “Professor, what is SEO?”
The professor looked over the classroom full of young students and replied, “Let me tell you a story…”
There once were 5 families that lived in a rural valley where the soil was rich, the weather was harsh, and the best apples in the whole world grew wild.
As you start to delve into the world of online marketing, it is important to be able to understand the terminology being used. We always try to limit the “tech talk” when possible and use terms normal folks use; however, there are times when there simply isn’t another word to use. You may also be reading though other resources and run into confusing terminology. So, we have created the Church Marketing Online Search Marketing Glossary.
We encourage you to look over this dictionary of search marketing terms before you begin reading through the rest of the articles. We also encourage you to bookmark this page so you can visit the page if you ever run into a word or acronym you are not familiar with. If it’s search marketing related, you should find it here. If not, post a comment to request a definition.
Perhaps as you’ve searched around the Internet and Church Marketing Online you’ve seen the term SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is simply setting up your website to best allow search engines to read your website and understand what your website is about. Search engines aren’t very good guessers, so SEO is done to tell the search engines specifically what they need to know or what you want them to know.
The goal of SEO is to increase your website’s rankings in the search engines and bring more visitors to your website. An optimized website can bring 2 times, 3 times, or even 10 times the visitors than an un-optimized website. So, understanding SEO and its importance can make or break a website.
One of the biggest reasons why many organizations are not doing even simple things to help people find their websites in search engines is they simply don’t understand how search engines work. This article is intended to explain the basics of how search engines work and in the course of doing so shatter some search engine myths and help you understand what you can do to help people find your website in search engines.
Some people believe the church can be more effective by utilizing processes most commonly and effectively used in business today, including marketing. In fact there are companies that specifically help churches develop a logo, a slogan, a website, brochures, and a multi-faceted marketing campaign much the same way other companies develop these elements to launch a new business.
On the other hand, some people abhor these practices and think the church should stay as far away from them as possible. They believe marketing is deceptive, manipulative, superficial, worldly, and yes – evil.
And then there’s the middle ground where I think most of us find ourselves. We want our churches to reach more people in our communities. We want to express the passion and love we have for God and people. If people would just come to a Sunday service, we know God would show up and touch their hearts and show them the amazing life they could have with Him in it. We want to let people know about the opportunities God has for them, but it’s so hard to get people’s attention in this media-saturated culture. We want to reach out, but we don’t want resort to hype, gimmicks, or starkly corporate tactics.
Is marketing the way to do that, or is marketing evil?
In the past when a family was looking for a church they would talk to their friends or maybe check the yellow pages for churches in their area. Then they might visit several of those churches until they find one they like.
The Revolution of Local Search
Over the last several years Internet search engines have made tremendous improvements in what is called local search, that is the search for businesses or organizations in a specific geographical area. Now if you search for something and include a city in the search phrase you’re likely to see results that include a map with some virtual push-pins in it. With one click you can get a phone number, driving directions, and even read reviews of the place of your choice. As a result, people have been ditching their yellow pages in droves and searching online for restaurants, retailers, and even churches.
Today someone who is looking for a church – let’s call him Bill - will most likely start his search online. Bill uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask to find the websites of churches close to his home. Then he visits many of those websites. Based on what he reads, hears, and watches on those website’s Bill quickly rules out most of the churches without ever stepping foot in them. Then he picks 2 or 3 that seem to be most like the kind of church he’s looking for. He attends a Sunday service at those churches. Hopefully he likes at least one of them and gets involved in that fellowship.
Let’s take a closer look at this process
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