We talk a lot about SEO and social media on the Church Marketing Online, but one thing I haven’t talked much about (if at all) is press releases.  Often times I think people think of press releases as being something for businesses or politicians or that something has to be amazingly spectacular to be worthy of a lofty press release, but that isn’t the case, especially in the Internet age. Read more…

I ran across an article by Dean Seddon recently about why people don’t come to church and it got me thinking…not so much about those specific reasons that he mentioned, but rather about the church marketing approach that we churches use.  There are reasons people don’t come to church.  Are we making sure that we are addressing those reasons in our marketing campaigns?  More than that, are we giving people a reason to come to church? Read more…

There’s an interesting thing happening in Mansfield, OH.  A church put up several billboards, but people thought the billboards were actually put up by an antheist group.  Why?  Because the church got a little too creative with their marketing and lost the message.

Here’s what happened: Read more…

From MyNakedPastor.com to coffee houses in the sanctuary churches have been trying to reach the world and appear “relevant”, especially the younger generations.  After all, according to one study, “70 percent of young adults ages 23-30 stopped attending church regularly for at least a year between ages 18-22.”  So, we have to do something, right?  But are we doing the right “something”? Read more…

This weekend I was listening to a book on economics because I’m a complete dork and that type of stuff interests me.  One of the lines that stuck out to me was a truism of statistics that the author quoted, “Correlation does not equal Causality.”  In other words, just because two things seem connected doesn’t mean that one caused the other.  Don’t worry, that’s the last of the economics talk.

Today, I was catching up on some church marketing reading and came across Todd Henry’s article at Church Marketing Sucks, “Eliminating False Assumptions“.  He was writing about the same type of thing.  In his article he writes about how we need to be careful not let assumptions control what we do, but rather examine what is really happening and challenge those assumptions. Read more…

Google has announced that listings in Google Maps will now include descriptive phrases associated with the listing.

“Google Maps search results in the U.S. and Great Britain will include some of the phrases which are most frequently used to describe those places. These phrases come from sources all across the web, such as reviews, web pages and other online references, and they can help people quickly identify the characteristics that make a particular place unique.” Read more…

Last week I wrote about what factors are most important in local church SEO.  Yesterday, I wrote a related article over at the Christian SEO Guys blog looking at the top 10 things to avoid in local SEO.  These principles absolutely apply to church SEO.

Some of the things mentioned are: Read more…

I was reading a post from Steve Sjogren’s blog, Confessions of a Stumbling Servant, and he had a great post about the importance of using different outreach approaches in your ministry because different people are attracted by different things.

“If we hope to attract lots of fish — and that is the name of the game if we are professional fisher people — we must try for a number of kinds of fish. To have just one pole in the water isn’t going to cut it.” Read more…

Local SEO is crucial for churches.  Churches and ministries who aren’t doing SEO are missing out on new visitors and hindering their ministry efforts.  So, what do you need to do to get your church to show up in the local search results? Read more…