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.
A week ago I wrote a bit about the value of a pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign as a part of your online church marketing. Almost every time I talk about pay-per-click and search engine optimization, I get the one of two questions, “Which is better?” or “Which should our church do?” Read more…
We have discussed the importance of keyword research when optimizing your church website. In a previous article, “Keyword Research”, I mentioned two of the top keyword popularity tools, WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Both are decent tools, but base their estimates on data from several smaller search engines and both cost a several hundred dollars a year to use. Now there’s an alternative.
You can now add the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool to your list of keyword popularity tools. There are two key benefits to the Google Keyword Research Tool. Read more…
We’ve looked at what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, setting up your website to make it readable by the search engines and so that it tells the search engines what your website is about by targeting specific keywords. So, what is local SEO? Local SEO is optimization of your website both targeting keywords with local modifiers (ie: churches in Trinity, FL) and with the intent of telling the search engines where your church/business/organization is. As a church with a specific location, local SEO is important for bringing new visitors to your church through your website. Read more…
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.
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.
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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