Original | Church Marketing Online

“I Hate Your Church!”

“These people are a bunch of hypocrites.”

“The people are a bunch of stuck-up snobs.”

When talking about listings and reviews for churches the comment always comes out, “We don’t feel comfortable with just anyone being able to post a review. They might post something negative.” The fear is that someone who had a bad experience at the church will post some rant about the church on one of these review sites or perhaps someone who doesn’t have any connection to the church at all, but just doesn’t like Christians will post some false story. It’s an understandable fear, but I think it’s one that we must get over. Read More

Get New Church Visitors in 15 Minutes Or Less

If you could get new people to visit your church with just a few minutes work, would you? This is the question you can present to your congregation, because each of them can help to bring in new visitors to your church by taking just a few minutes to post a couple positive reviews in your church’s online listings.

Positive online reviews can have a huge impact both on local search rankings and getting people to visit your church. So, here are…

5 Ways To Get Members To Post Reviews: Read More

Local Listings For The Local Church

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

Keyword Research

(Updated on 3/15/2011)

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

How Do Search Engines Work?

(Updated on 3/2/2011)

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.

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