Local search | Church Marketing Online

Why Aren’t You Telling People About Your Church?

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

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

CMO University Update: How People Find a New Church

We have updated the CMO University article, “How People Find a New Church“.

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.

http://churchmarketingonline.com/2008/04/how-people-find-a-new-church/

Are you tracking your church’s search visibility?

How is your church doing in the search engines?

Photo by IITA Image Library

What is Local SEO and Why It’s Important to Church Marketing?

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

Tag - Local search