Why Church search engine optimization (SEO) is more important now than ever

A Church article with View Comments posted 6 March 2009.
Tags: Church, html, search engine, seo

Poorly optimized church websites are getting lower search engine rankings when competing with professional “directory” services.

A few years ago, when you did a Google search for “church city, state” you would get, by and large, a list of websites and relevant news articles connected to churches in that community. It wasn’t perfect, and sometimes you’d end up with something weird, but you could generally count on the first ten or twenty results to be fairly relevant.

Now, however, when I Google the community I came from (church columbia, mo) or the community I now live in (church dubuque, ia), at least one, and sometimes more than half of the results are for directory sites like Merchant Circle or USAChurch that provide no real value to searchers, or to social networking sites that are only tangentially related to a church at all.

It’s not that church websites got worse. By and large, standards for congregational sites are going up as pastors are recognizing the need for a compelling site to attract church shoppers (like it or not) who no longer visit in person. If you look through either of the list of results I linked above, you’ll find some pretty good sites – above average, in fact.

Rather, the directory sites have found an easy target. Church websites are notoriously poorly optimized for search engine performance. Yet churches are something that people search for on Google, and any click is potential ad revenue. Thus, a professional web designer with an eye towards optimization and a national appeal (i.e. these sites are usually oriented nation- or worldwide and thus have more content, more links, and higher pagerank) can easily displace a ragtag group of congregational sites in any given community. They would be stupid not to try.

So, what can we do about it? Three things:

1. Work on search engine optimization. Okay, duh. But surprisingly few sites take this into account, even sites developed by professional developers and “church website mills” that produce generic sites for cheap. Using HTML tags appropriately, rendering content as text instead of images, and more search keywords in each page will help make your site friendlier to search engines, visitors, and especially the visually disabled.
2. Promote your site offline. It continues to amaze me how churches that have a good website don’t promote it everywhere. Just a little bit of ink and design space on stationary, pens, publications, bulletins, newsletters, and mailings to the community can drive incredibly targeted, relevant traffic to your site for free.
3. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. If a directory listing site ranks higher than your church, see if the site offers a way to add your website to their profile. Make sure that the contact information they list is correct so that people can find you. Even if the directory exists primarily for advertising purposes, you may be able to get some better exposure from them for free.

When people type “church city, state” in their browser, they have a “finding a church” problem. The key is in doing everything we can to help them solve it.

You might also enjoy:

1. Strangest Search Engine
2. Church Demographics and Use of Technology
3. Website Picks on “Pretty Good Lutherans”
4. New church website launched!
5. Custom Firefox search shortcuts