Tips for Improving Your Church Website Search Engine Optimization

There are some extremely technical things you could do to your website to make it easier to find online. But, a lot of them only provide minimal benefit and are very technical to put into place.

Plus, Google changes what they want you to do with your church website search engine optimization to increase in their search ranking all of the time. It is nearly impossible to keep up with those small details unless you are a Search Engine Optimization specialist.

My guess is that you as a Pastor, Church Staff or Ministry Volunteer are not an expert and have no interest in keeping up with these changes.

But, there are some things you can do to potentially increase your online visibility. Here are a few ideas.

Add your CORRECT Church Name, Address and Phone Number and the wording for how you think people will SEARCH for you in GOOGLE to the FOOTER of your website.

This will help Google connect your website to your online Local Business Directories giving Google more verification that it can trust your Church Google Business Page, your other Local Listings and your Website to potentially raise it for local church search terms.

You may have to get creative with this as far as fitting in the search term. For instance, our church was Journey Church of Kansas City, but we also wanted to be found for “Northland Kansas City Church” on Google for people looking to find a new church in our area.

So we included the Church Name, Address and Phone Number, but also this statement – “Find your Northland Kansas City Church home at Journey Church” and linked “Northland Kansas City Church” text back to the home page to make it even more clear and connect that term to our pages.

You will want to put this in the footer of your website so that it shows up on every page. Software like WordPress makes this easy because you only have to put it in once to show up in the footer everywhere. But, if you are using software or coding that only allows you to create a page at a time you will have to add this to every page.

You still want to optimize every page for a different and unique search term. However, putting this text in your footer helps Google know that your entire site is about churches in your local area.

Fill in Unique Title and Description Tags for EVERY page of your Website.

Most websites will allow you to fill in the Title and Description tags for each page and blog post on your website. If you have a site that was created by another person or company and do not have access to this part of the page, ask them to include this for you.

If you use WordPress there is an excellent plugin called YOAST that not only allows you to fill in this information, but also provides suggestions for improving your Church Website Search Engine Optimization. These suggestions include word count, saturation of your keyword or phrase, and it even has a place for you to upload a graphic and alternate title for you to display when posting that post or page to Facebook and Twitter.

Focus on ONE Keyword Search Term or Phrase per Page or Post.

Some pages will be extremely challenging to focus on any Google Search Terms that will make a difference. Your “Our Team” or “Our Beliefs” pages may just have to be what they are, and you connect them to your main search term.

Even your Front Page can be challenging because a lot of times you do not have much text on that page to work with. Many times the Front Page is usually graphics or video, and you may not be giving Google much text to work with.

But your Upcoming Events page, for example, could focus on event search terms and add your City to it so that when people search for things to do in your city they find you.

You will have to get creative with this.

The challenge is that most people are not searching for CHURCH related terms other than your City and adding CHURCH to the term. Unless you can think of a way to work a community term into it like Youth Sports in your City or something like that, I would just stick with your main CHURCH search terms and get found there at least for your main pages.

Write more content for your site.

One way to increase your church website online visibility on Google is to regularly add fresh content related to your Church and Community. This lets Google know that your Church Website is active and worth raising in search rankings for your local CHURCH search terms. This is one of the best ways to improve your church website search engine optimization.

You can do this be creating more pages on your website, but one of the best ways is to create and regularly add content to a Church Blog.

I would suggest NOT using this as a place to advertise upcoming events. You most likely have an Upcoming Events Section on your site for that.

I would suggest using these blog posts for articles from the Staff, stories from your church attenders or volunteers, video and picture recaps from past events, ministry highlight videos and similar content. This way your content can stay on there for a very long time and still have value.

Not only does this help you in Google Search, but it also helps a potential NEW Church Visitor get a feel for the life of your Church BEFORE they choose to attend.

Create a Community Page on your Website to Get Found for your Local Community Search Terms.

The simplified approach to this is to create one page that contains information about your community similar to what a Real Estate Agent would do to provide local information to prospective buyers.

The purpose of this is similar to what some churches have done with postcards. Many churches send out postcards or deliver Welcome Baskets to people who are new to the area. They include coupons to local businesses, and of course information about their church.

Creating and delivering baskets can be very costly. So why not do something similar for basically FREE?

Create a page titled something like “New to [add your City and State here]” or “Moving to [add your City and State here]” and add every piece of local information you think a person moving or new to the area would want to search for and need to find.

You could include area demographic information, information about ALL churches instead of just yours, schools, local restaurants, where to get car tags, etc. The more creative and thorough you are the better.

You will want to organize the information the best you can to look good on the page. But, the most important thing is that you have the information on there and that you REALLY do give good information. Even link to the websites of these places to make it easier for the person who finds your page to get value.

Then, of course, in the header or sidebar you have information about YOUR church inviting people to attend. The purpose of this is to get found by ANYONE looking for this information, not just people who are new to the area.

Create an entire Online Community Guide.

Why stop with just one page when you could have a page on your website with information for EVERY business, school, restaurant, hotel and community resource. The goal? Get found in your local area for nearly EVERY local search term.

Think about this. The only business really trying to get found for their actual name in your community is probably that business. Do you think they would be upset if you created a page or a blog post with information about their business on your Church Website?

Even if your post rose ABOVE their actual website for their search term, they should be happy as long as you are providing information in the post that leads back to them.

Yes, this will take a lot of work and organization. But the good part is that once it is in place it is working FOR you without you having to touch it again for the most part.

How would you do it?

There are many ways that it could be done. You could just have a page for each online category in your city where you would want to become found such as Restaurants, Schools and Banks. Then add as many businesses and schools to the appropriate pages. Link them together and you have a Community Guide.

You can see an example of this type of Guide at the link below.
>> Journey Church Community Guide Example

Here is a plan for a more extensive version of the guide.

Create an entire blog or a blog category on your website called “[your City name] Community Guide” or something similar.
Then, create subcategories under that for each local category you would like to include like Schools, Restaurants or whatever else you want to be found for. That way in the website address for each page you have the city name, category and then you will have the name of that business or community organization when you create the post.
Create a blog post template for the information you would like to include for each business post. This could include Business Name, Address, Phone Number, Website Address and Logo.
Create a post for as many businesses as possible under each category. The post titles and descriptions should center around the Business Name and could include your City again. Even if you do not think you would have time to complete all of the categories, just start somewhere. Start with Schools then move to Police, Fire and other Community Resource Contact Information, then on to Restaurants until you have reached your goal.

The idea is to have a post from your website on the Front Page of Google for your Community for EVERY business or at least business category in your local area. The link leads to your site, but also connects the searcher to the local business information they are searching for. In the process these site visitors are introduced and invited to your church, and may choose to use your site as a local business finder resource in the future.

The main maintenance concern that you will have is if a business owner requests that you remove their post or change information on the site. That will probably not happen very often if at all, and would be easy to update if they asked.

Technical Steps You Can Take

There are a lot of technical things you could take and many tools you can use to improve your church website search engine optimization and online visibility. Here are a few…

Website Grader – Check your Website for problems and receive recommendations to improve your website quality and speed.
Submit your website to Google using the Google Search Console after making your website changes using the HERE.
Setup your site with Google Analytics and add your site on the Google Marketing Platform.
Check your website for hacking and to see if it has been blacklisted by Google at Sucuri.net.
Add Social Media icons and links to your site. Most Churches already do this, but if do not have them you need to add them. WordPress has plugins that can help do this for you or you can add links manually.
Add your Church Google Business Page link to your Website with your Social Media icons so that Google connects your Google Business page to your site.