3: Your Church – Name, Address, Phone Number & Website (NAP)
Your church contact information is WAY more important to the findability of your church than you might think.
Google specifically has placed great importance on this information with their Google Business Pages. Bing Places and the many, many other Local Business Directories have followed. This makes the correct use of your church contact information a critical part of your online strategy.
The good thing is that this really is a simple part of the process.
But, if you mess this up you will be frustrated with your results in Google and other search engines.
What is Google looking for in your Contact Information especially your Church NAP?
What Google and other search engines want is to give their users the BEST possible search results.
When someone searches for a restaurant in your city, Google wants to make sure they find a restaurant that is still open and matches what that person was searching for.
This same thing applies to your church. Google, Bing and other search engines want to determine that the church they are promoting is still open and that people are actively managing the online presence for the church.
One of the ways Google and the other search engines determines this is through your CONSISTENT Church NAP or Business Name [Church Name], Address and Phone Number.
Most people just say to have a consistent NAP. But, I have added your church Website Address to this list based on the fact that you need to be pushing your website HUB in everything you do. Plus you want to be very clear to the search engines what website address you want connected to your church.
One of the most important aspects to this process is that your Church NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number needs to be EXACTLY CONSISTENT across as many of these Local Business Directory websites as possible.
It also helps to have your exact Name, Address and Phone Number on other local websites like your local newspaper website and local community pages.
It can even help to put your exact NAP at the bottom of YouTube video descriptions on videos that you know will be around for a long time.
Anywhere online you can place your consistent and exact Church NAP will give Google one more reason to believe that your website is a relevant search result for church related search terms in your local area. Not only does it recognize the consistency, but also that someone must be managing the online presence of the Church or Business because it is so consistent.
This is especially true when you place this information and link back to your website on sites that are local to your city and community. The more local the better.
Local Search is very important for the Local Church.
Unless you are a Mega Church with an International reach and multi-State fundraising efforts you probably are mainly concerned with becoming found in search terms related to your local city or region.
It does not do the average local church in Florida any good to be found online in California. You may reach people with your online Services and website content that way, but that will not bring new visitors and guests through the doors of your actual building very often.
I am not discounting the value of reaching people across the country and around the World with your online content. It would be great if we could just do a few tweaks to our website and get found for CHURCH search terms across the country. But typically it does not work like that. It is EXTREMELY difficult to get found in a National or Worldwide search term like Church
or Assembly of God Church
or Baptist Church
. There is way too much competition.
But in your local city and community it is VERY possible that you can get on the front page for CHURCH search terms related to your area. This is especially true if you are in a rural or medium size city. It may be a lot tougher in a place like Dallas, Texas. In places like that you could go for a strategic area of the city, your specific denomination or go for non-denominational search terms plus your city.
So even though you may not be able to get to the front page of Assembly of God Church Nationally, you may be able to get on the front page for Independence, Missouri Churches. It just depends on how many other churches are working strategically in that same area.
Of course, we are not in competition with other churches. But, we still want to be doing our best to get the message to as many people as possible. If we believe in our church and what is happening in it, we will do everything we can to get to the top of those CHURCH local search terms.
That is not being competitive. That is simply being a good steward with the opportunities and knowledge that we have been given.
Determine Your EXACT Church NAP – Name, Address and Phone Number
We have already determined our website HUB that we will include everywhere. As we mentioned, this should be your main website in most situations.
Now we have to figure out EXACTLY how we will write and format our contact information online. After we figure that out we will use that exact format in as many places as possible online.
This is important even to the most specific detail.
Why make Google figure out if your multiple address wordings are the same church? Decide if you are going to spell out North or abbreviate to N. Decide if you are going to use an exact Street Address or a Rural Route address.
How are you going to print the name of your Church? With our without abbreviations? Are you going to include your denominational title or not?
What phone number are you going to use? Will you use your local number or an 800 number? Local numbers are better for this process as it lets Google know even more that you are local to that specific city.
It all matters and you can only use ONE version online. You can choose to print it differently offline, but you want to use it exactly the same everywhere online as much as possible.
Make those decisions and write out your exact Church Name, Address and Phone Number before moving on to the next step.