Church Search Engine Optimization Ideas for the Big City and Multiple Suburbs
Getting Your Church Found is a Challenge
Getting your church found is challenging enough in a small town. Churches are so much different than businesses as people primarily look for churches by directly searching for churches. It is hard to get creative and go after strange niches with your main website like you can with a business.
I do believe that you can get creative and try to create content on your website focused on things like family fun, divorce help, and addictions connected to your local city. But, if you are not found in the main church search terms for your city, it is going to be a struggle for your church findability.
At least in a small town, if you do more than other churches [which is probably not much], then you should have a relatively easy time getting found in your local Google church term search.
Google Business for your Church
This is also true of getting found in the Google Business listings that typically appear at the top of the search. The links with A, B, and C are places listings that are independent of your website rankings. These are Google created listings that you can create and manage.
Create a Gmail account for your church, claim your church phone/address listing, completely fill it out, then get people to leave positive reviews on your listing. That will give you an additional shot at showing up on page one, and allow you to be found in Google Maps.
Can your Church become Found in a Large City or Metroplex?
It is challenging enough to get found in the church search terms in a small community. But what about a huge city? What about a community like the fringe of Dallas with many suburbs blending together?
You can’t afford to just focus on one location when people who live in many areas around you would easily be able to drive to your church?
There are many things you can do including hiring an SEO expert to work with your website. However, with churches I think it is pretty straightforward process to figure out what your target keywords are. For the most part, they need to just have your town name and the word church or churches in it. That is probably how people will find you.
But when you live in a multi-city or suburb area, you will have to work harder to be found. I am not an SEO expert to the level of a church search engine optimization specialist. But I have had good success getting my local church found in my town. The basic principles should apply, but there are some things to keep in mind.
Suggestions and Ideas for Church Search Engine Optimization in Large Cities
- Focus the content of your main home page and significant pages in your site on the main city or area your are in or trying to reach. For instance, you may want to focus on Kansas City Church or Northland Kansas City Church.
- Do NOT create multiple Google Business listings for your church. You do not want to be caught tricking Google. These listings are supposed to be based on an actual address or phone number. You should only create multiple listings if you have multiple physical locations.
- Do create or claim ONE Google Business page based on your address and the actual city you are in. You should also at least claim or create your Yahoo Small Business and Bing Places page as well.
- Create or choose other pages within your site to focus on variations of your main search terms. Instead of Kansas City Church, create an additional one for Kansas City Churhes. Many times you will be found for one and not the other. Focusing another page on the variation plural of it would help I think.
- Create a blog and blog posts based on specific cities and areas that you are trying to reach. Don’t make it up. Just find reasons to blog about those areas and suburbs. Talk about an outreach you did in those areas. Create a video testimony of someone from those areas and tag the titles with their name and add …from that city to the title and description of the video and blog posts. Do what you can to create content about those areas.
- YouTube videos can rise the top very quickly. So create those videos and add them to YouTube tagging them with titles and descriptions including those areas, and put your website and contact info in the YouTube description.
Hiring a church seo company can be a benefit, but you don’t necessarily have to do that to see success. Try the tips above and see how high your church can rise in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines.
Want to create a Church Blog for your Church Search Engine Optimization Plan?
A blog for your church can be a great tool to create content that will expand the reach of your church online as mentioned above. Bluehost is a great option for hosting and creating a blog for your church, and it even has a one-click install option. Check out the link and the WordPress video tutorial below showing you how to install your blog [my link].
