Webs 4 Christ has been providing Church web
hosting, Church web
design and Church Internet Marketing Campaigns to Churches
for over 4 years. During that time we have discovered some sure
fire techniques for not only getting your Church excellent
placement in search engine results pages for people who are
actually 'church shopping' on the Internet, (SERPs), but in
helping you reach the unchurched in your community. Those people
who are not searching for a Church at the moment, but who are
looking for some other information about your community.
First the question some of you will ask is "Why do I want to do
that?" It's simple really. Its a matter of building name
recognition for your congregation and, if you have designed your
web site in such a way that you have exciting things to show a
casual visitor, visiting your website may stir the first
longings within someone who has either fallen away from the
church or never been churched. (But that is a topic for another
article *smile*)
Another reason is that by bringing in visitors for information
related to your community, you are also laying the foundation
for a link program that will help your church gain ranking with
search engines. Why? Because if you provide useful information
to the community, others will link to you for that.
So what can you do to help gain exposure? Stop right here! I
will tell you it is a lot of work, but well worth it if you have
the time and/or assistance from others in the church. Our latest
marketing campaign is for a fairly small congregation of 165
average attendance in Palatine, Il, called St. Paul United Church of
Christ. We designed their website and, in June, began to
slowly build the site to attract casual visitors.
The first thing we did was capitalize on the upcoming 4th of
July celebration in Palatine. The church was participating in
the parade, providing parking for attendees of the 4 day
festival, and also having a church picnic and fireworks watching
fellowship gathering. We will list the things we did here step
by step and then tell you what the results were:
First we did a search on major keyword phrases that we
assumed people looking for information on the Palatine 4th of
July Family Fest. We took a look at the sites that ranked high
for Palatine IL combined 4th of July
Parade, Fireworks,
Home
Town Fest and parking.Then we created separate
pages on our website for each of those items. Being sure to
optimize the pages for search engines.On our home page,
we have a prominently placed "What's Happening" area. In this
area, we placed links to those pages. At this time, Google et al
were only hitting the St. Paul website about once a week, so we
had to move fast.Within 2 weeks, St. Paul was ranked #1
in Google, Yahoo and MSN for search phrases "Palatine 4th of
July", "Palatine July 4 Parade", "Palatine Home Town Fest",
"Palatine July 4th Fireworks" and "Palatine Fireworks Parking"!
Even the sites sponsored by the city itself did NOT outrank
us!
The result? In June, the St. Paul website had 724 visitors and
426 unique visitors. Only 1 person added that site to their
'favorites'. Between July 1st and July 4th, the website had over
400 unique visitors, and 12 of them marked St. Paul as a
"favorite". Which means that they found the St. Paul website
while looking for 4th of July activities, but actually took the
time to look at other areas of the website, saw things they
liked, and bookmarked us for future reference.
Another result? During July, one of the slowest months for
church attendance, (particularly for visitors), St. Paul's
average attendance increased, AND it had an average of 5-8
visitors in attendance every Sunday. St. Paul doesn't always
formally collect information on how visitors found out about
them, but in this case they know at least 2 people every Sunday
found the Church through its website. During July and August St.
Paul had 3 couples come to the church to make plans for upcoming
weddings - each of those couples had found St. Paul by ending up
on its website.
In conclusion, staying in touch with special events in your
community and helping to promote them on your church website
will not only add value to members of your congregation, but
will also increase your church's recognition in the community,
its search engine standings, and maybe, just maybe, your church
will have the opportunity to share God and His love to a
newcomer.
If you are looking for assistance with helping to promote your
Church's website, please stop by Webs 4 Christ. We offer a
variety of services and ALL of our services have affordable,
reduced rates for Churches
|
