5 SEO Improvements You Can Make To Your Church’s Website | Pro Church Tools Ep. #065
– Today on Pro Church Daily we're talking about five SEO improvements you can make to your church's website. – Well hey there and
welcome to Pro Church Daily, the show where in 10 minutes or less you'll get your daily
dose of tips and tactics to help your church share
the message of Jesus while we navigate the
biggest communication shift we've seen in the last 500 years. I'm your host Alex Mills. I'm joined as always by the
boss man, it's Brady Shear. Today we're talking about
five SEO improvements you can make to your
church's website today. – SEO is an acronym. Stands for search engine optimization. It has to do with how easily your church's website can
be found within search. What I wanted to do on this
episode of Pro Church Daily is talk about five
improvements you can make to your website's existing SEO and also to just make the disclaimer that there's no such thing as
achieving perfect SEO.
All you can do is continually get better. In this episode we're gonna
offer five improvements but if you wanna do a really deep dive into SEO and make it as
best as it can possibly be, two resources that I would recommend are moz.com, m-o-z dot
com and backlinko.com. Both tremendous resources on SEO. Let's talk about five improvements your church can make right now. The first has nothing to do
with your website per say, it has all to do with
your Google My Business. Google My Business is a platform that local organizations are meant to use so that when someone searches
for Life Abundant Niagara, not only does their website and maybe social platforms show up in search, but there's also on the right
hand side of Google's search the Google My Business
platform that shows up and your church's profile there.
In that profile you'll
see hours of operation, the address which is linked
directly to Google Maps so people can find directions,
there's actually photos. If you search for Pro Church Tools you'll see our website and all of our social platforms on
the first page of Google but you'll also see our office space, the picture we uploaded to our
Google My Business Profile, which we really only did to learn about the profile of
Google My Business 'cause don't come to our office 'cause there's nothing here we can sell you. Actually, please do come. We'll meet you. It'll be fun.
– Come visit. – A lot of people do come
by from now and again. It shows photos, it'll show
Facebook and Google reviews that are directly
connected to that profile, and it also has contact information, phone, email and of course your website link is found there as well. You have to verify your
Google My Business profile. They'll mail you an
actual thing in the mail to your address to make sure that you actually authenticate,
verify that address is yours.
Basically, this is the easiest and best improvement that you can
make that you haven't already and it doesn't even have to do anything with your church's website. – And it's totally free. – Totally free. Continuing along, improvements you can make SEO wise that are free and are not a
part of your church's website, Facebook reviews and Google reviews. I don't know about you Alex and I don't know about the listener or viewer of Pro Church Daily right now, but reviews to me matter so much online.
When I'm looking for a new restaurant, a new barber, a new counselor,
whatever it might be, I'm going straight to those reviews. – Absolutely. – When someone's looking for a new church they're doing the same thing. It doesn't matter if your
website is perfectly optimized. If someone lands on your front page of Google rankings for
Life Abundant Niagara and they see all of these
reviews that are not good. You want to make sure that your Google and Facebook reviews have as many possible five
star reviews as possible. What you can do is you
can just run a contest let's say in your church and be like, we're giving away a $200 gift card to this amazing restaurant in Niagara, in Tallahassee, in Vegas, wherever you are and the way to enter is you gotta leave a review for our church
on Facebook and Google.
– You could leverage your volunteer teams to do that as well. We talked about this awhile ago but leveraging your volunteer teams to, we suggested change their
profile picture on Facebook to your current sermon
graphic or whatever. That is applicable to this as well. Start it with people in house and no need to be ashamed of that but get the ball rolling with honest reviews. When I'm searching for things online whether it's products I'm about to buy. I just booked an AirBNB. Customer reviews is my
first tier of filtering. I will almost exclusively look at customer reviews and then
filter out a small list and then look at everything that those AirBNB's or restaurants
or whatever have to offer.
If it's not reviewed well, I don't even need to look at the rest because I know that people
who have been there before, their experience wasn't good. This one's really, really important. – How do reviews work? They work that we leave negative
reviews when we're upset. We don't leave positive
reviews when things go well. It's okay to ask for reviews. You probably will need to 'cause you gotta recognize that the way
reviews work is that you have to be compelled
to leave a review, and what compels you? A bad experience because you
expect a good experience. If a good experience happens, you're not likely to leave a review because that was what you expected. It's okay to ask for reviews. Incentivize reviews even because it's so important to new visitors checking out your website and getting
connected to your church.
– Especially for churches. Not a lot of people are probably thinking that leaving reviews
for churches is a thing. It's important for us like you said as far as search engine
optimization is concerned. Let's just go for it. – Fourth SEO improvement
that you can make, this does pertain to your
actual church's website, is keyword phrase optimization
across your website. We're talking about H1 title tags, we're talking about the meta
description for your pages, the kind of three to four line text that shows up in searches, and we're talking about keywords in the body content of
your website pages as well. When it comes to keyword optimization, really what you're looking
for mostly as a church, assuming you're not in a crazy, giant city and if you are in a major metropolis you're gonna change
this from the city name to the neighborhood name.
If you're in San Diego, maybe using the San
Diego keyword isn't great but you could put Ocean
Beach or Pacific Beach or La Jolla or something like that. What you wanna do with keyword phrase is you wanna get the word church and your city or neighborhood's name in every single place that you can put it, especially on your
homepage in the page title, in the meta description, in the copy of the body of your website. You wanna get San Diego, actually no you wouldn't want
San Diego like I just said, you want Oceanside church. When someone searches
churches in Oceanside, your church comes up because you are optimizing for those keywords. – How many H1 tags should
I have on each page? – Just one H1 tag. – Just one? I shouldn't have more than one? – If you're using a
slider you might have six. – That's not gonna work well for my SEO? – With SEO you only want
one H1 tag per page.
– Thanks for clearing that up for me. – That's helpful. Five, the last SEO improvement is to use a tool like Pingdom web tools. You can Google search Pingdom web tools. This is basically checking is my website's performance up to par? You'll see your page's load
time compared to other pages, you'll get your Google page speed ranking and it'll basically give you a score out of 100 along
with a letter grade.
You'll probably want 80 or above. It'll give you all these different ways that you can optimize for page speed and page optimization. Page speed, Google uses that for rankings. They do not wanna send
a user to your website and then to have a bad experience because that reflects poorly on them. It's like if your friend
recommends a restaurant and the restaurant sucks, you're like I'm not gonna
trust that friend anymore. Their recommendations are bad. Same with Google. They want their users to
have a good experience. If your website is not optimized, if it loads slowly it's
gonna be a bad experience.
They will penalize your rankings. Use a tool like Pingdom web tools to access your church website's
current status with that. – We had somebody give us some feedback online just this week
about using this tool. They ran their website through this tool and they were shocked with
how slow it was running. What they did was they
went into their website and they just compressed all
their images and video files and said this file doesn't need to be 20 megs, it can be two megs. They just made all those
files a little bit smaller and ran the website again and it was loading way faster and that's gonna help them in the long run when it comes to people finding their church. Simple, easy things you can do. It's all free and you can do it right now.
– Of course if you're looking for a website builder for your church, we would recommend the one that we built. – Of course. – Nucleus. You can find it at nucleus.church and I've talked enough about Nucleus. Let's hear it from one of our users. This is from Devon. He's a student pastor. Devon says, "Nucleus has been the single best thing we've ever done as a church. We absolutely love it. Our main concern was our giving going in. We were worried that giving would go down due to our app being responsible for about 80% of our monthly donations but since switching to Nucleus,
our giving has gone up.
As a matter of fact, it's gone up 105% from
this week last year. God has been doing amazing things here and we're extremely excited to have Nucleus as a major tool in that growth." – Wow. – I could not make a promise that your giving will go up 105% the first year of Nucleus.
– There's no guarantee. – It's like those weight loss disclaimers, results are not typical I guess. Nucleus.church, a new kind of
website builder for churches. That'll do it for today's
episode of Pro Church Daily. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching today's
episode of Pro Church Daily. Make sure to subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications so
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