Search Engine Presence
In two recent Church Encourager articles we discussed the Website Audit and the Social Media Audit. In this article we will be looking at the impact and importance of Search Engine presence. Search Engine presence, or digital presence, is your church’s online footprint. It is what happens when a search is performed for your church or if you are showing up for related queries. You should obviously be the top result if someone searches for your church by name, but what happens when they are searching for churches in your area? Go ahead and try a Google search for churches in (the name of your city or town). How did you do? If your church isn’t showing up in one of the top few spots on the first page, then you are not going to be getting much traffic.
Thinking about traffic is a good way to understand search engine presence. Search engines are like highways. Where you rank on the search is your location. Just like in real estate, it is all about location. Location, location. Your website is the digital representation of your facility, and your social media is like the front porch. The reviews you have are like cars in the parking lot. The number of cars in the parking lot was how people used to determine if a place was any good. Now, it is way more about the reviews. People look at reviews before they do or buy almost everything. Your church is no different. People will search for a church on the Internet, they will look at the top few results, they will read reviews, they will look for pictures to get an idea of what the church is like and pretty much make up their minds from there. If you are church doesn’t have a healthy search engine presence, don’t despair. It can be fixed. It does take some effort, but it will be worth it.
One of the first things you can do is either set up your “Google My Business” account for the first time, or if you already have an account, spend some time getting it current. This is a free service offered by Google and every church should be using it. It is how you get your church to show up in the map area that pops up when you do a Google search. If you are not sure how to do it, just Google it. There is a lot of advice and step by step videos available to walk you through the process.
Conducting audits of your church website and social media and getting your Search Engine presence established will go a long way in helping people find and visit your church.
Steve Lawes is a Certified Church Consultant and a Church Encourager.
