As more and more content becomes digitized, it has become a trend to church SEO to increase the chance of it appearing on other people’s searches. The more people that know about your church, the better it is. While it is a good idea to target an ever-growing audience, a local audience is just as important. If there are two or three other churches in your area, naturally you want to be the first result when someone in your neighborhood searches for a nearby church. SEO can help with that and much more. Let’s take a deeper look at how you can improve your church SEO.
Church SEO Tip #1: Enlist to ensure your church found
Everyone uses Google, that’s nothing special. So it is vital that you should claim your Google Listing and register your company in its local listings. Google My Business is a free and easy tool that allows you to update your business information on Google Maps, review pages, and other places across the web. It also helps customers find your business online. By claiming your local listing, it allows you to respond to reviews, answer questions and even add relevant photos.
Apart from Google, you should claim your listing on various other sites such as Yelp and Facebook. A great way to improve your local ranking is by encouraging people to write reviews about your church on these sites. Many people use these sites when deciding which church to attend, so having good reviews is important to display. Google has recently announced that it will be placing greater emphasis on local citations and consistency in NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number). So it is important to ensure all your information amongst different sites is consistent with each other.
Church SEO Tip #2: Create meaningful content
One of the biggest ranking factors that determine the top of the search engine results is your content. Content is what keeps people’s attention and the more people that enjoy your content, the greater your popularity and usefulness are in Google’s eyes. Your content can be in various forms from a blog to a newsletter, but it’s important how your content can be relevant to the people in your local community.
Video-based content is also very captivating but comes at a cost. Google’s bots can read the text to analyze the content but cannot do the same for a video. This is where transcription comes into play, if a video is transcribed, Google bots can read the transcriptions and know exactly what content is contained within the video.
Church SEO Tip #3: Focus on church meta tags
Having content is a great start, but there are a few more steps to ensure it ranks. This is where church meta tags come into place. These pieces of information help determine when your content should pop up in search results. The title tag is a large ranking factor for Google. It’s also what shows up in the search results, so it needs to entice visitors to click. The optimum length for a title is between 50-60 characters and you should include your topic and church name in front of the tag.
Keywords, such as churches near me, are essential to any search. You want your church to pop up when people search for something related to it, so it’s important to figure out the interests of your community. By thinking about what people in your community might be searching for, you can optimize your site to rank higher for those terms and get more visits from interested visitors. You can conduct polls to find out your community’s interest and create content based on that. After finding out the topics, you can use various online keyword optimizers to determine which are the best keywords for churches to use for that topic.
Church SEO Tip #4: Don’t forget about descriptions
Descriptions regarding images are important. Just like videos, Google’s bots can’t see images so it is useful to provide an alternative description known as Alt-text. Alt-text is used to describe an image and closed captioning is used to describe a video. The primary use of alt text is to describe an image for those who are visually impaired. Google views it as a ranking factor because crawlers are unable to see images. When optimizing alt texts, be as descriptive as possible.
You should also optimize the URL of every page. When deciding on a URL, keep it as short as possible and include a variation of your target keyword. The shorter and simpler it is, the easier it is to share and click on.
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