Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is how your website appears on the search results when someone is looking for a specific keyword. If you implement SEO best practices across your site, your church website will appear on Google when people are looking for a church near them.
Here are some church SEO tips you can easily implement across your site, even if you’re not a web designer or developer!
1. Identify and Use Keywords
The first and most important step in optimizing your church website for SEO is to identify and use relevant keywords across all pages of your site.
There are many keyword research tools available, but you likely already know or can guess relevant keywords for your church. Keywords such as “Lutheran church in [Your City Name]” or “LCMS church near [Your City Name]” are good starting points!
I recommend focusing on one keyword per page—so your homepage’s keyword would be similar to the above, while other secondary pages would have their own keyword.
2. Write Like a Human, Not a Robot
If you were creating websites fifteen to twenty years ago, in the early days of SEO, many websites were stuffed with keywords—so many that they were unreadable. The sites sounded forced, stilted, and unnatural, but they ranked incredibly high.
Since then, Google and other search engines have gotten smarter, and they’re able to recognize intended keywords without them being present in every single sentence on your page. They can even recognize slight variations, so you don’t have to repeat your keyword verbatim throughout the page.
For example, you could say “LCMS church located in Oceanside, California” and “Lutheran church in Oceanside, CA,” and Google would recognize that these keywords have the same search intent and serve the same purpose.
3. Format Your Site
One aspect of SEO that many churches overlook is the formatting or tagging of their site. You likely already have headers, subheaders, and paragraph text on your site—but it might not be labeled correctly!
Whether you’re using a drag-and-drop church website editor like Church360° Unite or you have a custom-coded site in Wordpress, it’s easy to make sure your text is tagged correctly. Each page on your site should follow a basic structure: Heading 1 (H1) first as the most important header on the page, followed by any H2s or H3s. Paragraph text should be tagged as such.
All that to say, if you want to create a subheader on your page, don’t just reduce the text size—make sure it’s tagged as an H2 or H3. When your information is structured correctly, it signals to Google what’s most important.
Try to distribute your keywords evenly throughout all of your headings and paragraph tags, but remember not to overuse them!
4. Update Metadata
If the word metadata is intimidating, don’t worry—it’s actually very simple! Think of metadata as the back-end information on your website pages that gives Google or other search engines signals as to what the page is about.
Alt Text
Alt text is an abbreviation for “alternative text,” which is essentially a label for all of the images on your site. These descriptions not only help Google understand what kind of information is on the page but they also assist vision-impaired users who are using screen readers to navigate websites.
When you upload an image to your website, oftentimes the alt text will automatically be what your uploaded file is called. Think of it like this: If you have an image of your Sunday morning service on your site, but it’s labeled “IMG-234.jpg,” that gives no indication what the image actually is.
Instead, choose a few words to describe your image, including keywords when relevant. In the above example of a worship service image, you might change it to “Church service in [City Name]” or “Sanctuary of [Church Name].”
Meta Description
When you see a link to a webpage on Facebook or Google, you’ll often see a few lines of text that tell you what the page is about; this is your page’s meta description! It’s not seen often, but it gives important signals to search engines of the content of your page.
It’s imperative to include your targeted keyword for that page in the meta description. Other than that, the content should simply describe what sort of information is on the page. Think of it as a short summary of the content of your page!
Meta descriptions should be around 150 words—any more than that and they’ll get cut off in search results.
Page Title
The final piece of the metadata puzzle is your page title. When you see a search result on Google, the page title is the main bit of text you’ll see in the search results. Your page title should describe your page in a few words; you should also include your chosen keyword!
Consider structuring your page title like this: [Page Title] | [Keyword]. For example, for your homepage, your page title might be something like “St. John Lutheran Church | LCMS Church in Springfield, Missouri.”
5. Look at Google Analytics
If you really want to rank your church on Google with SEO, you’ll need to take a look at Google Analytics. This might seem overwhelming at first, but Google provides comprehensive trainings for beginners to understand how to use the site.
Google Analytics will help you understand what keywords are performing well for your site and where you have opportunities for improvement.
Another key aspect of Google Analytics is being able to submit your pages for crawling on Google. This essentially signals to Google that you want them to look at the content of your page and start having it appear in search results. If you don’t do this, Google might never look at your website.
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