Let’s a play a little word game.  I’ll say a word; you say the first word that comes to mind.

1. “Marketing”
2. “Search marketing”
3. “Church growth”

Your answers may have been something like:

1. (Marketing): “businesses” “ads” or “commercials”
2. (Search marketing): “Google”, “Adwords”, or “online company”
3. (Church growth): “evangelism”, “outreach”, or “flyers”

But what if I said they are all connected?

Let’s look at the case of Knott Avenue Christian Church where marketing, search marketing, and church growth are all connected.

Knott Avenue Christian Church
Knott Avenue Christian Church is a non-denominational, multi-ethnic Christian church located in Anaheim, California.  They are a vibrant and active church with a wide variety of ministries to help meet the spiritual needs of everyone they can and spread the Gospel in their community and the world.

In the past year Knott Avenue Christian Church (KACC) has been increasing their online presence through a variety ways.  They have started using Twitter and Facebook.  They are podcasting sermons and messages.  They even have an iPhone app allowing people to watch their sermons from anywhere on their iPhones.  In addition to these social media, KACC has been focusing on the local search engines.

Local Search for a Local Church
Most people these days go online to find information.  If they are looking for a church or looking a resource a church can offer (marriage help, addiction groups, answers to life’s questions), they will most likely go online to find what they are looking for.  So, it was important for KACC to start showing up so people could find them when they looked online.

Over the past several months KACC has been working to achieve high rankings in the search engines for searches in their local area through the Top Church Search Rankings service.  So far they have obtained over 500 top ten rankings with well over 100 #1 rankings.  These are rankings for search terms related to churches in their area, such as churches in Anaheim, CA.  In addition to the search engines, the service also setup listings in local review sites, (like CitySearch.com) and Internet yellow pages, and church directories.

Results
The results for KACC’s website have been fantastic.  KACC.com has been averaging about 1250 visitors a month from the search engines alone.  Over 50% of the visitors to the website are new visitors.  I asked Jack Scalfani from KACC about the results and he said,

“I know that the website has been surviving with lots of help from your SEO. Obviously it has, because we have been consistently getting 100 visitors a day and mostly new visitors.”

But, in the end, the church website is just a tool of the church.  The real results are in the church itself and how it has helped them fulfill their ministry.  In addition to talking about the website, Jack went on to say,

“Our rankings that OurChurch.Com helped us get are bringing in new donations, new members, and new viewers on our live broadcast on our website.”

KACC has maintained having about 100 visitors to their church each week.  These visitors include people who hear the Word of God and become followers of Christ, families who find a church home, and Christians who are strengthened and go out to minister to their community.  They are a growing church in part because they are growing in the search engines.

Are you and your church engaging people online?

Search Engine Marketing can be a very effective way of not only generating traffic to your website, but targeting the specific traffic that is interested in what your website has to offer.  This has the effect of not only increasing the traffic to your website, but also increasing the conversions on your website.  This may mean more sales, more visitors to your church, or, as in the case of Christian Leadership University, more students.  Here’s how.

About CLU
Christian Leadership University (cluonline.com) is a an online Christian university that offers Associate, Bachelor, Master, and Doctoral degrees in several fields, including theology, Biblical studies, Christian counseling, Christian leadership, youth ministry, and many more.  CLU believes that faculty should be experienced leaders in the Christian community and include Christian leaders such as Nate Krupp, Mark Virkler, and Ron Luce.  Their educational philosophy (Lamad method of learning) sets them apart as each student’s curriculum is fashioned for them focusing on life experience, gifts and abilities, and resting on the Bible and Holy Spirit.

About the Service
In 2008, Christian Leadership University signed up for OurChurch.Com’s Progressive SEO Management service.  As part of the service, the cluonline.com homepage was optimized for the search engines, CLU was registered in over 2000 search directories over the course of the first year, and OurChurch.Com employed several link building strategies to gain inbound links to the cluonline.com website.  One of the main strategies for link building was creating remarkable content and spreading the word about that content.

With the optimization of the CLU website, CLU began seeing an immediate bump in traffic to their website.  Then the link building strategies began to increase the authority of cluonline.com in the eyes of the search engines as we obtained thousands of new links to the CLU website.  As a result, cluonline.com has moved from a Google Page Rank of 4 (out of ten) up to a Page Rank of 5 (out of ten), a significant increase.  The Page Rank scale works a bit like the Richter Scale for earthquakes.  Each level up indicates much more authority in Google where a Page Rank 5 website may have 10 times the authority as a Page Rank 4.

More authority in the search engines means a website is capable of ranking for more competitive keywords.  So, we were able to continue to update the search engine optimization of the CLU website to focus on more and more competitive keywords.  Currently, cluonline.com has top ten rankings for such general and competitive keywords in their field as “Bible colleges”, “Christian colleges”, “Seminaries”, “Christian Theology” and many more.

Real World Results
Top ten rankings and increased links are nice, but how do they translate into real world results?  For CLU they meant an increase of over 1000 people contacting them from their website during the first year.  Most importantly, they experienced over 10% growth in enrollment…all during a recession.  This has increased their financial base, but more importantly for them, it has increased their ability to minister to people and train up new leaders in the Christian community.

Things to Take Home

• Optimizing your website for the search engines can provide traffic to your website fairly quickly.
• Employing link building strategies can build up your website’s authority in the search engines increasing your search rankings.
• One of the best ways to gain quality, inbound links to your website is by creating remarkable content.
• As your website grows in the search engines, you should modify your search engine optimization to target more and more competitive keywords.
• A good search marketing plan creates beneficial, real world results and pays for itself.

What are you doing to market your website in the search engines?  What comments and questions do you have about CLU’s search marketing campaign?

In an economic recession, people tend to reduce unnecessary spending.  This may mean changing little things, like not going to the movies or eating out as much, however, it can also mean changing big things, like whether a child goes to public or private school.  One way a family can quickly save $5000+ a year is to stop sending their child to a private school.  While many schools simply resigned to the fact that they were going to see enrollment go down until the economy turned around, at least one school planned to see their enrollment go up.  How?

Family of Christ Christian School, Tampa, FL
Family of Christ Christian School is a Kindergarten, elementary and middle school located on the north side of Tampa, FL.  They are a relatively new school that started in 1999 with a Kindergarten program.  Since 1999 they have expanded to Kindergarten through 8th grade and now have a full K -8 school program.  As of 2009 they had 140 students, which is up from the lower 130’s the year before.  They are associated with Family of Christ Lutheran church and offer a Christ-centered education with a high academic standard as well as many extra-curricular activities.

Increasing Web Presence
Family of Christ Christian School first started hosting a website with OurChurch.Com in 2005.  Deciding that they wanted to start utilizing their website more and realizing how important making a good impression on the Internet is to getting new students, in 2008 Family of Christ purchased a custom designed website.  This added new functionality to their site, but also made the site much more appealing to visitors.  It was easier to navigate and was much more attractive.

With their new website in place was ready to start actively using their website to gain new students.  So, shortly after, Family of Christ moved forward with the Top School Search Rankings service.

The Top School Search Rankings service
The Top Schools Search Rankings service offers a multi-pronged approach to search marketing for schools.  It includes local search engine optimization, geo-coding, adding listings in the Internet Yellow Pages, adding listings in school directories, adding listings in local search sites, setting up listings in Google+ Local, Yahoo Local Business, and Bing Maps.  In addition we also optimized several pages on the school site.  When all of that is done we work with the school help get positive reviews for the school through the Internet.

The Results
Even after just the first month into the service, Family of Christ Christian School was already starting to see results in the rather competitive large city of Tampa, FL.  Typically, local search engine optimization takes two or three months to see real results, however, they had already moved up to having:

- Rankings:

• 428 Top Thirty Rankings
• 159 Top Ten Rankings
• 74 Top Five Rankings

And they are continuing to move up in the search engines!

In addition to these search rankings, Family of Christ has several new listings in school directories, local search sites, and the Internet Yellow Pages.

- Increased Traffic
So, what do all these new listings and higher rankings meant to the site?  Comparing this past week to the first week we started tracking traffic (7 weeks ago) on the Family of Christ Christian School, the website traffic has increased by 87%.

With twice as many people visiting the school’s website, the potential for new students has increased dramatically.  Family of Christ increased their enrollment last year and plans to increase their number of students again this year, actively reaching out to potential families through the search engines.

Update:
In Feb 2013, I decided to update the Family of Christ story.    Family of Christ Christian School has continued to see gains each year for the past 4 years.  This year their enrollment is well over 160, having increased every year.  They are now nearly at full enrollment with some grades having a waiting list.  There rankings have also improved to:

• 684 Top 10 Rankings
• 484 Top 5 Rankings
• 148 #1 Rankings

How is your school’s enrollment?  Would you like to do so well in the search engines that you can grow in a recession?  Request a consultation today to find out how.

Is search engine marketing a one time deal or a ongoing  process?  It’s a question a lot of people face, especially in a tough economy.  Do I really need a service that is ongoing or will I be fine just optimizing my website for the search engines and forgetting about it?

I would suggest that a one-time search engine optimization (SEO) service is missing the big picture.  The search engines are constantly changing and your website is constantly changing to keep fresh content.  New websites are coming online and old sites are realizing the potential of SEO bringing more competition.

But how bad could it be…really?  Let’s see… 

The Client:
As they used to say at the start of Dragnet, the following story is true, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent.  I have purposefully omitted the name of the organization, but wanted to give a little background information about them.

The client is a large Christian publishing company with several departments and hundreds of products and services who offers great Christian curriculum options for both children and adult.  There’s a good chance your church has done business with them.

They have always been a great client with an important ministry.  Over the course of several years we have optimized several pages for them for various product lines.  They host their website with another web host (not OCC) and have a team of web designers who control their website design.  Our contacts, the heads of the product lines, did not have control over website itself and because of the size of the company and complexity of the website; they decided to have their web team implement the optimization as per our instruction.

The Service:
The client purchased several marketing services from OurChurch.Com over the years, but the primary service they had was the SEO Management service.  With this service, OurChurch.Com:

• Performs in-depth keyword research
• Optimizes the web pages for the search engines targeting the best keywords
• Monitors the optimization of the pages
• Runs regular search ranking reports
• Keeps the optimization practices current

The Initial Results:
With each page optimized, the initial results in the search engines were dramatic.  On average, we were able to reach 50 top ten, 37 top five, and 14 #1 rankings for each page.

1. The Sudden Drop:
After having optimized several pages and maintained many of them for a couple of months, the rankings suddenly dropped for all of the pages we had optimized.   We discovered this during a mid-month review of the search rankings of the pages we were managing.  We immediately reviewed the web pages we were maintaining and discovered that much of the optimization of these pages had been lost.  Just in case, we then checked some pages we had optimized previously, but were not currently managing, and discovered they too had the same issue.

It turned out that the web design team made some changes to the client’s entire site and, while making these changes, inadvertently removed some of the optimization.  We notified the client of the issue and they were able to quickly re-optimize the pages.  Within a week the top rankings were returning for all of the pages.

2. Duplicate Content:
A few months later, the rankings for several of the pages started dropping again, this time more gradually.  We made a few adjustments to the optimization of the pages and continued to monitor the pages, but the rankings continued to drop.  This decrease in rankings was a bit baffling.  All of the typical things that may cause a website’s rankings to decrease looked fine.

Just to be sure, we did some manual checking of the keywords in the various search engines and made a discovery.  The rankings had not actually dropped, but had shifted.  After further research, we found that they had performed another significant web design change and created duplicates of each of the websites.  Some of the search engines were now listing the duplicate web pages instead of the original pages.  In this case we recommended making some minor changes to the code of the websites to make sure the search engines would not penalize the client’s site for duplicate content issues.  We were able to adjust our ranking reports as well to show all listings.

3. Another Drop In Rankings:
The roller coaster ride wasn’t over yet.  Several months later the client decided to make some major changes in the structure of their website and the website’s design.  Two of the pages we are managing were affected in the website redesign.  Much of the optimization was lost and rankings began to fall.  I would love to tell you that we contacted the client about the issue immediately and once again they were able to reapply the optimization and regain their rankings.  We did contact them about it immediately; however, in this case, due to the continuing changes in how the company is handling the website, the client decided not to re-optimize the pages.  Several months later, unfortunately, the rankings for both pages had continued to drop.  The pages had less than half the top ten rankings they had just a few months ago and have lost most of their #1 rankings.

So, is ongoing SEO Management important?  I think the case study above demonstrates that it is.  It’s a bit like landscaping your business or church.  The initial landscaping takes a lot of work and costs quite a bit, but it makes the business or church look a lot better.  If you just left it at that, it wouldn’t take long before weeds started growing and flowers started withering.  After a few months the landscaping that was making your location look great is now an eye-soar making the investment in landscaping worthless.  However, if instead you have the landscaping company come out every couple of weeks to maintain the landscaping, it will continue to look great.  It costs a little extra, but it keeps the investment valuable.  A SEO Management service is similar in that it keeps your website optimized, producing traffic and leads.

As illustrated in this case study, ongoing SEO Management services have several benefits, but the three biggest benefits are:

1. They allow you modify the content of your website and keep it current with fresh content without having to worry about losing your positions in the search engines.
2. They protect you from changes to your website that inadvertently affect the optimization of your website and changes within the search engines that affect rankings.
3. They keep you informed of your current situation in the search engines and allow you to address issues that may come up.

Perhaps there is one more benefit that comes with an ongoing SEO Management service, peace of mind.

We believe that search marketing can dramatically effect the influence a ministry or business has on the web and, in some cases, can be the difference between success and failure of a website.  We do search marketing for OurChurch.Com and we believe search marketing can greatly benefit all of our members.  So, we wanted to show you how.

Let’s see how church marketing has effected one church in Safety Harbor, FL…

Cypress Meadows Community Church:

Cypress Meadows is a relatively contemporary and forward-thinking church. As such they have had a website for nearly 10 years now and even had a custom website built by OurChurch.Com. They have about 400 weekly attendees at the various church services. These services are contemporary in nature and include praise music and dramas. They regularly engage in various forms of offline church marketing and have even run some web related campaigns. They refer to themselves as a “Seeker church” and are very focused on evangelism and outreach.

Before Using Our Online Church Marketing Tools:
We approached Cypress Meadows about participating in the Top Church Search Rankings in early 2008. Even with their online presence and focus on church marketing when we approached them about the service we found that local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was not something they had ever thought about. After running some reports, we found that the church website was doing very poorly in the search engines for local keywords. When they saw the state of their search engine rankings, they instantly wanted to try the Top Church Search Rankings service and improve those rankings.

So, we performed keyword research and optimized the Cypress Meadows website for the local keywords related to their church.  In addition to optimizing their website, we setup listings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, added them to several church locator websites, setup listings in various Internet Yellow Pages, and setup listings in local search sites.  These listing would help with the sites search engine rankings and provide additional places where people could find information about the church.

The Results:
As we began the Top Church Search Rankings service and almost immediately began seeing results, even before the setup was completed. By the time the Local SEO work was completed, their search rankings for local keywords in the general search results were on fire!

• 85 #1 rankings
• 225 Top Ten rankings

Over the months that followed those rankings increased.  Within a year, they had:

• 121 #1 rankings
• 352 Top Ten rankings

That’s just in the general search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

The local search engines, like Google+ Local, Bing Maps, and Yahoo Local Business, are notoriously slower to update their rankings, but we were even starting to see changes in the local search engine rankings with:

• 50 #1 rankings
• 72 top ten rankings

With these results in the search rankings we were thrilled, but we also wanted to see how this affected traffic to the Cypress Meadows website. After checking the stats for the site, we saw that in two months the number of unique visitors to the site increased by 40% and number of visitors from the search engines doubled!  The increase in traffic continued to grow for several months and, while the traffic has leveled off at this point, it is maintaining the higher level of traffic achieved from the Top Church Search Rankings service.

Real World Results:
We received an email from Chuck Deitch, Cypress Meadows director of communications, shortly after we completed the Top Church Search Rankings service. He wanted to let us know what effect the church had seen from the high rankings and increased website traffic. Here’s what he had to say:

“Thanks for all your hard work on this.  It really did surpass my expectations.  Thanks to the Church SEO service we now have 225 top 10 search rankings. OurChurch.Com surpassed my wildest expectations.  Every Sunday we have new visitors to our services and many of them tell us they found our church through search engines… the number of such reports is significant and has grown as of late.”

Now a year later, I was speaking with another member of Cypress Meadows Community Church.  He indicated that while Cypress Meadows had not been keeping a specific tally of how many visitors had come from the search engines, he did say,

“I know of several families who found the church through the web and have now joined Cypress Meadows.  Even our Executive Pastor found the church through the search engines!”

For Cypress Meadows Community Church, optimizing their church website for the search engines had a big impact on the amount of traffic to their website.  Even more importantly that additional traffic has helped bring new visitors to the church and additional members.

We can help to do this for your church, too.  Request your free church marketing consultation today!

“He has showed you, O man, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” – Micah 6:8

About 6:8
6:8 Community of Faith is a Vineyard church located in Wynnewood, PA.  They believe every person  is important to God and seek to get to know people as individuals with their own story.  Thus, community is a central focus of 6:8 as they seek to love and serve one another and the community around them in the practical love and message of Jesus Christ.

Being Visible
Part of reaching the people in your community is being visible, allowing people to see you and find you.  At 6:8 this is frequently done in the real world through various community outreach and community service events as well as personal interaction with the people they meet.  But 6:8 Community of Faith is also visible online.

6:8 partnered with OurChurch.Com through the Top Church Search Rankings service to increase their visibility online.  We optimized their website for keywords people would search for when looking for a church in their area.  We also setup dozens of local listings listings around the web creating more places for people to find the church (these also serve as citations for the church).  In about a year, 6:8 has achieved:

• Over 3,200 top ten rankings
• Over 1,500 #1 rankings!

They are not only ranking well for searches in their city, but also the surrounding cities, like Ardmore and Havertown.

The Big Move
Several months ago the folks at 6:8 contacted us and told us they were moving locations.  They had been meeting at a location in Ardmore, PA and were now moving their Sunday worship to a location in the neighboring town of Wynnewood, PA.  In addition to all the other challenges this presented the church, they had dozens of listings online with the old address as well as search rankings which were more focused on being located in Ardmore.

They were able to handle the online issues with a simple email.  We promptly went around to the various listings and changed the meeting location for the church as well as updating the optimization on the church’s website.  They now have hundreds of top ten rankings and even hundreds of #1 rankings for church related keywords in Wynnewood, PA.

Visit the Church
If you live in the Wynnewood, PA area or are every visiting up that way, I highly recommend visiting 6:8 Community of Faith.

If you’d like to talk with someone at OurChurch.Com about marketing options that can help your church to better achieve your mission online, read more about our church marketing services and request a free, no-obligation phone consultation.

Photo by spaceninja.

Congratulations to GeriSmallGroups.com!  After starting to receive OurChurch.Com’s Local Ministry Search Marketing service, they have obtained 850 top ten rankings, over 600 top five rankings, and over 350 number one rankings in just a few months

GeriSmallGroups.com is a Christian counseling ministry in Fairfax, Virginia.  Their Christian Counseling service is mobile, licensed, professional, and insured. The service is requested and provided for churches in the Northern Virginia area. The administrator will work with any Baptist church pastor in providing service on the church’s site. Resources are from the Fresh Start Recovery Series of the American Association of Christian Counselors.

GeriSmallGroups.com is now ranking in the top ten for keywords like “Christian counseling ministries in Fairfax Virginia” in the general search engines.  The site is also ranking in the top ten for keywords like “Ministries” and “Christian counseling” in  Google+ Local and Yahoo Maps when searching in Fairfax, VA and the surrounding areas.

With these rankings, GeriSmallGroups.com is getting hundreds of visitors each month which is helping the ministry to be able to serve the Lord in a greater capacity.  Gearline Young, the website owner and primary counselor, has had several people contact her looking for individual counseling and she is excited about a new book she will be releasing this fall and her winter season starting in 2011.

Congratulations Gearline!!

We’d love to partner with you to help your ministry grow and achieve it’s mission as well.  Request a free search marketing consultation today!

Making sure people can find your church in the search engines is important for any church, but it can be difficult if your church isn’t located close to the center of town, you have a new website, or the church just created it’s listings in Google and Bing.  So, how do you overcome such obstacles?

Crosspointe Church:
I remember meeting Dr. Greg Crocker, pastor of Crosspointe Church.   Crosspointe is a Christian church in Sanger, California with its campus located in the grapevines of Fresno County.  Their mission is “Connecting people to God and to each other”.  The members of Crosspointe seek to accomplish this mission both through personal ministry and by having a strong online presence.  I’ve been honored to be able to work with Dr. Crocker and Crosspointe to achieve their mission online.

I asked Dr. Crocker to share with us why they decided to do search engine optimization (SEO) for their church’s website and what their experience has been with it. Here’s what he had to say:

“It is difficult to find a quality SEO team for churches. You can find people that do SEO, and people that understand church, but very rarely a thorough knowledge of both.  Very few secular companies understand the terminology of the Christian world – you can end up with all kinds of weird and even malicious link building, on-page SEO, and more. We were so glad to find Kurt and the team at OurChurch.com because we’ve had numerous bad experiences with other companies (some of which were quite large).

One SEO company actually worsened our positions in the search engines – we think it may have been sabotage, but were at least able to cut loose from them, and I believe Kurt and the team at OurChurch.com repaired the damage they had done, and we are now back on track.

OCC’s quality SEO technicians have a thorough understanding of the area they are working in – in this case, churches. OurChurch.com is run by solid Christian people that not only attend various churches in the area, but also work with many churches around the U.S. They understand exactly what churches need to do with their SEO.

Why do churches need SEO?
The internet is becoming the next phone book – people go online to look for a new church, and a good SEO team can get you on the first page of local results - kind of like getting a better ad spot in a phone book. And I can tell you that the top three spots get the most clicks – and it takes good SEO to get there. OurChurch.com can get you to those prime positions.”

Targeting Fresno:
Crosspointe has members who live in Fresno, CA and they wanted to reach out to Frenso, but the church is located in Sanger, CA, a city adjacent to lager city of Fresno.  One of the ways Crosspointe chose to overcome the obstacle of not being at the center of one of the cities they wanted to reach was through citations.

Citations are listings or mentions of the church with their contact information.  Citations often provide links and they serve to reinforce for the search engines both that the church does exist and that the church is relatively popular (it’s being mentioned a lot around the web).  By getting citations for Crosspointe Church we were able to regain search rankings they had lost previously and start to rank in the top 10 for Fresno related keywords, like “Churches in Fresno” and “Fresno churches”.

What’s in a Name?
The folks at Crosspointe are a bold Christian congregation.  While the church has a long and rich heritage, they decided they could better achieve their mission of connecting people to God and to each other by making some changes in the church, including changing their name.  This kind of change usually carries with it some challenges within the congregation and the community, but there was one other challenge they soon discovered…online.

Around the web there were dozens and dozens listings and references to the church under it’s old name.  This was not only confusing for people searching for a church, but actually hurt the church in the search engines.  So, one of the tasks we took on was changing the various listings of the church under their old name to the new name.  This was a team effort.  OurChurch.Com was able to find and change many of the listings and Greg and his congregation were able to find some and were very helpful in verifying the church information for the sites.

This is something many organizations don’t realize, but your contact information is out there on the Internet to some extent, even if you aren’t trying to put it out there.  So, if you change your name, location, phone number, or web address, you need to go around and find the various places online that are listing the old contact info and get it changed to the new information.

If you happen to be in the Sanger/Frenso, CA area, be sure to visit Crosspointe Church.

Your Turn:
I hope you will consider how SEO and citations can help your church.  We’d love to talk to you about it.  Request a free, no obligation consultation today!

For most people, marketing makes perfect sense for a business, but what about a church?  Churches do evangelism, right?  Not marketing.  Well, that’s half right.

Certainly, churches should be engaged in evangelism.  How can believe if they have not heard?  (Romans 10:14b)  Similarly, you could ask, how can show up to hear if they cannot find you?

Brian Schmidgall of MiddleTree Church in St. Louis, MO has embraced both of these ideas.  Brian is bringing the message of Jesus Christ to a divided and hurting area of St. Louis both by starting MiddleTree Church right in the middle of the area and by reaching out to people online.  Why don’t I let Brian tell you a little more about it.

MiddleTree Church and a City Divided:
“MiddleTree Church is a multicultural, multigenerational church within the city of St Louis.  St Louis is a city divided culturally along racial and socio-economic lines.  We are a church looking to bring life among the division through Jesus Christ.“

Here’s a great video from MiddleTree Church about their mission and vision:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZ5oSKqB7o

Reaching Out Online:
In addition to joining the community, the members of MiddleTree Church decided to be present online with a website, social media, and search marketing.  Though their website was brand new and they had no listing in Google+ Local or Bing when we started, MiddleTree Church quickly became a major presence in the search engines with over 600 top ten rankings, including being in the top 5 for “church in St. Louis”.  Did you get that?  St. Louis.  We’re not talking about some small town in northern Idaho.  This is a major city with hundreds of churches

Brian writes, “We made the decision to go with Ourchurch’s SEO over paying for ad space because of the long term payoff.  We’re a church that is less than a year old that is in a big city and getting recognized in online searches was going to be a challenge.  As I’m writing this, we’re eight months old and have had many guests attend who found us by searching for churches in St Louis.  It’s been a great investment. “

It’s been a great joy for me to know that people’s lives are being changed through the ministry at MiddleTree Church and that God has used the church’s visibility in the search engines to bring people into the church.  Thank you Brian for allowing OurChurch.Com to be a part of your ministry.

I hope you will consider how SEO can help your church.  And, if you happen to be in the St. Louis area, be sure to visit MiddleTree Church.

Is your church reaching out to people online?  We can help.

Request your free church marketing consultation today!