The main reason we launched EZ Sermon Manager for our WP-EZ Church Website Builder is to help churches get their sermons out to more people.
One feature that helps with this is the “browse” options at the top that enable a visitor to browse messages by sermon series, speaker, topic or book of the bible. A second feature that extends the reach of sermons is the share feature – links to share via Facebook, Twitter or email.
EZ Sermon Manager provides another opportunity to reach more people that may not be as obvious – the opportunity to reach people through search engines.
Every Sermon Has Its Own Optimizable Page
Many churches that put sermons on their website, do it by creating a Sermons page and then adding audio, video, or links each week for that week’s sermon. In other words, all of the church’s sermons are sharing the same page.
With EZ Sermon Manager, each sermon has its own page. It’s not a normal WordPress page like you find under the “Pages” menu on the Dashboard but it does have its own URL and its own unique content, which means Google and other search engines can index and rank each sermon as its own entity.
7 Church SEO Tips for EZ Sermon Manager
1) Choose a good title. The sermon title will automatically become the title tag for that sermon’s page. This is the most important SEO component of a page. So, don’t use a title like sermon “October 1, 2017.” If your pastor gives each sermon a title, use that. If not, consider selecting a title that people might be searching for like “Why does God allow evil?” or “What does the Parable of the Sower mean?” or “Is money the root of all evil?”
2) Set the speaker. Some people might Google “Sermons by [your pastor’s name]” or “Sermons by [guest preacher’s name]”
3) Choose a keyword-rich description. The description field for each sermon automatically becomes the description meta tag which Google shows in the search results below the title of the page. When creating the description, again think about what people might be searching for. Also keep in mind Google only shows the first 160 characters of the description tag, so try to limit your description to that.
4) Select a series. This is easy if your church does series. If your church doesn’t do sermon series, there may be some other options. For example, if your pastor teaches verse by verse through books of the bible, you could name the series “Lessons from [book].” If your church follows a liturgical calendar, you could name the series for the season like “Advent 2017”
5) Select relevant topics. The “Topics” feature is a great way to get sermons associated with specific topics and keywords people might be searching for.
6) Add scripture references. When adding a new sermon, there is a “Scripture” that can be used to list all scripture referenced in the message. Don’t overlook this option.
7) Share your sermons in social media. After you publish a sermon, share it on your church’s Facebook page and/or Twitter profile. If your church uses other social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest etc you can also share to those profiles by getting the link for that sermon by clicking the “Share Link” button. Consider also sharing sermons to your personal social media profiles, especially sermons that were particularly meaning for you.
What good is our communication if its impact ends the moment we stop speaking? -John Maxwell
If you have any questions about EZ Sermon Manager or how to optimize it for search, post a comment below. If you’d like to see your church ranking better in search engines so you can reach more people online, we have SEO professionals on our team that specialize in church SEO.