Throughout Church Website Builder Month, we’ve been discussing what to look for when choosing a church website builder. Since the church website builder you choose affects the design, hosting and SEO (search engine optimization) of your church website, we’ve been examining all 3 of these aspects.
In this post, we’re going to get very specific. I’m going to tell you how to optimize a church website with our WP-EZ Church Website Builder. That way, if you’re already using WP-EZ, you’ll know exactly how to optimize your site for better search rankings. And if you’re considering WP-EZ for your church website, you’ll see what you can optimize and how easy it is to optimize with WP-EZ.
Keyword Research & Keyword Plan
Before we get to the optimization steps, I’ve got to mention how important it is to first do keyword research and then based on that keyword research create a keyword plan that indicates which keywords you’re going to optimize each page for.
There’s a pretty good chance you’ll want to optimize your homepage for “church in [your city]” but what else? Are there other cities, neighborhoods or regions in your area? Are there specific ministries or descriptive terms people might be searching for like recovery ministry, charismatic or Southern Baptist? You can guess, but I recommend making data-based decision like we do for the churches we do SEO for.
6 SEO Steps to Better Search Rankings with the WP-EZ Church Website Builder
1) Footer Contact Info. Put the address and phone number of your church in the footer of your website so it’s at the bottom of every page. We just introduced the Footer Contact Info feature yesterday. Click the link to read more about the Footer Contact Info feature and watch a video which shows you how to add and edit it.
2) Page Title. The page title is shown just below the header and menu and is the most important visible part of the page from an SEO perspective. Try to include targeted keywords in the titles of your pages. For example, instead of having the title of your homepage be “Home” make it “Welcome to Christian Life Church in Boston, MA”
3) Page URL. The URL (aka web address or permalink) of a page can affect its search rankings. You can’t change the URL of your homepage because it’s always going to be your domain name (eg. MyChurch.com). But you can optimize the URL of the rest of the pages of your site. If the name of your student ministry is “Souled Out” but you want to rank well for “Boston Youth Group,” the main page for your youth group should have the URL MyChurch.com/boston-youth-group/
When creating or editing the page, click the “Edit” button that’s just below the title box.
4) Page Text. Try to include the keyword(s) you’re targeting 2-3 times in the text of the page. If you can include it in the first sentence of the page that’s idea.
5) Image Alt Attribute. Images have a setting or “alt attribute” that explains what the image is about. When adding or editing an image, include a keyword in the alt attribute. To edit an image’s alt tag from the page editor, click on the image, then click on the pencil-like edit icon, then change the “Alternative text”
6) Title & Description tags. The title and description tags not shown on a web page to website visitors, but they used by search engines to determine what the page is about, so they are extremely important. They are also what search engines display for your site in the search results. When editing a page with WP-EZ, scroll down below the big box with the page text to the “Snippet Editor” and click the “Edit Snippet” button to edit the title and description tags. Here’s an SEO video tutorial that shows you how to do it.
Just to be clear, step 1 – Footer Contact Info – just needs to be done once for your entire church website, while steps 2-6 should be done for each individual page of your website.
If you have any questions about optimizing your church website with WP-EZ, please contact our support team. If you’d like to build a church website, start here. If you want great search rankings for your church, but don’t have the time or expertise, check out our church SEO services.
Comment & Discuss
- Have you optimized your church website for better search rankings? Why or why not?
3 Comments
Hello, great article . I wonder if you are thinking to make a WordPress theme with a broader scope from churches to non-for-profits-organization. If available I will be the first one to use it for my online volunteering for United Nations opportunities and globalgivingtime.com challenges.
Giuseppe
Hi Giuseppe, WP-EZ now has 70 themes available and 35 of them are general themes that would fit any organization.
Also great article of you:) Paul 🙂 Dear Paul, can you write some article for the introduction of how to avoide site attacked 🙂