Church Search Marketing: A Case Study

During Search Marketing Month, we wanted to give the members of OurChurch.Com an idea of what search marketing can do for their website, ministry, school, or business. So, we decided to do a series of case studies of actual search marketing clients.  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.

This week we’ll start with churches.  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 several 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 a little over a year ago. 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.  Currently, they have:

• 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 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.