I have a confession to make…
…some of us here at OurChurch.Com are data addicts.
We love to gather data, analyze data for trends, discuss the data and trends… Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking more data is always better.
But that’s not always true. Sometimes more data is overwhelming. Sometimes more data causes the really important data to get lost in a sea of less important data. Sometimes less is better.
SEO Report Overload
One area where we realize we have gone overboard with data is in the search ranking reports we generate, review, and send to our SEO clients. Search ranking reports show a website’s current search rankings for the keywords we’re targeting in various search engines.
Motivated by a desire to be as comprehensive as possible, our SEO reports have included search rankings for as many variations of an organization’s targeted keywords as we could think of. For example, for a church in Pittsburgh, our reports would include:
- Church in Pittsburgh
- Church in Pittsburgh, PA
- Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Pittsburgh church
- Pittsburgh PA church
- Pittsburgh Pennsylvania church
That may not sound too bad so far but…
- We double that by checking adding all the same keywords with“churches” instead of church.
- We triple that because we target not just one city but 2 additional adjacent cities.
- We quadruple that because for each church we serve we also target 3 descriptive terms such as “Christian church” “Baptist church” or “family church”
That means 6 x 2 x 3 x 4 keywords. Throw in some other factors and we’ve been checking more than 330 keywords for churches.
We’ve been checking those keywords in 7 search engines – Google, Google Mobile, Bing, Bing Mobile, Yahoo, Yahoo Mobile, and ask.
So, now we’re talking about 2300+ data points. And we’re not done yet.
In addition to checking keywords in general search engines, we also check keywords in the local/maps search engines – Google Maps, Google Mobile Maps, Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps and Yelp – for the city the church is located in and 2 adjacent cities. 15 local search engines in all x 24 keywords = another 360 data points.
That’s a grand total of more than 2600 data points every month for each church.
For data addicts, that might sound cool. For everyone else that is probably completely overwhelming. With 2600 data points, how does anyone know which are really important?
New Simplified Church SEO Reports
Our new general search ranking reports will be reduced to 25 general keywords x 3 general search engines – Google, Google Mobile and Bing. Very few people use the Ask and Yahoo search engines anymore. And most of Yahoo’s search results come from Google and Bing anyway.
Our new local (maps) search ranking reports will be reduced to 9 local keywords x 3 local search engines (Google Mobile Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp) x 3 cities.
Combined, those two reports still contain 156 data points, which you could probably still make a case is more than necessary, but it’s less than 1/16 the data points of the old reports.
The Benefits of Simplified SEO Reports
We think this will help the churches, ministries and business we serve in many ways:
- Clients are less likely to be overwhelmed by the data
- Clients can focus on the most important 6% of the data and not get distracted or confused by 94% that was less important and no longer included.
- Clients are more likely to read the reports because they’re much shorter and simpler
The new reports also take our SEO team a lot less time and computer resources to generate and analyze, which frees us up to spend more time optimizing our clients’ websites, increasing the number of people visiting their websites, and helping them live out their mission online.
If you would like to see more people visiting your website and getting involved in your church, ministry or business. Check out our church SEO and other SEO services, and fill out a consultation request form to schedule a free, no-obligation call to discuss how SEO can help you reach your goals.
Got any questions or comments? Post ‘em in a comment.