Are People Finding Your Church Website?

I've just completed the initial phase of a major pay-per-click advertising campaign for an evangelistic ministry, a campaign which will include quite a bit of local advertising. In performing the necessary research, I spent a lot of time thinking about key words and phrases — the terms people might actually be using in search queries to find our websites. That research has reminded me that not only do we need to be mindful of how to develop our websites to rank well for search queries, but we need to research what key words and phrases people in our local area are actually using in their search queries.

If we are only targeting "baptist church atlanta," our church websites will not have as much reach as they can because there are not a lot of people actually searching on that phrase. Don't misunderstand me - obviously, if we are designing a website for a Baptist church in Atlanta, there will be a segment of people who find our website because they are searching on "baptist church atlanta." But there are scores of people in Atlanta who would never think to search on that set of keywords because they are not interested in attending a church. Does that mean we should ignore them when formulating a search engine optimization strategy? No!

Let's consider what these verses might mean to us in terms of our strategy for using digital means to reach an unbelieving world:

Romans 15:20-21: "And thus I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man's foundation; but as it is written, 'They who had no news of Him shall see, and they who have not heard shall understand.'"

Luke 14:23: "And the master said to the slave, 'Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.'"

With that thinking in mind, I did a little experimental research this morning. I was curious to know what percentage of the bulk of searches in a local area might be related to churches. I chose two cities: Atlanta, Georgia (where a friend of mine pastors a church) and Santa Cruz, California (the county where I live). I chose those two cities not only because I have some connection to them, but because my guess is that they are quite different culturally.

My approach was quick and unscientific. It does not take into account the long tail of search, which is a valid concept. And it only relies on data from Overture's search term suggestion tool. Google has a similar tool (although it doesn't give search counts if I understand correctly), and WordTracker also provides a good tool for these purposes.

Here are the results of my quick research on Overture this morning.

Search Queries Related to Atlanta
I looked at the top 2.3 million top searches (over the past month on Yahoo's network of sites) which include the word "atlanta" the following are the primary interests of the searchers:

Search Queries Related to Santa Cruz
I looked at the top 184,000 top searches (over the past month on Yahoo's network of sites) which include the phrase "santa cruz" the following are the primary interests of the searchers:

What these figures tell me is that people (at least in Atlanta and Santa Cruz) are generally not using the word "church" in their search queries. So how do we publicize our church websites through search engines to the majority of searchers?

It was interesting to me that there was such a high instance of car-related searches in Atlanta. Initially, I didn't think much of it at first, figuring that people wanted to buy cars. That's probably still true, but I was intrigued to find that, in the last month, the 24th most commonly-searched-upon phrase which included the word "atlanta" was actually "atlanta motor speedway." That brought to mind an interview we included on a church website I developed several years ago — an interview with a man who was a former member of an Indianapolis 500 championship team whose life had been revolutionized by his conversion to Christ.

If a similar story were included on an Atlanta church's website (obviously, the church would need to have such a person in their congregation, but this is just an illustration - every person has an interesting story whether they know it or not, and every person's story can be recounted and optimized for search engine placement for related search terms in their local area), and then that web page were optimized for search engines so that it ranked highly for "atlanta motor speedway" in some way, would the church's website receive more traffic because of it? If the page could not be optimized so that it ranked highly enough to make it effective, the church could probably gain traffic through pay-per-click advertising targeted at searches for "atlanta motor speedway." After a quick search on that phrase at Google, I'm confident that a church which had a championship race driver in their congregation and posted that person's story on their website could come up with a much more compelling paid ad than any of the ads which are currently being displayed for that search.

My encouragement to churches is to therefore think strategically about how to use search engine optimization to promote their church websites. The goal should always be to intrigue unbelievers enough to want to meet believers in face-to-face relationships and join them in the regular gatherings of the church. But we need to go where unbelievers are (in keeping with the verses I cited above), and in the online world, unbelievers are largely not searching for churches nor using "church" in their search queries.

Something to think about. Comments are of course, as always, quite welcome.