FYC Podcast Episode 009: 5 FREE Steps To Improve Your Church Website and Online Reach

Podcast Resource Links

> FindingYourChurch.com/FreeScan – FREE Church Online Visibility Scan
> “FREE Photoshop For Churches, Non-Profits and Businesses” Podcast Episode
> FindingYourChurch.com/Toolbox

Podcast Episode Text Version

Welcome to the Finding Your Church Podcast from FindingYourChurch.com. My name is Jeremy Phillips and my goal is to help you make it a challenge for people to live in your community without finding your Church.
There are many different approaches we could talk about, and extremely technical things we could do to improve the findability of our Church online.
There are some of you listening who would understand them, and love to make the tedious and detailed time investment it would take to put those strategies in place.
Those ideas are probably valid and would work to improve your Church online presence. But, how many of those extremely technical strategies would actually bring new Guests through your doors and new people visiting your Church?
Even more importantly, if you are limited on time and resources you want to put your effort into something you can actually understand and accomplish. You do NOT want to invest your limited time into something that will frustrate you and produce limited results.
So we want to look at 5 FREE Steps you can take TODAY to improve the online presence of your Church.
For the most part, as long as you have access to the Internet and your Social Media accounts you can do these steps. Only one of the steps requires that you have access to the backend of your actual website.
So lets get started with the 5 FREE Steps.
#1 – Add your exact Church Name, Address and Phone Number to the footer of your website.
If you are using WordPress you can usually add this information using a Footer Widget so that you only have to add it only once and it will show up on every page.
If you are using some other website program, you may have to actually add this to the footer of each page of your site one at a time.
If you are using an outside company to handle your website, you will need to ask them to make this change for you.
If you are currently unhappy with your Church Website, check out our Resource Page at www.findingyourchurch.com/Toolbox for options to have a new one created for you.
So why would we want to add this information to every page of our Church Website? Why not just have this contact information on the Contact Page only?
The main reason for this will tie into the 4th and 5th steps as well.
One thing Google looks for to make sure business and Churches are open and being managed by real people is how consistent the business or Church Name, Address and Phone Number is across the Internet.
When Google sees that your Church Name, Address and Phone Number is exactly the same on Local Business Directories and other directory sites online as it is on your Church Website, it can be more likely that Google will boost your website in local Church search terms.
So the simple way to approach this is to determine your exact Church Name, Address and main Phone Number and use it EVERYWHERE in the exact same format.
You have to decide exactly how you are going to write your Church Name. Do you include your denomination in the name? Do you abbreviate anything?
One of the Churches I worked at was an Assembly of God Church.