How SEO can benefit your church

What is SEO?

You may be thinking, what in the world is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used in online marketing to help organisations reach their target audience. The aim of SEO is to make your website more visible to users on Google. The higher a website ranks when a person Googles search terms related to it, the more web traffic (or clicks) it will receive. As most people don’t scroll past the first page on Google, the aim is to get your website on there for peak visibility.

SEO is a great tool to use to increase the visibility of your church website, by being intentional and strategic we can encourage more people to encounter and embrace our message.

You may have an idea about what keywords you think are important or you may have no idea at all! This is why you will need to do a keyword analysis, to figure out what people are searching for.

How Search Engines work

Search engines do two things:

  1. Index your web page, so they know, based on the keywords they find in your site, what is in your site.
  2. Examine links that pointing to your site from other sites (also known as votes).

Essentially, they know what is in your site, and how much the internet cares about your site. This means that even if a website has better content than another one, the other website may rank higher if it has more links (votes) than the first site.

On and off page optimisation

On-page optimisation refers to the things you do to make your web page more search engine friendly such as putting keywords into URLs, heading tags, title tags etc.

Off-page optimisation refers to links pointing to your site from other sites (backlinks). You need a range of links to rank well on your search engine.

Both on and off page optimisation are important to consider when it comes to creating your own SEO strategy.

Optimising your page for SEO

Each page or blog post has different keywords. Your keywords should be placed in the:

  • Title of the post
  • The URL
  • The first and last paragraph
  • Throughout the post
  • In the tags of images used

When you add keywords into a post, make sure you’re using them organically in a way that doesn’t disrupt the flow and still makes sense to the reader.

Permalinks

A permalink is the URL for a webpage. Permalinks should be short and describe what the webpage is about. Using clear and meaningful words in your URL makes it easy for your audience and for Google to understand what your website is about.

Permalinks are permanent so avoid using specific dates or information that could change later on.
You don’t want to delete pages all the time, instead keeping permanent pages will give you an advantage when it comes to SEO. Instead, update your pages with fresh and relevant information regularly.

Hyperlinks

If you’re writing content for a post and it’s related to something else you’ve already written about, make sure to link it in your article. This creates a better user experience by helping the reader to discover related content and navigate to other pages on your website.

Writing for SEO

Your content should still be engaging, your audience should have an overview of the desired topic and
the answers they are looking for. Don’t cover your article with so many keywords that it no longer makes sense. Trying to cheat the system by placing as many keywords as you can in an article can lead to a penalty by Google.

SEO and images

Images not only help to visualise your content and make it more understandable to readers, but they also help your website to be crawled by bots. Using your keywords in the image ALT-Text will ensure that Google will index it for that specific keyword.

Page Speed

Page speed is important for website ranking. A fast-loading web page ensures that your audience stays on there for longer. If your website takes too long to load, it is unlikely that people will wait around to see your content.

Mobile is important

As many people now use mobile devices to browse online, it’s important to make sure your website is optimised for mobile viewing. You want to make sure you give people a positive user experience no matter how they choose to view your website.

Keep your page up to date

It’s important to keep your page up to date with relevant information. We would recommend doing an SEO audit regularly to ensure your website stays relevant.