In an age of smartphones and other devices, many more people are visiting church websites than may ever walk into the building. Church websites have the same challenge as any other site—communicate clearly and powerfully to a broad audience. Is your site easy to navigate? Does it convey who you are as a church, both for existing members and potential new visitors? Are you providing news, updates, and fresh photography on a regular basis?
This article—the second in a series—addresses how to create a content and SEO strategy.
Identify your why
Your content strategy should reflect your core mission. Are you aiming for greater participation in small groups or in mission opportunities? Do you want to build up your youth and children’s ministries? Are you hoping to expand the property for greater outreach?
Clearly identifying your church’s goals can also help guide your content goals and website strategy. If your church has a clear mission and vision statement, that is a good place to start.
Web audit
As discussed in the first article in this series, evaluating your website is the first step to creating a more effective site. Once you’ve assessed the challenges, create a document or spreadsheet to address each issue.
For example, if feedback indicates that links to the online service are hard to find, make sure you solve for that on the new site. A good web audit will also reveal the high-level topics you want to feature on your site, along with related sub-topics.
Homepage considerations
Your home page is the first thing most people see when coming to your site. It should do three things well: Be impactful, welcoming, and informative.
Photography helps create impact for visitors. Avoid using stock photography, opting for high-quality photos of your congregation, ministries, and facilities. This also welcomes visitors and lets them get to know your church before attending a service or event.
A good navigation menu will help inform, but so will the first few words on your site. This is an opportunity to quickly lay out who you are, and what you offer. Your church’s vision and mission statement should be posted prominently on the website homepage.
Clearly listing your upcoming services, Sunday School classes, and other offerings will also inform visitors about what to expect.
Streamline your navigation menu
It’s tempting to add links to all your content on your navigation menu to make it easy to find information. But that can quickly clutter up a visitor’s experience. Instead, aim for simplicity. Navigation menus are often more effective when each tab has one or two words at most. Strive to make them parallel (all verbs, all nouns, etc.) for consistency.
Below is an example:
- Worship
- Learn
- Grow
- Serve
- Give
- Visit
Search engine optimization (SEO)
As you develop content, it is important to remember how your website will perform in online searches. If a person church googles “Churches near me with preschools” or “church mission opportunities,” you want them to see your content quickly.
This is done utilizing search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO practices influence online search engines through the use of keywords, strong page titles, and internal and external links. We cover some basics below.
Keywords are phrases that help your website match up to possible web searches. For example, if you want people in your city to find you, make sure you list your city: “Join our Sunday service in Anytown!”
Think about what people type into Google when searching for a church, and use those terms. These might include nursery, Sunday School, baptism, wedding, funeral, Bible Study, women’s prayer, and so on. Keywords can appear in page titles, body content, and photo captions.
Links across your site are a sign of activity, and that helps with SEO. Make sure you are linking actively from one page to another using hyperlinks.
Search engines also assign value when other websites link to your website. This requires some outreach on your part, but if you’re able to appear on city or county sites that promote outreach programs, for example, that will elevate your site. This includes links from social media as well—another reason to interact and stay social!
Note: Your website platform can affect how much control you have over these elements. Make sure to engage with your website vendor to continue understanding the value of building out your SEO plan.
Measurability and metrics
What does success look like for your site? The answer requires having targets in place. The more specific these targets, the better you can assess your return-on-investment.
For example, you may want to double the amount of people viewing sermons online each week. Or you may want a 15 percent increase in the number of people giving electronically.
These targets allow you to build content with those goals in mind, and also allow you to measure success. Without them, you may fall into the common trap of creating random content without a clear purpose.
Regular reviews
Keeping your website updated will require some regular reviews. Bake this into your content strategy process to ensure that all your hard work doesn’t fall by the wayside.
A good plan is to review your homepage and top-level navigation pages once a week and make any needed updates, such as date changes or removing past events.
A more thorough review of content and metrics should take place quarterly. This will help you determine if some pages are performing well or poorly, and if some of your navigation or other content needs to change.
A group of people willing to help with this can be useful, as they bring fresh eyes to the site that you may look at every day.
Next steps
Once your site is updated, it’s time to celebrate! The final article in this series will discuss how to launch and market all your hard work.
Catch up by reading Part 1 of this series here
Rebeca Ervin has more than two decades of experience as a journalist and legal and nonprofit marketer. She enjoys working with teams to implement strategy and vision through strong and effective communication. Rebeca is a lifelong United Methodist and native of San Antonio, Texas. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and a Master’s in Theological Studies from the Iliff School of Theology. In her free time, Rebeca enjoys photography, writing, traveling abroad, and spending time with family.