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Christian Web Trends Blog
Here are five free tools to help you measure the search marketing for your website: Continue reading Five Free Tools for Measuring Your Search Marketing
Here are 5 free tools you can use to get the SEO ball rolling for your website: Continue reading Five Free Tools for SEO
A recent study reports 61% of the companies surveyed indicated they “have experimented with social media but have not done much.” 61% also indicated they are having difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Most churches, schools, and ministries are in the same boat. Most are experimenting and having difficulty measuring the ROI. This applies not just to social media but also to other online marketing efforts like search engine optimization, Google AdWords, and Facebook ads. Organizations that aren’t measuring ROI effectively, are shooting in the dark. They don’t have the information necessary to make informed decisions about which online initiatives to continue to experiment with, which to put more effort and resources into, and which to pull the plug on. So, how does a church, school, ministry, or business measure ROI? Continue reading SEO & Social Media ROI: Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not
Why? It appears that you, the Christian Web Trends community, simply aren’t interested. In January and February we did 7 reviews. Those posts averaged 2.5 comments excluding my own. Those posts also averaged just 1 retweet excluding my own. Additionally, as time went on we’ve got fewer and fewer requests for reviews, and many of those who requested reviews did not comment on the blog which was one of the requirements. Add to that the fact that the reviews are very time consuming, and it just didn’t make any sense to continue doing them. The positive is that those organizations whose sites were reviewed for the most part found them to be very helpful. In fact I just saw a comment from Justin at The Grove Church in Hattiesburg, MS (review) that he completely redesigned their site, making a lot of the recommended improvements.
Your answers may have been something like:
But what if I said they are all connected? Let’s look at the case of Knott Avenue Christian Church where marketing, search marketing, and church growth are all connected. Continue reading Case Study: Knott Avenue Christian Church – Church Growth Through Search Growth
That was the motivation behind the creation of the ChurchMarketingOnline.com website and Church Marketing Online University. Church Marketing Online University includes more than a dozen articles that explain search engines, search engine marketing, and the specific applications of search engine marketing for churches, all in great detail. Check out these articles:
If you’ve read some of the Church Marketing Online University articles, what was your biggest take-away? What questions do you have about search marketing for churches not covered in these articles?
So, here are 9 questions about search engine marketing every organization should be able to answer. Can you? 1) How important are search engine rankings are for your organization, really? Almost everyone says search rankings are important, but few do much to improve them. If you’re not willing to invest time and/or money to improve your search rankings, then be honest with yourself that search marketing isn’t a priority. If search marketing really is important, then make sure that’s reflected in the time and money you budget for it. Continue reading 9 Search Engine Marketing Questions Every Organization Should Be Able to Answer
In Content Alone Doesn’t Cut It for Traffic, SEO, he makes the case that great content is important, but “distribution is just as important.” In other words: Content x Distribution = Success Great content with poor distribution will result in a great site that has few visitors. Poor content with great distribution will result in a flood of one-time visitors who never return. You need good content and good distribution. And search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of good distribution. John goes on to say, “Perhaps you need to sit down and plan it out. Ever think about that?” Have you done that? Are you giving equal importance to content and distribution? Do you have a search marketing plan? Or are you just hoping that Google will find your great content, put it at the top of the search results for frequently searched phrases, and people will show up at your site?
It’s always good when talking about a topic to have a good idea of where your audience is on that topic. So, I’d like to open the month and the conversation by listening. I remember when OCC first started providing search marketing services about 6 years ago, it was an uphill battle just to convince people that their search rankings mattered. Now just about everyone says search rankings are important, but there also seems to be a disparity between how important organizations say search rankings are (very) and how much time and money they’re willing to budget towards improving them (little to none). I also hear a lot of confusion about how to know if a site is doing well in search engines, what keywords to target, and how to improve a site’s search rankings. So, where does your organization stand when it comes to search engines?
While you’re thinking about what you’re going to write in your comment, why not take 2 seconds to vote in this week’s poll over in the right sidebar. |
If you have started marketing your website in the search engines, I want to applaud you. You’ve taken a big step to making your website a success. Once you’ve started search marketing for your website, it’s important to track how you are doing in the search engines, measure the success of your efforts, and find ways to improve your results.
Search marketing is one of the best forms of marketing today. Unlike just about any other form of marketing, search marketing has the ability to provide you with an ever increasing amount of free traffic to your website. With this in mind, I want to encourage you to start actively marketing your website in the search engines if you aren’t already doing so, or step up your game if you’ve already done some search marketing.
Many people are predicting 2010 will be the year social media “grows up.”
We’ve decided to pull the plug on the 
Let’s a play a little word game. I’ll say a word; you say the first word that comes to mind.
At OurChurch.Com we want to see Christian organizations make the most of the great opportunity to connect with new people that search engines provide. We do that both by providing professional search marketing services and sharing our insight with do-it-yourself SEOs.
Someone once said wisdom starts with asking the right questions. That’s because you don’t know what you don’t know unless you know which questions to ask. (Did you follow that?)
John Saddington posted a good article to ChurchCrunch yesterday that is a perfect fit for our focus on search marketing this month.
Search Engine Marketing can be a very effective way of not only generating traffic to your website, but targeting the specific traffic that is interested in what your website has to offer. This has the effect of not only increasing the traffic to your website, but also increasing the conversions on your website. This may mean more sales, more visitors to your church, or, as in the case of Christian Leadership University, more students. Here’s how. 
March is Search Marketing Month at OurChurch.Com. That means we will be putting extra emphasis on issues related to search engines, optimization, and paid search listings. We will be focusing a good bit of our blog posts here at Christian Web Trends on search engine related issues as well.
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