Local SEO’s Importance To Church Marketing – Part 2

In first part of this two part article, “Local SEO’s Importance To Church Marketing – Part 1”, I talked a bit about what local search and local SEO is. To summarize, local search is either searching in the major search engines using local modifiers, (e.g. churches in Kansas City, MO) or searching in a local search engine like Google Maps. Local SEO are the things you can do to your website and around the web to get your site ranking well for the local search. If you want more details, check out the first article. In this article I want to talk about why local search is so important to churches and what one of the biggest obstacles is that can hinder your efforts.

Local Search Results Surge In Importance
Several years ago it was not really all that important whether an organization ranked well in the local search results, but that has changed dramatically due to two major developments.

First, searching online for local businesses and organizations has gone mainstream. Several years ago the vast majority of people still looked for local organizations in the phone book. Today most people prefer the speed and convenience of searching for local organizations online. So, church marketing in a phonebook isn’t as important anymore as church marketing in the search engines. I haven’t used my phone book in years.

Second, the major search engines have integrated the results from their local search engines into the results from their general search engines. If you go to Google and search for “churches in Tampa,” you’ll see the map and 10 listings from the local results first and then below that are the general search results. As a result, the local search listings are seen by many more people than they used to be and by showing up in those local search listings, you can appear above the number 1 ranking in the general search results.

The Big Obstacle:
When performing search engine optimization on a site, you have very few restrictions on what keywords you can target. Your biggest obstacle for ranking well for any keyword is how competitive your website is. This is not the case with Local SEO. The competitiveness of your website isn’t all that important, the big obstacle of Local SEO is the location of your organization. You can’t just optimize for any location, you have to optimize for the location of your church or business (though you can optimize for cities very near your home city as well).

The distance of the physical location of your organization from a city will play a huge role in whether you can rank well for a location or even be listed. In some local search engines, even if you are located in a particular city, you may have difficulty ranking well if you are on the outskirts of the city. Some local search engines have a determined “center” of the city and they measure distance from there. For example, the church I attend has an address is in Tampa, FL; however, it’s been difficult ranking well for the keyword “church” in the local search for Tampa, FL because Google measures from downtown Tampa. My church is about 10 miles outside downtown and there are a lot of churches closer to the down town. There are ways to overcome that, but it makes it more difficult to rank well if you are on the outskirts of a town or do not have an address in the specific town. The best way to overcome the distance obstacle is through ratings and reviews both within the local search engine itself and other local review sites, like citysearch.

Final Thoughts:
Local search is growing in popularity making local SEO something that cannot be ignored. Right now very few churches have realized the trend towards local search and so it is a great time to get your church in the on the cutting edge of this movement. Whether you optimize your church website for local search yourself or you get a service and have someone do the work for you, if your church has a website, you should be optimizing it so the site performs as well as it can and so your church is utilizing everything it can for its ministry.