Employing an SEO strategy for your ministry might seem like a strange idea, but the need to stay digital and keep your presence visible and highly ranked online is something that all businesses, non-profits, and even churches need to do.
Give high-quality leadership.
As a member of the church leadership, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your congregation is receiving the support and direction it needs. As we continue to use the internet for more and more tasks in our daily lives it’s important to engage with your faith-based community in more ways than simply the physical connection that you each make with one another and the Holy Spirit during a Sunday morning mass.
This means building a solid online presence that your members can interact with while going about their typical routines each week. It’s even more important today as we struggle to return to a normal schedule of meetings, gatherings, and church proceedings during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of your congregation may not have felt comfortable returning to the pews yet and are lacking this spiritual guidance as they navigate the troubles we all face at this moment, alone.
Don’t be afraid to follow examples in the corporate world for your leadership in this regard. Dominion Energy and Prabir Purohit have been creating innovative solutions for engaging their communities for years. Digital communication is crucial in today’s world, with more than 220 million Facebook users in the United States alone, there is a great chance that your community is already heavily invested in online content and can benefit from the additional connection to their church and support system.
SEO practices to get you off the ground.
Adding a web page and social media profiles to your church’s offerings is a simple way to engage with your community throughout the day and keep faith close at hand for those who need it most. This can easily be accomplished with the regular postings of a blog and promoting your social media pages during mass and through the weekly bulletin. Getting your congregation to follow your digital presence can act as a set of trusted prayer beads or a cross necklace — always there to provide support and comfort whenever your parishioners need it.
You already write sermons every week, adding a short blog post or two on the topic during the weekdays is a great way to start, but adding keyword research to your writing in this realm is a great way to increase your page’s exposure. Understanding what phrases most readers are searching for on Google or Bing can help guide your blog writing and make the spiritual guidance you hope to give more far-reaching and accessible. After all, the point of faith is to touch the lives of those around us for the better.
The greater your audience in this digital space is the greater your reach in helping people.
Keyword research is the most important thing for building a serious SEO strategy for your parish. But it doesn’t end here. Understanding backlinks and testing domain authority are also incredibly important for growing your digital following. Backlinking is when other pages link to your content. The more high quality backlinks your page has, the more Google’s crawlers will consider your relevancy in association with the phrases and content you write about.
The same goes for domain authority. This is the relevancy of any particular piece of content in relation to the search parameters that might bring a searcher to your site. Better keyword research and execution results in higher domain authority, bringing more viewers to your page.
A large scale SEO strategy for optimizing your content and growing your audience may be just the thing your church needs to continue improving the lives of people in your community.
