Greetings in Christ!

I’ve recently had a huge influx of subscribers, so I thought it would be a good idea to reach out with an extra broadcast to cover a few things.

Here is what we are going to cover:

1. My comprehensive church SEO checklist.

2. Recent algorithm update

3. Why and how to set up a locale cluster

4. A little about me, why I lean into SEO for church marketing, and how I learned about SEO

5. A recent, impressive client success story

6. A free, easy, and powerful backlink you can build

But first, your meme:

Many of you signed up through a form that doesn’t give you my comprehensive church SEO checklist. (I need to make sure that the checklist is just a part of the general welcome sequence – will get to that!) In any case, you all should have that checklist, because it’s so powerful. Here it is: https://churchseo.io/checklist​

March Core Update

Google just completed its “March Core Update” – an almost annual tradition in which it broadly reconfigures its algorithm. Core updates typically see huge fluctuations in rankings, and there are winners and losers in every core update. If you’ve been working on your church’s SEO, you may have seen some improvement over the last month. This update seems to have strongly impacted local search results. (Church SEO is local SEO.)

One of my recent clients did in fact see some great improvements in their SEO recently, due to the optimizations I performed for them and their following through on the advice I gave them. More on that below.

Why and How to Set Up a Locale Cluster

Last Sunday, a young mother from a community over ten miles away came to church with her five-year-old son. She had no connection to the congregation – no friends, no family. Just a cold show up.

And, it’s not like we are easy to find. We are tucked away in a tiny village of 430 people, on a country road that’s mainly travelled by agricultural vehicles.

How did she find us?

The answer to that is simple – through a locale page I had made targeting the community she lives in.

Most of the optimizations I recommend are for your homepage, and I recommend optimizing your homepage for what I call your “top-level locale.” So, for example, if you are in Maplewood, Missouri (an inner-ring St. Louis suburb,) I tend to encourage you to optimize your homepage for Saint Louis and not Maplewood.

But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have other pages targeting Maplewood and other nearby suburbs. This is an SEO strategy used quite frequently by law firms. (Law firms tend to have some of the best SEO around, and they are a pretty decent corollary for church digital outreach strategy.)

Here is how I like to make a local cluster of pages to target surrounding communities:

1. Create a hub page for communities you want to target. Call it something like “Communities we serve.” On that hub page, list the communities you want to build pages for.

2. Link to your hub page in your website footer.

3. Make a locale page targeting each community you listed. Make sure to follow all the best practices I outline in my checklist for metatitle, metadescription, H1, H2s, and paragraph text.

4. Link to those pages on the anchor text on the main hub page.

5. Make sure to link back to the hub page from each locale page you create.

If you want to see an example of my locale hub and pages, you can check it out here: https://doorcounty.church/communities/​

That young woman – after service she said that she will be enrolling her son in Sunday School and joining our church.

And, that gets to the question:

Who Am I, Why Am I Into SEO, and How Did I Learn About It?

I am a small-town LCMS pastor who serves two small churches in the “thumb” of Wisconsin. I’m also an early riser, and I’ve always used that time to pursue side projects.

For much of my life, that entailed things like getting degrees, teaching college classes, or writing journal articles. A few years ago, I didn’t have any of those things. So, I did something different: I started a travel website.

Stupid idea.

Travel is one of the hardest niches to get traffic in. It’s highly competitive. In order to get traffic, I had to compete against big brands like Booking.com and TripAdvisor.

That meant I had to get really good at SEO.

I’m also fairly mission-oriented and outreach-oriented. That’s always been a marker of my ministry.

And, so I started applying the lessons I learned in the travel niche to my church’s website. The principles I learned worked marvelously – I got it to the top of Google.

I’m enthusiastic about SEO because it is one of the most efficient forms of outreach imaginable. Instead of trying to convince uninterested people to come to church, you are making yourself available to people actively looking for a church or for answers to spiritual questions. That’s different than almost every other form of marketing or outreach that are trying to “interrupt” people who are concerned about other things.

I still have a foothold in the secular world with SEO. I make a fair bit of money from my secular SEO projects.

But, what I’m really excited about is helping other churches use it to connect with prospective members.

A Recent Client Success Story

A client just recently sent his church's SEO over the moon:

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When I began this journey, I didn’t expect some of the most enthusiastic members of my audience to be the Gottesdienst crowd. (For those of you outside the LCMS fold – Gottesdienst is our liturgical maximalist group – think incense and pink vestments. Or, rose? IDK what the color is called, honestly.) Man, was I wrong about that.

I have to hand it to Jason Braaten, an influential Gottesdienst contributor – he hired me to do some SEO work for his church, and he implemented better than anybody else I’ve seen the recommendations I’ve given for things he can do to improve his church’s SEO. The guy’s a machine. He’s gotten Google review after Google review for his church.

And, it has paid off. During this last core algorithm update, I kept an eye on his church’s rankings. They kept climbing higher and higher. Look where it has gotten him for the query “Tuscola IL churches”:

Pretty impressive!

A lot of you joined recently because of Jason’s recent blog post. I want to personally thank Jason for writing that.

Welcome, Gottesdienst guys.

A Free, Easy Backlink You Can Build

A great link for your church to build is Flickr.com. Flickr is an old-school image sharing website, and it has one of the most powerful domains on the internet: DR 94. It offers a dofollow (that means that it transfers SEO juice) profile backlink. It’s also a place for you to post your church’s NAP (name, address, and phone number), which will help it to pop up better in map results.

Here's how to build this link:

1. Gather some pictures of your church.

2. Prepare about a 300-word description of your church, including your NAP.

3. Create a Flickr account for your church.

4. Navigate to your church’s profile on Flickr: ‘You’

5. Click ‘About’.

6. Edit the description. Make sure to have 100 percent NAP parity with your Google Business Profile!

7. Continue scrolling down, and edit further profile details. This is where you will edit the website. Put your church’s URL here!

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8. Help Google discover this link. One way I’d love for you to do this is to post about it on X and tag me. Another way you can do this is by adding it to your church’s LinkTree, or linking to it on your church’s website.

Profile links aren’t the most advantageous links for you to build – those would be links from other local businesses and organizations. However, they can and do make a difference, especially since the bar for link building among churches is so low. Even a few profile links can set you apart in the Google algorithm.

Thank you for your readership!

God's blessings, Pastor Chris Jackson "SEO Priest" ​chris@churchseo.io​ Subscribe Now for Free Not subscribed to the free Church SEO Shapeup Newsletter? Subscribe now. Get My Free Comprehensive Church SEO Checklist ​Get the checklist that will guide you to winning top search visibility. Completely free. Inexpensive 1-Page Church Websites Designed to make it easy for your church to get on the web. Check it out. Need Help With Your Church's SEO? I aim to give away all my SEO knowledge for free. However, if you need muscle to accomplish your church's SEO goals, here are a few ways I can help: ​Stratospheric SEO Package. This is a baseline SEO package designed to give your church name, address, and phone number across the internet and to boost your church's SEO power. It helps you show up better in map results. Start with this package. ​Orbital SEO Package. The Orbital SEO Package does everything in the Stratospheric Package and also optimizes your church's homepage and boosts your church website's authority. It will help you show up better in both the map results and the link results. This package offers powerful optimizations. ​

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