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by Shane Bazer
Celebration Christian Fellowship (the Raleigh, North Carolina, congregation of the WCG) has been getting visitors to its worship services nearly every week for the past six months. Where are they coming from? They are all visiting after viewing our website.
Many people are bypassing the yellow pages and local newspapers when it comes time to searching for a church. They head right to the Internet. If your congregation isn’t utilizing this tool effectively, you could be missing out on a potential growth opportunity.
The geographic demographics of many of our congregations require a number of members to travel 20 or more miles to church. That is a barrier to inviting your friends or neighbors to church. But by using the Internet, you can target a specific community in which to grow your congregation.
I did a little sleuthing and found that many of our congregations don’t have websites or have ones that would probably never encourage a visitor to show up for church. An effective website doesn’t have to be splashy or expensive to be effective, but it does have to be attractive. If there isn’t anyone in your congregation who can put together a pleasant looking site, consider hiring a college student or professional. You should be able to get a basic website up for a couple of hundred dollars, and headquarters will even do the hosting for free.
One of the problems I have seen in many of our congregational websites is that they are soon outdated, or they post graphics and links to so many Christian organizations that they become cluttered. You don’t want to give your visitor reasons to leave your site.
A visitor searching for a church in your community is going to want to know some basic information:
And that is about it. Putting everything under the sun on your website can be more of a distraction than a help. Be careful about putting a calendar or other things on your site that can get quickly outdated. Unless your members regularly use the website to be informed, keep that sort of information for your church bulletin, or better yet, the pastor or someone else should send out a weekly e-mail to all the members with various updates and notes of encouragement.
Here are a few of our congregations’ websites that I found to be effective:
http://www.cfc-cinti.com/ -- simple, attractive and effective. They obviously didn’t hire a big guns web designer to do their site, but they didn’t need to.
http://www.newlife3.org/ -- attractive and professional in appearance
http://www.ndcf-nc.org/index.htm -- professionally designed logo, and the website says everything it needs to say and just a little more.
Having an effective website is just a part of the equation. You have to get visitors to come to your website so they can even consider visiting you. Unfortunately none of the above websites is properly optimized for search engines.
To see a website that is search engine friendly, check out http://www.fayettevillechurch.org
If you put your cursor on the page and use your right click button and then click on “view page source” you will see the all-important “meta tags” up at the top. This is what most of the search engines look for to decide how to properly index your website. Make sure your webmaster includes that information on your site.
Your website will not just show up in most search engines magically. You have to submit them. Here is one place where you can submit your website to Google and 13 other search engines for free: http://tools.addme.com/servlet/s0new
Webmaster note: Most search engines pull new sites automatically from the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org. It's well-worth the trip there to register your site, and it's likely to be picked up faster by the major search engines if you do.
Eighty percent of web searches originate with Google, Yahoo and MSN, so if you concentrate on submitting to those search engines, it will be worth the effort. Just be aware that it sometimes takes months for your site to begin showing up after submission.
A healthy percentage of the traffic that the Raleigh church’s website receives is from people finding us on various search engines. Up until a few months ago that resulted in a visitor showing up about once a month or so. Not bad really. But then we began buying visitors, no, not to church, but to our website and boy did they start showing up.
With the Google Adwords program at https://adwords.google.com you can target your advertisement to reach only those in a specific geographic location. You can name the communities where you want your ad to appear or even type in your church’s address and designate a limited radius of miles in which your ad will appear.
You want to make this sort of limitation because you have to pay for everyone who clicks on your ad. The Google PPC (pay per click) rates begin at 3 cents per click. I have found that even if you pay up to 20 cents per click, it is usually worth it. I have figured that probably about 5 percent of those who click on our church ad actually show up to church. Our average cost per click is 12 cents, so that works out to $2.50 per visit, and visitors usually bring a friend or family member. I don’t know what church wouldn’t pay $250 if they could get 100 visitors to their church.
There are also other places where you can pay for search engine traffic. Yahoo http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com has the biggest audience. If you do PPC ads with search engines that don’t allow you to limit the geographic location of where your ads will be appearing, you will only want to bid on terms that tells where your church is located. For example, in Google, you would want to bid on *family church* where it will only appear in the cities close to where you meet, but in other PPC search engines you would want to bid on *Madison Wisconsin Family Church* in order to pinpoint your audience.
I have come up with a list of nearly 200 keywords or phrases that I put bids on to bring traffic to the Celebration Christian Fellowship website at http://www.celebration-wcg.org/
I would be happy to share those with any who are interested.
Having said all of that, please realize that those who are coming to your church after finding you on the Internet are “shoppers.” Your congregation is going to have to sell itself if the shoppers are to become members. Relational evangelism is always best because a relationship has already been established. Don’t be overly discouraged if you get a lot of visitors and you never see most of them again. But do take the opportunity to consider whether your worship day, time, place and format is geared toward those who are wanting to build a relationship with Jesus.
For more information about designing a web site and hosting options, see http://churches.wcg.org/create.htm.
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