Case Study

Building Your Church Website-

The purpose is to provide an easy to use platform for churches to build, maintain and reach their community through their own website. Many platforms do not allow customization of one’s website and if a church wants to customize their website, they are charged a large fee for something that can be done both quickly and easily. I have found flaws in the software and businesses online that are currently creating church websites that cannot be overlooked if you want your church website to rank for specific keywords on Google. With the lack of flexibility and customization of the internal coding of a website, you are out of luck in terms of ranking on the Search Engines. For a website to be successful you need both the ability to easily change your content and to be able to change code within the website to rank on the major Search Engines.

Our vision is to help churches who have no website to first create their own online presence and secondly to help churches create their own site without being limited to one specific customization or one template.

A church’s website should consist of the following features:

• Easy to maintain
• Easy to change and update the content.
• Be appealing to the eye
• Ranks well for local search results, i.e. ‘your city name’ churches.
• The ability to add pictures and videos
• Easily upload sermons and notes. (Especially good for missionaries or people traveling)
• Update the churches monthly calendar to include events, special dates and times.

Without being able to customize or have complete control of your website you will not only miss opportunity, but also miss being able to reach the community with your website. In a day where information is available with the click of a mouse, it’s more important to not only have an online presence, but to be ‘findable’ on the major Search Engines.

Do you want to be found online through the major search engines? Is it a priority to have an aesthetically pleasing website that both speaks professionalism and also the heart of your church? Then being free to customize your own website with what you want on it should be a priority. You might ask that most church website building software programs allow you to have complete control and customization of your own website. Well that is not completely true and it can both cost a lot of money and the ability to actually rank for search terms.

As an example, let’s look at www.generationalhope.org. By going to Google and searching the church’s name you should find it as the number one listing, which in this example is the case. But take a closer look at the sites URL (website address).

Most people would notice the actual URL of the site is not www.generationalhope.org but it is app.razorplanet.com. This is the incorrect website to be displayed in the search engines.  The title displays Generational Hope, but the display URL does not.  This could be confusing for searchers and cost the website clicks because the searcher may think it is the incorrect website. Unfortunately this is a common problem when you see websites using these certain types of template software.  This website may be easy to manage and easy to add content, but it lacks what it needs to draw the most viewers who are searching online for a church.   This leads to the second issue which is that this wrong display URL will cause the website to not rank as high as it should. The display URL is a factor in search and if it does not relate in any way to the website Google and other major search engines will not rank it as high as it could be. You can see below this site does not rank in the top 10 of Google for its target audience of ‘Maple Valley Churches’ in part due to this issue.

You might ask, “Why does Maple Valley Presbyterian Church rank number 1 if they are using the same church building software?” That is an easy answer; their churches name is almost the exact keyword phrase we searched to find them, just like when we searched for Generational Hope, they were number one also.

If you build it they will come?

This is not true at all. You can build a website, set everything up, add your pictures, videos and spend days working on your site to never have a single visitor. Setting up a website is one of the most important parts to ranking well in the search engines. We can help you do it right… from the beginning. The right website, the right setup, the right information and a little bit of work can get you ranking in Google and the other search engines in a matter of a few weeks.

Generationalhope.org is not ranking in the top 10 results of Google as of 1/12/10, but given a few weeks after the site is setup and they will be number 1. There are other factors that need to happen to actually get in the top 10 of Google, which is what we can accomplish. After a website has been either fixed, if it’s broken or created, if it’s new… it’s only then that we can start the journey to actually being found by the people searching for us online. If you build it and put work into it, then they will come.

What we can do for you!

If you have a website and feel you are stuck, unable to make the changes and customizations you want, we can help! If you do not have a website and are just starting out, there is no better time to start than now!

If you have no website:

• We will create an easy to use and customizable site that fits your church.
• Cost $499 for setup
• Monthly hosting and support fee of $49

If you have an existing website and want to change:

• We can create a new theme for you and transfer the majority of your old site to your new site without your current website coming offline. Depending on how big your churches website is, will depend on the cost of transferring the data to the new site.
• Cost run between $499 for setup to $999 for merging the old site over to the new site.
• Monthly hosting and support fee of $49

Want to start ranking on the search engines for specific terms such as ‘Your City’ Churches?

We can do that also for a monthly fee of $299 with a 3 month commitment. Depending on how competitive a ‘keyword’ is, will depend on how much time and effort it takes to get to the top of the search results. Three months is the average time for optimization of a specific keyword to start to show up on the search engines.

Other church website building options:

• Halosites.com charges up to $149/month
• Churchwebworks.com charges up to $149/month
• Ourchurch.com charges up to $299/month. SEO services for $499/month 1 year commitment

High Rankings Means More Traffic

Generational Hope now ranks number 1 for the local search on google for the term “Maple Valley Churches” and is sitting in the 3rd position on the organic search.

So what does all of this mean? Since Generational Hope started ranking for the term Maple Valley Churches, more people have been able to find the church website. Either people who already attend the church or people moving into the city who are looking for a church to attend, having a top ranking on Google can help grow your church and get people involved.

Google has sent 173 people to the website who would have normally never found it because it never ranked for Maple Valley Churches.

Contact us and let us help you!