How to help people find your church online

Most people who find your church website for the first time arrive from a search engine, usually typing something like “church in” followed by your town. The good news is that Hubb quietly does much of the technical work for you, and the rest is mostly about writing well. Here’s what actually moves the needle, in order of value.

What makes the difference

1. Say plainly who and where you are, high up on your homepage. Search engines match what people type to the words on your pages, so your church name, your town or area, and your main activities (services, toddler group, youth work) should appear naturally in your welcome text and around the site. Write for people, not for robots: repeat-the-keyword tricks stopped working years ago and can now get a site penalised.
2. Give your key pages good titles and descriptions: they’re the headline and the shop-window text people see in the results, and they’re yours to write.
3. Set up a sitemap so search engines know about every page you want found.
4. Ask relevant sites to link to you. Links from your denomination’s directory, local community sites, and organisations you work with tell search engines your site is trusted, and unlike everything else on this list, links can’t be faked, which is exactly why they count.
5. Measure it: Google Analytics shows you how many people arrive from search and which pages they land on, so you can see what’s working.

---

Good to know

• Every page on your site already gets a human-readable, search-friendly address containing the page’s title, which is one of the things search engines look for; you don’t have to do anything to earn that.
• Each page also carries a built-in canonical tag telling search engines its one true address, which stops the same page being listed several times and diluting your ranking. If your site answers to more than one domain name, there’s a Host Names setting to make the canonical address always use your primary domain, so your rankings consolidate under one name; worth switching on if that’s you.
• Patience is part of the job: search engines re-read sites on their own schedule, so changes typically take weeks to show, and a brand-new site can take a couple of months to be indexed at all.
• Formatting helps twice over: clear headings and sensible emphasis make pages easier for people to scan, and search engines give headed-up text a little more weight.
• Being found is only half the story; making the visit count is the other. Our blog’s 10 tips to getting the best church website covers both, including why “we meet on the High Street” helps neither Google nor your visitors.