Church marketing for the person who just moved to your town
Church marketing is mostly local search. Someone new in town types a denomination and a town name, checks the service time, then looks at photographs of the room. Fix those first.
Two kinds of people look for a church. One has just moved and is working a shortlist in a kitchen full of boxes. The other is having a bad night at eleven and wants to know somebody will be there on Sunday. Both are on a phone.
Neither reads your mission statement first. They want the time, the street, whether parking is obvious, and what the room looks like when it is full. Most church websites bury all four under a video.
We are a web development company in Lewes, Delaware, we hold no denominational affiliation, and the monthly search work is a newer line here than building the sites is. Saying all three now beats you discovering any of them in month three. What we bring is the technical half of the job.
More on this:our church website design and build work·how our monthly SEO retainers actually run·Core Web Vitals repair on a WordPress site·ask us whether a retainer suits your church at all
Where church websites lose people
Times only a designer can find
Times live inside a hero graphic, so they are not text and Google cannot quote them. The visitor tries the next one.
A listing nobody owns
The profile was claimed by a volunteer who left in 2019. Wrong hours, a pin in the wrong car park, a 2016 photograph.
One page doing six jobs
Everything sits on one homepage. The youth group, the food pantry and the Wednesday study have no URL, so none can rank.
A quote aimed elsewhere
A five figure rebuild gets proposed to a church living on offering income. The number is not dishonest, just aimed elsewhere.
What the work covers
Times as indexable text
Times go into the HTML as words, then again in schema.org Church markup using openingHoursSpecification. If yours sit inside a Church Center or Planning Center embed they arrive in an iframe, so view the raw source and search for the word Sunday. If Sunday is missing, that is the problem.
The Google profile, taken back
Ownership recovery, the right primary category, hours that match reality. Then photographs from the road, so a stranger recognises the building.
A page per ministry worth searching
Youth, recovery meetings, the food pantry, weddings, funerals and the Spanish service each get a URL. Six pages beat one carrying six paragraphs.
Speed on rural data
Google measures Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds in the field. A twelve megabyte header video never gets there on a phone in the car park.
Writing that sounds like you
We draft and you edit. The pastor holds the last word on belief, and we do not guess at theology.
In every month
- An audit of the site, the Google profile and every duplicate listing we find
- Service times, address and parking as text and as schema.org Church markup
- One ministry page drafted each month with the person who runs it
- Reporting from your own Search Console property, held in your name
- A quarterly call where we say whether the money is doing anything
What a visitor looks up first
How we would run it
Month one is diagnosis and cheap repairs. We pull whatever Search Console history exists, find out who actually controls the Google listing, and put the service times on the page as text. None of that needs a design decision, which is why it happens first. No committee, no vote, and no new budget line to get approved at the next meeting.
After that the work splits between pages and local signals. Pages means one ministry at a time, written with whoever runs it, because the volunteer who has led the food pantry for eleven years knows what people ask. Local signals means the profile and links from organisations you already work with.
Church budgets have a shape agencies ignore. Giving dips over summer, the boiler fails in February, and a bill that looked fine in October becomes a real conversation in March. So we size the hours to be carried all year, not to look impressive in October.
There is a version of church marketing you do yourselves. For many churches it is the right one. Claim the profile, write the times in text, photograph the building, put up a page per ministry. A weekend, and most of the value.
- A fixed monthly hour count you can carry through a slow summer
- Thirty days notice, no annual contract
- The pastor signs off anything touching doctrine
- Every change ships as a commit your next developer can read
The first quarter
- 01
Week one, who owns what
Domain, hosting, the Google profile and the mailing list get traced and written down. In a church that is the hard part: the answer is often a volunteer nobody has called since 2021.
- 02
Week two, the facts
Times, address, parking, accessibility and who to call. Plain text, high on the page, and repeated again in schema.
- 03
Week three, the listing
We fix the category, the hours and the photographs, then chase the duplicate listings denominational directories and dead plugins left behind.
- 04
Month two onward
A ministry page a month, written with whoever leads it and reviewed by you first. Some months that is the youth group, some months the funeral page nobody wants to write.
- 05
Every quarter
We compare impressions and clicks against the month one baseline. If the line has not moved and we cannot say why, you hear that rather than a prettier chart.
What church marketing costs
Who maintains the site now
A volunteer on a Tuesday evening and a paid communications coordinator are different starting points. The second needs far less from us, and costs you less.
How many congregations
One building is one profile and one set of times. Four campuses is four profiles, four sets of times, and four pages that must not compete.
What the site runs on
A current WordPress install is cheap to work in. A nine year old theme carrying three stacked page builders is not, and we say so before quoting.
How much writing you want
Some churches want a draft every month. Others want the structure and a template, then write it themselves, which is smaller and often better.
Why the rich results test stays blank
Here is the one that sends developers in circles. A church is a CivicStructure in schema.org, not a LocalBusiness, so a correctly marked up church page returns no local business result in Google's Rich Results Test. Nothing is broken. Use the Church type with openingHoursSpecification, keep address and geo on the node, and validate in the Schema Markup Validator, which reads the type as written.
Sources:the schema.org Church type and its opening hours fields·Google's own eligibility rules for Google for Nonprofits
Run the search yourself first. Your town plus the word church, on a phone nobody is signed into, then read what your own listing claims the hours are. Four minutes, and almost everything month one would repair is on that screen.
If you then want a second opinion rather than a proposal, send the URL and roughly what the year's budget looks like. Back comes a list in two halves: what a volunteer can do on a Saturday, and what genuinely needs paying for. Sometimes the second half is empty.
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Questions churches ask
How do I get more visitors to my church?+
Most first visits start with a search for a denomination and a town name, so a correct listing and a service time written in text do more than any campaign. The other half is invitation from people already in the room, which no agency can sell you.
How do I market a small church with no budget?+
Claim the Google Business Profile first: it is free and it is what most people see. Put your service times, address and parking on the homepage as plain text. Take forty honest photographs on a phone. A weekend, and it beats any campaign you could buy.
What should a church homepage say?+
The meeting time, the street, where to park, and what happens to your children while you are there. Put those in words, not a graphic. A first time visitor is deciding whether they will feel out of place, and a photograph of a full room settles that faster than prose.
Can a church get free Google advertising?+
Possibly. Google Ad Grants gives eligible nonprofits up to 10,000 dollars a month in Search ads, and faith based organisations are not ruled out. Read Google's eligibility page rather than an agency summary, because the rules about who your programmes serve decide it.
How long before any of this shows?+
You have no season to wait for, but the query space is tiny. A small town might run a few hundred church searches a month, so progress arrives as a dozen extra clicks rather than a curve. Listing fixes show inside a fortnight. Page work takes a quarter to judge.