I've spent a bit of time over the past few days looking at church websites. Man, they're bad! Of course, that's why there's a website called Church Marketing Sucks! As the communication team leader at my church (charged with internal and external publicity), I want our church website to look good, offer usable content, and be easily found by people looking for a church home. Unfortunately, our website comes with a subscription-based church management system that offers a really grand "behind the curtain" online community for members -- and while better than most church websites, ours still sucks.
We're going to take matters into our own hands and develop our own website that looks much better, is written for the web, and is search engine optimized.
When you put together a great looking website, how do you get people to find it? If you're looking for local traffic, you can advertise it to your local market in the newspaper, on Facebook or Google, or on radio or TV (if that makes sense to your kind of business). Don't forget the obvious: put it on your business cards, stationery and brochures!
There are important steps you need to take that will pay off in much bigger results for building your web traffic. Include target keywords and phrases that your prospects would be using to find you online. If you don't overwhelm your pages with meaningless words, the prominent use of keywords will make the page more appealing to the search engines and more meaningful to potential customers.
Carefully evaluate the benefits of online advertising (banners and pay-per-click). The nice thing is you can tell pretty easily if your investment is paying off and then adjust your budget to those ads that get the best results.
And use a blog and social media (Twitter and Facebook are no-brainers for many kinds of businesses) to connect with and keep in touch with customers -- and remind them about you and your website.
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