Great point Hal. God certainly provides, but he often does it through our labor.

Thanks Dr. Don. I'm glad I didn't have to suffer the wrath of your long knives 😉

Rowan, that's a good point. One church's advancing in SEO does mean others loose rankings. I don't know that that is ever a bad thing, per se, even if the other churches are good churches. Someone has to number 1, right? But there are also a lot of times when it may be a good thing.

For example, the search engines may be listing one particular church because it has a central location and lots of good links, but the church may not be the most relevant result. Maybe it's a new contemporary church that's very active online, but is ranking very well for keywords like "traditional church" because they happened to write some articles about traditional churches. It would be more relevant for the search engines to rank a church that is actually traditional. So, moving ahead of them in the search results is beneficial.

Another example is one that you mentioned. Maybe the church that is ranking at the top has beliefs you disagree with. So, you would want to rank better so that more people are exposed to your beliefs than the other church's. I see a lot of church related search results where the Mormon church is ranked at the top. The LDS seems to have put a big emphasis on SEO in the past few years. That means they are probably attracting more visitors who do not understand the differences between true Christian teachings and Mormon teachings.

So, yeah, sometimes SEO means two good churches competing, but other times it's beneficial or even needed. I'm glad to hear that you're engaging in SEO in your town and hopefully you will be able to convince others of it's importance.

I agree Fernando. From my experience it's the most effective online marketing strategy and it's the marketing that just keeps on giving. Thanks.

Thanks Jim.

I think the sad reality is that seo is about competing with other good churches in your town. You want your church to come up number one in the list, and thats going to come at the expense of other churches which might also be really good.

There are some positives though, I've found in my town that the church that has lots of historical significance ranks really highly because it has a fair few links to it, the problem is its an absolutely rubbish liberal church. If I can encourage the other good churchs in town to take SEO seriously we might have a chance of getting the dodgy church onto page 2 🙂