Marketing Spotlight: Crosspointe Church

We’re continuing our series 25 Stories from 25 Years with an updated story about Crosspointe Church which we first published in 2012…

Making sure people can find your church in the search engines is important for any church, but it can be difficult if your church isn’t located close to the center of town, you have a new website, or the church just created it’s listings in Google and Bing.

So, how do you overcome such obstacles?

Crosspointe Church

Crosspointe is a Christian church in Sanger, California with its campus located in the grapevines of Fresno County.  Their mission is “Connecting people to God and to each other”.  The members of Crosspointe seek to accomplish this mission both through personal ministry and by having a strong online presence.

We’ve been honored to be able to work with Dr. Crocker and Crosspointe to live out their mission online.

I asked Dr. Greg Crocker, pastor of Crosspointe Church, to share with us why they decided to do search engine optimization (SEO) for their church’s website and what their experience has been with it. Here’s what he had to say:

It is difficult to find a quality SEO team for churches. You can find people that do SEO, and people that understand church, but very rarely a thorough knowledge of both. 

Very few secular companies understand the terminology of the Christian world – you can end up with all kinds of weird and even malicious link building, on-page SEO, and more. We were so glad to find Kurt and the team at OurChurch.com because we’ve had numerous bad experiences with other companies (some of which were quite large).

One SEO company actually worsened our positions in the search engines – we think it may have been sabotage, but were at least able to cut loose from them, and I believe Kurt and the team at OurChurch.com repaired the damage they had done, and we are now back on track.

OCC’s quality SEO technicians have a thorough understanding of the area they are working in – in this case, churches. OurChurch.com is run by solid Christian people that not only attend various churches in the area, but also work with many churches around the U.S. They understand exactly what churches need to do with their SEO.

Why do churches need SEO?

The internet has replaced the phone book as the place people start looking for a new church.  SEO can get you on the first page of local results – kind of like getting a better ad spot in the phone book. The top three spots on in the search results get the most clicks, and it takes good SEO to get there.

Targeting Fresno

Crosspointe has members who live in Fresno, CA and they wanted to reach out to Frenso, but the church is located in Sanger, CA, a city adjacent to lager city of Fresno.  One of the ways Crosspointe chose to overcome the obstacle of not being at the center of one of the cities they wanted to reach was through citations.

Citations (sometimes called local listings) are listings or mentions of the church with their contact information.  Citations often provide links and they serve to reinforce for the search engines that the church exists at that location and that the church is relatively popular (it’s being mentioned a lot around the web).  By getting citations for Crosspointe Church we were able to regain search rankings they had lost previously and start to rank in the top 10 for Fresno related keywords, like “Churches in Fresno” and “Fresno churches”.

What’s in a Name?

The folks at Crosspointe are a bold Christian congregation.  While the church has a long and rich heritage, they decided they could better achieve their mission of connecting people to God and to each other by making some changes in the church, including changing their name.  This kind of change usually carries with it some challenges within the congregation and the community, but there was one other challenge they soon discovered…online.

Around the web there were dozens and dozens listings and references to the church under it’s old name.  This was not only confusing for people searching for a church, but actually hurt the church in the search engines.  So, one of the tasks we took on was updating the listings the church had under their old name to the new name.

This was a team effort.  OurChurch.Com was able to find and change many of the listings and Greg and his congregation were able to find some and were very helpful in verifying the church information for the sites.

This is something many organizations don’t realize – your contact information maybe listed on many websites even if you didn’t specifically put it on those websites.  So, if you change your name, location, phone number, or web address, you need to go around and find the various places online that are listing the old contact info and get it changed to the new information.

If you happen to be in the area, be sure to visit Crosspointe Church in Sanger, CA.

This Story Doesn’t End There…

While this article was originally published back in 2012, OurChurch.Com and Crosspointe continue to work together after more than a decade to help Crosspointe reach people in the Sanger, CA area. How awesome is that!

Comment and Discuss

• What is your church doing to reach people online?
• What is the state of your church’s citations?  Have you checked them recently? Updated them? Added them to websites where you weren’t listed?

If you and your church would like help with your citations and church SEO, fill out the form below to schedule a time to talk.

Read more of our 25 Stories from 25 Years