One of the greatest missed opportunities that churches overlook is with the online church shopper. Unfortunately, most churches aren’t paying attention to their website analytics. For most mainline American churches, traffic reports, or analytics, will tell you a story – a significant amount of your website traffic, in some cases most, is coming from the first time visitor seeking a new church home.
Let me first define what I mean by online church shopper. The typical online church shopper is either an individual or couple that has recently moved to a community and is seeking a new church home, or it’s an individual or couple who feels wronged or is unhappy with their current church and is seeking a new church home.
In the many years that I’ve spent researching web ministry trends and building church websites, there’s been one constant. You have mere moments to capture the attention of the online church shopper. Most online church shoppers are using Google to seek a new church home. They will typically search using the following keywords:
- Name of city or town;
- Name of state;
- The term “church”;
- Or the name of a specific denomination (example: Methodist or Lutheran).
They will then move down the list of their search results, systematically visiting each church home page. With each visit, they are creating a relevancy rating of your church based on your website’s visual design, architecture, and quality of content. And guess what? The church website with the highest relevancy rating is typically the first church the online church shopper will visit.
Here are few tips to assess your relevancy rating:
- Begin tracking your website traffic using Google Analytics, here’s how you can learn more.
- Search Google using the following keywords: your community name, state, and then “church”. Where did your church land in the results? It’s critical for websites to appear on Page 1 of Google, especially in one of the top three organic positions, as these spots receive 58.4 percent of all clicks from users, according to a new study from Optify.
- How does the visual design of your website stack up to the other churches listed in Google search results? Do you need to redesign your website?
- Is the content of your website’s home page friendly to the first time visitor?
- If you are tracking your website analytics, study the bounce rate for your index page (i.e. home page). According to Google, “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site.”
So, what relevancy rating do you think your church website would earn with the online church shopper?
