The Ark Church Gulf Coast is led by Brandon and Brittany Johnson and serves the Galveston County area in Texas. The church has a passion for serving children in the community through kids programs, school participation, and community sports programs. As the church grew, they realized they needed to do more online to let people in their community know about their church and ministries. This was especially true since they didn’t have a building of their own.
Problems with a Previous Company
To expand their reach within their community, they initially hired a general marketing company to help. However, after working with them for some time, the church didn’t feel like they were seeing any positive results. So they asked around, and their sending church highly recommended Missional Marketing as a better alternative. A coach from Missional Marketing met with their staff, assessed their needs, and determined they needed Local SEO. The Ark Church Gulf Coast began working with Missional Marketing earlier this year to help more local people find their church online.
What is Local SEO?
Local Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO) improves the likelihood that an Internet user searching for a local church will find your church—first. Local SEO is all about helping Google understand, see, and trust your Google Business Profile so that it will recommend your church more often to local church seekers.
When a person is searching for a local church, Google wants to offer the most trusted results. Therefore, it wants to make sure any business it recommends has a consistent name, address, and phone number. Quite often, errors in a church’s name, address, or phone number pop up across the hundreds of online directories, decreasing Google’s trust in your church info.
Local SEO helps fix these errors while optimizing your Google Business Profile so your church can gain a trusted status with Google, increasing the number of times your church will be shown to local people searching for a church nearby.
Experiencing New Visitors
The Ark Church Gulf Coast was excited to get started with Missional Marketing, hoping for better results. Pretty soon, they noticed an increase in visitors to the church. Brandon Johnson, founding pastor of The Ark Church Gulf Coast, shared, “Lately, almost every week, we hear from visitors that they found us through doing a Google search. We rarely, if ever, would hear that before. Since partnering with Missional Marketing, our new visitors have increased significantly as well.”
The results Brandon began seeing were undeniable. More people were finding their church online than ever before, and the church began seeing new visitors attend almost every week!
For many churches, this is the ultimate goal: more visitors. When visitors attend your church in person, it’s an opportunity to make a real connection and share God’s love in a tangible way.
Sharing Success
After seeing these results, Brandon concluded that many people are looking for churches via Google, so improving your Local SEO is worth the investment. He said, “The church needs a reputable company to help them find your church! Missional Marketing knows what they’re doing here and has a heart to reach people for God. They are the kingdom partner you are looking for!”
Helping Your Church Be Found Online
When it comes to being found online, Local SEO is a great place to start. It’s like working on the foundation of your house. It’s not something people see, but it sure is essential to help your home stand strong.
At Missional Marketing, we get to hear stories like Brandon’s every day. We believe the local church offers the greatest hope to their local community. And we want to help local people find YOU online. How is your church doing with Local SEO? You can start by getting a free report to see how your Local SEO is doing.