Where online presence significantly influences outreach and community engagement, churches should adopt more sophisticated SEO strategies to stand out. One such advanced technique is the implementation of Schema markup on church websites.
Schema markup is a code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help search engines return more informative results for users. For churches, leveraging Schema markup can profoundly enhance visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), making it easier for potential visitors to discover their services, events, and missions. This article explores how Schema markup can benefit church websites, offering specific examples and implementation tips tailored to the unique needs of religious organisations.
Understanding Schema Markup for Churches
Schema markup for churches is designed to communicate specific information about your church’s activities and events directly to search engines. This can include service times, special events, location information, and even leadership bios.
By providing this detailed data in a structured format, Schema helps improve the way your website appears in SERPs, often enhancing listings with rich snippets, which are more eye-catching and informative than standard search results.
Key Benefits of Implementing Schema Markup
Improved Visibility: Enhanced listings can make your church more noticeable in the cluttered landscape of search results.
Rich Snippets: Information like event dates, times, and locations can be displayed right in the search results, making it easier for people to find the details they need.
Increased Web Traffic: By providing clearer, more detailed information upfront, potential visitors are more likely to click through to your website.
Better User Experience: Visitors benefit from having easy access to essential information about your church and its events, improving their overall experience with your site.
Types of Schema Markup for Churches
1. Organisation Schema
This foundational Schema type is vital for any church website. It helps display general information about your church, including the name, address, contact details, and even a link to your social media profiles. It’s the starting point for making your church more recognizable online.
For churches that host regular services, special gatherings, or community outreach programs, the Event Schema is crucial. It allows you to detail events with dates, times, and descriptions, making them pop in search results.
Example Implementation:
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Event",
"name": "Easter Sunday Service",
"startDate": "2024-04-01T11:00",
"endDate": "2024-04-01T12:00",
"location": {
"@type": "Place",
"name": "St Pauls Church",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "123 Church Road",
"addressLocality": "Bury",
"postalCode": "BL0 9BP"
}
},
"description": "Join us for our Easter Sunday Service to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. All are welcome.",
"organizer": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "St Pauls Church"
}
}
Implementing Schema Markup: Best Practices
Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper: This tool simplifies the process of generating Schema markup for your website.
Validate Your Code: Before going live, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure your markup is error-free.
Keep Information Up-to-Date: Regularly review and update your Schema markup to reflect current and accurate information about your church and its events.
Incorporate Multiple Schema Types: Don’t limit yourself to just one type of Schema. Use a combination of relevant Schemas to provide as much detailed information to search engines as possible.
Conclusion
For churches aiming to enhance their digital outreach, implementing Schema markup is a game-changer. It not only improves visibility in search results but also enriches the information presented to potential visitors, helping to draw more people into your church community.
By following the best practices outlined above and utilising specific Schema types effectively, your church can achieve a stronger online presence and connect with a broader audience.
With consumers increasingly relying on search engines to find nearby products and services, optimising “near me” content has become imperative for businesses aiming to enhance their online visibility and attract local clientele.
Whether you’re running a cozy café, a boutique shop, or a repair service, harnessing the power of local SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can significantly amplify your online presence and drive organic traffic to your website. So, let’s dive into effective strategies for optimizing “near me” content tailored specifically for local businesses, including shops, restaurants, and service providers.
Keyword Research and Localisation:
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases that local customers are likely to use when searching for businesses like yours. Include location-specific keywords such as city names, neighbourhoods, landmarks, and phrases like “near me” or “near [location].”
Utilize keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to uncover valuable insights into search volume, competition, and keyword variations.
On-Page Optimisation:
Incorporate targeted keywords naturally into your website’s meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, and body content. Ensure that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are prominently displayed on every page, preferably in the footer or header section.
Create location-specific landing pages optimized for each area you serve, providing detailed information about your products, services, operating hours, and contact details. Include relevant geo-modifiers in page titles, URLs, and content.
Google My Business (GMB) Optimisation:
Claim and verify your Google My Business listing to enhance your visibility in local search results. Complete your profile with accurate business information, including your address, phone number, website URL, categories, and business hours.
Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on your GMB listing, as reviews and ratings play a crucial role in influencing consumer decisions and improving your local search ranking.
Local Citations and Directories:
Ensure consistent NAP information across all online directories, citation sites, and local business listings, including Yelp, Yellow Pages, TripAdvisor, and industry-specific platforms. Inaccurate or inconsistent information can adversely affect your local SEO efforts.
Seek out opportunities to get featured in local publications, community websites, and online forums, as backlinks from authoritative local sources can boost your website’s credibility and visibility.
Mobile Optimisation and User Experience:
Given the prevalence of mobile search, optimise your website for mobile devices to deliver a seamless browsing experience for users on the go. Ensure fast loading times, intuitive navigation, and responsive design to cater to mobile users effectively.
Implement clear calls-to-action (CTAs) prompting visitors to take specific actions, such as calling your business, getting directions, or making a reservation. Streamline the conversion process to maximize user engagement and conversions.
Content Marketing and Localised Blogging:
Create informative, engaging, and locally-relevant content that addresses the needs, interests, and pain points of your target audience. Publish blog posts, articles, and guides focusing on local events, news, trends, and tips related to your industry.
Share your expertise by providing valuable insights, troubleshooting advice, and DIY tips for common problems that your target customers may encounter. Position your business as a trusted authority in your niche, fostering trust and loyalty among local consumers.
By implementing these strategies and consistently optimising your “near me” content, you can strengthen your local search presence, attract qualified leads, and drive foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar establishment. Remember, local SEO is an ongoing process that requires diligence, monitoring, and adaptation to stay ahead in the competitive landscape of local search.
If you need a hand to get up and running with your local content, or improving your strategy to increase your search engine rankings – get in touch today.
What if I told you that you could rank your local business for terms such as “barbershop near me” or “nail salon near me”.
The reason this is possible isn’t by some quirk, but its through simple research using SEO tools available on ahrefs.com (Ahrefs.com) and SEMRush (Semrush) which tell you how difficult a keyword may be to rank for and much search volume there is. Together these metrics indicate just how worth such a keyword such as Barbershop Near Me would be worth including in a website and social media campaign to enhance search rankings.
But such keywords as these two are not alone.
The majority of “near me” terms are low difficulty to rank for, this means very low competition levels — this is the case even though search volumes are high for these terms. This includes terms such as “dessert near me” (who doesn’t want to know where to find cake!) and “liquor stores near me”, “tacos near me”, “Italian restaurant near me”, along with “florist near me”, “hardware store near me” and multiple others — all of which have a keyword difficulty of less than 5 but a search volume greater than 100,000!
These are local terms, but there are many others, all you need to do is go to the relevant too and order by Keyword Difficulty and/or Traffic. Perhaps include a single keyword from your market or a lower level of traffic to get you started.
How to Use These Keywords to Rank
Whilst these keywords may seem generic, it is important to make them quite specific to your website or article.
For example whilst there are many other keywords available I’ve only here spoke about the subsection of “near me” which is also relevant to the previous article I have written about. This is because it enhances the chances of search terms ranking overall, but also because it means the terms work together.
If these terms were used on a site you would use them as directions “which florist is near me” on a specific florist page from a question, with instructions on how to get there from a well-known town location. Embedding such keywords not only enhances the content on the page for a user but can enhance search results as questions are becoming commonplace (examples of google people also ask below) both on desktop search and within voice search (with answers read aloud).
Google Trends is, without a doubt, one of the most valuable sources of open data on the internet.
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It’s not a tool that’s exclusive to marketers. You’ll find many studies and research articles that were created thanks to this great resource. It was even used to identify an influenza outbreak two weeks before the CDC was able to. (We’ll get to this one in a short moment.)
So what is Google Trends?
Well, in this guide we’ll cover what Google Trends is (if you don’t know already) and we’ll get you familiar with the Google Search Trends interface and instantly find ways to implement it into your SEO and keyword research workflow.
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So, let’s get into it!
A Brief History + Fun Facts
Google Trends initially launched in 2006. However, it still lets you to view data all the way back to 2004.
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Google has built, shut down, and merged many different websites that used Google Search Trends data.
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One of which was a “Trends for Websites” tool that allowed you to compare the search traffic of two different websites. It was kind of like the free Similar Web tool, however it made use of more concrete data. Like many cool Google products, it was unfortunately shut down.
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Another was Google Flu Trends. It was a very insightful tool that did just what its name entailed — It let you view data on flu trends. It actually predicted the 2010 influenza outbreak (based on trends for common symptoms) 1 or 2 weeks before the CDC made an official announcement.
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Here’s an interesting fun fact about Google Trends
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From Bush/Kerry to Trump/Clinton, Google Trends has accurately predicted the victor every time since 2004.
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Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the data:
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George W. Bush vs. John Kerry
Barack Obama vs. John McCain
Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney
Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton
In each of these tests, I searched for both their full names as well as last names. The results are quite clear.
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Will Google Trends continue to predict the outcome of US elections accurately? Only time will tell.
How To Use Google Trends
First, there’s one important thing I should tell you before you dive in.
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Google Trends does not provide search volume. That would be too useful, wouldn’t it?
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Instead, they give you an arbitrary scale of 0–100. “0” represents a search terms lowest point of relevance. “100” represents its highest.
These values are entirely dynamic and change once you introduce multiple search terms. It then becomes relative to the popularity of the other search terms you provide.
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By default, Google Trends makes use of data from their regular search results, but as you will learn shortly, you can also look at other sources.
Where The Data Comes From
Before we dive right in and learn how to use Google Trends, it’s important to know where the data comes from.
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There are five different data sources for you to utilize.
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It is worth noting that with web search you can view data from 2004 while the other sources only allow you to go back to 2008.
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You can select your desired data source by clicking the following drop-down field:
Searching For Keywords
When you’re typing a search term, you’ll see different keyword types.
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In the below example, there are a variety of grouped topics to choose from.
“bernie sanders (Search term)” would only include data based around that one particular keyword.
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“Bernie Sanders (United States Senator)” would include not only the main keyword but others that might be related to it. Like “senator Sanders” or “was Sanders a good senator?”
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Same goes for “Bernie Sanders (Election campaign)”. It would only include data for searches around his campaign.
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I’d tread carefully with these grouped keywords. Why? Just take a look at some of the “related keywords” that popped up when I was browsing the “plumbing category”. You can say I don’t have too much confidence in Google accurately grouping and associating keywords.
Finding General Search Trends
A slightly “hidden” feature of Google Search Trends is the ability to view an industry’s general trends by removing all of your current search terms.
It’s just passed November in America so as you can see, as soon as I removed the search terms, the biggest trends happening were related to Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
Be a Pro, Use Search Operators
There are various search operators you could use to get more out of your data.
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The first one is the plus operator. Simply connect as many terms as you like using plus signs to combine results. This is useful if you want to see the trend of multiple industries.
Another useful one is using double quotes in order to only include direct match results. As an example, check out the discrepancy between how to make bread and “how to make bread”.
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If your search term is associated with another meaning, to avoid having skewed results you can use the minus operator.
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As an example, let’s say I want to get a feel for the mattress industry. However, I want to exclude people that are only looking for mattress toppers. I can do so with the following.
Finding Different Spellings & Abbreviations
Now that I told you about search operators, it’s time to give you a common, practical use case.
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Using the plus operator, you can account for different spellings, abbreviations, and punctuation of different terms.
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Take the below image as an example.
First, I set the location to “Worldwide”. After that, I started adding different variations of two terms — SEO and PPC. The goal of this trivial example was to compare the worldwide popularity of SEO and PPC.
Embedding Trends Graph to a Website
The easiest way to embed a Google Trends graph is to click the little embed button after performing a search. It’ll give you a basic code snippet to add to your website’s HTML source.
Bare in mind that Google lets you export Google Trends search data. It’ll give you a CSV. With it, you can use any sort of charting software you like to visualize your data and display it on your website.
Finding Additional Features
Often ignored by most users, Google Trends has a sidebar where you can get access to additional features.
Trending Searches
This tab operates much like trends on Twitter. In the default view, it will show you the top events in your home country. You could easily adjust the country and additionally show worldwide news if you like.
Year In Search
Google publishes reports every year on search trends. These are always interesting to take a look at. It’s a ton of fun to browse the previous “Year in Search” reports to see all of the oddball fads that were popular way back when.
Subscriptions
The most useful additional tab of Google Trends definitely has to be Subscriptions. It’s quite similar to Google Alerts. You can sign up for email alerts based on a specific topic of your choice.
Finding Hot Niches & Blog Topics
So far, we’ve covered many tricks for using Google Trends search data efficiently. Now we can actually get into some practical uses.
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Ok, so I lied to you. Google Trends isn’t that great of a discovery engine for new industries. In order to identify hot niches, we’re going to need the help of an additional tool.
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To find industries, you need some sort of tool that allows you to seed ideas.
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You could browse through trend/hobby related websites like Trend Hunter. You could go over to the forums. You could even endlessly browse Pinterest to keep finding new hobbies/industries.
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But the trend seeding tool I am going to should you is redditmetrics.com. It lets you view the fastest growing communities on reddit.
Finding Seasonal Trends
Some products sell better at different times of the year. Below is an example that you likely would have guesses yourself.
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“running shoes” and “winter jackets”. Running shoe popularity peaks at the same time that popularity for winter jackets die down. And vice versa.
A less obvious example is yoga. You’d imagine it would remain constant the entire year. Well, yoga appears to be one of those “new years resolution” niches. Just like gyms, everyone gets excited for the new year, starts going to classes, and then popularity dies down. Very useful information for anyone in this sector to know.
There’s a problem with search volumes in popular keyword research tools. They’re based on yearly averages!
Say a keyword gets 10 searches per month for 11 months out of the year. Then in the last month, it gets 1,000 searches.
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A keyword research tool might only display an estimate of 92 searches per month. Way off!
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Let’s see if we can create an estimate of how many searches a particular keyword will bring in during its hottest months.
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We’ll investigate the term “Christmas stockings”. Here’s its Trends data for 2018:
The first step is to download the data. See that little download button in the above image? Click it to get a CSV.
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Now you’ll have a sheet that looks like this.
It’s organized into weeks. We need it organized into months. To do that, all that’s needed is combine some data. After a bit of number wrangling you’ll have a nice sheet like this.
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There we go! You’ll notice that I also have calculated percentages as well. This is key.
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Now, we need to find the average monthly search volume. You can use any keyword research tool as you please. I choose Ahrefs.
Ahrefs shows that “Christmas stockings” gets searched 37,000 times a month.
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Next, we multiple that number by 12 to get our yearly searches. 444,000.
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All that’s left to do is find the monthly searches using our percentages and the yearly total, 444,000 number.
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For example, we found December’s value by multiplying 444,000 with 0.3622 (36.22%).
And just like that, you’re now able to get an idea of the true monthly search volume during this search term’s peak.
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160,814 is quite a difference from the initial 37,000, isn’t it?
Location-Based Keyword Trends
You want your marketing to be as effective as possible. Some areas of the country- or some areas of the world -are more interested in a product, service, or industry than others.
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Take the Trends data for the traditional breakfast, grits. Most of the interest comes from south-eastern states.
And now how about “farm equipment”. No surprise that most of the interest comes from mid-western states as well as others where farming an important industry.
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Keyword Trends For Local SEO
You can see what cities your service is most popular with a bit of location filtering.
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Below, I took a look at the most popular cities around Phoenix, AZ for the term “plumbing”.
Google Trends For Olden Times
Google Trends goes back to 2004 and that’s great! However, what if we want MORE insight.
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…Like insight from all the way back to the 1800s.
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Well, you might think that’s impossible. No internet back then, right? That’s where books come in.
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Google created a tool named Google Ngram Viewer. It’s great! Just enter one or more values and it will plot it on the chart for you.
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Here’s a graph of the mentions of “brewing beer” over the last 200 or so years.
It’s also a useful way to discover literature of the past. If you’re working on a research project, it’s quite useful to see how something was viewed in the past.
Final Notes + Bonus Free Training
By now, you’ve learned all the ins and outs of Google Trends as well as some ways to accomplish your SEO goals with it. It’s an excellent tool that every marketer should have at the ready.
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The last tip I wanted to mention is that Google offers some great beginner level training on Google Trends. Training will uncover some of the tips mentioned in this guide such as using search operators to find keywords with different spellings and punctuation.
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You can view the Google News Initiatives training here.
Understanding how search engines, such as Google and Bing, work can make the difference between a highly ranking site and users clicking through to your content and not — to be blunt.
In my most recent podcast I spoke about How Search Engines Work — below is that section — its just a few minutes long and will give you the information you need to know to understand search engines if you are a website owner, content creator or web developer.
There is no jargon here, just a simple and easy-to-understand explanation.
Video from The SEO Podcast
In this video you will discover how Google really works from crawling and indexing to how algorithms are applied during user searches. Andy (The SEO Podcast host) demystifies how search engines actually work, so that you as website owners and website creators can better create content and develop websites in the future — gaining a competitive advantage moving forward.
In the past almost 20 years since seoandy.com (and in its various guises) has existed, we’ve always aimed to educate as much as we have service clients – and the world as a whole.
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This means we’ve written well over 1000 articles, both for this website and across other platforms, as well as many guest authors. In 2022, we launched The SEO Podcast – now in Season 2, the weekly marketing podcast continues the work of our numerous articles in educating in all digital marketing areas.
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The ebook we’ve written is a starter guide for beginners, website and business owners. It is a no-jargon look at the fundamentals of SEO, including keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, and link building.
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It starts by discussing the basics of SEO and how search engines work. Then, dives into keyword research, the process of identifying the words and phrases your target audience is searching for. Understanding the keywords and phrases relevant to your business can optimize your website’s content to rank for those terms.
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Next, the beginner’s SEO guide covers on-page optimisation. This includes techniques for improving your website’s content, structure, and design to make it more attractive to search engines. We’ll discuss title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and more. Finally, in this section, the ebook covers the importance of creating high-quality, unique content to help your website rank for specific keywords.
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Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, this book will provide you with the knowledge and skills you need to boost your website’s visibility and drive more traffic to your site. We’ve written it in an easy to understand, beginner-friendly language, so that anyone can understand and apply the concepts discussed in the book, no prior knowledge of SEO is required.
