Why Online Reviews Are Key for the Local SEO of Your Church

For the most part, churches overlook how important reviews are for their online presence, or fail to consider them important when managing their presence. That is a major error! Reviews are vital for local search presence, which means there has to be a dedicated focus on reviews throughout online platforms including:

• Facebook
• Google
• Yelp

Online Church Reviews

When someone Googles "church near me," or "church in [city]," part of the algorithm Google uses to determine what results to share is reviews. Especially when it comes to the local pack: the trio of results with a map within the typical search engine results pages (SERPs) of Google, or within Google Maps search results. The ranking potential of the church website is also impacted, particularly the organic search results on a local scale.

Here are some relevant statistics from a 2018 Moz study about the various factors of local searches:

• Behavioral Signals (check-ins, click-through rate, mobile clicks to call, etc) - 9.56%
• Citation Signals (citation volume, IYP/aggregator NAP consistency, etc) - 10.82%
• Google My Business Signals (categories, keyword in business title, proximity, etc) - 25.12%
• Link Signals (inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, linking domain quantity, etc) - 16.53%
• On-Page Signals (domain authority, keywords in titles, presence of name, address & phone number or NAP, etc) - 13.82%
• Personalization - 5.88%
• Review Signals (review diversity, review quantity, review velocity, etc) - 15.44%
• Social Signals (Facebook engagement, Google engagement, Twitter engagement, etc) - 2.82%

Positive Reviews

Reviews are more important than posting on social media, and they can help the church be found by potential visitors on the most popular search engine. Reviews are critical to the church's online reputation as a whole. All that time they spend working on increasing web traffic could be redirected towards getting more reviews and improving their reputation online. Positive reviews from your members posted to different review sites will help you to establish basic trust with prospective attendees before they even walk into your church.

Before the internet, people found businesses by asking for recommendations from respected friends and family members. Now, Google is the go-to for questions and opinions.

Because reviews are critically important to customers, they are critically important to Google. Google wants customers to come back to their search engine and therefore has algorithms that generate results based on what reviews people tend to click on in order to ensure those are the very best. 

The Other Side

When someone leaves you a negative review, your search rankings won't immediately drop in Google. It’s also normal to think that if you click the “Not Review” link, it’ll remove the review from both your profile and from Google’s search results. 

Having a few negative reviews can actually be healthy for your church, and if you want them removed, you need to reach out to the reviewer.

Conclusion

Online reviews are incredibly important for businesses and organizations, including the church. Coming up in local SEO search results in particular will be more likely if there are organic reviews. Beefing up the church's online presence and encouraging people to leave reviews on Facebook and such will go a long way in bringing in more attendees.

Looking into digital marketing for churches? Reach out to Faithworks Marketing today! We build and manage websites, especially for non-profits and churches all over the United States.