Web Site Content

Tim Bednar gives the following advice for church Web sites:

Create content from a user perspective

Too often church sites are structured from a point of view of the church leadership and often reflect an organization chart. Unfortunately, this breaks down. Here is why.

Churches have no marketing budget for their web sites thus most traffic is generated through organic search. This means a person types keywords into Google and your church's pages are listed in a search engine results. Most of your traffic is not entering through the home page or is even going to use the site navigation.

I often suggest that churches create lists of keywords that they think users would type into Google, then group the keywords together to produce a site architecture that is optimized for their situation. For example,

• City, State, region and even landmarks (Tip: I often find that if churches include photographs in a gallery of nearby landmarks, they often see quite a bit of organic traffic).
  
• Women, teens, kids, etc.
  
• Events and activities especially sacred calendar events
  

Each of these groupings of keywords should have their own page found under a meaningful navigation heading.

Rod