SEO Cost for this Situation

[aprillarita]

If you can put in a little time, you should be able to get on the first page for local searches without having to go out and pay for it, by working on the content and quality of the site. You may want to consider starting a blog, if you don't already have one. You (or anyone in your church) can write a short article about any events going on, social concerns like Insurancetechhead suggested, or even a short summary of each service.

Ask for links from websites of other local religious or charitable organizations that you are connected to.

Also, make sure you claim your listing and fill out your profile on directories like Google Places, Manta, and yelp.

 

[ksigmtsu]

To be perfectly honest and answer your original question, I'd estimate between 200-500 dollars maximum to push that to page 1 on most keywords, being that your local church keywords are very unlikely to be highly competitive. Local search generally isn't either, very few people bother to do citations to push up.

 

[HoosierLife]

Well the domain is Greenwood Bible Baptist

These were the google searches I did for it and the corresponding pages I found it on:

"churches greenwood indiana" - page 5
"church greenwood indiana"- page 3
"church greenwood in" - page 3
"churches greenwood in" - page 4
"churches greenwood, in" - page 4
"church greenwood, indiana" - page 3
"baptist church greenwood indiana" - page 1
"baptist church greenwood in" - page 1
"fundamental baptist church greenwood indiana (or in)" - #1 spot Nice!
"independent baptist church greenwood indiana (or in)" - #1 spot!
"KJV church greenwood Indiana" - page 1

I would also like to rank when you replace greenwood with Indianapolis.

**Now imagine I'm a complete noob (which I am) when it comes to SEO. What should I do first?

 

[YouGotMyMoney]

how much will u pay me not to xrumer it with 5 million forum profiles lol

 

[JohnWalker]

how much will u pay me not to xrumer it with 5 million forum profiles lol

common YGMM WWJD

btw your website doesn't load.... must be a sunday

 

[ksigmtsu]

Well the domain is Greenwood Bible Baptist

These were the google searches I did for it and the corresponding pages I found it on:

"churches greenwood indiana" - page 5
"church greenwood indiana"- page 3
"church greenwood in" - page 3
"churches greenwood in" - page 4
"churches greenwood, in" - page 4
"church greenwood, indiana" - page 3
"baptist church greenwood indiana" - page 1
"baptist church greenwood in" - page 1
"fundamental baptist church greenwood indiana (or in)" - #1 spot Nice!
"independent baptist church greenwood indiana (or in)" - #1 spot!
"KJV church greenwood Indiana" - page 1

I would also like to rank when you replace greenwood with Indianapolis.

**Now imagine I'm a complete noob (which I am) when it comes to SEO. What should I do first?

Step 1 would be to look at your keyword density, title tags, header tags, and pages to see if you are in fact targeting the keywords you want to be via the page text.

Since so many of those keywords overlap, my solution would be to make sure most of them were in the page text somehow, then use the keywords you are targeting as the text for backlinks directed toward the pages you are targeting.

Greenwood and Indianapolis should be separate pages on the site targeting their own sets of keywords, you will have a terribly hard time ranking both of them on the same page.

Step 2, if you want to do it cheaply, would be to set up a few web2.0 sites, then backlink your site with those, and backlink the web2.0 sites with links to pass the juice as safely as possible.

If you have several articles in spintax format you could backlink it a TON, but I doubt you'll find a lot of articles available in that niche, you'd likely have to have them handwritten.

You'd also want to set up something like seopanel in order to track your keyword positions, along with piwik to show your daily visitors, what they searched for, where they came from, and their bounce rates and other factors.

Other than that, page load speed makes a difference, so do a ton of other factors, but this is where you START.

Good news is, I bet the people running most church websites know next to nothing about SEO or ranking their pages, and are likely there just by virtue of members linking them from facebook and other signals, and you could easily crush them with a small amount of links.

 

[JohnWalker]

All jokes aside if you want to jump start the site and need to do it for cheap and easy, I suggest just copying or summarizing the weekly newsletter (most churches have one) and posting it to the blog in some text form so Google index's it. Grow the site with unique content by posting about what's going on in the church and the various events the church may have. If you get the church involved in the website, it can grow itself. Word of mouth and the support of other members in the community can be powerful. Just make sure you get people to link to you in any way they choose.

Because your site is not even up at this time, getting the site indexed consistently and frequently should be your first priority. The goal is to build a domain by getting the most "quality" pages indexed by the search engines.

To expand on aprillarita's example a more complete content marketing strategy could be to use the church's special events and create new pages about them on the website specifically to be used for link building. If the church has the events annually or regularly, the entire content creation process should be a breeze.

After you have the content, you need to market it. The more people involved with the event, the easier your job should be. Contact everyone involved with the event and speak to them about the importance of insurance.... I mean the church's new website. At the very least you should be able to get them to think about people they know that might have a website. Regardless talk to everyone you can about the website and find link opportunities.

Take it a step further if the church has events that can get business involved you've got a potential gold mine for relevant and local links. Usually, the bigger the business is the more authority their website will have. Its sales and marketing. Remember, promoting a website is completely different than designing a website.

If you want to add social you can easily look to the members of the church. It should not be too hard to create a church Facebook and Twitter page. These can not only help your websites rankings but more importantly they can actually make the church more effective in communicating with its members and reaching new ones.

For me, it helps to think of a link as just another signature on an app. Market and prospect well and the results will show. If you think about it, you've got an easy vertical..... god is content people have been buying for centuries .

 

[HoosierLife]

Ok like I said, I'm a noob when it comes to this stuff. I added that free Wordpress SEO plugin, and as easy as that is supposed to be, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what back links are or even how to link stuff.

This stuff seems pretty basic, but I just don't have vocabulary. Is there a source that will walk me through the things you guys have recommended?

Thanks for all the help btw.

 

[pcbinsurance]

Search Engine Optimization For Dummies Cheat Sheet - For Dummies

 

[ksigmtsu]

Ok like I said, I'm a noob when it comes to this stuff. I added that free Wordpress SEO plugin, and as easy as that is supposed to be, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what back links are or even how to link stuff.

This stuff seems pretty basic, but I just don't have vocabulary. Is there a source that will walk me through the things you guys have recommended?

Thanks for all the help btw.

I'd make sure the SEO plugin I'm using is the Yoast one first, it's the best in my opinion.

I swear I wrote an old post that detailed exactly how the tags and text in the page relates to seo. The big thing to remember, H1 tags are not to make text bigger. They're there to tell google or whoever what the topic of the page is. Same thing with the title tags, H2 tags, etc.

You'll see those options when you turn on "kitchen sink" in the visual editor for wordpress. Then if yoast says your target keyword is targeted correctly, it's normally correct.