Hello Reader,

And welcome back to the marketing newsletter for people who look forward to December 26 more than the 25th:

But, until the 26th rolls around, we have work to do. I'm here to make that work a little bit easier by helping you:

Create the perfect Christmas landing page.

Here is what we're going to cover:

• New YouTube channel, new members, and other personal and business news
• SEO advice from Google's John Mueller, and other items from around the web
• Tip on preaching about the end times
• How to promote your Christmas services and events
• A poll

🗞️Personal and Business News

📹 SEO Priest YouTube Channel

I just launched the SEO Priest YouTube channel. I'm calling in a favor here. Please click this link to subscribe to my new YouTube channel.

I plan on posting tutorials, tips, 'roast my' content, and more here. Expect to see a collaboration soon with Lutheran Satire / Hans Fiene.

👉Space for 5 Clients

I'm now building full, multi-page websites for clients, using the most advanced web technology, most advanced SEO practices, and designed to guide users to paying your church a visit. Right now I feel comfortable taking on 5 clients, beyond the clients I'm currently serving.

Interested in my help? Whether it's for your Google Business Profile or your website, you can hit 'reply' and tell me a little bit about what you're looking for. I'll work up a free video consult that church boards love. No high pressure sales calls. Here's what I do:

• Optimize Google Business Profiles (your most important digital asset!)
• Optimize existing websites
• Built new websites

😀New Members

The smaller of the two churches I serve just welcomed 15 new members. A big deal for us. Lots of kids, too. Church marketing works!

🌐Around the Web

Google's "search advocate" John Mueller said recently that consistency with small details like URLs is the most important factor for SEO success.

AI related stocks have been taking a hit lately, as investors are concerned that the AI balloon is going to pop. The one exeception? Google. A few factors to this success: Google search is still utterly dominant, Google is vertically integrating their AI side of the business (even making chips!), and Gemini is getting good.

This is a big one for churches! Google has rolled out post scheduling and multi-profile posting for Google Business Profiles. (If you aren't posting updates to your Google Business Profile, you should be. Check out my workout in the Church SEO Shapeup on this topic: workout-12-updates.pdf​

Speaking of Google Business Profiles, a post circulating on X recently brought up the topic of bad reviews for churches:

You can't control what people will post on your Google Business Profile. Because of that, you need to know how to deal with bad reviews for your church.

🙏God Stuff

I am a Lutheran (LCMS) pastor, and towards the end of the church year and the beginning of the new church year, our lectionary tends to deal with the end times.

One of the main sources for this topic are the prophecies Jesus utters during the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24-25, Mark 13, and Luke21), in which the prophecies regarding the fall of Jerusalem (fulfilled in AD 70) meld together with prophecies regarding the end times.

Preaching this passage is hard, including the idea that Jesus sees the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the world in some senses as the same event. But, an image came to me recently that helped me explain it to my parishioners.

I've always loved paddlesports. I was a whitewater rafting guide in college, and I've continued to engage in them as an adult. Because of this, I've turned over a few boats in my years. And, swamping a boat always goes the same way: It starts with a trickle. And, it seems like you manage that trickle. But, faster than you know, that tricle becomes a flood that overtakes the whole craft.

That trickle was the same phenomenon (flowing water) that sunk the boat.

That's an image that helps to explain Jesus' Olivet Discourse: the fall of Jeruslaem was the first trickle of the coming deluge that will lead to the fall of the world in the end times.

🎄Make a Christmas Landing Page for Your Church

Yule thank me later for this one.

Lots of churches actively promote their Christmas services and events to the community. This is a great idea! It's a time when lots of unaffiliated people are looking for a place to worship on Christmas Eve or a way to add a little bit of religion to their holiday celebrations.

Ideally, this is an opportunity to start building relationships with unchurched people in your community that may lead eventually to full belonging at your church.

Your first step in promoting your Christmas services and events need to be a Christmas landing page.

I recently worked up a YouTube video on this topic, but I'll also walk you through the why and how to make a Christmas landing page for your church's Christmas services and events.

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Looking for the show notes for this video? I'll be indexing all of my free resources here.

Why to Make a Christmas Landing Page

Making a Christmas landing page needs to be the first step in your Christmas promotional activities. Why?

1) It gives you a place to send people for more information in your other promotional efforts like social media posts, traditional media slots, postcards, etc.

2) It can pick up search engine optimization traffic. The SEO opportunities around Christmas are huge. For example, my tools tell me that there are 9,900 searches per month for "Christmas Eve services near me." That's averaged out over 12 months, so the number of people searching this on Christmas Eve is absolutely huge.

3) You can run paid traffic to this page via Meta (Facebook / Instagram) ads.

4) You can use it to get commitments from potential visitors to actually attend.

5) You can use it to gather information on prospects for your church and use that information to nurture your relationship with them.

How to Make a Christmas Landing Page

Throughout the following steps, I'll be referring to the page I built for my church: https://doorcounty.church/christmas.

Step 1 - Identify your 'conversional goal.' Your conversion goal is what you want somebody on the page to do. There are many conversional goals you could choose, like 'make a reservation,' 'tell us you're coming,' or 'get directions.' Personally, I like 'register for a free gift.' It's appropriate for this gift-giving holiday, and it doesn't give the impression that people need to reserve a spot for church.

Step 2 - Create a signup form you can embed on the page.

All of your primary calls-to-action on the page are going to lead to this portion of the page.

Step 3 - Make a full view hero that focuses people on the conversion goal. Use copywriting practices to get people to follow-through on what you want them to do.

Step 4 - List all of your public services and events. Don't forget your call-to-action!

Step 5 - Include a personal invitation from the pastor.

Put yourself in the shoes of a random person landing on your page. They don't know anything about you, and they're probably a little wary of you. Your pastor putting his face out there an giving a personal invitation can help make people much more comfortable in visiting you.

Once again, don't forget your CTA!

Step 6 - Talk about the true meaning of Christmas.

This is probably a good step these days because most people have no idea what Christmas is about! The majority of people have very limited exposure to Christianity. They think that Christmas is about reindeer and fat men in red suits!

Step 7 - Remove objections. People come up with all kinds of objections to attending. A "What to Expect" section can help to remove those objections and make them more likely to commit to visiting. When it comes to this section, there are no dumb questions to answer in helping people plan a visit.

Step 8 - Help people find you! Include your address, contact info, and a map. Give people all the info they need! Even if this information is on another page of your site, include it here. You don't want people moving away from this page, as it will decrease your conversion!

Step 9 - Mind the SEO details. If you implement the following SEO details, your Christmas page will likely be at the very top of Google for your community:

URL: /christmas

Metatitle: Christmas Services & Events [{Year}] | {locale} | {Church Name} Don’t worry about lengths!!! Plural is critical

Metadescription: Include the terms ‘Christmas,’ ‘services,’ and ‘events.’ Optimize for click-through. For example: Learn more about Christmas services and events at St. Martini Lutheran Church.

H1: Include the terms ‘Christmas,’ ‘services,’ and ‘events,’ and the year

H2s and H3s and Paragraph Text: Variations on locations and the terms ‘Christmas services’ and ‘Christmas events’

Internal links: Homepage, service-specific pages, and blog posts.

Never delete this URL. Leave it up all year long, and update it year-to-year.

Build external links to it (coming episodes!)

🗳️Poll
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God's blessings, Pastor Chris Jackson "SEO Priest" ​[email protected]​ Subscribe Now for Free Not subscribed to the free Church SEO Shapeup Newsletter? Subscribe now. Get My Free Comprehensive Church SEO Checklist ​Get the checklist that will guide you to winning top search visibility. Completely free. Get All My Free Resources ​This Google Sheet has all my free resources. Inexpensive 1-Page Church Websites Designed to make it easy for your church to get on the web. Check it out. Need Help With Your Church's SEO? I aim to give away all my SEO knowledge for free. However, if you need muscle to accomplish your church's SEO goals, here are a few ways I can help: ​Stratospheric SEO Package. This is a baseline SEO package designed to give your church name, address, and phone number across the internet and to boost your church's SEO power. It helps you show up better in map results. Start with this package. ​Orbital SEO Package. The Orbital SEO Package does everything in the Stratospheric Package and also optimizes your church's homepage and boosts your church website's authority. It will help you show up better in both the map results and the link results. This package offers powerful optimizations.

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