Greetings in Christ, Reader,

And welcome back to the Church SEO Shapeup Newsletter, the marketing newsletter for people who take naps in the narthex.

We're building on last week's email about making a landing page for your Christmas observances by taking you step-by-step through a plan to effectively promote your church services and events for free. I like to keep a happy piggy (bank) 🐖.

Here's what we're taking up in this special edition of the Church SEO Shapeup:

• Don't say "All I Want for Christmas is You."
• Sad deer (happy me) and other personal and business news
• Greedy Google
• Digital outreach and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire
• How to promote your church for free via a press release

❓Question

I'm going to experiment with a new feature to this newsletter: ask you a question.

Here's this edition's question: "What is your favorite Advent or Christmas song?" Hit reply, and let me know.

(If you reply with "All I Want for Christmas Is You," I will pray an impreccatory Psalm against you.)

🗞️Personal and Business News

🦌 Gun Deer Season

It was gun deer season last week - a big deal in Wisconsin. I participated, and got a spike buck:

Which, brings up an important point. As you can see, I'm a stereotypical rural Lutheran pastor - the embodiment of a village parson. Some ask, "Pastor Chris, does digital outreach even matter for a rural congregation?"

Digital outreach matters especially for rural congregations. Thousands of cars don't pass my church every day - people won't discover my church through signs or the facade. How is somebody 25 miles away (and, I get people from even further fairly regularly!) ever going to know we exist?

The answer to that is digital outreach.

📻 Podcast Guest

I was a guest on the Issues, Etc. podcast last week, talking about building a landing page for your Christmas events.

🕯️Advent Is Here

Advent is upon us, and like many Lutheran churches, this mean stepping up our life together with midweek services and community meals. It's a busy but blessed time. Whether you belong to a liturgical church or not, I pray that your preparations for Christmas are also blessed.

🌐 Around the Web

Search results are like stock and crypto: one man's gain is another man's loss. And, those gains and losses accelerate in times of volatility. This week has seen a lot of ranking volatility in Google. You may want to check appropriate searches for your church to see what side of the equation you're on.

Unfortunately, Google itself seems to be the one winning the most and taking the most traffic for itself. Much of this ranking volatility is probably tied to Google testing new search results features that keep traffic on their platform rather than sending it out to the open web.

This matches a broader trend in which Google is becoming more and more of a closed ecosystem. This is one of many reasons why expanding and optimizing your Google Business Profile is so crucial.

🙏 God Stuff

I'm currently reading The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders by Peter Heather. It takes up a period of time very interesting to me: the ongoing Roman legacy after the Fall of Rome in 476.

In his section on the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor Justinian, he discusses the important role that Law played in their ongoing Roman identity.

Heather argues that some touchpoints to Classical Rome had been subverted by Christianity. One example is Classical Roman emphasis on aristocratic identity and privilege - a cultural impulse that lost influence in part because of Christian emphasis on the equality of all before God. The fact that a man like Justinian, coming from obscure origins, could become Emperor shows just how far the power of noble birth had fallen.

Roman Law, on the other hand, had staying power for the Eastern Romans. Even as all were equal before God, so also all could be equal before the Law, and the fact that much of the Bible is composed of civil laws also reinforced this cornerstone of Roman Culture.

Because of this, Justinian threw his support to the reform of the legal system, and the resulting Code of Justinian remains the foundation of much of Western Law.

Can our way of life in the Western World (which, I believe is still the Roman world!) survive secularization? Can Rule of Law continue without reverence to a Law Giver?

While there is increased interest among a sizable group to re-emphasize the intertwined nature of Western Culture with Christianity, the fact is that the Western World continues to secularize, and that deeply threatens our culture.

Maybe I'm making too much of what I do, but this is one reason why I see my efforts to help churches with digital outreach as so important. The most important reason to do digital outreach is for the sake of others' eternal salvation. But, insofar as greater numbers of Christians will aid our civilization, I believe it has worldly benefits as well.

🐖 Promote Your Church Events for Free

Churches get promotions all wrong. They try free but ineffective methods, or they go straight to paid methods. (many of which are also ineffective.)

What if, and hear me out here, you can utilize promotion methods that are both free and effective.

That's where you should start, and the best method I've found for this is the old fashioned press release.

I recently worked up a YouTube video on this, but I'll also walk you through how to do an effective press release in this email.

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By the way, if you're looking for the show notes to this episode, you can click here.

You also might want to check out Workout 33 of the Church SEO Shapeup for another discussion of writing press releases for your church: workout-33-press-release.pdf​

Step 1: Make a landing page.

The very first thing you need to do to promote any church event is to make a landing page for it. If you need help with making a landing page, check out last week's email.

Step 2: Assemble a list of local media outlets.

Any and all local outlets love to get press releases. Reporters and content creators have demanding and unending jobs. By making their life easier with ready-to-publish content, you stand a good chance of your events getting featured.

Local media outlets can include radio and TV stations, social media accounts, email newsletters, and newspapers.

Ideally find a suitable email address at each outlet - a personal email of a community or news editor, for example. Second best is a generic email address (like [email protected]). Finally, if necessary, you can use a contact form.

Step 3: Use AI to interview you and compose the press release.

Here is a prompt I just used to generate a press release for my church's Christmas services and events:

Step 4: Edit the press release.

AI does a decent job, but you always need to edit it. Make the prose clear and accurate.

Also, make sure that NAP (name, address, and phone number) match your Google Business Profile with 100 percent parity to your Google Business Profile. For that matter, you need to make sure that the name on your Google Business Profile is optimized. You can check out Workout 7 in the Church SEO Shapeup for more information on this: workout-7-branding.pdf​

Finally, include a link to the landing page you are promoting!

Step 5: Assemble high-quaility pictures.

Including photographs make it more likely the outlet will publish an article on the basis of your prss release. Good photos to include are:

• logo
• Sanctuary decorated for Christmas
• Children's program
• Front of church with snow/creche

Step 6: Send the press release (and pictures) in DOCX, PDF, and Inline Text

Send DOCX so that the reporter can edit it, PDF to establish a properly formatted, canonical version, and inline text within the body of the email for quick scanning and searchability.

Step 7: Post the press release on your church's blog.

A great chance to build up your church's website and add internal links!

Step 8: Modify it as an "Update" on your Google Business profile.

You made the content already, now reuse it another place.

Updates to your Google Business Profile are even more important in the age of AI, as they are a major source of information for LLMs.

Bonus Step: Submit to a press release distribution gig on Fiverr.

An inexpensive one for about $25 will do. Before you go with a gig, ask the provider if they allow embeds of Google Business Profile maps. Only go with one if they do.

They will distribute it to potentially hundreds of press release aggregators. It's kind of spammy, honestly. But, the truth of the matter is that some kinds of spam works.

This is a good way to build consensus about your church in LLMs, build backlinks, get NAP citations, and get activity to your Google Business Profile.

Google will need to be able to discover those links. Submitting the report you get back from the Fiverr gig to a PDF submission gig can do the trick here. Those, are also often quite cheap - often only $5-$10.

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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