Welcome back to the newsletter for those who have been fighting rabbits (in other words, the secularization of Easter) since the Middle Ages.

I’m actually not the kind of guy that gets super mad about the Easter Bunny. He brings baskets and hides eggs every year at our house. But, I am the kind of guy that loves books. But, with books, comes another issue: searchability. How do you find the books that you need? How do you find what you need within those books?

The practice of illuminating manuscripts in the Middle Ages, including all those wildly violent rabbit illuminations they were strangely so fond of, served many purposes. One of those purposes was to search within books. Illuminations served as quick reference points, and this could be especially handy in time-crunched situations like a worship service or during a debate.

And, that brings us to our topic today: Search Is Everywhere. I am excited about this one, because it will bless you even if you aren’t working on your church’s online SEO. This newsletter edition is just as impactful for your personal and professional organization and productivity.

Here is what we are going to cover in this special edition of the Church SEO Shapeup:

• Got on TV again and other personal and business news.
• 🤖 Websites need to be built for bots, and other items of interest from around the web.
• Is your church website using schema markup?
• Charlemagne - Proto-Protestant and informational mogul
• How search optimization can help you find your dog 🐶 - Search Everywhere Optimization

🗞️Personal and Business News

🚀Launched a Site

We just launched a news site for Immanuel Lutheran Church in Norton, Kansas: https://ilcnorton.church. This is one of the one-page websites that we sell over at Affordable Church Websites. This was a perfect use case for our one-pagers. We designed this offer precisely for smaller churches and churches in small towns that don’t need a full-fledged website.

I’m pretty excited about this particular site, because it was a departure from our typical aesthetics - a little more modern and adventurous. On top of that, their pastor really pushed us to expand the capability of our sites, integrating his YouTube feed into the site.

📽️Got on TV Again

​Our local Fox affiliate came out to do a story on some 90-year-old murals that one of the churches I serve rediscovered and displayed recently. Seeing our church on TV was a real high point for our members, and it certainly raised our profile in the community.

How did the TV station find out about the murals? Through an old-school press release.

🌐Around the Web

Palantir Technologies posted a manifesto on X last week - one of the most provocative pieces of writing I have seen. If you’re not familiar with Palantir, their main emphasis seems to be providing bleeding-edge technology solutions to the fundamental sectors of American society such as manufacturing, the military, and agriculture. They have been criticized by many especially for their defense and law-enforcement technologies, which many consider immoral, dangerous, and intrusive on private individuals. Read the manifesto, and keep an eye on Palantir. [Full disclosure: I am an active Palantir investor.]

Google John Mueller recently said that “SEO is complex, multifaceted, and resilient.” My interpretation: You don’t have to pull all the levers in order to rank well. You just need to pull some of them (and, more than your competitors are pulling.)

Google is testing showing video ads in the local pack results. This is a development I will be keeping my eyes on, because it is a feature that could possibly be offered to participants in Google’s ad grant program that many churches utilize. I’m not currently offering ad grant management as a service, but I am actively experimenting with it until I feel comfortable doing so.

More so now than ever, your website needs to be built for bots. A recent study from Duda showed that sites optimized for AI drive 320% more traffic to local businesses. Structured data, integration with Google Business Profiles, and fresh content (sermon posts for churches are a great example of this!) all contribute to more visits from AI. I say it all the time: You gotta talk to the bots in order to talk to people.

🙏A Favor to Ask

Subscribers to this newsletter have stalled out at just over 700. I'd like to get this to 1,000 soon. Can you help me get there?

Here are some ways you can help me boost subscribers:

• Forward this email to a friend or coworker.
• ​Link to an edition you really appreciated on your social media.
• ​Tell someone about my checklist.

✅Poll - Local Schema Markup

Schema markup is a way to talk directly to bots about the content on your website. Does your church website use schema markup?

🙏 God Stuff

I’m not going to wax too theological in this edition, but I will share a little historical snippet that is pertinent to today’s topic on search being everywhere.

I’ve been reading recently about the Carolingian Renaissance and the absolute explosion in written text during this time. You might liken this period to something similar to the coming online of the internet. The amount of “pages” that were being produced in this era was beyond anything the world had seen before. (The more I’m learning about Charlemagne, the more I’m seeing him as a Proto-Protestant, by the way, including this emphasis on the written text as being the backbone of Christian life.)

This explosion of pages meant that new means of organization needed to be developed, both within and among books. Standardized printing eased search within books. Illumination also played a role here. Libraries developed novel organizational schemes.

Information needs structure in order to be useful. That’s what SEO is all about.

🔎Search Everywhere Optimization

SEO used to just be about your website. But, the internet has changed over the last 20 years. It’s not just websites anymore. It’s also AI platforms, video platforms, social platforms, Google Business Profiles, podcast platforms . . . the list goes on and on. And, search is an element in every single one of these platforms.

(My most recent YouTube video takes just this approach to SEO.)

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In response to that, some have proposed changing the basis of the SEO acronym. Instead of ‘search engine optimization,’ they have proposed ‘search everywhere optimization’. I still think SEO is perfectly appropriate, because all of those platforms are also search engines.

But, that got me to thinking: Search is something that we do in other areas of our life. We do it in our physical libraries. We do it in our email clients. We do it in the local file systems on our computers. And, if we optimize for search, our life will be much more easy and productive. Information and objects are useless if we can’t find them. In fact, this is something I’ve been trying to do more and more with my emails and computer files, and it does in fact help.

So, here are principles of search, and how they can help you anywhere you end up searching:

• Principle 1: Categorization
• Principle 2: Tagging
• Principle 3: Naming or Titling
• Principle 4: External Validation

Principle 1: Categorization

This is a fundamental principle of search, and it applies in the physical world and electronically. Under the principle of categorization, like goes with like.

Physical World

Arrange similar objects in groups together. For example, you categorize the books in your home by putting them on a bookshelf. You categorize those books even further by grouping each shelf by some other quality, such as genre or subject. Doing this will often help you quickly find a book, but this principle can be used for other items like cookware, clothing, tools, etc.

Computer File System

On many computers, the primary grouping of files you work with are probably in the “Documents” folder. However, you can go further, with subfolders for work and home. Under your home files, you can have a file for each member of your household, a file for your household finances, a file for your personal correspondence, etc.

Your Church’s Website

Your church’s blog or ‘posts’ function likely has the ability to categorize posts. You might categorize them as sermons, announcements, theological articles, etc. That’s not the only way to categorize content on your site. “Pages” in most content management systems don’t have ‘categories’ per se, but you can still group them under directories. Landing pages targeting communities can all go under a /community/ directory. Pages describing your ministries can all go under a /ministries/ directory.

Social Media

Examples of categorization on your social media platforms include, for example, YouTube playlists. This kind of categorization can help you find videos you like and also help others find videos you create.

Principle 2: Tagging

If categorization is throwing items in a bucket, tagging is marking each item. This is usually much more granular.

Physical World

Tagging luggage is so common, we hardly think about it. However, we can take tagging even further than we often do. My mother-in-law makes yarn pom-poms to attach to our luggage to make it easier to find (search optimization!) on a carousel. While I feel a little silly toting around a suitcase with a frilly pom-pom on it, I have to admit that it really does work. Lots of mechanics and construction workers ‘tag’ their tools with unique duct tape or electrical tape color patterns.

Are you a medieval monk and want to find a page quickly in a book? Tag it with something outlandish, like a picture of rabbits at war with humans.

Finances

I use tags a lot in financial matters, such as in my expense reporting software or our family financial software. “Hey, honey, what did we spend on that trip?” “No problem, babe, let me pull up a report on that tag I used.”

Your Church’s Website

Tagging is usually used mainly for “posts” on your church’s blog. If you have a ‘sermons’ category, you could have tags such as “Sermons on the Psalms” or “Marriage Sermons.”

Social Media

Not as common as they used to be, but hashtagging is a form of tagging on social media. The way it was used for a while was dumb, but the principle can still be helpful.

Principle 3: Naming or Titling

What you name something is one of the most impactful practices to help it get found.

Physical World

Giving your dog a unique name with hard syllables that carries well can help you find your dog if you’re searching for it, either in the house or if it gets loose. On the other hand, if you name your dog something embarassing, you probably aren't going to drive around the neighborhood calling its name. In Middle School we had jokes that went like that.

Want your kid to be easy for people to find? This could be helpful when she’s trying to get a job, for example. Give her a unique name. Want your kid to be indistinguishable from gazillions of people? If he’s born in 1979, name him Chris Jackson.

Your Church’s Website

Your domain name is one of the most powerful search ranking factors. It can make it easy or difficult for people to navigate directly to your site. You can get this very right or very wrong.

The final part of any webpages url also functions as a name. It should be simple and descriptive. Is that page about your youth group? The slug of the URL should be /youth and not something like /pageid=a;dkj145.

Your website has other names associated with it: The metatitle is one form of name at the page level, and it’s an incredibly strong ranking factor in Google. Your page’s H1 header is another form of name at the page level, and it’s another strong ranking factor.

You can even name or title at the sub-page level. H2 headers on your page are titling your page sections, and these are also strong ranking factors.

Sermons

One pastor I knew always named his sermons stuff like “The Impact” and “Struggle.” Not very searchable names. Names that are more searchable are things like “3 Biblical Principles on Marriage,” or “What the Bible Says About Grace.” Honestly, that kind of clarity will probably help you write better, more understandable sermons.

I can be surprised sometimes, however. One of the most visited pages on my church’s website is a sermon on the topic of “Holding It Together When Everything Is Falling Apart.” I thought I was being unique and clever with that title, but it turns out that 720 people search that exact term every month!

Email

If there is an email thread that I want to be able to find in the future, I will use the subject line to name it something hyper-descriptive to help it surface when I search in my email client. For example, in the email threads I use to fulfill client orders, I will often make the subject line {Service Name} Fulfillment | {Church Name}, {Church Town}. Here would be an example of this: Multi-page Website Fulfillment | St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, Forestville, WI

Computer Files

Descriptively named computer files are a serious hack when it comes to organization. I often will use a format like this: YYYY-MM-DD-type-name. So, for example, let’s say that I’m saving my Easter sermon for this year, I might name it something like this: 2026-04-05-sermon-easter-christ-redeems-body-mind-heart.docx.

In a typical A-Z sort of my computer files, this organizes them nicely by date, and it makes them easier to find if, for example, I do a search on “Easter sermon.”

Social Media

​Lots of churches (and people) get this wrong. The premium type of social media post right now is the short form video, but people neglect putting much thought into the titles or descriptions of the video. These can give your short form videos an incredible “long tail” of visibility, both in Google search and on-platform search. Don’t name the sermon snippet you post as a short form video something like, “Pastor Greg’s sermon.” Title it: “What the Bible says about marriage. | St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana.” That way, that video might surface for people searching for “What does the Bible say about marriage?” or for “churches in Fort Wayne, Indiana.”

Principle 4: External Validation

We’ve always had various forms of external validation, and this is important for search.

Physical World

Items that you need to find and not get lost in the mix are given special places in your home. You keep important documents, firearms, and jewelry in safe, secure locations. This is a form of external validation.

Online Media (Social, etc.)

Likes, subscribes, and bookmarks are a common form of external validation in online media. If you are a media consumer, these can help you find media that you like, whether that’s in your Spotify account or in YouTube. If you are a social media creator, vying for these and other external forms of validation (like watch time and number of views) can also help your discovery via search.

Web

For churches, there are three forms of critical external validation for their web presence: backlinks, citations, and reviews.

Backlinks are simply links from other websites to your church’s website. Every domain on the internet has authority, and when they link to your website, that transfers authority to your site. You should always be looking for backlink opportunities.

Citations are references to your church’s name, address, and phone number on the internet. Citations help your Google Business Profile (your most important online asset!) perform better in map results, because they give Google confidence that if they give people directions to your church, there will actually be a church there or that if they send you a phone call, there is actually a working phone there.

Reviews are absolutely critical. Always be getting reviews. Google reviews are your most important ones, but Yelp, Facebook, Trustpilot, and TripAdvisor are other good platforms to get reviews on.

Search has always been with us. Search will always be with us. It is in every facet of our lives. Optimizing for search makes our lives better.

God's blessings, Pastor Chris Jackson "SEO Priest" ​[email protected]​ Get a Free Review I'll record a free video review of your church's website and SEO situation. Get your review. (No sales calls.) Subscribe Now for Free Not subscribed to this newsletter? Subscribe now. Get All My Free Resources ​This Google Sheet has all my free resources.

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