Small churches can punch well above their weight online. I say that fairly often, but Dr. Daniel Hyde and Oceanside United Reformed Church in Oceanside, California, offer a particularly good example of what I mean.
Danny has served as pastor of Oceanside URC since 2000. He is a theologian, author, and longtime pastor of a confessional Reformed congregation. What he does not have is a giant communications department, an enormous advertising budget, or a staff of people spending all week worrying about digital marketing. In that respect, Oceanside URC looks a lot more like the churches most pastors actually serve than the churches that usually get held up as models of “successful” church marketing.
And yet something interesting has been happening there. At various points over the past year, Oceanside URC has seen roughly twice the number of visitors it would normally expect. During the summer, when the church ordinarily receives a fair number of vacationers because of its coastal location, the number of visitors has increased substantially. More importantly, some of the people finding the church online are not tourists at all. They are local people who have found the congregation through Google, YouTube, blog content, advertising, and even ChatGPT. Some of them have stayed. Some have become members.
That is what interested me enough to sit down with Danny and talk through what he has been doing.
The Difference Between Having a Website and Using One
Oceanside URC has not suddenly discovered the internet. The church has had a website since around 2000. Sermons have been online for years. They have used Facebook advertising and promoted events before. In other words, the story here is not that a church with no digital presence suddenly created one and immediately exploded.
The difference is that they became much more intentional about the pieces they already had.
They refreshed the website while keeping the same domain. They went back and repaired old broken links. They started paying more attention to backlinks from other churches, ministries, newspapers, and organizations. A member of the congregation who works with Google Ad Grants began helping them make use of the advertising credit available to qualifying nonprofits. They also used modest paid social advertising to promote specific services in specific geographic areas.
None of these things, by themselves, is especially dramatic. That is part of the point. Good local SEO is very often not about discovering a magic trick. It is about doing a collection of rather ordinary things more consistently and more intelligently than the other organizations around you.
What Happened at Oceanside United Reformed Church at Christmas and Easter
One of the more obvious early wins came at Christmas.
I had mentioned online that churches should consider using an old-fashioned press release for major seasonal services. Press releases sound almost comically old-school in an era when everyone wants to talk about TikTok algorithms and artificial intelligence, but local events still give newspapers, community calendars, tourism sites, and other organizations a perfectly natural reason to link to a church website.
Danny decided to try it. Oceanside URC sent out information about its Christmas Eve service and received links from roughly six or eight local media and event sites. They also ran some modest local advertising. The result was a Christmas Eve service with around 200 people, significantly more than the congregation would normally expect.
They then repeated much of the same process for Easter. They created a dedicated Easter page, promoted it, secured more local links, and once again saw a substantial number of visitors.
There is a deeper SEO lesson here that is easy to miss. The Christmas page still exists. The Easter page still exists. The backlinks pointing to those pages still exist. The authority those links add to the domain does not simply disappear when the service ends. Next year the church does not have to begin at zero. The dates can be changed, the copy can be improved, new links can be added, and the page can continue accumulating value.
This is one of the fundamental differences between SEO and many other forms of digital marketing. Social media is largely a treadmill. You publish something today, people see it for a few hours or perhaps a few days, and then you need something else. SEO for churches is cumulative. Work you do today can continue serving you years from now, especially if you resist the temptation to delete good pages or constantly change URLs.
A Small Church Showing Up Beside the Megachurches
Danny began searching for queries related to Christmas and Easter services around Oceanside and nearby communities such as Carlsbad. Predictably, the large churches appeared. They have big budgets, professional staff, sophisticated websites, and enormous amounts of content.
But Oceanside URC was appearing too.
As Danny put it in the interview, “There’s us. We’re right there.”
That is one of the reasons I remain so bullish about search engine optimization for smaller congregations. Google does not rank churches simply according to Sunday attendance. The church with 3,000 members does not automatically outrank the church with 100. A smaller congregation can often compete remarkably well if its website contains the right information, if its pages are structured clearly, if it earns relevant links, if its Google Business Profile is healthy, and if it creates content that genuinely answers the questions people are asking.
There are limits, of course. A tiny church is not going to dominate every query in a major metropolitan area overnight. But local search is one of those unusual places on the internet where a small institution with patience and discipline can genuinely compete with organizations many times its size.
Daniel Hyde’s “Weak Sauce” Blog Posts That Started Getting Traffic
One of the most useful things Danny did was also one of the least glamorous.
He began publishing relatively simple articles around questions ordinary people actually search for: “Why does God allow suffering?” “What happens after death?” “Bible verses for anxiety and fear.” He joked that, for confessional Protestants, topics like these can sometimes sound like “weak sauce.” Pastors generally want to talk about substantial theology, and there can be a temptation to assume that basic questions are beneath us.
The trouble is that people really do ask them.
Danny took material he already had from sermons, combined it with relevant Scripture, and produced a handful of fairly straightforward articles of around 800 words. Those pages became some of the most searched and discovered pages on the Oceanside URC website.
That should tell us something about how churches think about their websites. A church website should certainly tell people what the congregation believes and what it does, but it should not be organized exclusively around the categories insiders already understand. It should also meet people where they are actually asking questions.
There is no need to water down theology in order to do that. Answer the question well. Answer it confessionally. Answer it pastorally. But answer the question the person is actually asking.
If someone types “Why does God allow suffering?” into Google or asks the same question of an AI assistant, there is no particular reason the answer should come only from a gigantic publishing ministry or a generic evangelical content farm. A faithful local church can answer that question too.
The Visitors Started Adding Up at Oceanside United Refomed Church
Oceanside is a beach town, so summer visitors are nothing new. Danny said the congregation might normally see around ten vacationers on an average Sunday, sometimes fewer and sometimes more. This summer, he said, they were frequently seeing twenty or more.
The raw number is encouraging, but what interested me more was what the visitors themselves were saying. Local people were telling him that they had found the church on YouTube, discovered a blog post, seen an advertisement, or simply searched for a church and found Oceanside URC.
That is closer to the way digital discovery actually works than the neat marketing funnels people like to draw on whiteboards. Someone may first encounter your congregation in a Google search, then visit the website, then watch a sermon, then read your reviews, then search your pastor’s name, and only after all of that decide to attend. Another person may begin somewhere entirely different and eventually end up in the same place.
In other words, the website, Google Business Profile, YouTube channel, sermon archive, backlinks, and other digital properties reinforce one another. You should not always expect to be able to point to one click and say, “That did it.”
Sometimes the whole ecosystem did it.
The Man ChatGPT Sent to Oceanside URC
The most striking story in the interview concerns a man in his late thirties or early forties who had been away from church for about thirty years.
He had a baby and began thinking seriously about life again. He started asking questions and working through ideas with ChatGPT. Eventually, after a longer process of conversation, he asked what kind of church he should attend. Based on what he had been discussing, ChatGPT suggested that he look for a historic Protestant or Reformed church. He then asked where he might find one.
ChatGPT recommended Oceanside United Reformed Church.
He showed up. Eventually, Danny received him as a communicant member.
It is worth lingering over that story because it clarifies what is actually at stake in church SEO. A marketer could reduce the whole thing to impressions, rankings, traffic, and conversions, and all of those measurements have their place. But this was a man who had not attended church in decades. He began asking serious questions, found a congregation, walked through the doors, and became a member.
That is not merely “traffic.”
It is also a good illustration of why I do not think artificial intelligence makes SEO obsolete. In some ways, it makes the underlying work even more important.
AI Is Changing Search, Not Eliminating the Need to Be Found
There is a lot of discussion right now about “AI SEO,” “GEO,” “AEO,” and whether ChatGPT, Gemini, or some future AI interface is going to replace Google. Some of the terminology is useful, but I think the discussion often makes the change sound more radical than it actually is.
The interface is changing. The underlying problem remains.
Whether a person asks Google for “Reformed churches near me” or spends half an hour discussing theology with ChatGPT before asking which church he should attend, the system still needs information from somewhere. It needs to know that your congregation exists. It needs to know where you are located. It needs to understand what you believe. It needs signals that suggest your information is trustworthy and that your church is actually what you claim it is.
That is why your website still matters. Your Google Business Profile still matters. Your backlinks still matter. Your content still matters. Clear page structure still matters.
In fact, Google Business Profile may become even more valuable precisely because its information is so standardized. Websites are messy. Every church site is structured differently, uses different terminology, and may or may not make basic information obvious. A Google Business Profile presents location, category, reviews, hours, photographs, and other information in a predictable structure that machines can understand easily.
The way people discover you may change dramatically in the coming years. The need to provide clear, credible information about your church will not.
By the Time People Visit, They Already Know You
Danny and I have both noticed something else that has changed over the years: the physical visit is increasingly late in the decision-making process.
Twenty years ago, a church website was often little more than a digital brochure. Someone checked the service time, looked at the address, perhaps glanced at the beliefs page, and then decided to attend. The actual process of getting to know the church happened after the person arrived.
Now Danny regularly encounters visitors who have listened to sermons for months before walking through the door. They know who the elders and deacons are because they have read the biographies. They know when the men’s group meets. They know what the worship service looks like. They know what the church confesses.
By the time they visit, they have already spent a considerable amount of time with the congregation online.
I see the same thing in my own ministry. For many people, Sunday morning is no longer the first serious encounter with a church. It is the final check. They have already been researching, listening, comparing, and evaluating. They arrive wanting to see whether the actual congregation matches the one they have encountered online.
AI will probably accelerate that tendency. The prospective visitor may eventually arrive at your church already 95 or 98 percent convinced that this is where he belongs. The physical visit simply answers the final question: Are these people actually what they appear to be?
That means your digital presence is not incidental to your hospitality anymore. It is increasingly part of your front door.
How Daniel Hyde Does the Boring Technical Work Still Matters
Oceanside URC has also been working through some very ordinary on-page SEO issues. Danny talked about going through existing pages and making sure there is a clear H1 heading, logical H2 and H3 subheadings, useful keywords, and good structure. Their beliefs pages clearly identify things such as the creeds and confessions rather than burying them under vague marketing language.
None of this is exciting enough to sell a conference ticket.
It is also exactly the kind of thing that works.
Search engines and AI systems do better when a page makes its subject obvious. A heading saying “What We Believe” is useful. Subheadings naming the Apostles’ Creed, Heidelberg Catechism, or other confessional documents make the content even easier to understand. A clear page about a church’s theology is much more useful to both a human reader and a machine than a visually impressive page containing three giant photographs and fifty words of vague copy.
Oceanside URC has also done an unusually good job building links. When I checked during our conversation, the church was sitting around a Domain Rating of 30 in Ahrefs, which is very strong for a local congregation. Those links help search engines understand that other websites consider Oceanside URC a legitimate source worth referring people to.
Again, there is no mystery here. Good structure. Useful information. Real links from real websites. Basic SEO, done over time.
“Peck Away” at It
One of my favorite parts of the conversation was Danny’s description of how his church actually approaches the workload.
He and several men from the congregation used ChatGPT, Claude, and other tools to audit the church website. They asked the systems to be critical and tell them what was wrong. The result was an enormous list of possible improvements.
That can be paralyzing. A small-church pastor looks at a fifty-item SEO audit and thinks, “I have shut-ins to visit, a sermon to write, confirmation to teach, a council meeting tonight, and now apparently I need to become a technical SEO consultant.”
Danny’s solution was much more sensible. Treat it as a year-long project and peck away.
Fix a page this week. Add alt text next week. Improve a heading. Publish an article. Upload some photographs. Repair a broken link. Do another little thing after that.
This is much closer to the way good SEO actually happens. You do not need to “finish SEO,” because SEO is not something that gets finished. You build a healthier digital presence gradually, and the improvements accumulate.
That is also the philosophy behind my Church SEO Shape Up newsletter: one task per week. If a church does one useful SEO task each week for a year, it will probably be in an entirely different position twelve months later.
If You Only Have Time for One Thing, Work on Google Business Profile
Danny has also become something of an evangelist for Google Business Profile, and I think he is right.
He tells other pastors to look honestly at their profiles. Perhaps the church has one photograph from three years ago and two reviews. Nothing has been posted in months. The information may technically be correct, but the profile looks abandoned.
His advice is simple. Have someone take photographs regularly. Photograph the church building, the sanctuary, the sign, the view, a church event, or the pastor preaching. Then add new images periodically. Danny also posts an update most Fridays or Saturdays with information about the upcoming Sunday service and a link back to the church website.
Over time, he has seen his profile go from very modest activity to hundreds of interactions.
I have often told churches to treat Google Business Profile like a blog, and Danny picked up on that idea. I think that is exactly the right mental model. It is not merely a static listing containing your address and phone number. It is a living property that should be updated and cared for.
For a church with limited time, this is one of the highest-leverage places to begin.
Your Sermon Archive May Be Your Largest Untapped SEO Asset
Another fascinating part of Danny’s situation is that he has been preaching for twenty-five years and writes full manuscripts.
That means Oceanside URC is sitting on an enormous library of original theological content.
Many churches post sermons only as audio or video. That is certainly better than not posting them at all, but from the standpoint of search, a text version gives search engines and AI systems far more material to work with. The names, biblical texts, doctrines, questions, and explanations in a sermon manuscript can all become searchable.
Danny has therefore started putting sermon manuscripts online alongside video and audio.
This is an enormous opportunity for pastors who have years of old sermons sitting on hard drives. You may already possess hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words of original content. You do not need to manufacture a thousand AI-written articles about Christianity. You may already have a corpus of genuinely pastoral, genuinely theological writing that simply needs to be organized and published.
That kind of content can become increasingly valuable as search engines and AI systems look for detailed, trustworthy answers to theological questions.
Automate the Repetitive Parts
Because small-church pastors have limited time, I am always interested in finding ways to make one piece of work do several jobs.
During the interview, I showed Danny one of the workflows I have been experimenting with. When I publish a sermon or other article on WordPress, an automation watches the site’s RSS feed. It can then take that content and distribute it automatically to places such as Google Business Profile, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
I have been using Make for this, although there are other tools such as Zapier that can accomplish similar things.
The principle is more important than the particular software. The pastor should not have to copy and paste the same sermon description into five different platforms every week if a machine can handle that repetitive work. The human being should spend his time creating the sermon, teaching the faith, and interacting with people. Automation can handle some of the distribution.
For small churches, that kind of leverage matters.
One of My Favorite SEO Tricks: Optimize for the Plural
Toward the end of the interview, I showed Danny a tactic I use on my own sites and on client websites: deliberately optimizing for plural church searches.
People often search for “churches in Oceanside,” “Lutheran churches in Door County,” or “Reformed churches near me.” They are comparing options. That means the plural version of a church keyword can be extremely valuable.
This same principle shows up in other industries. Law firms routinely optimize around terms such as “lawyers,” “attorneys,” and “law offices,” even when the actual practice is relatively small.
I therefore like to incorporate plural church terms into title tags, headings, copy, and internal links when it makes sense. On a client site, I might use a title format such as:
Door County Wisconsin Church | St. Peter’s Lutheran Church | Door County Churches
I may also include a section on the homepage with a heading such as “Churches in Door County” and a paragraph discussing the place of churches in the community.
Is that aggressive optimization? Certainly.
Does it work? In my experience, yes.
Some people get nervous about this kind of thing because they have heard that Google penalizes “spammy” optimization. What they usually fail to appreciate is scale. When Google talks about spam, it is often dealing with enormous websites generating thousands or tens of thousands of low-value pages. A local church deliberately using the phrase “churches in Oceanside” on a relevant page about a church in Oceanside is not remotely the same thing.
I am probably more of an over-optimizer than most people. I can live with that.
The $20,000 Website Nobody Can Find
This led us into one of the more provocative parts of the conversation.
Churches can become very precious about web design. They want enormous photography, clever animation, minimal copy, tasteful white space, and everything else that communicates that the website is professionally designed. Sometimes they spend $10,000 or $20,000 getting it.
There is nothing wrong with a beautiful website. I like attractive websites too. But there is a point at which aesthetics become a vanity project.
If nobody can find the site, none of it matters.
The problem is compounded by the fact that most people now encounter church websites on a phone. On a small mobile screen, many of the dramatic distinctions between expensive custom designs disappear. What matters is that the site is clean, readable, fast, useful, and easy to navigate.
Meanwhile, the things that make designers nervous—substantial text, clear headings, descriptive copy, links, and pages targeting actual searches—are often the very things that make the site useful to search engines and useful to people.
A church website is not primarily an art object. It has a job to do.
People are looking for churches. They are looking for answers. They are looking for sermons. They are trying to understand what Christians believe. Increasingly, they are asking AI systems where they should worship.
Your church ought to be there when they do.
SEO as an Act of Service
That is ultimately why I find church SEO compelling.
Advertising is often about interruption. You are trying to take a little bit of someone’s attention while he is doing something else. Search is different. The person has already told you what he wants.
He is looking for a church.
He is trying to understand suffering.
He is wondering what happens after death.
He is trying to decide whether he ought to return to Christianity after thirty years away.
SEO is about making useful information available in precisely the moment someone is looking for it.
That does not guarantee he will visit your church. It does not guarantee he will believe what you teach. But it does mean that a faithful local congregation can participate in the conversation rather than surrendering every search result to the largest church, the biggest publisher, or whichever website happens to have the largest marketing budget.
Oceanside United Reformed Church is a good example of what can happen when a relatively small congregation takes that responsibility seriously. The work has been incremental. It has involved some advertising, some content, some technical cleanup, some backlinks, some experimentation, and a lot of simply doing the next useful thing.
And now people are finding them.
Some are visiting.
Some are staying.
One man spent decades away from church, asked ChatGPT where he should go, walked through their doors, and became a member.
That seems to me like a pretty good return on some SEO work.
Start With the Church SEO Checklist
If you want to begin improving your own church’s visibility, you do not need to implement everything Danny and I discussed in this interview tomorrow. Start with the fundamentals and work from there.
I have put together a free Church SEO Checklist that walks through the foundational things I recommend churches work on first: the kinds of improvements that help Google understand your church, help prospective visitors find the information they need, and give you a much stronger foundation for everything else you do online.
Download the free Church SEO Checklist at https://churchseo.io/checklist.
Then take Danny’s advice and peck away at it.
One useful improvement this week. Another next week. Keep doing that for a year, and you may be surprised how far a small church can punch above its weight.
