Your church’s Google Business Profile is its most important digital asset, and it’s completely free. But you’re probably not using it or using it incorrectly.
My name is Chris Jackson, but many people call me the SEO Priest, and I’ve helped thousands of churches with their search engine optimization.
Chris Jackson AKA SEO Priest
Today, we’re going to be talking about Google Business Profiles. We’re going to be talking about what they are, why they’re important, and how to optimize them so that they can be your voice to people searching for churches on Google:
- What Is a Google Business Profile?
- Why Your Google Business Profile Matters So Much to Your Church
- Checklist
- How To Optimize Your Church’s Google Business Profile
- Step 1: Claim and Verify Your Church’s Google Business Profile
- Step 2: Optimize the Basics – Name, Category, Address, Phone
- Step 3: Write a Strong Description and Fill Out Every Field
- Step 4: Add Pictures
- Step 5: Use Products, Updates, and Service Areas
- Step 6: External Validation (Citations and Reviews)
What Is a Google Business Profile?
First of all, let’s talk about what a Google Business Profile is. A Google Business Profile is an online profile that Google offers local institutions like businesses and non-profits and churches.
And it has all of your important information on there, like your address, your name, your phone number, and your website. Chances are you already have a Google Business Profile for your church. Google is really good at identifying local institutions, so it’s likely they’ve already added one on Google for you.
Why Your Google Business Profile Matters So Much to Your Church
Now, if you don’t have a Google Business Profile, we’ll talk about how to get one on Google. But before we do that, let’s talk about why a Google Business Profile is so important.
Help Your Church Show Up in Map Results
A Google Business Profile is so important because it’s what lets you show up in the map results on Google, and those map results show up in many different places.
So first of all, in the general Google results. If you search for churches near me, typically at the very top of the page, the first three results are going to be in something that we call the map pack or the local pack. There’s only three churches listed in there, and you want to show up as one of those three churches.
That’s not the only place where you can show up in map results. Google Maps itself is a search engine, so many people will go on Google Maps and scroll around on Google Maps for their local area, or maybe they’ll do a search on Google Maps looking for churches in a certain geographic area.
And your Google Business Profile is what lets you show up in those map results as well.
Your Google Business Profile is how a huge number of people will find your church and get their first impression of your church and figure out if they want to explore more about your church.
Get Your Church in AI
Another very important reason to work on your Google Business profile is because it’s one of the favorite places that AI draws from in order to recommend your church to people. AI combs the internet for information, and it does this for local institutions.
We’re entering into a world now in which the AI bots are doing searches on behalf of the users.
But here’s the thing about a lot of the information it encounters on the internet. It can be hard to understand. When an AI bot lands on a website, it never knows exactly what it’s going to get. The HTML is going be different. The structure is going be different. It’s hard to understand, and it’s expensive to parse that all out.
But when an AI bot hits your Google Business profile, whether that’s Google Gemini or if that’s Google AI mode or if that’s ChatGPT or Perplexity, all of that data is neatly structured and easy for the bots to understand.
So if someone goes on to ChatGPT and says, “Hey ChatGPT, show me a list of good churches near my home in St. Louis, Missouri,” ChatGPT will crawl the internet looking for churches. And when it hits Google Business profiles, and it finds that nicely structured data and a lot of data about a particular church, guess which church it’s going to recommend?
Bless People Here and In Eternity
This gets us to the most important reason to work on your Google Business profile, and that’s because people need to find churches. Think about all the reasons that somebody would be searching for a church. Maybe their marriage is falling apart, and they perceive that one of the last institutions in the US that affirms marriage is churches.
Or maybe it is a young man. Our cultures tends to look down upon young men. He knows that the church is an institution that doesn’t look down upon young men, but instead tries to build them up.
Finally, maybe there’s somebody that’s wrestling with his own sin. And maybe he doesn’t know what waits for him after he dies. And so when someone searches churches near me, he might be just trying to know, “Am I gonna go to heaven or not?” And that’s your opportunity to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to him, to help him know that through the blood of Christ shed for him, eternal life is his.
So I believe in optimizing Google Business profiles because it’s not just about getting people in the pews. SEO for churches is about blessing people here on Earth, and even more importantly, eternally in heaven.
Free SEO Checklist for Churches
Hey, before we go on, I have a free checklist to help you improve your church’s appearance in search products and AI. Go to churchseo.io/checklist to get the checklist. Follow it. Your church will start showing up great online, and will see people coming in to get blessed by your church.
How to Optimize Your Church’s Google Business Profile
How do we optimize your Google Business Profile so that it’s showing up to as many people as possible and giving a great impression to as many people as possible? There are many ranking factors that go into how well a Google Business Profile shows up.
The first and most important factor is location. The closer somebody is to your church, the more likely it is that your church will be one of those top three results when people search churches near me. We can’t influence where your church is located, but there are lots of other ranking factors that we can influence that can help your church show up as one of those top three results in a broader and broader area.
Working on those factors can help you even show up at all when you’re close. I have seen countless churches where you can sit in the parking lot, Google ‘churches near me’, and the church doesn’t show up as one of the top three results. Working on these ranking factors can help you show up at all when people are looking for churches near them.
Step 1: Claim and Verify Your Church’s Google Business Profile
The first thing that you need to do for your Google Business Profile is claim and verify it.
Before we talk about claiming and verifying, there’s a chance, like if your church is new or maybe it’s located in another building that you don’t own, that Google hasn’t added your Google Business Profile yet. So if that’s the case, you can s to business.google.com and add your church.
Now, if you do have that Google Business Profile, you can find it this way. Search for the name of your church and your town. In all likelihood, your Google Business Profile is going to show up right at the top. You’ll see a little link there called Own this business. And if nobody else has claimed that, you can click Own this business, and then you can choose to claim and verify that Google Business Profile.
Now, when it comes to verification, there are lots of different means of verification.. The best form of verification for your Google Business Profile is phone verification. Other forms of verification, like video verification, can get pretty dicey and hard to get through.
When you try to verify via phone, Google will not leave a message, now will it dial through to any extensions. So when you click to verify via phone, you need to make sure that any auto receptionists are turned off so that you can pick up the phone and hear the code that Google’s will give you. One you enter that code, you will be verified.
Once you’ve claimed and verified your Google Business profile, you’ll be able to edit it.
Step 2: Optimize the Basics – Name, Category, Address, Phone
Let’s talk about your name. There are two words you need to have in your name: ‘church’ and the the main location you are trying to target. This is because you are targeting searches like:
- Churches in St. Louis
- Churches in Lexington
- Churches in Kansas City
Putting both the word ‘church’ and your location will help you to rank for those searches.
And when you’re thinking about location, generally think about bigger rather than smaller. So if you’re in the suburb of a larger metro area, always go with that larger metro area. (The one exception to this is if you are in a megacity like Los Angeles or New York. Then, you may want to choose a smaller locale like your borough or neighborhood.)
So like if you’re in Maplewood, Missouri, which is an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis, just choose St. Louis. There’s lots of different ways to do this. Here are some examples:
- Faith Baptist Church in St. Louis
- Faith Baptist Church of St. Louis
- Faith Baptist Church, St. Louis
- Faith Baptist Church | St. Louis
- Faith Baptist Church – St. Louis
This can get a little bit more difficult for churches that have opted for less traditional names. Sometimes you end up with churches calling themselves ministries, for example. Sometimes you get the word chapel. Even in these cases, try to find a way to work the word ‘church’ into your name.
Next comes your category. And for the category, typically I select the broad ‘church’ category. And then if you have another category that applies to you, you’ll have the opportunity to add that as an additional category. And choose as many additional categories as apply to you. So if you’re a Lutheran church, you could select additional categories like:
- Lutheran church
- Christian church
- Protestant church
Once you edit that, you want to make sure that your address and your phone number is accurate.
Step 3: Write a Strong Description and Fill Out Every Field
And then you’ll have as well the opportunity to edit a description. You get 750 characters for your description.
Now, descriptions are places where churches sometimes go off the rails because a lot of times in the descriptions, they put aspirational values in there like, “We are a welcoming church,” or “We are a friendly church.”
These descriptions don’t differentiate your church. Every church considers itself welcoming and friendly.
Other churches will put things in there like, “We are a church for people who don’t like church.” My brother in Christ, besides being an absolutely cringe 2004 thing to promote about your church, there isn’t a single person on earth who goes searching for churches and enters in something like, “church for people who don’t like churches near me.”
So don’t put aspirational values in there as much as hard information about your church that is going to help Google to understand you better so that they can recommend you to more people. Instead, these are the sorts of things people search for:
- LCMS church near me
- Catholic church near me
- Baptist church near me
- churches with good youth groups near me
- churches with contemporary worship near me
- liturgical churches near me
So for example, if you belong to a denomination, that’s a really great place to put your denomination. Spell it out and also abbreviate it. It’s a pretty good practice. If you have things like a youth group, Bible study, women’s group. If there are certain qualities that apply to you, like in my own tradition, a Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, a lot of people like to put the word confessional or liturgical in there. Go ahead and do that.
Whatever hard information about your church that you can put in there is gonna be helpful to help you rank better.
Now, this gets to a concept that a lot of people don’t realize, that specificity is better than generality. Many people think, “I want my church’s online profile to be as generic and general as possible, and that’s going to appeal to more people.” It doesn’t work that way. The more specific you get means that you’re going to rank for those specific niche searches. And as you begin to rank for those niche searches, Google is going to trust you more and more to rank you then for the general searches.
So definitely get as specific as possible and use as many of those 750 characters as possible.
There’s gonna be a lot of other information that you can add in there, like do you have a hearing aid loop? Do you have parking lot? Do you have paid parking on the street? What is your website? All those kinds of things. Just fill that out as accurately and completely as possible.
Step 4: Add Pictures
Good pictures will help engagement with your Google Business Profile, and engagement will help it appear better. If you can afford a professional photographer, this is a great option. Make sure that he has experience both with photographing buildings and events.
However, if a photographer isn’t in the budget, don’t fret. Modern smart phones take great pictures, and many young women (Millenial and younger) tend to be quite good photographers. This can be a great way to get the young women of your congregation engaged.
Step 5: Use Products, Updates, and Service Areas
Then come a few other things that people often overlook that are incredible opportunities for your church.
Products
The first is products. You may be thinking, “Chris, what in the world are you talking about? We’re a church. We don’t have products.” Well, Google lets you put things in there like divine service, Bible study, youth group, and Sunday school. And for all those products, you actually get 1,000 characters of text. It’s a major unlock that most churches aren’t using.
So use those products and put in there all of those things that your church offers.
And once again, this is more of an opportunity to give good, hard, solid facts about your church so that Google can understand you better and then they and the other AI products can help to recommend your church to others.
Posts / Updates
One other feature in Google Business Profiles that they have is posts or updates. (For some reason, Google can’t stick with one term here.) Think of those like blog posts for your Google Business Profile, and you can add events and also generic posts. It’s a good practice that, for example, when you’re getting ready for your vacation Bible school, or you’re recruiting for your Sunday school, or you have a special service coming up, go ahead and add an update for that as an event, or maybe just topical things as well.
The more activity on your Google Business Profile, the more you add to Google’s ecosystem, the better they’re going to like you and the more likely they are to recommend you to others.
Service Areas
One other little secret in Google Business Profiles is that you can add service areas in there. And so for those service areas, add all the locations around you where you would legitimately give ministry. So if you’re gonna go visit someone in the hospital half an hour away, go ahead and add that community in there. Or if you’re gonna go visit a shut-in in the other direction a half hour, go ahead and add that community in there. The more communities you add in there, the more Google understands that you serve a broader area, and the more likely they are to recommend you to people in those areas.
Step 6: External Validation (Citations and Reviews)
So that’s all the content that you need in order for your Google Business Profile to rank well. SEO can always be boiled down to content on the one hand, and external validation on the other. So what are the forms of external validation that your Google Business Profile needs in order to rank well?
Citations
The first form of external validation that your Google Business Profile needs to rank well is citations. What are citations? Citations are references to your name, your address, and your phone number with exact parity to your Google Business Profile broadly across the internet. So you wanna be building these citations, first of all, after you’ve edited your name and your address and your phone number, because you don’t want to have mismatching citations to your name and your address and your phone number.
So get those edited first, and then you can go out and build citations. Directories are a great place to do this. I usually aim for about 50 directory citations. And what these citations do is they give Google greater confidence that if they send people directions to your church, that there’s actually a functioning church at that address. And then it gives Google confidence that if they send a phone call to your phone number, that there’s actually a working phone number there where they can connect with someone who can help them with whatever question or concern they might have.
So the key here, once again, 100% parity to your Google Business Profile, and aim for about 50 as a start to give Google that confidence.
Reviews
Once you’ve built citations, then you need to go on to a review campaign. If there is one single thing I could recommend to your church to do that’s going to help your search engine optimization, it’s to get reviews.
And so you need to be getting reviews as frequently as possible, which means that you need to be asking as frequently as possible. Because believe it or not, it’s actually very difficult to get reviews. Your hit rate for getting reviews is typically going to be pretty low. You can ask people, and the vast likelihood is they’re actually not going to do it.
The first place to start asking for reviews is from your friends and family members. They don’t even have to have been to your church. They’ve still been blessed by your church in one way or another. And you pray for your family and friends, right? So they can leave a review for your church. So call up your mom and your dad, call up your grandmother, call up your aunties and uncles, your cousins. Call up your buddies from college and ask them to give reviews for your church.
In your Google business profile, it actually offers a link that you can give to people that will take them directly to a review form. You should definitely use that because it makes it a lot more easy.
Now, something that you’re going to notice that when you start asking reviews of people who love you, that it’s gonna be very difficult. You’re going to feel awkward asking for those reviews. And that’s a good thing to feel that awkwardness, because if it feels awkward to ask people who love you to leave you a review, it’s definitely gonna feel more awkward to ask others to leave you reviews as well. So start out with the friends and family so that you can start getting that confidence asking for reviews.
Once you’ve done it with friends and family, another good level of hit rate is reciprocal reviews with fellow pastors. So if there are pastors in your denomination that you’re friends with or other pastors in the area, what I like to do is I like to go and leave a review for their church, a nice thorough review that is informative for people, and then I’ll email them with a screenshot of the review that I left for their church and say, “Hey, I just left a review for your church. Do you mind leaving a review for mine?” That’s gonna have a pretty good hit rate.
After that, I’d move on to your church board and ask the people there to leave you reviews. These are some of the most invested people in your church, and so that’s gonna have a pretty good hit rate as well.
Finally, you should probably have a sign up in your entryway. Put it in your bulletin announcements. Put it up on the screen if you’ve got a screen. Those are gonna have some of the lowest levels of hit rate, but you’re still gonna get some reviews trickling in, and that’s going to help you a lot.
You should reply to every single review. And in your review, it’s a good idea if you use some keyword-optimized phraseology. So once again, use the word ‘church’ and also use the community that you serve in
And if you do all these things — in terms of adjusting the content on your Google Business profile, and if you take care of all of these external validations, you’re going to find that you’re going to be one of those top three results in a broader and broader area.
Hey, before we go, make sure to download my free checklist to improve your church’s appearance in online search. Go to churchseo.io/checklist.