Creating a weekly event for your small church service on Craigslist is a way that we've discovered to "cheat" traditional website SEO and rank in the search engines.
This is one of those crazy marketing tricks that seems a little bit too good to be true. Here is a screenshot just so you believe me.
On the morning I took this screenshot, our ad was appearing on page 3 of Google, but there have been quite a few times that I've seen these roll up on page one. One other fun note for us church planting types... notice that directly above our ad are a huge local Catholic church and one of the mega churches nearby. Creating an event on Craigslist basically gives you a free pass when it comes to SEO!
It is impossible to tell how long this quirk will last. If there are any marketing nerds out there, I suspect that it has to do with the new schema.org markup Google is relying on and how well Craigslist structures the data that you send to their site.
Will This Get People to my Church Plant?
Here is what I learned as a church shopper. Sunday morning comes and you feel lost because you still haven't found a church to call home. You've visited quite a few churches. So you head to Google to see if there any other local churches you might have missed. What you desperately want to find is that "diamond in the rough" that you missed on the first pass. This is where I believe your church plant comes in.
Hear me on this... from a pure website analytics standpoint, you won't generate many direct clicks to your website from a Craigslist ad. However, the people that do find your ad on Google are the ones who really need a church to call home.
Church plant marketing boils down to this... if a person in your area is looking for a church, they 1) have to be able to find you through a Google search and 2) need to be able to learn enough about your church to know that you are safe to visit.
How to Build Your Craigslist Event Ad
These ads are wildly simple to build, but the really exciting part is that once taken the 10 minutes to build the ad, you can simply "repost" it week after week in under one minute.- Log into Craigslist at https://accounts.craigslist.org/ (create an account using your church email address if you don't have one)
- Create a new posting. If you are logged in, look for a box that says "new posting in:" near the upper right corner
- Under "What Type of Posting?", select Event
- Under "Categories", choose Events
- Choose the proper location
Now let's talk about the details of the ad itself. The Google search you are trying to win is "church in CITYNAME". I'm going to use "church in Woodinville" in this example.
- Event Start/End Date - Obvious
- Contact Info - I never include an email address for people to reply to, I suspect it will just create a bunch of spam. A link to our church is on the ad.
- Title - Church in Woodinville
- Location - Woodinville, WA
- Zip Code - Obvious
- Body
- The first sentence is what will show up as the description in the Google search result. Don't forget your city/state here. Here is what we use: "Imprint Church is a non-denominational Christian church in Woodinville that was planted in the fall of 2012."
- The remaining content should tell them what to expect if they come and visit you. These are a lot of the same talking points I laid out What to Include on a Church Plant Website.
- ok for others to contact you about other services, products or commercial interests
Photos in Your Church Event Ad
Once you build the basic ad, you are going to be asked to add photos. DO IT! I want you to include pictures of:
- People worshiping in your church (this is the primary photo)
- A kid happily enjoying Sunday School (with the parent's permission)
- Adults hanging out and talking
As a tip, upload photos that are all the same size and oriented horizontally. If you add wide landscape photos and tall vertial photos, it makes your ad look wonky.
Publish the Craigslist Ad
Once you've moved through those two basic setup steps, you can publish the ad. For newer accounts, Craigslist tends to make you respond to an email confirmation before they will actually put the ad online. Make sure you don't miss that small step.
And Now the Easy Part... Reposting
This is the thing that I love about Craigslist... reposting your ad is free, fast, and easy. Just log into your account and click "repost" next to your expired ad. All you need to do is change the date each week and recycle this ad over and over again. Who said marketing can't be easy?
I would recommend making this an activity that is performed every Monday by a volunteer in your church.
Summarizing this Post
Craigslist events are free to create and seem to be beating out traditional website SEO right now. All you need to do is build the initial ad and set a reminder to repost it once a week.
Nobody is going to be on Craigslist looking for a church service. This is all about appearing in the search engine results.
Make sure you verify that this trick works in your local area by searching on Google a day after you post the ad to make sure it still shows up.
