Optimize Your Website for Church Online – Interview with Jason Hamrock

 

Bart Blair: Hey, Jason Hamrock, thanks so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me today.

Jason Hamrock: Glad to be here. Thanks, Bart.

Bart Blair: Jason and I have known each other for about a year and a half. Do some work together with a company called Missional Marketing. Jason is the CEO for Missional Marketing. Also has a background in church ministry. Was on staff at a large church in Arizona for over a decade as the communications director and worked for Ramsey Solutions for a while, I believe. Right? And has done a lot of different things, has a lot of different experience in ministry and helping churches solve problems. And right now, the church is having some very unique and different problems, things that we haven’t ever really experienced before, especially as it relates to church online and staying connected, getting connected and being connected with people through the internet. So I invited Jason to spend a little bit of time with me today. Give me a chance to ask him a few questions and have him sort of maybe pull the lid off of some things that maybe we as churches and church leaders can do to better reach people online through our websites and to basically deliver ministry through a website better than maybe we’ve ever considered before. So, Jason, again, thanks. Thanks for taking the time to hang out with me. Say anything about my introduction there that you you want to add to or change.

Jason Hamrock: No. Spot on. Yeah. We’ll talk a little bit more about what mission market does and our desire to search churches.

Bart Blair: Ok, great. So, you know, one of the things that we realized that, as we’ve had sort of this this shift in the way that churches are communicating online is that, you know, we often, especially in our Missional Marketing circle, place a great emphasis on communicating to people who are outside the church. We want to position churches to expand their digital footprint to reach people who don’t yet know that those churches even exist. These days, we’ve kind of shifted online and we’re now really focused as much on helping churches communicate to their own congregations as well as people who are outside of the congregation. So why don’t you break down a little bit, maybe some of the different ways that we use our website to communicate to different audiences?

Jason Hamrock: Well, I love to break our audience up into three different rings. That’s how we’ve kind of done it and Missional Marketing. So RING 1 are your people that go to your church. And no doubt, in this kind of season, with COVID-19, we’re trying to figure out how to connect with them and do ministry online. So that’s a that’s a pretty big ring, but it’s a very important ring. But that’s RING 1.

Jason Hamrock: RING 2 are people that are looking for a church. And of course, that’s in the days before COVID-19. It was, I’m typing in “churches near me” or “best churches around me” because I’m interested in attending church. Well, now that hasn’t necessarily changed. People are still interested. In fact, I think there’s a a better opportunity for churches to connect with people who are sitting in their home on a Sunday morning. They can just kind of tune into YouTube or Facebook live or go to a church’s website. So definitely a different kind of RING TWO, but RING 2 are people looking for a church.

Jason Hamrock: Then there’s a huge ring and RING 3. Those are people that are searching for help with a felt need. And no doubt there is massive amount of felt needs these days, especially in terms of fear. Is this the end of the world? Or what’s that look like? And so people are searching for marriage help, you know, financial help, overcoming grief or fear or suicide, or maybe they’re looking for “who is Jesus?” We call those felt needs. And that’s a massive ring and RING 3. So our our hope and goal is to educate churches about those different kind of rings and then build and implement a plan to go after each ring accordingly.

Bart Blair: Ok. So I’m looking at my church website. What are the things that I need to make sure I’m doing with my church website to effectively communicate to all three of those different audiences?

Jason Hamrock: Well, the way that I usually share that with churches is we typically built our website around RING ONE only. You know, we kind of throw up on people or we make it tough for people, but we just kind of figure out, like if you go to our churches as this is all for you and we’ll sprinkle in like, you know, “if you’re new, click here.” But we really should switch that up a little bit. We should make it more for people that are thinking about going to church and make the home page and a plan to visit page to give them the information they need to feel comfortable to come in and visit you, well, now online, but or in person when when we pass through this COVID-19 thing. But that’s really who we should be building our website for, as is those RING 2 people and having content on our website about RING 3, because we want people that go to your church. They’re going to they’re going to search around, they’re going to click and and find what they’re looking for. They’ll take the time to do that. But as you know, people are kind of impatient. And so if they’re checking you out, make sure you you have your homepage built to connect with them and answer their questions and certainly invite them and show the benefit why they should come to your church.

Bart Blair: What are some examples of the type of content that we should have on our websites for that RING 3 audience?

Jason Hamrock: Oh, my goodness. Well, you definitely want to have individual pages around marriage or parenting or addictions, all the different kinds of addictions, things out there. Certainly  church have a page on like “who is Jesus?” or “meet Jesus” and actually walks them through the gospel. It’s amazing how many churches don’t even have a page dedicated to sharing the gospel with somebody. And I kind of shake my head, and go, wait a minute, isn’t that what we exist? You know what, we’re trying to do that. The other thing is a content online is such an important thing. Google, they care about content. They can crawl content. They can call text and they can crawl like metadata. They can’t crawl images and colors. And they don’t really care about what your website looks like. They care about the content of your website. And so most churches, I get in a conversation with them, they’ll sit there and say, well, Jason, we just have time to create the content. My pushback is, well, actually, you do. Every weekend you write and deliver a sermon, your pastor does. He probably says five to seven thousand words every single weekend. That’s amazing content that you could have on your website. And it’s certainly a good thing to have like Subsplash to present your sermons online. But you also want to take advantage of that content and make sure you’re properly structuring that so that Google would crawl that, give you higher domain authority. But also those keywords. That’s rich content on your website that can be found online in Google.

Bart Blair: Alright, you’re using some pretty technical words there, Meta. And you know…

Jason Hamrock: I get the weeds a little bit.

Bart Blair: That’s OK. It’s OK. Because it’s good to know that some people understand these things because most of us who are pastors in the pastoral world, we don’t know these things. The vast majority of my friends, they’re probably watching this video or probably a small church pastors. Many of them are managing their own website on Squarespace or Wix or, you know, maybe a few have have braved the WordPress world. Maybe the church secretary is doing the weekly updates on the website or the worship pastor. You know, I was a worship pastor for 12 years. And I’m managing the website was a big part of my responsibility. Now, one of the things that you talked about there a second ago was, we build out our websites. We want to make sure that we build out our websites and we focus on that RING 2 traffic. Right now, obviously, things are a little bit different because everybody is outside the physical presence of our church buildings. Are there different things that we ought to be doing with our website, even if it’s just temporary, during the COVID-19 season?

Jason Hamrock: Yes. Yes. You should have a brand new homepage. So, if I could take your current homepage and just set that aside and and not have that be your homepage and create a new homepage, what I would focus on is everything online. Right? So obviously at the top, it’s your COVID response. And maybe that’s a link to a page where you you have some resources. Certainly a link to however, you’re going to do church. So either you’re doing Facebook live or you’re doing YouTube live or you have church online. So you’ve got some other resources that’s on your website. You want to have that front and center. But see, below that, I think you need to also speak into different ways that people can engage your church. How are you doing Children’s Ministry? Are you cutting any videos? They don’t have to be super high polished videos. They could be easy things. Are there were different resources for parents, for their kids? Maybe there’s a spot there to submit a prayer request. That’s a pretty big deal right now. Maybe there’s other options that you’re offering your church members or people in the community to connect like a blood drive or ways that you can serve the community. Everything should be about your response to this COVID-19 on your home page. Take off the plan a in-person visit or take off the “what to expect when you come,” “come casual.” Like, that’s information that doesn’t relate. And so you need to push that aside. Don’t have those events. We’re going to have a pancake. You’re not going to have that anymore.

Bart Blair: I’m just I’m visualizing everyone can come casual now. You can come so casual….

Jason Hamrock: Super casual.

Bart Blair: you don’t even have to get out of your pajamas. Right?

Jason Hamrock: And walk to your family room. That’s it. That’s right.

Jason Hamrock: You want to get rid of the the things that you were doing while you were meeting in person. Don’t communicate that on your home page. Make it all about this crisis that we’re in. Maybe there’s a section on there if you’re feeling fearful: Click here. And your pastor could cut a video, could literally record a message on his iPhone, upload that and people could watch that. Things I’m trying to help churches… Don’t try and throw up on Facebook, if you will. Right. Be careful with that. Take a proper approach to that, but drive more people to your website where they can get answers.

Bart Blair: Yeah, that’s a really helpful advice, I think. It’s tricky. It’s tricky to know really what you should be communicating and how much to be communicating. I think that your advice about, kind of, hiding all of the stuff that is talking about the in-person engagement at this particular point is pretty helpful. In fact, I think in WordPress you can literally build a new page, make it your new homepage and unpublish your current homepage so that it kind of hides it. Pretty simple to do.

Bart Blair: Jason, what are some things that you see that churches do, unwittingly, they’re not doing it intentionally, but things that churches do on their church websites that actually hurt more than they help?

Jason Hamrock: A lot. Most of the time, we have our content on our websites, we Christianese things. Like we’ve said, things that only people that go to your church would understand. You know, we we put calendar events on things, we name things that only inside people would know. We have to be very, very mindful that your website is is well, now it is 100 percent your front door to your church, 100 percent. Right. So we have to do things and say things on our website that connect with people that maybe have never even been to church. And even if you’re a small church, you don’t want to be, I said throwing up, but you don’t want to be talking about things that people just wouldn’t understand. If they’ve never been to church before, which is a growing amount of our population these days, unfortunately. They’ve never stepped foot in a church except for maybe a a wedding or a funeral. Then you want to connect with them because if they’re interested in coming to church, be very upfront with them. Be very inviting to them, but share benefit for why they should come to your church. Often we just, you know, skip right over that. We think they’re going to come just because they’re on your website. That’s not true anymore. I’m a big fan of, everybody should read this book from Donald Miller called Building a Storybrand.

Jason Hamrock: It’s a great, great book on how you can really position your homepage on the benefits for why somebody should come to your church. And these days, we have to communicate that. And so, other than the sharing all the information that a calendar or a daily Bible verse that really nobody really connects with anymore, because you can find that on social media all over the place. I think you really want to be very much focused on RING 2 people that are thinking about coming to church. And I’d also include RING 3 people on some of the top searched things out there. Certainly if you look at Google Trends, the keyword “fear” is up and to the right because with all that’s going on these days, people are very fearful. So address that on your home page, right. Address how to have a stronger marriage, how to overcome financial difficulties, how to connect with Jesus. Those are just simple things that you can have on your website that that connect with RING 2, RING 3 and really actually RING 1 people now because they can’t get their daily you know, they can’t show up on Sunday and they can’t go visit pastors. They can call. But still, people are just kind of freaking out.

Bart Blair: Yeah, it actually reminds me of something, you mentioned Google Trends and maybe we’re Internet nerds, but I love Google Trends. And I think it’s a tool that pastors need to figure out a better way to utilize when developing their content, planning sermons, launching new ministries. And before we started recording, you and I were talking about the fact that prayer requests… If you go to Google Trends and you type in “prayer requests,” you can see up and to the right. People are searching for places that they can submit prayer requests. So going back to the question that I asked you a few minutes ago about, you know, things that should be on your, probably not just your temporary, but your permanent home page, or at least somewhere easy to find, is a place where people can submit prayer requests. There’s not a lot of physical, tangible ministry that we can do to be missional in our communities today. But when we realize we’ve got so many people who are going through super, super difficult times, financially, people are dealing with fear and anxiety and stress of this whole COVID-19 thing that we can still pray. And that’s actually, as followers of Jesus, it’s the most powerful tool that we have, is our ability to present our requests to God. So I just thought I’d throw that in there as a side note, because it made me think of that when you said Google Trends.

Jason Hamrock: Yeah. And I’ll piggyback on that.

Jason Hamrock: So there’s a small church in Southern California, it’s kind of a start up church that I bet we serve at Missional Marketing. This pastor and his wife, brilliant. They actually went to Facebook and they put out a Facebook post and they do this often. I think they boost it as well, to say, if you have a prayer request, click here, which it gets the Facebook-bot going. So you could do it like a message to the pastor and just submit your prayer request.

Jason Hamrock: So people do this a lot, in the thousands. And so they’re sending a prayer request. Well, he and his wife will read those prayer requests. They will record, in Facebook, they’ll record the answer. They’ll pray as a video. They’ll pray for that prayer request and send it back to the person and then say, we would love to connect with you and invite you to our church. And he has had several hundred people come to his church, small church, several hundred people come to church just because of that act. That the pastor prayed, sincerely prayed, and sent that video back to that user. How amazing is that? That’s being the hands and feet right there. And he’s actually growing his church just by simply praying. And so I would encourage all churches, but especially smaller churches. You can make a huge difference in your community right around you simply by praying and using digital tools to help grow your church, as of right now. In these days, even when we can’t be there in person, we can still grow it online.

Bart Blair: Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing that. Now, I’m going to go back to things that churches do on their websites that hurt more than they help. You talked about the way that we present our church through language, through images. What we’re what we’re communicating in terms of content. What kind of technical things do we do on church websites that sometimes hurt more than help?

Jason Hamrock: Oh, well, technically speaking, if you really, it depends on the platform you’re using because there’s certain platforms that run church websites that are just horrible for Google. They just are. No way to sugarcoat that. I’m not going to mention any, but I really am bigger fans of…

Bart Blair: I would’ve bleep them out if you had.

Jason Hamrock: Yeah, you’re probably would. I’m a big, big, big, big fan of WordPress or Squarespace because those are kind of what are called open source platforms. Google loves those because groups like us, companies like ours, can get in there and optimize your website to really meet the needs of the people right around your community so that when somebody’s searching, you’ll show up and the search engines. Other platforms don’t really have that. So that’s a technical issue with a lot of church-based websites is they just don’t, they’re not found online. I mean, I would encourage anybody, wherever you are in your church, just Google. “I need help with my marriage” or “how to know who Jesus is” and tell me if your church even shows up. Probably isn’t going to show up in the first 10 pages of Google if the first 20 pages of Google. That’s a problem because you can go to Google Trends and find how many people are searching for that. So to me, there’s a lot of technical difficulties. And at Missional Marketing, we love to help out with that by offering free tools. We’ll run an audit of your website and show you the good, the bad and the ugly of what your website looks like and then give you a plan to go fix that. So there there’s a lot of other local SEO tools we can use, some keyword audits we can do to, help you understand just the position of your website when it comes to Google so that you are equipped. You’re educated and you’re equipped with tools on what you can do to move forward and fix it.

Bart Blair: Yeah, I think for you know, for years as a pastor, when I was building running my own websites for the churches that I was serving in, I had this mentality that the homepage was going to be where everybody entered my website. And I began to realize over time, especially with good content on a website, when it’s optimized for search, there will probably always be more traffic to the homepage that that leads in from the home page, than any other pages, but a significant amount of content on the website is accessed through side doors and back doors. People are finding it through search if it’s optimized for search through Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo, whatever their search engine. Very few. But it has to be optimized for search in order for people to find that. And what I realize is that the people who are finding that content are people who are skipping the stuff that they don’t need in order to find exactly what it is that they do need. So, you know, having a page on how to communicate better in marriage or practical tips on parenting, parenting teenagers, guidance on what to do with finances. You know, I talk with churches all the time that run 12-Step recovery programs, things like Celebrate Recovery and Regeneration and others like that. And I look at their websites and very seldom do they ever have any real fleshed out content on the website related to those particular ministries. Yet those are the types of things that people are searching all the time. Help with addiction, help overcoming all these different things. And we’re offering these ministries in our church. But unless somebody knows to look for it on our church website, they’re never going to find it unless we’ve built out that content in a way that makes it searchable.

Jason Hamrock: Spot on. Exactly. Because if you look at your Google Analytics, I don’t want to get technical, but every almost every church has Google Analytics. Analytics is just a way of looking to see what were those pages that people went to first? Right. And then how long did they stay on there? What did they do next? All that stuff’s available in analytics. And you’d be amazed how many people would go straight to that particular page. And that’s the beauty of Google is, and when we talk about Google, Google is 92% of all searches online are done in Google. So nine out of ten people use Google. One other person uses some other search engine. So we really talk about Google. We’re talking about almost the entire internet of when people search. And like you just said, if somebody is searching for how to be a better husband or a better wife, they’re wanting to fix their marriage or parenting or any of those kind of keywords, those felt needs, then that page can show up if you have it built in such a way that Google likes it. And that’s the kind of stuff we want to educate churches on and help them understand that. They do have plenty of content. I almost guarantee that every church that’s listening to this has had some kind of a sermon series on marriage. We just know this. That is phenomenal content, but it’s probably not structured so that Google even knows it exists. So we can help with that.

Bart Blair: That’s a really good point. I just want to take a couple more minutes. But one of the things I want to do as we wrap up is, I didn’t ask you to have this conversation with me to do a commercial for Missional Marketing, although I love Missional Marketing. I think that the work that Missional Marketing does is phenomenal. And I am biased. But I do want to let you just speak a little bit about some of the key things, you’ve already mentioned a few of them just in passing, but a few of the key things that Missional Marketing does for churches, particularly like small and mid-sized churches that really help them gain traction online and increase their digital footprint, especially as it relates to reaching people who are outside of the church.

Jason Hamrock: Yeah, we have a big heart for every church, but especially start-up churches and smaller churches that want to grow. But they just need some expertise. They just need some direction on what they do. And we’re working with a lot of churches around the country and our pricing is very affordable because we’re working with smaller churches. We understand this. So we’ve built our model in such a way to be able to serve smaller churches and kind of fill the gaps if they’re, you know, anybody from administrative assistants to executive pastors or worship pastors that are kind of overseeing their website, we want to have those conversations to help educate and equip them so that we can help make decisions and actually put together a game plan. So if it’s running a campaign to reach new people in Facebook or Google Display or YouTube or it’s actually using the Google Grant was something we can talk about and how you can get some free advertising in Google search from Google. Great opportunity. Or if it’s optimizing your website, maybe building a new home page with this COVID-19 thing, we can do that it’s very affordable because work with so many. That’s really our vertical is churches. And the lane we stay in is really helping reach unchurched people, connect with a local church to help grow your church. And so between the three different RINGS, we’ve got strategies on all three of those different RINGS that we’ve implemented with hundreds of churches.

Bart Blair: That’s great. So if somebody wants to get in touch with you or find out more about Missional Marketing, some of the services, how would you recommend that people do that?

Jason Hamrock: Probably the best way is go to MissionalMarketing.com and look around our website, by the way. But you can connect with us by clicking on our schedule an appointment. You can schedule an appointment with me or one of our church growth experts, and they’d have a conversation with you about what your needs are and walk you through and present some reports. Or you can send me a direct e-mail if you’d like. aArt, you could probably put that on there, but it’s jhamrock@missionalmarketing.com. Pretty simple. And I respond to all my emails and I would love to talk with any church that is just wanting to learn more about what they can do in this, especially now during this kind of crisis mode. But really, then what, after we’re past this, what does that mean for doing church in-person versus online? Those are some fun conversations that we’re having.

Jason Hamrock: I think there’s a lot of silver lining to this. And I think it’s a great opportunity for every church, very, very small or the biggest in the country to continue to grow, to reach more people, because we know there’s a lot of people out there that need this hope that we can offer. and his name’s Jesus.

Bart Blair: Jason, thanks so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate your heart. And I appreciate you hanging out with me for a little bit time today. Thanks. Thanks for taking this time with me.

Jason Hamrock: Thanks for having me. Bart, my pleasure.

Seth Muse: Thank you, Bart, I appreciate it.