DIY SEO 14: Tracking Your Success for your Church or School

With Churches especially and to some extent Schools, success of SEO is not able to be completely tracked online. People who search for your church may find your website and then come to a church service without contacting anyone through the website. The tracking we discuss in the main article will show that someone found your site, but it won’t let you know that their finding your site led to a new visitor to your church. Similarly, someone may find a school’s website and call them to setup an appointment to visit the school. Again, analytics will show you that someone visited your site, but it won’t tell you that the visit lead to a visit or even a new student.

Because of the conversions for churches and schools are often off-line conversions, the tracking for these conversions must be off-line as well.  So, I encourage you to develop off-line tracking methods to allow you to track these conversions.

Here are some possible ways of tracking off-line conversions:

• Add “How did you hear about us” to visitor cards / sign-in book.  Most churches have either visitor cards or visitor sign-in books.  Instead of just asking for their name and contact info, ask them how they found the church.
• Have receptionist/secretary ask.  For schools, whoever answers the phone to setup prospective visits from parent ask how they heard about the school.

The basic idea behind any offline tracking is going to be the same, you have to ask.  So, it’s important to setup procedures for doing that so it get’s done and you have that information.

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What tracking do you do for your website?

Do you have another tracking method that you use?

DIY SEO 13: Optimizing Your Web Pages <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #15: Becoming More Competitive