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Eastland Baptist Church (EBC) is a large church located in Tulsa, OK. They had several upgrades going on at their church and were in need of increasing their organic presence on search. They needed an audit of their current SEO practices and a strategy to move forward.
When reviewing the EBC site, there has been some growth in the past 12 months, by it very quickly started to stagnate. It came to my attention that it wasn’t because of increased SEO work, but because there was higher search volume for branded keywords. EBC was having their congregation engage with the site more which caused an increase in organic traffic to the site.
To increase their rankings for more searches, I recommended they start publishing their sermons on their site. While this isn’t directly SEO, most of the sermons are addressed in a topical way, which directly answers questions EBC could answer. The main thing I recommended was to optimize the question for SERPs.
One core issue we saw on the site was that 24% of the content was duplicate content. This wasn’t because there was a lot of duplicate content, but because of a lack of content volume on the site. Simply put, EBC needed to add more unique content to their site to reduce the ratio of duplicate content.
EBC did not include alt text on their images. It is important to include the alt text for screen readers, site crawlers, and as a backup if the image doesn’t load. I instructed EBC to include alt text that was an accurate description of the image.
Additionally, the images needed to be made responsive. While the images would size down based on the screen size, they were still showing the same resolution image. I recommended that they show a lower resolution for smaller devices to keep loading speeds up.
There was no Google Analytics installed on the site. While some SEOs disagree whether GA4 is a ranking factor or not, I tend to lean to the idea that it is. Regardless, it doesn’t hurt to have it installed. I recommended that EBC install GA4 and set up custom events and conversion tracking. From there, they can build out reports, funnels, and explorations to see how people engage with their site and what improvements EBC can make.
Loading speed is the biggest thing that was hurting the EBC site. On PageSpeed Insights, desktop scored 64 and mobile scored 14. Those are some pretty rough numbers. The best optimizations EBC can do is eliminate render-blocking resources and reduce the amount of unused JS.