Digital Doulos › Services › Local search
Be the church they find when they search for one.
Somebody three streets away types “churches near me” on a Saturday night. There is a fair chance you are not in that list at all, and a better chance the version of you that shows up has the wrong service times on it.
$299 a month · $349 on a site we don't hostThis is the slow one, and we'd rather you knew that first.
Local search compounds over months, not weeks. Nobody can promise you a ranking, and anyone who does is either guessing or lying. What we can promise is that the work is real, it is the same work we did for companies far larger than your church, and you will see exactly what happened every month.
If you want people in the building by Christmas, start with the Ad Grant. This is the one that is still paying you in three years.
Five things, done properly, every month.
Your Google Business Profile, claimed and kept true
This is the single highest-leverage thing on the list and most churches have never touched it. Correct hours including the ones that change at Christmas and Easter, real photographs of the entrance, the right category, service times, and someone actually answering the questions strangers post on it.
Church and Event structured data
The machine-readable version of who you are, where you meet and what is on this week. It is how a church turns up in map results and how a Christmas Eve service appears in Google's event listings. It is nearly free to do and almost nobody in this market does it.
Pages for the towns you actually draw from
Not spun doorway pages — real ones. If a third of your congregation drives in from the next town over, that town deserves a page that says something true about the drive, the parking, and who from there already goes.
Review requests, handled for you
A church with nine reviews outranks one with none, and asking is the entire trick. We build the ask into the rhythm of the year so it never falls to a staff member to feel awkward about.
Every sermon transcribed — the one nobody expects
This is the sleeper. Transcribing your archive turns decades of preaching into searchable text: every passage, every topic, every question your pastor has ever answered from the front. A church with twenty years of sermons has, without knowing it, one of the deepest bodies of content in its whole town.
It is also an accessibility win for the part of your congregation that needs captions and would never ask for them.
What the first six months look like.
- Month 0We tell you where you actually stand.A plain audit: what you rank for now, what your Business Profile says about you, which of your neighbours is beating you and why. Often uncomfortable and always useful. You get this whether or not you carry on.
- Month 1The profile and the plumbing.Business Profile claimed and corrected, structured data in place, the technical faults fixed. This is the month with the biggest gap between how little there is to look at and how much has changed.
- Months 2–4Content, and the archive.Town pages, ministry pages that answer real questions, and the sermon back-catalogue transcribed and tagged. Rankings start moving in this window, usually on the specific things first.
- Months 5–6Compounding, and honest reporting.By now the monthly email has a trend in it rather than a snapshot. If it doesn't, we will say so plainly rather than send you a chart that flatters us both.
Fair things to ask.
Can you guarantee we'll rank first for "churches in our town"?
No, and nobody can. Google does not sell that and does not take instruction. What we can tell you is where you stand today, what is realistically reachable, and what it will take — and then show you the movement every month, including the months there isn't any.
How is this different from what a web designer would do?
A designer builds the page. Search is about whether that page is ever put in front of anybody, which is a different discipline with different tools. Our founder spent twenty-two years doing this one, most recently leading search for Fortune 500 companies.
We're a small church. Is this overkill?
Possibly, and we will say so on the call. If you are a congregation of forty in a village with one church, local search has very little work to do — you are already the answer. This earns its keep in towns and suburbs where somebody genuinely has a choice and is deciding between you and four others.
Do we need you to host our site for this?
No. It's $349 a month on a site we don't control, against $299 when we do — more, not less, because a site we cannot edit is slower to move and harder to fix. Yes, that means the version where we also build and host you a website is the cheaper one. That is not a trick; it is just what the work actually costs. And there is a floor below which we would rather decline than take your money and fight someone else's platform every month.
Should we do this or the Ad Grant first?
The Ad Grant, almost always. It is free money from Google, it works within weeks rather than months, and it works on the site you already have. Local search is what you add when you want the effect to still be there in three years.
We'll tell you where you stand, free.
Before anything is signed. Twenty minutes on the phone and we'll look up what you currently rank for, what your Business Profile says, and whether this is even the right thing for your church to spend money on.