What Every Church Leader Should Know about Google My Business

This is the first post in a new series on digital marketing for churches!

For all the attention that churches focus on their website, there's another (easier!) tool that determines how, when, and where you show up in Google's search results.

And no, I'm not talking about Google Ads, or paid listings in the Google search results. I'm talking about Google My Business (formerly Google Places), the app that feeds a church's address, phone number, website, and operating hours into Google's all-powerful search engine. Google My Business (GMB) is a free service that helps organizations to increase website and foot traffic by providing key pieces of information to people searching for local resources.

An animated GIF showing local search results taken from Google My Business

In this article, we'll explore why Google My Business is so critical to a church's online presence, especially during COVID-19, and how you, the church leader, can make the most of this free technology.

Google My Business: An Essential Marketing Tool

Perhaps the fastest-growing category of web searches is for services "near me." When searchers turn to Google for information, they increasingly do so with the intent of finding directions, operating hours, contact information, and customer reviews for nearby businesses and organizations. This matters a great deal for churches.

While searches for "church" have stagnated or declined in the past decade, searches for the query "church near me" have increased by nearly 100x since 2013.

This shapes church marketing tactics because the search term "near me" tells Google to search Google's own local search data, listings that are populated from Google My Business.

From the standpoint of acquiring web traffic, today's church leader will find more value from claiming and optimizing their Google My Business listing than their own website! Unfortunately, 56% of all local organizations (those with some brick-and-mortar presence) have not claimed their Google My Business listing. Among churches, where tech adoption usually lags businesses and other non-profits, this percentage is likely much higher.

The information you include in your church's Google My Business listing will show up on Google.com. It will show up on Google maps. It will tell searchers if your ministry is open or closed. It provides photos, answers user questions, and lists user reviews. It is critical that today's church leader keeps this listing accurate and up to date!

An unclaimed Google My Business listing with little to no information about the church

GMB doesn't require much active maintenance. It's likely far less work than your church website. All you, the church leader, must do is to:

• Claim your listing. You'll need a Google (ie, Gmail) account. Google has thoroughly documented the steps involved in claiming a listing, and they're fairly easy to follow. While it can take several days for Google to complete the verification process, most church leaders I have worked with have no difficulty with this step.

• Ensure an active church leader has access to edit the listing. It's important that an active church leader be listed as a GMB owner, meaning they can make changes when needed. For this reason, it's advisable to log into GMB with a church email address, one that remains within the church during staff transitions. Transferring ownership is, again, a simple process that Google has documented.

• Upload core church information. Add business hours, update addresses and phone numbers, link social media accounts, and include recent photos. Logos, cover photos, and additional photos don't just make your listing more visually appealing, they also help with boosting your ranking in Google's search results.

• Update the listing when you change worship times, operating hours, or contact information.

Updating Google My Business Listings for COVID-19

COVID-19 continues to disrupt church operations, especially with regard to worship. Since your church's Google My Business listing continues to show up in search results, it's critical that this listing accurately reflect current operations. Updating your listing for COVID-19 makes it clear to searchers how they can engage with your ministry, while likely boosting your search rank on Google's search engine.

Some churches have marked themselves as "temporarily closed" on Google My Business. I would advise against this. A "temporarily closed" flag on Google My Business suggests to searchers that your ministry is offering no services at all at the moment, either online or in-person. Unless your ministry has completely shut down (ie, no online worship, no online community whatsoever), you shouldn't use the "temporarily closed" flag.

Instead, use the "Online Attributes" feature within Google My Business to highlight what your ministry is up to online. Online attributes don’t show when a business is marked "Temporarily closed." When logged into your church Google My Business account, navigate to the "Stay connected during COVID-19” dashboard card. You'll have option to provide information about online worship, virtual events, and other aspects of the digital community within your congregation. GMB managers should also consider adding a brief "COVID-19 Post" to provide the search engine with a synopsis of how your ministry has adapted.

What To Do With Reviews

Creating, updating, and changing a listing for COVID might seem daunting, but each of these tasks can be accomplished in one or two sittings. But there's one area of GMB that requires some active maintenance. As a church leader, you'll want to regularly check your Google My Business listing to engage with new reviews. From a user's standpoint, searchers want to click on listings and explore ministries with a high rating. This makes Google more-likely to feature the listings with the highest reviews atop its rankings.

To that end, I recommend the following three practices for handling Google My Business in a way that is empathetic, pastoral, and aligned to the realities of search engine marketing. First, encourage your community to leave a review for your church by clicking the "Write a review" link atop your search listing. Second, regularly respond to most, if not all, reviews. Thank your positive reviewers for their affirming message. Invite your negative reviewers (if you have any) to contact a pastor for a follow-up conversation. Every organization has some negative reviews, churches are no different. What matters is that you try to turn negative reviews into a conversation. Third, flag reviews that are inappropriate or dishonest. Churches can be targets for trolling and cyber-bullying. Take the time to report malicious reviews to Google.

Google My Business does not require hours of active maintenance or strategic thought. It doesn't take a web marketing guru to curate an effective Google My Business listing. By following the steps in this guide, you'll help your ministry to stand out in this digital age, during COVID and beyond.

Book Review: The Advice Trap by Michael Bungay Stanier

Best-selling author Michael Bungay Stanier wastes no time getting to the point in his latest book, "The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever." Whereas business authors often rely on circuitous, indirect reasoning in an attempt to generalize their ideas to as broad an audience as possible, Michael Bungay Stanier jumps right to it: "Your advice doesn't work."

Why the crusade against giving advice? Whether you're a Fortune 500 CEO, a middle manager at a startup, or just starting your career in a frontline position, you likely give advice to friends, to coworkers, to customers. But the advice doesn't work. It doesn't solve problems. It doesn't make our peers, friends, and colleagues wiser, more productive, more autonomous. Not only does the advice not work, but it's also adversely affecting both your performance and the performance of your team. To Bungay Stanier, our propensity to dole out advice freely and excessively is a leading cause of dysfunction within our organizations, one that renders us less engaged, less autonomous, and less happy. Our cultural inclination to sling advice leads to a collective sense of learned helplessness.

For Bungay Stanier, the act of jumping to advice is a tacit statement that we, the advice giver, are "better than the other person." When you give advice, "You're saying they're not smart enough, wise enough, resilient enough, capable enough, competent enough, generous enough, trustworthy enough. You're saying that they're not good enough." Since we don't fully understand the situation of those to whom we are giving advice, since we don't appreciate their context and the scope of the problems, our advice is weak and flimsy at best, condescending at worst. Regardless of intention, our advice is rarely put into practice.

Bungay Stanier argues that our whole tendency to launch into advice-giving comes from our innate need to exert control over a situation. We develop advice-giving habits and even advice-giving cravings. Situating advice in the frameworks of "Atomic Habits" and "The Power of Habit," the book argues that we become wired for advice-giving in response to ambiguity or distress, which in turn triggers a dopamine release leading to repeated advice-giving.

As one might expect from the author of "The Coaching Habit," this book proposes a remedy that relies on coaching. The artful application of seven coaching questions empowers our colleagues to solve problems for themselves, making it all the more likely that they'll actually solve the problem. But it's insufficient to know about these seven questions. What's needed instead is the establishment of a new habit, a new way of relating to our peers, friends, and family. For Bungay Stanier, that new habit is being "coach-like." Not hiring a professional coach, not seeking out coaching training, but gradually integrating "coach-like" behaviors into our practices. Coach-like behaviors include asking questions, staying curious, being comfortable with silence, and clarifying ambiguity. None of these comes easily in a fast-paced, advice-prone culture. But when we find opportunities to be intentional in applying them, we see that they are intrinsically rewarding. And we observe that they actually solve problems, they actually get things done.

That's why "The Advice Trap" is an essential follow-up to "The Coaching Habit," because it shows us what we're up against when we seek to be more coach-like. In turn, it gives us the tools to break through this resistance, the tactics we need to establish a culture of coaches.

Beyond the insightful content, "The Advice Trap" is a fun, laugh-out-loud read. It's the rare business book that you'll actually want to read and apply right away, it's the rare coaching text that you'll want to devour all at once. Through sharp wit, well-used brevity, and innovative type-setting, "The Advice Trap" can easily be read in one or two sittings, just as it can be re-read in brief moments between meetings, when faced with the demands of an uncertain world, when we set an intention to be more coach-like.

Build coaching skills with "nudges"

This post is the fifth in the Training in Turbulence series, which explores how to develop talent amidst the disruption and volatility of the COVID-19 pandemic. Talent developers will find that the concept of nudges pairs well with micro-learning, as described in the last post!

From programs to systems

Before COVID-19, talent developers taught coaching skills in “macro-learning” contexts that required considerable resources, particularly of that increasingly-important resource: employee time. As this resource wanes amidst economic disruption, talent developers have to develop alternative strategies for building core skills. One such strategy, that of behavioral nudges, doesn’t just require “less” of learner’s time. It requires no time investment whatsoever.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest in their book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" that “nudges” are strategic configurations of the “choice architecture” surrounding behaviors. Those who want to use nudges to improve the performance of a skill, say coaching, should seek to influence the “physical, social, and psychological aspects of the contexts that influence and in which our choices take place – in ways that promote a more preferred behavior rather than obstruct it.” If we want to develop coach-like behaviors through nudges, we need to stop managing learning programs - and start acting on organizational systems.

Getting started with nudges

At first, this may seem daunting. Many of us were educated in the traditions of cognitivism or other theories of education, trained to teach primarily through the well-sequenced delivery of high-quality content. In support of this, we learned to work within a system. We didn’t learn to be architects of the system itself. If we want to build nudges, we need to give ourselves the time and patience to learn this new tactic. Still, I believe that everyone in this profession can affect positive outcomes through nudges, regardless of our level of experience or expertise with this type of intervention.

Let’s start with the basics. To create nudges that assist in the building of coaching skills, we need an awareness of when, where, and why coaching should ideally take place within our organization. When we isolate these variables, we begin to understand the best place to deploy a nudge.

Since workplace coaching originated with formal “sessions,” team meetings and 1:1s are the natural places to begin. Team meetings often have a recurring cadence, they occur in conference or huddle rooms, and they provide an opportunity for coaching because they are the typical setting for performance-oriented conversations.

When considering the physical, social, and psychological aspects of team meetings and 1:1s, perhaps we are drawn to that physical (or virtual) organizing tactic that guides nearly all of these interactions: meeting agendas. Meeting agendas are often “topical,” in that they sequence a list of items for discussion. It is here that we can apply a simple nudge to encourage coaching behaviors by writing each agenda item not as a topic, but as a question. Then, below each question, we might include 2-3 coaching questions. For example, let’s say a manager and an employee are reviewing candidate resumes in search of a third member to add to their team. Rather than writing “candidate selection” or “new employee hiring” atop the agenda, the manager can add the question: “What next steps must we take in our hiring process?” Below this question, they add three popular, practical coaching questions: “What do we know to be true about each candidate? How can we separate the facts from our judgments? And if we say yes to this candidate, what are we saying no to?” By formatting meeting agendas in such a way, the manager nudges their meetings away from reporting sessions and towards coaching opportunities.

But coaching as a habit cannot be limited to team meetings and 1:1s. Nudges can make us more likely to practice coaching on a peer-to-peer basis, but only if embedded in the environments where our peer-to-peer coaching should occur. My background is in technology, and currently, I work for Zendesk, a company that builds software for customer interactions. Customer service conversations in the form of “tickets” form the most common use case for this software. Customer service agents or salespeople can work out of Zendesk to respond to emails, serve chats, and take phone calls. Zendesk then logs the conversation in a ticket that facilitates further communication. Working at Zendesk, it’s clear to me that many of our customers deal with highly complex questions from their clients. When evaluating this scenario for nudges, we again want to consider the when, where, and why. In this context, our “when” includes the moment before a new hire submits a response to a customer. Our “where” is the software user interface in which customer support agents work. We can deploy a nudge in this context to accelerate new agents in their ability to support customers.

Nudges and technology

Let’s use this example in the context of an online store that uses Zendesk to field questions ranging from refunds and billing to product troubleshooting and issue resolution. If that online store needed a fast way to bring their new hires up to speed, they could pair a new agent with a tenured mentor for 1:1 assistance on ticket responses. That’s where the nudge comes in. The online store could configure Zendesk in such a way that the new hire’s replies are automatically sent to their mentor for feedback and coaching before they are sent to the customer. The store could even configure Zendesk in such a way that the mentor could initiate a coaching dialogue based on the new hire’s responses, giving the new hire a chance to revise their answer before sending it out to the customer. By configuring a software application to initiate a coaching dialogue automatically, a talent developer nudges their organization towards peer-to-peer coaching. By the way, such a use case is quite common amongst Zendesk’s customers - it can be configured with a simple and widely-used feature known as “macros.”

Accustomed to a world of macro-learning, talent developers tend to think too broadly about many things within their domain. Shifting from day or week-long courses to small systems-level details is an abrupt change of pace. We must remain focused on the least amount of work that we could do to make it easier for team members to engage in a target behavior - in this case, coaching.

For a nudge to achieve optimal results, it should require little work by the talent developer, and next to no overhead or administrative obligation. Similarly, team members should hardly be aware that the nudge exists at all. That’s why low-tech nudges are not only more efficient to implement than high-tech nudges - they’re often more effective! Ultimately, this is why nudges matter for training in turbulence. They combine little effort on the part of the trainer and the learner - to achieve lasting improvements to recession-ready skillsets.

Low-tech and high-tech coaching nudges