How many people are looking for a church in McKinney? 10,000. Every. Single. Month. A few weeks ago I checked out how Olathe church websites fared on Google. Today I'm turning my eye to the websites of McKinney churches - and it is a much brighter picture.

I'm not going to do an in-depth review of the specific websites as there are far more interesting things to point out about how Google treats McKinney churches.  Plus, I'm pretty psyched to have found a mistake Google makes that makes it much easier to get your church to the top of the website results in any city!  Let's start there.

Typically, Google doesn't care about grammar.  Plural and singular words mean the same thing to it.  Try searching for "McKinney Website Design" and "McKinney Website Designers" and you'll see identical results.  The "ers" didn't affect anything.

When you use the Google Keyword website it becomes clear - usually the number of searches for a singular phrase will be identical to the number for a plural phrase - Google regards them as identical.  That's why I was shocked to see "McKinney Church" show up with over 5 times the number of searches compared to "McKinney Churches"!

My first question was: Is this only true for McKinney website designs?  But no - Olathe had the same result - with the same dramatic difference in searches.

What was even more interesting is the little green "Competition" bar next to McKinney Church(es).  When you want to get your website to the top of search results, you look for a low green bar.  In spite of there being far more people searching for the singular phrase, far less websites and designers are competing to be at the top of those results.  Excellent news for church websites in McKinney.

That was the main excitement for the day in McKinney, but I did want to briefly cover a few other interesting observations.

• Directories of churches appeared at the top of the results.
• Google Places (where the marker and the map are next to the result) hit next - if you don't have a Google Places page for your McKinney website, stop reading and go set one up.  It is that important (and easy).
• The church with reviews was at the top.  This is increasingly important.

All of these things get mentioned in a good article I came across today by Matt McGee.  It was written a while back, but the applicability of the advice hasn't changed a bit.

Oh, and finally, here are some top terms for McKinney websites related to churches.  I included some interesting denominational searches and individual churches to see their pull.