How the Reach Audit works
We score five things.
Honestly, and without ceremony.
The audit looks at your church website and your YouTube channel together. The weighting is biased toward sermon discoverability and audience capture — the things that grow your online reach — not toward local-attendance optimization.
Why these five
Reach is not the same as attendance.
Most church-website tools optimize for local attendance: where we are, when to come, what to wear. That is a real concern, but it is not the wedge for a small church that wants to grow online. The audit weights the categories that actually move online reach: YouTube performance, search discoverability, and audience capture. Front door matters, but it’s weighted last.
What we measure
Five categories, weighted by impact.
- 0125% of score
How your YouTube channel is performing.
Most of the small churches we audit publish to YouTube but treat it like a tape archive. We look at what your channel is actually doing for you — and what it could be doing.
- Subscriber count, view count, posting cadence
- Whether titles, descriptions, and thumbnails are written for discovery
- Whether your most-watched sermons are being capitalized on
- 0225% of score
Whether people can find you when they search.
If a visitor types your church name, your city, or a sermon topic into Google — what happens? Most small-church sites are technically invisible to search engines. We measure how invisible.
- Page titles, meta descriptions, sitemap and robots configuration
- Mobile responsiveness and page-load speed (Google's PageSpeed metrics)
- Schema markup and how your sermons appear in search results
- 0320% of score
How sermons are presented on your own site.
Your sermons are your best work and the reason most visitors return. We look at whether the sermon page on your own site treats them that way — or buries them three clicks deep.
- Whether the latest sermon is one click from the homepage
- Whether each sermon has its own page with title, date, and speaker
- Whether sermon pages are tagged so search engines understand them
- 0420% of score
Whether visitors leave a way to follow up.
Most small-church websites are dead ends. Someone watches a sermon, leaves the site, and you never know they were there. We measure how many ways your site invites a visitor to keep in touch.
- Email signup or newsletter capture on the homepage and sermon pages
- Plan-a-visit or first-time-guest forms
- Share buttons and social-link presence
- 0510% of score
What the front door looks like.
Front-of-house matters, but it isn't the biggest lever for online reach — so it's weighted lighter. Still, a homepage that loads slowly or hides service times costs you visitors before they ever click anything.
- Service times and address visible above the fold
- Real photos versus stock imagery
- Whether the page reads as cared-for or as auto-generated
What you receive
One PDF. Four sections.
Your Reach Score, out of 100
A weighted total across the five categories above. Most small churches we've audited so far score between 30 and 60. The number isn't the point — the breakdown is.
A breakdown of where your score came from
Category-by-category, with the specific signals that helped or hurt. So if your YouTube subscore is low, you know whether it's because of titles, thumbnails, posting cadence, or something else.
The top three highest-leverage fixes
Out of everything we found, the three things we'd fix first — ranked by how much your reach would change for the time invested. Each one is something a non-technical person can act on.
A 90-day plan, if you want one
For the structural issues that don't have a quick fix. Not a sales pitch — just a written sequence you could follow yourself, or hand to whoever maintains your site.
You also get a hosted version of the audit at a private link (so you can share it with a board member or whoever maintains your site) and the underlying data as a JSON file, if you want it.
How the process runs
Quiet. No drip. No handoff.
1. You send your URL.
Either through the form on the homepage or by replying to a cold email if we already reached out. We ask for your church website and your email. That's it.
2. We run the audit.
It takes about 24 hours. Not because the analysis is slow, but because every audit gets a human read before it goes out. We don't email you something a script just generated.
3. The PDF lands in your inbox.
From a real founder address. If something in the audit lands oddly, you can reply and you'll be writing to me directly. There is no support queue and no sales sequence.
Want to see one?
Read a real audit before you ask for yours.
Here’s a recently completed audit, hosted as it would be sent to the church. The score, the breakdown, and the page you’ll get yourself.
Ready to see yours?
PDF in your inbox within a day or two. No drip sequence. No sales handoff.