Search Engine Optimization Update

When the website initially went live, it was ranked lower than the other Pretty Prairie church websites, which had all been in existence for years and had undoubtedly risen in the rankings over time due to clicks. This is normal and it was expected that the Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church website would gradually rise in rankings, which it did. For instance, the amount of website traffic increases dramatically in July at the time of the Pretty Prairie Rodeo. The website is now a top search engine result in all major search engines, and even surpassed the Google ranking of one of the other churches.

There is a strange twist to the website's traffic though.

On September 29, 2016, a women gave Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church a review, with a rating of 1 out of 5 stars. This was very surprising since the person seemingly had no connection at all to Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church and lived in a different part of the country. The post was thought to be spam.

One September 30, 2016, a woman posted to Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church's Facebook page and the post began, "What is wrong with you people?? You are evicting..." However, the post was soon non-existent and it was thought that the post had either been spam, or removed because the person realized it was the wrong page.

On October 5, 2016, a man called Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church and said he wanted to make a complaint about a story that he had seen on the news the night before about a cemetery.

All three of these people had something in common. They had mistaken Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in Kansas for Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in Howe, Indiana. The mystery was solved when the man who called realized he had called a church in the wrong state.

The Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in Howe, Indiana has a cemetery. The church decided to construct a new church driveway, but there is a grave where they want the driveway to be and so began a dispute between the church and the family of the deceased about what to do. The story was written up in an Indiana paper local to the church: "Family battles LaGrange Co. church over mother's grave site". People who saw the story began to search online for Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in order to make a complaint. Several did make complaints on the correct Facebook page. However, the traffic to the Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in Kansas website and Facebook page went up as people mistook them for those of Pretty Prairie United Methodist Church in Howe, Indiana.

Though I would never have wished this experience on the family, I found it to be an astonishing example of the unpredictability of internet traffic. Who would have expected this to happen?!