If you were gay or lesbian or bisexual and in a pentecostal charismatic or evangelical church and closeted…….and you were looking on the internet for some answers to you situation………what key words or phrases would you use to search on google and other search engines.

At the moment the majority of people are finding us by searching for freedom 2 b[e] or a similar hybrid. this is good in one way as it means our name is getting known. But I wonder if there is an entire demographic of people who dont know or our existence and are missing out on connecting with us.

It never occurred to me to search under ‘pentecostal’, ‘charasmatic’ or ‘evangelical’ in the context of LGBT. My dealings had been so negative in those circles that I didn’t think the two co-existed. I searched under ‘gay christians’ and ‘gay spirituality’ but didn’t discover f2b that way. I found the site by accident after stumbling across the episode of ‘the hack’ that featured Ben. I was so moved by his courage that I felt compelled to comment on the after show blog. It was there that avb and others referred me to the site.

When I was looking for churches, I tended to type in ‘gay-friendly churches’ and always found the metropolitan church but few others that I recall.

I’m sure you are right that there are others in our demographic who are not hearing about us and could benefit from doing so. I even called the 89.9 Light FM careline and they were unable to recommend any organisations or gay friendly churches. The Lesbian and Gay Switchboard came up with a local social group for lesbians but seemed to know nothing of f2b. Those would be good starting places to target in order to get the word out: letting the L & G switchboard know we exist along with radio stations like Light FM and Joy FM, as well as places like Womens Health in the South East who cater for LGBT.

Blessings,

Ann Maree

BTW….if I was in a pentecostal church and gay…. i think I would google gay pentecostal

When redeveloping the site, one of my aims was to incorporate the more commonly used keywords (Gay, Christian) over the more definitive ones (GLBTIQ, from pentecostal evangelical & charismatic backgrounds, etc…). However, I still don’t plaster “gay Christian” all over the site because it dilutes the rather specific target market which f2b focuses on. I wanted a balance between the two.

Despite the fact that freedom 2 b[e] ranks quite poorly in Google searches for “Gay Christian”, it still actually is one of our largest keyword combinations that people use to get to this site. This basically means two things:

1. Some people will trawl through many many pages of Google results for “Gay Christian” to find what they’re after


2. Heaps and heaps of people search using these two key words together, far more than any other related combination.

I have no doubt that by replacing with and adding more “gay Christian” slogans over the site, we would increase our search engine traffic. I wasn’t sure just how big a difference it would make before, but now I’ve seen a taste of the statistics, it has become more obvious. A lot of people are out there looking for information (or more) on this stuff, and they use the most generic terms to do so – which makes sense.

I certainly never searched for “Gay Seventh-Day Adventists”.

thanks for this Chris….I’m sure many have found your expertise in this area helpful….I know i have.

So are there some words or phrases you suggest we adopt in order for people searching the net to find us more readily.