A Church Near You (ACNY) is a free website supported by the Church of England which lists churches and their services, events, and facilities to make them easily searchable online.
All Church of England churches have a free listing, and we encourage parishes to check and edit entries from time to time to ensure the information is up to date. We want to make sure this resources is pointing people to the correct website or phone number, as that is often the starting point for people finding a church when moving to a new area.
The Church of England also supports each page with search engine optimisation, meaning it can make your church appear higher in online searches on the web – something which can cost a lot of money and time for an individual church to achieve with their own website. This is where “tagging” pages can be helpful, as it guides search engines with page topics. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on the formatting of the pages, but it is a good idea to learn how to set up a basic page and use the “tagging” feature.
There are two types of tags on ACNY:
• Services & Events tags
• Facilities tags
If you have a parish room or a church hall available for hire, add a page and add the “HALL FOR HIRE” tag to it. This can simply be a page which includes a link to your own hall booking information website or, if you don’t have one of these, you can upload basic information about the room / hall including photos, your pricing, layouts, terms and conditions and details of how to book, directly onto the ACNY page.
More information about ACNY tags and how to add them is available here.
