Adjust A Sermon's Advanced Options

After creating your sermon under the Info & Media tab in the left sidebar, your sermon is 100% ready to be published.

But if you want to tinker with a few advanced options, which are available for the more daring admin, Nucleus has you covered. From SEO settings to social sharing options to privacy controls, each sermon you create can be fine-tuned exactly how you want it.

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

Fine-Tune Your Sermon's SEO Settings

Fine-tuning your Sermon's SEO settings (search engine optimization) is a surefire way to make sure that when people are searching on Google, they can find your sermons and other pages! To start editing the SEO of a Sermon, head to that Sermon, and Click on SEO in the left-hand sidebar.

Your first option is to ask search engines to NOT index this sermon. This means that Google and other search engines won't populate this page on a search result. The only way for someone to get to this page would be if they had the direct URL, or if they went to your website, went to your SermonHub, and clicked on this specific sermon.

Note: By default this will be not be checked off, as generally you will want search engines to index your Sermons. You'll want to check this box if you have a more private message, like a member sharing a testimony, and you don't want that sermon to be searchable through search engines.


Your next option is to change your SEO Title.

Remember, these are advanced options, which means you do not need to update this title. Nucleus gives each Sermon an SEO Title by default which will be the name of your sermon, followed by your church's name. For context, here is what this will look like on Google:

We recommend leaving the title that was automatically generated, but if you prefer to update the title, you can do this by clicking the Edit button!

After you're happy with your SEO Title, you can update your SEO Description for this sermon.

Note: Leaving this blank will NOT leave a blank description in search engines. If left blank, it will default to the SEO Description set for your whole website. If you want to learn more about SEO Descriptions for you whole site, click here.


We do recommend adding a sentence or two (up to 160 characters) with a brief description of what your Sermon is about so that people can quickly understand before clicking the link. 🙂

Now that your Sermon has a title and description, you'll want to add Keywords to it. Think of one word (or a really short, common phrase) that relates to your sermon, that people might be searching for online. These are the keywords you should add to help your sermon be found more easily in search results.

For this Sermon title: Hurt by Community, keywords like 'people' and 'pain' might help it appear in more searches!

Moving on to the Sharing Image. Have you ever shared a link/URL to someone in a text message or in a DM on a social media platform and an image also pops up alongside it? That's the sharing image. This image helps bring context to what the link/URL is all about.

Click the + Add Image button to open your device's file browser, select the image, and upload it. Or drag the image directly into the sharing image box.

Note: Adding your Sermon Series graphic, or an image of your pastor preaching this message would be a great idea!

Update Your Sermon's URL Slug

Moving onto the last SEO option to update: the Sermon URL Slug!

When you initially name your sermon, Nucleus will take that title and create a URL slug automatically. This will be your sermon's title with hyphens instead of spaces between the words. If you'd like to edit this, you can do so by clicking Edit in Sermon Settings.

This is where you can adjust what you'd prefer the URL slug to be.

One potential reason for wanting to make changes to this would be that your sermon title is long or wordy and you'd prefer your url slug to be something simpler. Whenever you make changes to your URL slug, we recommend you select the "automatically create redirects" option so that if anyone previously had access to the original URL for this sermon, they can be redirected to the new one. But if you haven't ever published this sermon or shared it before, then you may not need this option selected.

If you make any changes, don't forget to save!

Customize Your Sermon's Social Sharing Previews

To customize your Social Sharing Previews, head over to Social Previews. You'll see that button on the left-hand side.

By default, Nucleus will choose to use your SEO information and sharing image for when you share your sermon to any social media platform. But in case you'd like to take matters into your own hands and adjust the sharing title, description, and sharing image for Facebook (including Instagram and Threads) and Twitter, you can do so by selecting Customize.

After clicking customize, new options will appear.

Facebook (including Instagram and Threads)

Twitter

Then, in the same way you edit your SEO information, you can input a title, description, and image for both Facebook (including Instagram & Threads) as well as Twitter.

To add an image, click the + Add Image button to open your device's file browser, select the image, and upload it. Or drag the image directly into the sharing image box to upload it.


Note: We recommend most users not add anything here, and leave, Use SEO Info (default), on. Only advanced users should be tinkering with these options.

Adjust Your Sermon's Privacy Controls

Nucleus Sermons allows you to manage the privacy of a specific Sermon. There are three privacy levels available:

  • Public - Any person or robot on the internet can view, save or screenshot all sermon content. And it’s okay for this sermon and its content to be indexed and stored by search engines (e.g. Google)
  • Hidden - This content can still be seen or shared by anyone with the link. Hidden simply means it is unlisted and search engines will be told not to index the content. If you want your sermon fully protected, use the “Private” option
  • Private - Requires a Nucleus login to access. This fully protects your sermon and prevents indexing. Only those connected with your church who sign in and match the allowed types below can view.

To adjust the privacy settings for a Sermon, go to Sermons, select the sermon you want to edit, then select Privacy Controls.

Sermons will automatically be set to Public, but to change this, scroll down and select either of the other two options.

What Next?

Once you learn the ropes of creating and managing individual sermons, it's time to understand how you can manage all of your sermons at large. Check out some of the following articles to help you on that journey 👇

Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.