I don’t know where I learned this concept, but I believe it’s valid: plan, PPC, and then Organic.
My church’s website doesn’t get much traffic. Although attractive, the website wasn’t designed for traffic optimization (much less conversion). So I’m trying to change that.
The Plan: How will people find your church on the Internet?
PPC: Use this tool to test your plan and to drive traffic to the website or at least measure searches on Google.
Organic: Once PPC has helped you determine the best keywords, try to get the traffic organically. It’s free once it’s running, and if you combine organic with PPC it draws even more traffic.
So I made a small plan for attracting more church traffic on some keywords. The keywords draw about 20-25 searches per day on Google. But over 250 searches, my church’s Google Ad hasn’t been clicked even once.
When People Search for a Church on Google, do they Avoid PPC?
Some experts think that users click 80/20 on Google. 80% of all user clicks are on organic listings. 20% of all clicks are done on Google Ads. So far, in my small Google ad campaign for my church, I have reason to believe that less people than expected click on my church’s Google ads. Actually, in 250 searches, there have been no PPC clicks.
After running this ad one trend is becoming clear. I’m getting more clicks from content ads than search ads. Currently, 1 in a 1000 exposures yields a click. But the price is right so I’ll continue it.
Time to Focus on Organic
So using PPC has shown that there is search traffic for my church’s keywords and its Google campaign. Not much traffic, but enough to care about. So if Google PPC is getting little traffic, I’m turning my attention to some basic website page optimization.
My church’s website scores this way regarding its critical HTML coding:
Title - The HTML does exist but the titles are generic. They have not been customized to match the actual page.
Keywords - The HTML seem adequate.
Description - The HTML code is non-existent. We are not feeding good descriptions to Google even if the page is indexed.
So for this simple test, it’s time to create meaningful titles for my church’s website, continue with good keywords usage, and to begin meaningful use of descriptions in the HTML code.
So at least for my church, I believe simple planning, a dash of PPC, and some organic SEO is a good idea.
Summary
PPC direct search in Google is surprisingly low, non-existent.
PPC content search is a pleasant and affordable surprise. I’ll continue Google content search for my church.
I need to tune my church’s website for about 3 keywords and pages to get my church onto the first page. It will be interesting to see how difficult that will be with churches as competitors.
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