Richard Kraneis Blog

How do I get my church on Google?

I wrote a blog article regarding Google and my church’s advertising, and a few days later, someone was looking at it on the Internet.  Their search phrase according to my blog was:  How do I get my church on Google?

It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a church, a painting contractor, or a $20 million manufacturer, getting your website Googled is still the same.

1. Create a website, even a small one, with reasonably good content.
2. Submit your website to Google for indexing.  (Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your website.)
3. You’re done.

In a few days, Google will spider through your site looking at all of your web pages and it will be indexed within Google on the Internet.

Perhaps a week after you submit your site for indexing at Google, you’ll be able to find your church’s website on the Internet.  (But that doesn’t mean that others will find your website easily.)

You can even push more traffic or visitors to your church’s website using Google’s Adwords advertising.  (Go to http://www.adwords.google.com)  Yes, it will cost you money whenever someone clicks on your ad.  But it may be worth it.

But the question, “How do I get my church on Google?” is only the first question in a series of 3 questions.

• How do I get my church on Google?
• How do I attract new visitors to my church’s website through Google?
• How do I persuade new visitors to our website to come to church one Sunday?

I don’t mean to be overly religious on this blog.  I’m actually a Fishing Methodist (I’m either fishing or in church on Sundays.)

But a church’s effort to be visible on the Internet through Google is just part of a marketing campaign.  You want to attract people to a website, you hope to interest them in your services, and finally you hope they will visit your church one Sunday.  Church members want to believe there is something very different about their website compared to a law firm or a CPA firm, but the similarities are striking.

So yes, you can get your church “on Google”.  But just like a law firm, a CPA firm, or a boy scout troop on the northside of Chicago, the real objective is to get someone to walk through the door.  Building a website isn’t enough.  It needs to be marketed, traffic needs to be encouraged, content needs to be persuasive.

Good luck to the person who found my blog on Google with the keywords:  “How do I get my church on Google”.

Church Advertising and Google

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.