Why "Some" Think That Blogging is 1,000 Times Better Than Google Adwords
John Saddington of Church Crunch recently put out a post titled “Why Blogging is 1,000 TimesBetter Than Google Adwords.” I have to admit that I was fairly skeptical of such a claim. I mean1,000 better?! But after much thought, I have to admit that it was a genius piece.
Here is the crux of his argument. Many churches use Google Adwords to advertise their churches. Several weeks ago I wrote a post outlining my own experience using Adwords in my church. The problem with Adwords is two-fold: you have to pay for it, and when you stop paying for it, you are no longer advertised. There’s a ruthless logic to that isn’t it?
The reason, he says, why blogging is better is because you can increase the natural ranking of your church website just by writing about your church in a blog. The more you write in your church blog, the higher your ranking will be on google. I tested this theory by looking up his own church (he’s the web guru for North Point Ministries) and sure enough they had the number one spot without using any form of Google Adwords.
Another reason why blogging is so advantageous is because it is free! That’s always a big plus nowadays. And if you continue to blog on a consistent basis you continue to add to your lead in rankings.
So, I feel like I’m converted to the concept. And I’ll probably be starting a Carrollwood Church blog. But I do still think that it’s helpful to use Google Adwords. I know that there are many products, events, organizations, and services that I would have never paid attention to and found would it not have been for them being on the first page, towards the top, of the google rankings. So when I start this blog, I think I’ll decrease how much we’re spending on Google Adwords, but I don’t think we’ll throw it out entirely. Because as a church we are seeing people come through the doors as a result of finding it on Adwords.
Do you have a church blog? Have you tried Google Adwords? What have you found?
*Graphic using actual words of this post courtesy of www.wordle.net
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That's pretty cool. I don't blog, but I definitely plan on blogging when I get out of the Seminary and serving a church again. I did some experimenting myself, and found that this seems more important for churches in bigger cities, as well as churches that are not named after the city they serve. For example, I googled, "Bozeman, MT Church," which is a small town I lived in before I came to the Seminary, and the Bozeman SDA Church was 2nd or 3rd on the list. That's partly due to the fact that Bozeman is a tiny city, and Google lists up to ten churches per city. In other words, if the town is small enough that there are ten or less churches in it, it is guaranteed a spot on a Google search results page. However, it's also due to the fact that the church has "Bozeman" and "Church" in its name (which is interesting, because a lot of church growth experts say that it's better for a church to have a creative and more theologically descriptive name than to simply name the church after the city–and yet the churches that are named after cities seem to have more advertising potential on Google). Mt. Ellis SDA Church, which is also in Bozeman, MT, was not listed. Anyhow . . . interesting blog, Rodlie!
High rankings are the result of an address that will suggest to google that the site is serious, strategic use of the right key words, appropriate writing, content that is being constantly being added to and incoming links. the umbrella word for all of this is “search engine optimization.”
One should first carefully think through why people are attracted to your site. Is it because there is content that can help them, or because they want to know when services are taking place. In the first case you have a much better chance of having high search rankings. With the latter your site is nothing more than an electronic bulletin.
If you are targeting visitors, why would visitors come? Learn about the Bible? Deal with stress? Make new friendships? Each page should be written with the appropriate key words. Those key words can be found on sites that actually give the words used for various searches so that you can choose the words people are using most often.
Then find a way to keep adding content. Have members write something. Add a Bible verse. Aggregate content with an RSS page.
Hopefully you will get others to link to your site, though there is little link sharing from what I can tell between sites—this needs to change.
The advantage of the blog is that it goes out and is picked up by RSS feeds hopefully.
Beautiful sites with lots of pictures or catchy things may not even be seen by the search engines. Write with the search engine in mind.
Still wondering what to do? Choose your key word, check to make sure that it is a word often used, then do a search, and copy what ever the leaders are doing.
My own site, path2prayer.com is 4 for yahoo for intercessory prayer, 4 for bing and 16 for Google. I didn’t use to be found at all. Then I realized that sites need to be (1) destinations with content, or (2) hubs where people found other web sites. At this point my site is more a destination—there are some 1,600 URLs on the site supposedly, and I get over 200 visitors just from search engines a day. I want to get into the top ten on google and know how to get there but have to make changes to do so. I don’t pay for adwords of any kind.
I appreciated the post.
Wow…that’s great stuff, Dan. Thanks you for sharing.