Secret 9: Google Marketing

Where does Google marketing fit in the funnel?

Everybody loves social media ads, but they don’t usually share the love with Google Ads. Google is like the nerdy kid in high school that nobody understands and most people avoid. Then later in life, they become your boss. 

Many church leaders don’t understand what to do with Google. Some churches avoid Google marketing and do nothing with it, while other churches are overly obsessed with Google marketing. They think that it should be the catalyst for their whole marketing strategy. Which route is the best approach? To be honest, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Google marketing is a big part of your funnel. It is an incredibly valuable tool. In this chapter, we discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO), YouTube, Google Ads, the Google Ad Grant, and more. But I have some great news for you! Because you have already learned the structure of Facebook ad campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads, understanding Google Ads will be much easier for you. Google uses the same basic layout for their ad system, so you won’t be learning this from scratch. 

Google marketing is such an important piece in the puzzle. When someone sees your church on Google, it’s because they were looking. On Facebook and Instagram marketing, we don’t know if the individual seeing our ads is currently looking for a church or a life change, but with Google, your website is shown to people who are actively searching for things like “churches near me.”

In secular marketing, salespeople talk about the different types of “leads” when they are hunting for customers. When a salesperson contacts someone who is not necessarily even interested, they are called a “cold lead.” Those cold leads are the least valuable, because the success rate is low. But when a person has already shown signs of purchasing, they are considered a “warm lead.” Warm leads are what people want, because they have a much higher success rate. Salespeople are trained to give first priority to the warm leads, since they are most likely to convert to a sale. The principle is similar with Google marketing for your church. People that you reach with Google marketing are like warm leads. They have shown interest in your church based on the terms they are searching online. So if you don’t put any marketing budget into Google, you are missing out on all of the warm leads. 

I know, I know. It feels weird to refer to people searching for a church as a “lead,” but it’s just the term! The principle is what you need to understand.

Google is for the top of the funnel. It isn’t likely that a person will come to a Sunday service just because they found your website on Google. Remember, it usually takes seven impressions before someone takes action. Even if they don’t convert during their first visit to your website, that’s totally ok, because we have a funnel. Since you have set up your tracking pixel on your website, once this person opens their Instagram or Facebook, they will see your middle of the funnel ads. They will see them over and over until you reach at least seven impressions. This is how it works! There are plenty of ways that someone enters the top of the funnel, and Google is a big player. 

Google is a crucial part of your marketing funnel, so don’t ignore it just because it is confusing.

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Google Business Profile for Christian Marketing

Do I have to set up a Google Business Profile?

For your church to have great SEO results, you definitely need to set up your Google Business Profile. What is a Google Business Profile? When you do a Google search for a business or organization in your town, you will see a list of results. Many will just be typical text-only results, with a headline and a description. You will also see some results listed on a map, but you will also see bigger results of organizations with Google Business Profiles set up. They will have a much larger display of information including photos, business hours, reviews, and button-style links to specific pages on their websites. As a church, you want to make sure this is how you show up. When your Google Business Profile is set up, you will get incredibly better results from Google marketing. Take a look at the image below as an example of what business profiles look like.

To set up your Google Business Profile, start by doing a Google search for “set up my Google Business Profile” and click on the first result. Google makes all of its services pop up as the first result, so they are easy to find. Once you click on that link, Google will walk you through each step in the process to set up your profile for the first time. To confirm your address, they will have to call the main phone line or mail a postcard to your church. That is all normal and part of the process. 

For many of you, there will already be an existing Google Business Profile that has not been updated or touched in years. This is the most common situation for churches that aren’t brand new. In this case, you need to log in to your current Google Business Profile and spruce it up a bit. Add great recent photos, a description of your church, your hours, and anything else that is missing. As Google updates their settings and features for Google Business Profile, take advantage of any additional content you can post about your church. Just make it a practice to log in once a month and make minor improvements. 

If you don’t know the email address and password for the original Google Business Profile that was set up, there is a process called “Claiming Your Business Profile.” This is a button where you can take over administrative rights to a Google Business Profile. Just do a Google search for it and follow the steps to verify that you are in fact an approved administrator for that organization.

Although it is easy to forget about your Google Business Profile, keep in mind that literally hundreds of people see it every single month. Keeping it updated is vital. 

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Getting SEO Right for Christian Marketing

What is all this SEO stuff really about?

Google is a great way to get your website in front of the people who are actively looking for a church. There are two ways to use Google for marketing: paid campaigns on Google Ads and organic search results. Organic search results are when your website appears in Google searches without having to pay for it. It is a normal search result. Later in this chapter we are going to talk about paid Google Ads, but first, we should discuss how you can maximize your organic exposure on Google by improving your search engine optimization (SEO).

When your website has poor SEO, it won’t show up very highly on results for generic searches like “church in my city.” In fact, some churches with very poor SEO won’t even rank highly in the results when searching the actual name of their church. That’s pretty bad. A church with great SEO will show up for broad terms that relate to anyone looking for a church in their area. That is the goal.

Google’s search results are based on location, so when someone searches for “church near me” in Tampa, Florida, they will get local results. You definitely want a piece of that action. Google has a complex and ever-changing algorithm for determining which websites should run on the top of their search results list. As professional marketers, we are not given the specific details of their algorithm, but we know the SEO foundations that will improve your church’s rank in the generic results. If you make these foundational updates on your website, you will start to rank more highly on the search list. 

In marketing, the term SEO is used interchangeably for two different services. Some marketing agencies think of SEO as how your website is initially built. They analyze your site to make sure the proper keywords are used throughout your entire website. They make sure it is indexed properly with Google, as well as a lot of other things like reviewing meta tags, keyword density, and media file names. To other agencies, SEO refers more to the work that you can do after a website is already live to improve the search rankings. For example, we know that Google loves it when you have other high-quality websites linking back to your main website. So SEO agencies will often set up blogs, publications, and other websites to frequently write content that links back to your website. This is a lot of work, but it does improve rankings. 

Explaining this takes me back to one of the secular marketing campaigns that my team managed. We were working on the marketing funnel for a big real estate company in Los Angeles. After we set up the real estate company’s primary website, we actually then went and built a whole other website that was all about the different luxury communities and housing developments in their area. It was a place that featured more than just real estate, but was a resource for people to know the local neighborhoods. We would write weekly blogs and articles on the site, with real estate as a main topic, and we would link back to the primary website for the real estate company whenever possible. Over the next year we became one of the top search results, beating most of their competitors. It was great! 

Although this practice is effective in the long run, the primary thing we will be focusing on in this chapter is setting up your website properly for great SEO from the onset. Running a second website is probably too much work for most churches.

How do you know if your website is set up with good SEO? There are a couple of tools that you are going to want to learn that help you analyze your site. The first one is a tool called Google Search Console. To set up your Google Search Console account, you need to…you guessed it…do a Google search for “Google Search Console.” This is a free SEO tool from Google that shows you how your website ranks for the local searches that you are focused on. You can type in any search term, and it will instantly show you what number your site is ranked as in the search results. As you go through the setup process with Search Console, it will ask you to install the Google tracking code on your website. You will want to install this code just like you did the Facebook pixel. 

Once you have your Google Search Console totally set up, you will have all the data that you need on the SEO performance of your website. You can now see where Google ranks you for specific and broad search terms. With Google Search Console you can also test your website’s load speed on both mobile and desktop. Knowing your load speed will help you see what areas are most lacking in your website. If your website takes more than three seconds to load, people won’t stick around to wait. You need to improve your load speed by using caching, changing servers, and/or reducing the media file sizes. 

Now that you know you need to improve your SEO, what can you do about it? First, you need to add the exact search terms that you want to rank for in the verbiage and text copy of your website. Wherever and whenever, as long as it flows naturally. Here is an example: if you wanted to rank for the search term “church in Nashville” then you would change the spot on your website that says “Are you ready to visit us this Sunday?” to say “Are you looking for a church in Nashville?” 

Whenever you can, adjust your text to have the exact search terms (keywords) that you want to rank more highly for. Take an afternoon and comb through each page on your website and make these changes everywhere you can. Just be careful not to use the same search terms over and over so that it no longer seems natural. In the past, people have tried to game the system and overload a website with repetitive keywords. Google is savvy to that now, and it will penalize your rankings if you do that.

But wait, there is more that you can do! The next step is to change the title and the alt text on all media on your site. Most people don’t realize that the actual file names for your photos and videos play a big role in Google rankings. There are so many wasted titles on images like “image_homepage.png.” That image title should have a keyword in it. Go to each image and video on your website and rename it to one of your focus keywords. Change your files to “church _in_nashville.png” or something like that throughout your site. Trust me, it really helps! 

We’re still not done yet! On all reputable website builders, there is another spot where you can add additional description words to your photos and videos. They are called alt tags. You should see an option next to every photo you put on your website to add alt tags, or alternate description. Most churches leave this blank because they don’t understand what it is. However, Google uses the alt tags to get more info on what your website is all about. You need to make sure every alt tag is filled with strategic keywords. Switch it up with every photo and video, and keep it as natural sounding as possible. 

And finally, one of the most important things you can do to improve your search rankings is to update your website regularly. Google wants their users to see the most relevant websites, and they give preference to sites that are updated frequently. Make it a practice to add your message, upcoming events, or even a blog that you update every week. You will start to see your website shoot higher and higher in the search results. It is a long game, so don’t get discouraged if nothing changes in the first few months. Sometimes it takes six months to start seeing results.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Search Console, the next tool you should sign up for is called Google Analytics. This is another free program from Google, and it is insanely helpful, but also extremely complicated. People even take college classes on this program, so you are going to feel a little overwhelmed with all of the features. Don’t worry, you won’t use 95% of the features that Google Analytics has, but there are some very useful tools that you need. 

One of my favorite tools on Google Analytics is where you can track the most common map that someone follows on your website. This means you can see the order in which people view your pages when they visit your site. This is important so you can know if your pages are pointing people where you want them to go. It will show you how most people land on your home page, and then click to the About page, and then from there to the Messages page…or whatever it is for you. It also lets you see what pages people don’t stay on very long, so maybe you can improve the content on those pages. As an example, perhaps you want people to go from the I’m New page to the Plan Your Visit page, but you see that everyone who goes to the I’m New page is only on that page for an average of ten seconds, meaning they aren’t staying long enough to see your call to action. You might want to change the layout, copy, and images of your I’m New page so people stay engaged long enough to see and respond to your call to action to visit the Plan Your Visit page.

Google Analytics will also give you info on where people are visiting your site from. Are they on a mobile device or a desktop? Are they close by, or farther away than you expected? This kind of information can really prove helpful as you think about bettering your website experience. If you notice that a huge percentage of your traffic comes from a neighboring city, you might consider doing a blog post about what God is doing in that city, or you might start thinking about opening a campus there. Knowing this information helps you make wise decisions for your church. 

Pro Tip – If you are like many churches who have been approached by a business, or offered an SEO management upgrade by a website developer, beware. Agencies will take advantage of people’s lack of understanding about SEO and charge them for doing literally nothing. They will throw around terms like “metadata” and “indexing” that you won’t understand. You will feel like what they are saying is important, and you’ll agree to it. Ninety percent of the time it is a waste of money. If you are going to pay a reputable agency to do your SEO, it should cost well over $1,000 per month. A red flag is when someone offers to do your SEO for something like $200 per month, because they are likely going to do nothing but take your money.

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Google Ads for Christian Marketing

Are Google Ads a big part of our funnel?

Google Ads and social media ads are very different. Google is a super important part of the top of your funnel but doesn’t play a part at all in the middle of the funnel. Google Ads don’t include pictures or videos like social media marketing does. They are text-only ads, which makes them less fun for the more artistic people who try to run Google Ads. Furthermore, the ads are only shown to people who are doing an online search for certain keywords. Remember, the term “keywords” is the term used for what people type into the Google search bar. So even though “church in Denver” is three different words, the whole phrase is what we are referring to in Google Ads as a “keyword.”

In the church world, there are generally two types of people who end up being in charge of the marketing. One type is the person in charge of social media content at your church, who also tries to run ads. They are usually a creative person whose passion is the main content on the social media feed, not the ads. This person usually understands the power of social media reach and they try to make unique and creative ads, but they probably don’t dive too deeply into the analytics and metrics. This type of person doesn’t even touch Google Ads because they aren’t fun. Or if they do, they set it up once and feel overwhelmed by it.

The second type of person is usually someone on staff who is highly into numbers and data and more of an analytical type of person. They might even wear a pocket protector and thick glasses. But I digress. This person will likely have taken the church all in on Google Ads because it works well with their data-driven brain. They will probably have much less enthusiasm for social media ads, because they are not as clear cut as Google Ads are.

Recently I worked with a church in New Jersey that was heavily using Google Ads. They were spending literally 100% of their marketing budget exclusively on Google. And this wasn’t a small budget; they were actually spending over $10,000 per month! This blew my mind when I first looked at their numbers. They were running all kinds of Plan Your Visit ads, and they were getting results with them. Google Ads are really good, but you can get ten times more results for your budget when they are used within the funnel. So we changed this church’s plan to now spend only a fraction of that $10,000 per month budget on Google Ads. We paired them with social media ads that were top of the funnel ads, then our conversions happened by showing retargeting ads in the middle of the funnel. The church staff immediately started seeing the retargeting ads that we set up all over Instagram and Facebook, and so did their community. Their funnel began producing new visitors on a regular basis much better than their Google Ads had before. 

You can see from this story that using Google Ads alone could be successful in marketing a church. You would have to spend a lot on them, but they could produce some results by themselves. On the flip side, a social media ad campaign could work without any Google Ads, too. But if you put them together in this funnel, you will see long-term results like you never have before. 

If you have not already set up your own Google Ads account, that is the first step. Just do a Google search for “Google Ads” and follow the setup instructions. Once you have finished the setup, you will be taken to your Google Ads dashboard. It will take you some time to poke around and get familiar with it, but soon you will start to recognize the ad structure. It is the same as Facebook ads. Google Ads also organizes ads with the Campaigns – Ad Groups – Ads format, just like Facebook, so because we already went over this structure in the Facebook ads chapter, I won’t re-explain that part to you.

In our experience working with churches, we have learned that there are two main types of Google searches that you should be targeting. The first is location-based searches. You should have a campaign titled “Location Searches,” and utilize keywords related to your local area. 

A great example of a location-based campaign is an Ad Group with keywords about your city or area, like “churches in Denver” and “church near me” and “best churches in Denver,” or anything else that you can think of that people might search for as they look for a church in your city. Once you have all of the keywords selected, you should always make three or four different ads within each ad group. You will be able to tell after a few weeks which ad gets the best results, then you can turn the other ones off. 

The second type of Google search you should target is the general church search. This is for people who search for specific types of churches, like Baptist or non-denominational churches. Remember that Google Ads are based on the user’s physical location, so you do not have to worry about your ads showing up for people outside of your area as long as you set up your location in your ad settings. This campaign should be titled “General Type Searches” and you should choose keywords like “non-denominational churches” and “Baptist churches near me” and “charismatic churches in Denver,” or whatever is appropriate for your church. Every month people will be moving to your area who are looking for a church. They are going to hop on Google to search for one, and this campaign is how you reach those people. Beyond just using denominational descriptions, you should also use adjectives like “contemporary church” and “modern church” and “family-friendly churches.”

You will notice that I do not suggest running ministry-specific ad campaigns such as “women’s ministry” or “men’s Bible study.” Although you will be able to generate some clicks from those keywords, they are not usually high quality clicks. Because Google Ads are a tool for the top of your funnel, you should dedicate your marketing specifically for people who are searching for a church. 

When you are setting up your keywords, you should first do a Google search for “Google Keyword Planner Tool.” This is a free tool that Google gives to show you how many people in your area are searching for those keywords. This gives great insight into how many people are actively searching for a church in your area, and the numbers might surprise you!

When you are finishing setting up your ads, you will have an option to add “callout” links. These are four sub links under your ad’s main headline, and you should definitely use them. You get four more links, and it doesn’t cost anything extra. They make your ad way more noticeable, and you have additional space to get your message across. I suggest making at least one of your callout links either Plan Your Visit or My First Time, which will point directly to your I’m New page on your website. Messages, About Us, and Our Mission are other callout links that have proven successful. In the image below, you will see an example of four callout links. In this example, Upcoming Events, Active Kids, Listen Online, and Plan A Visit are the call out links of choice. You have room to pick and choose which links you think are most important, but always remember what your main call to action is—getting people to plan a visit.

We haven’t talked yet about your budget. With Google Ads, you can choose to set your own bid. This bid is how much you are willing to spend for one person to click on your ad. You can set a manual bid, or have Google automatically set it for you. If you are new to Google, I suggest letting Google set it for you using its automated bidding feature. This means that you tell Google what you are willing to spend per day, and Google will automatically take care of the ad bidding. For areas where there are many businesses bidding for the same keywords, the businesses with a lower bid will have their ad shown less often and lower on the results page. If you want to really be successful with Google Ads, you need to spend more per bid so that your result is on the top of the page. The top results get way more clicks, so it is worth the extra cost. 

I suggest starting out on Google Ads with a $10 per day budget if you are a smaller church, and as you grow, you should increase your daily budget proportionately. Even if you are a large ministry, I would tap your Google Ads budget out at $50 per day. That is sufficient for most large urban areas. Any budget over $50 per day should be put back into social media. Your social media ads will always represent at least 80% of the volume in the top of your funnel.

Besides budget, Google also uses a metric called click through rate (CTR) to determine your ad’s placement order. It isn’t as simple as paying more to get the top result, because your ad has to get a lot of clicks to make the top of the list. A good benchmark is an 8%-10% click through rate. If you have an ad or a keyword that is getting way less than 8% CTR, you should adjust the ad and keywords until it performs better.

Pro Tip – I have found after years of managing Google Ads for churches that cute ad copy just does not work. The first line of your Google Ad should simply be the church name. Don’t start with a description or a cool one-liner. It just does not perform as well as when you start with the church name. A solid ad headline is something like “New Life Church | Christian Church in Raleigh, NC.” I know it isn’t fancy, but it works.

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Google Ad Grants for Christian Companies

I heard about a $10,000/month free ads program. How do I get me some of that?

If you haven’t heard of the Google Ad Grant program, let me give you the inside scoop. Google has a program specifically for nonprofits. It allows you to run Google Ads at no cost at all to you, up to $10,000 per month. Pretty awesome! They don’t give you cash, so don’t get too excited, but it is a monthly credit for Google Ads. This is a big deal for churches who are jumping into this whole paid marketing world for the first time. As a new church, budget can certainly be an issue! 

You must be thinking, $10,000 per month in free advertising?! This is the greatest thing ever! It really is a great thing, and you need to set it up for your church. But it isn’t quite as amazing as it sounds. Let me explain. 

When Google Ad Grants first came out, it was hugely impactful for churches. We would run ad campaigns for churches and get hundreds of clicks per month, and it was amazing. However, now that the word has gotten out, it is an oversaturated market. With the Google Ad Grant program, there are some rules and limitations. One of the limitations is that you are capped at a $2 bid per ad, which makes it almost impossible to spend anywhere near the $10,000 monthly allowance. However, there is a way to remove the $2 bid cap. If you use the automated bidding option, and you can consistently keep all of your keywords and ads performing at a 5% or better CTR, then Google Ad Grants will lift the $2 per bid cap. The problem is that it is very easy to dip below 5% on many generic search terms. 

It is difficult to gain the maximum potential of the Google Ad Grant. But not impossible. By the time you are reading this book, the Google Ad Grant requirements will possibly have adjusted these metrics, and you should find out what the rules and limitations are at the current moment.

But right now, here’s how the oversaturated market affects churches: with so many churches using the Google Ad Grant program, everyone is competing for the same keywords. And everyone has the same bidding limitations, so each church is essentially bidding the same amount for their ads. This means that your church’s ads won’t get shown as frequently as you need, so it becomes much less impactful for your funnel. 

So what is the work around? Smart churches have gone back to running traditional Google Ads and actually paying for them, instead of using the Google Ad Grant program. Why would they do that when it is free? It’s because when you are paying, you are not limited to the bid cap. So you can set your bid at $2.01 per click and beat 95% of the competitors for that keyword. Your ads will trump all the Ad Grant campaigns because you are paying with real money.

This is an incredible opportunity. The market is oversaturated with Google Ad Grants, but it is very unsaturated with traditional Google Ad spend. Right now if you maximize and optimize everything possible with the Google Ad Grant program, you will only be able to generate around one hundred to three hundred clicks per month. But if you run traditional ads you will generate ten times those numbers. That is a good use of a marketing budget! The smart Google Ad Grant strategy is to use it, but also use a traditional Google Ads campaign at the same time. Go ahead and set up the Google Ad Grant program, even though your results will be limited. Any time you have an opportunity to get free traffic to the top of your funnel, jump on it. Just run the traditional ads as well. 

How do you get set up for Google Ad Grants? It’s a bit of a process, but totally worth it. The first step is to sign up for Google for Nonprofits. Do a quick Google search for “Google for Nonprofits,” and go through their verification process. Google uses a third-party entity called TechSoup to verify your church’s nonprofit status. They will ask you to set up a TechSoup account and enter your church’s EIN number, address, and a few other details. TechSoup needs to verify that you are a legitimate nonprofit organization. 

Once you have submitted all of the required information, it takes two to six weeks for TechSoup to verify your organization. You will get an email from TechSoup after it is complete. The next step is to log back into your Google for Nonprofits account, and you will see that your account has new features! Even a few more features beyond just the Ad Grant program. You will have access to free branded Gmail accounts, Map APIs, and a few other features in the Google for Nonprofits platform. 

The next step in the process is to sign up for Google Ads in your Google for Nonprofits account. Before starting, make a brand new Gmail account that you only intend to use for this Google Ad Grant account. This is important. Your Google Ad Grant account cannot be linked to your traditional Google Ads account; they have to be separate. Google’s Ad Grant setup process is not as smooth as it could be, and if you make one mistake along the way, you will have to start the process all over again. It’s terrible. For example, if you enter your billing info into your Google Ad Grant account, it no longer will be a valid account. Why is this? There is no good reason; it is just a glitch in Google’s setup system. A lot of people get stuck in this very spot, so trust me and don’t enter your billing information during setup. Just one little mistake makes the whole process have to start over.

Once you have your new Gmail account activated, you are ready to set up your Google Ad Grant account! Move forward with creating your settings and ads like you would a traditional account from here. There are a few more rules you must follow when launching your Google Ad Grant account, or Google will not approve your Ad Grant setup:

1. You are required to have at least two ad groups set up from the beginning.

2. Each ad group must have at least two ads in them.

3. You cannot use any single-word keywords. For example, don’t use “church.” It needs to be a longer keyword like “church in Nashville.”

4. You must not enter your billing info.

After you go through setting everything up, go back to your Google for Nonprofits account. Hit Activate next to Google Ads, and enter the Google Ads account number that you just received. It takes Google around three business days to approve your new Ad Grant account. But after that, you are set!

It would really be a bummer to go through all of these verification steps, only to have your account removed later. This happens if you don’t maintain it properly. You must regularly check in on the account, and update it frequently to ensure that your ads are preforming above the 5% CTR minimum. Log in once a week and update your ads, tweak your keywords, and try new ideas. If you let your ad account go dormant, Google will cancel it. Then you have to start this whole thing over again.

It is a process to get approved, but once you do, you will get some free traffic for the top of your funnel!

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