Customers make for a successful business, and visitors make for a successful church website. There are many ways to attract customers and visitors – one of the best ways to attract people is to place your product, service, or website directly in front of them, and with the use of a search engine, this becomes straightforward. This is known as SEM or Search Engine Marketing.
People search for different things every day, and by fully optimizing your web content, you can appear at the top of the search listings. This can be tricky and take a long time to achieve as your ideal position is in the number one spot – Search Engine Marketing helps you achieve this, but doing it organically is a deep and involved process.
An option that many people choose is to use PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising which can get you in a prominent position in the results and simply allows you to increase brand awareness.
How PPC works
- Through brainstorming and research, keywords and phrases related to your business are found
- Each keyword is evaluated for use in advertising via search engines. If a keyword is too broad – for example, “food” – it will be difficult and expensive to reach your target market. Narrowing the scope – perhaps “vegan food” or even “homegrown vegan food in Texas” – will help you reach the right people and avoid advertising to those who have zero interest in what you do.
- The competition for any keywords should be examined next. If the competition is very strong, it may still be tricky to reach a high position, but if there is no competition at all it may be that nobody will be interested – further research may be needed in this case
- When the keywords are settled, an advertising campaign is built around them
Whenever someone searches for your keywords there is a good chance your website will be shown in the results. This is determined by your advertising budget and the relevance of your keywords, but the more appropriate your keywords are and the higher your budget, the better.
PPC advertising allows you to start advertising immediately and can bring visitors within hours. Using only SEO tactics can take months to achieve similar results, but that’s the trade-off: you either pay to be seen straight away, or build up your customer base over a longer period.
Organic SEO is likely to continue to provide customers in the long term, but sometimes you just need a little boost, and that is where PPC comes in.