Oasis is #1, #2, and #4

I was reading a blog post on search result ranking.  It has been a while since I checked Oasis Church on google.  Since we are cutting out a lot of advertising this next fiscal year, I feel these results are even more important.  In July we got 1,000 unique visits from google and yahoo searches combined.  I don't know how good this is, but it has been steadily growing.

We have 3 campuses so I searched to see where we might land in three searches:

• "Church Pembroke Pines" = 1st place
• "Church North Miami" = 2nd place
• "Church Hollywood" = 4th place (ironically better than "church hollywood florida")

While this is good, it could be better.  I have a few ideas to try in order to improve this a bit.

The domain name visitoasis.org and the site are both 1 year old.  We rank well primarily because the site is essentially one big blog.  All of our posts are very search engine friendly.

I'm interested in exploring a few Ad Word campaigns, but it is one of those things we haven't found time to prioritize.  Anyone have experience with that? 

How does your church rank on a search "church city".

Comments

[Erik]

I just searched for "church Arden Hills" the city where the larger campus of my church of employment is located. Google returned a map and this church came up #10 (map letter J).

The interesting thing is that church #1 (letter A) is the church my family attends on Sunday morning. It's a much smaller church of only about 60 people (as opposed to 3,000) and isn't even in Arden Hills but located in nearby Shoreview.

[Jean-Guy Leconte]

Hi Kevin,

As a seasoned marketing professional and a new church member i can help out with you with some quick advice. Unless you can determine the impact of the website in terms of conversions i wouldn't want to do any Adwords advertising.

There are changes in terms of search engine optimization that can be done to help out the websites to maybe get a few more positions and some additional traffic to them. I would consider changing the title of the http://www.visitoasis.org/hollywood-campus page to the following: Oasis Church Hollywood campus, Formerly Church of Pembroke Pines.

By placing Church and Hollywood you will have more chance of ranking for it (even if it's backwards).

It's also important to test out some different things and just monitor the changes on the search engines, takes a lot of time i know but it's the only way to be number one.

Thank you and God bless

[kevin]

Jean-Guy,

Great insight! I changed the titles on those pages and I am going to update our metadata description for the main landing pages. We'll watch and see!