Who qualifies for the nonprofit SEO program?

Registered 501(c)(3) organizations (or equivalent, such as fiscally sponsored projects) that serve Orange County or the surrounding Southern California community. Small teams without an in-house marketer get priority.

What does pay what you can mean?

After the work is delivered, you decide what it was worth to your organization. That can be $0. There is no invoice, no negotiation, and the amount you choose does not affect the quality or scope of the work.

Why do you do this for free?

Three honest reasons: local nonprofits do work I want to support, published case studies and reviews help my paid practice, and word of mouth in Orange County is how I get clients. It is community work and marketing at the same time, and I say so openly.

What is Google Ad Grants?

Google Ad Grants gives eligible nonprofits up to $10,000 per month in free Google Search advertising. Many organizations qualify but never apply, or lose the grant because the account does not meet Google's policy requirements. Setup and structure guidance is part of this program.

How many organizations do you take?

Two per quarter. This is a fixed-scope project done alongside paid client work, and limiting slots is what keeps the quality real. If the current slots are taken, applications stay on file for the next quarter.

Is there any ongoing commitment?

No. The program is a one-time project, not a retainer. You get the fixes, the documentation, and a prioritized to-do list your team or volunteers can follow. If you later want ongoing help, that is a separate, normal engagement.

Orange County · Data study

557 Orange County churches have no website

Counted from a national directory of 334,555 congregations. The county does better than the country — and the gap it does have sits in a handful of cities.

Nationally, 70.9 percent of American churches have no web address of any kind — 237,225 out of 334,555. In California the figure is 63.0 percent. In Orange County it is 52.3 percent: 557 of 1,065 congregations, spread across 47 cities and 51 traditions.

So Orange County is ahead. It is also, still, more than half.

The county in five numbers

1,065

congregations on record in Orange County

557

of them with no website — 52.3 percent

10

have a verified Google Business Profile — under 1 percent

73% → 26%

the spread between Brea and Fullerton — a forty-seven point gap inside one county

1M+

monthly US searches for “churches near me”

The gap is a city problem, not a county problem

A county average of 52.3 percent hides a spread of nearly fifty points. Brea and Buena Park sit roughly where rural Mississippi sits. Fullerton sits roughly where New England sits.

Orange County cities with at least 20 congregations, ranked by share with no website. Counted 31 July 2026.
City	Churches	No website	Share
Brea	30	22	73%
Buena Park	67	46	69%
Santa Ana	88	60	68%
Orange	81	49	60%
Garden Grove	42	22	52%
Anaheim	118	55	47%
Costa Mesa	64	30	47%
Irvine	59	28	47%
La Habra	27	12	44%
Huntington Beach	51	21	41%
Fullerton	27	7	26%
Orange County	1,065	557	52.3%

Santa Ana is the case that matters most. The county seat, its largest working-class city, 88 congregations — and 60 of them cannot be found online. The neighbourhoods holding the most churches per resident have the fewest churches on the web.

Tradition predicts more than geography

Inside one county, with one economy and one housing market, the spread by tradition runs from 14 percent to 78 percent.

Orange County traditions with at least 25 congregations.
Tradition	Churches	No website
Foursquare	45	78%
Non-Denominational	206	69%
Community	58	60%
Presbyterian	45	58%
Baptist	83	52%
Lutheran	59	31%
Catholic	87	30%
Calvary Chapel	42	14%

Calvary Chapel is the outlier that shows the mechanism. The movement began in Costa Mesa in the 1960s; 42 of its congregations sit in this county, and only six lack a website. Where a tradition has a dense local network and a shared expectation of what a church shows the public, the websites follow. Where every congregation is on its own — as the county's 206 non-denominational churches are — 142 have nothing.

Catholic parishes tell the same story from the institutional side: a diocese builds and pays for parish sites centrally, and the tradition lands at 30 percent.

The cheapest fix is the one nobody has taken

Ten congregations out of 1,065 hold a verified Google Business Profile. That is under one percent, in a county sitting inside a national search volume of more than a million “churches near me” queries a month.

It matters because the profile is the strongest single predictor in the national data: churches that hold one are only 8.1 percent likely to lack a website, against 70.9 percent for churches generally. Claiming it is free and takes about ten minutes.

The free steps, in the order that pays

Claim the Google Business Profile. Free, ten minutes, and it is what actually answers a “near me” search.
Put service times somewhere permanent. One page with an address, a service time and a phone number beats a social account last posted to in 2019.
Claim the free directory listing. Most congregations already appear in public church directories and can correct their own entry without owning a website.
Name a person. A working number and someone who answers it outperforms a designed homepage nobody maintains.

None of these requires a budget. The first three require an afternoon.

If your nonprofit is one of the 557

I take two Orange County 501(c)(3) organizations per quarter and do the work at whatever price fits the budget — including $0. No invoice follows, and no one chases you for payment later.

The scope is fixed: a technical and on-page audit, direct fixes to the homepage, donation page and main program pages, Google Business Profile setup, and Google Ad Grants application guidance where the organization qualifies.

Faith-based missions are explicitly eligible. Small teams without an in-house marketer get priority. Political campaigns are the one exclusion. Every application gets a personal reply within a few days — including a no, and a place on file for the next round.

See the program and apply

At a glance

Who: 501(c)(3) or fiscally sponsored, Orange County and nearby Southern California
How many: two per quarter
Cost: pay what you can, $0 accepted
Excluded: political campaigns
Asked in return: a review, permission to publish results, and a link if you have somewhere to put one

Method and sources

Figures were counted on 31 July 2026 from the Churches List directory, a public database of 334,555 US congregations. Churches are assigned to Orange County through the US Census 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship file, using the ZIP on each record.

Limits worth stating plainly:

A church counts as having a website if its record holds a non-empty web address. We did not test whether every address still resolves, so the true share with a working site is somewhat lower, not higher.
A social media page is not counted as a website. Congregations maintaining only a Facebook presence are counted as having none, so 52.3 percent is an upper bound on invisibility.
City totals use the mailing city on the record, which does not always match municipal boundaries. Cities under 20 congregations are excluded, because one church moves the percentage too far.
The verified-profile count reflects profiles matched and confirmed by that directory's pipeline; some churches may hold one that has not been matched, so treat 10 as a floor.

The national counterpart to this study, with all fifty states, is published at Churches List. Disclosure: I maintain that directory as well as this consultancy, and the underlying data is available under licence so the numbers above can be checked independently.