Last week while I was at lunch, I came across this submission on Hacker News about how Avinash discussed the effectiveness of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints‘ SEO practices.
A tag cloud very quickly shows the story in hundreds of thousands of keywords. In the case above, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it becomes quickly apparent that the Mormon Church has done a near magnificent job with search. – Avinash
As an SEO, I was naturally interested in their strategy, so I looked deeper. What I found was extremely interesting and a great case study of the power of SEO (and how to do it well).
[All data in examples below was taken from competitive intelligence tools as I don't have access to data for LDS sites.]
Traffic Acquisition
One of the valuable benefits of organic search marketing is targeting searchers who have not yet been exposed to your brand. Through targeting highly searched terms, a website can expose their messaging to new users. LDS does an incredible job at attracting traffic from a variety of non-branded religious and non-religious terms.
Top Non-Branded Organic Search Terms
These are the top twenty non-branded terms sending traffic to the LDS website.
Source: SEMRush tool on Raven tools, excluding mentions of LDS, Latter Day Saints, and Mormon(s). Ranking checked with SEO Book Toolbar.
The LDS website is targeting a diverse set of religious terms such as Jesus Christ, church, church music, scripture, and new testament. They’re also targeting some interesting non-religious terms including friend, young women, chastity, and safeguarding children.
When you look at these terms, and data on the value of a Google result position, it’s easy to see how the LDS church is effectively using SEO to attract new visitors to its church. If only companies were this effective.
How Are They Doing It?
If you’re not accustom to SEO, I recommend taking a moment to read over SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, but all you really need to know is that Google uses links between sites to evaluate relationships and the quality of content. When looking at links, Google evaluates factors like quantity, popularity, trust, and words used when linking (also known as anchor text).
A Lot of Links
Let’s just say, LDS has a lot of links from lots of different sites.
Source: SEOmoz Toolbar
If you sort the Top 500 Most Important Sites on the Internet by External Links, LDS would sit right under MTV.com (3,508,016 links) in number of external links. That’s a lot of links.
Anchor Text Distribution
Anchor text, or the words used when linking, are a significant ranking factor used by search engines to determine the words associated with a piece of content. Users often link with phrases such as brand terms, company name, and URLs. A website’s rankings can be increased by increasing the number of inbound links with descriptive (keyword rich) anchor links.
Below is a tag cloud of the anchor text of inbound links pointing at LDS.org.
(click to enlarge)
Source: Linkscape API and Tagxedo (excluding terms including < and http).
The keyword cloud visually demonstrates the distribution of keywords used when linking to LDS.org. This is an impressive link profile and doesn’t come together on its own.
Interesting Facts About LDS.org’s Links
- Over 100 unique domains link to LDS.org with the EXACT anchor text “church”
- 60 unique domains link to LDS.org with the EXACT anchor text “Jesus”
- 70% of the domains linking with the exact anchor “Jesus” are from domains with the word “Mormon” in the domain name
- There are directory submissions anchored with “Jesus Christ”
- The most powerful exact “church” anchored link comes from Microsoft.com
Source: SEOmoz Linkscape API
What Is Attracting Links
They have a lot great links, so the next natural question was “what is attracting all these links.”
Top Linked to Content
- http://lds.org/
- http://scriptures.lds.org/
- http://jesuschrist.lds.org/SonOfGod/eng/
- http://scriptures.lds.org/bm/contents
- http://jesuschrist.lds.org/
- http://maps.lds.org/
- http://newsroom.lds.org/
- http://radio.lds.org/eng/
- http://lds.org/churchhistory/museum
- http://tech.lds.org/
(Dead URLs, non-canonical URLs, and redirects have been removed)
Source: SEOmoz Linkscape API
Nothing crazy here, just more solid SEO practices. A lot of diverse content, resources, and community content.
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