Joshua Steimle has written an article in Forbes that demonstrates just how advanced the Church is in using the Internet. He says:
“We tend to think of religions as being conservative, stodgy, or lagging when it comes to anything that has to do with technology, and especially online technology. Therefore it may come as a bit of a surprise to find out that at least one religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members are commonly known by the abbreviation “LDS” or the nickname “Mormons,” is one of the most advanced large organizations in the world when it comes to SEO, content marketing, and the use of social media.”
He notes that SEO means Search Engine Optimization and describes the activities of a website that determine the rankings in a search.
He said: “First, I looked at rankings for non-branded, generic keywords, Although exact results may differ from one person’s computer to another, when I used the SEO software tool SEMRush to analyze Google rankings for the following keywords for desktop users in the United Staes, I found LDS.org rankings in the top five results for these searches.
- bible
- bible dictionary
- christ
- church music
- holy bible
- holy ghost
- jesus christ
- king james bible
- new testament
- old testament
- scriptures
“It is not easy to rank for these keywords. Using SEMRush’s competitive analysis tool, the only website that outperformed LDS.org on these searches was Wikipedia, and this doesn’t take into account the fact that LDS.org is only one of the more than 100 websites the LDS Church maintains. Others include Mormon.org, ProvidentLiving.org, and OvercomingPornography.org.”
Steimle goes on to describe the inbound links to LDS.org and found that at 8.8 million of inbound links, the Church website ranks at 204th place, “just ahead of websites like GoDaddy.com and TechCrunch, and slightly behind Weather.com, Slashdot, and Forbes.”
Read the full article on Forbes.
