Why Does This Site Rank Well?

[cbizzle]

I noticed recently that the website of a local church (http://www.lifepointfc.com/) has climbed toward the top of the SERPS, and I cannot figure out why. The on-site SEO seems mediocre, at best, and their domain authority is 15 while their homepage authority is just 19. Does anyone see how they are working their SEO magic?

[Waismann]

I really don't see why. There doesn't seem to be much content, it always has only decent pagespeed scores and uses a lot of blocking js which hurts user experience. Every time I loaded a new page the screen went white for a second. But i think the question has to be "climbed to the top of the SERPs for what?"

Hard to find an answer without keywords to relate it to.

[cbizzle]

Thanks for your response. Two of the most potent keyword phrases are "churches in tyler tx" and "baptist churches in tyler tx."

[Waismann]

Based on the keywords you gave me, I think it's actually pretty simple. I think it's because they have Google Maps integrated into some of there pages, and contact info properly integrated in the footer of every page. Overall, I would give the site a D- or lower but for those location terms, just having the map and contact info can sometimes be enough.

Either way, you should read this article if you want some really hearty local SEO teachings: http://moz.com/blog/everybody-needs-local-seo

[Travis_Bailey]

They actually have an okay offsite local presence. When it is categorized, it's categorized as a Baptist Church. Check them out in Moz Local.

They appear to have frequently posted new content on their blog starting in February 2014. Also, the keyword isn't terribly competitive.

[cbizzle]

I thought that until I noticed that Sylvania Church often ranks behind Life Pointe, yet also appears to have local SEO in order and a functional blog with posts approximately every few weeks. Sylvania Church has a higher domain rank and the homepage has a higher page rank than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outperforms Sylvania on most searches...

[cbizzle]

Oddly, Sylvania Church has a better Moz Local score than Life Pointe, but Life Pointe still outranks it at times. It's a strange thing...

[Travis_Bailey]

This is pretty interesting because this isn't terribly competitive. It's easier to see the rudiments at work. The finer points seem to be more important.

A recent IMEC experiment noted that you could push a site up through CTR. There's one possibility. Maybe the congregation is more active online and uses a particular set of queries to find the site. Maybe the fact that Life Pointe posts more often gives them more possibilities of being found and thus clicked.

I haven't looked into it, but you may want to see if Life Pointe posts frequently on social channels. That may fractionally drive organic CTR.

I didn't see Life Pointe in any of the organic results for 'baptist church tyler tx'. I found Sylvania showing in the map pack. When I'm at home, my location defaults to Southlake. When I'm in the office, my default location is in Grapevine. I change my search location to Tyler, it was the same every time. However, they are page one organic for 'church tyler tx'.

I'm assuming your search was free of personalization. So that would be pretty interesting to look into as well.

At any rate, if you look at the technical side of things - the Sylvania Church site uses a lot of external JavaScript requests. While the Life Pointe site isn't exactly a gem, it's faster. So you might want to look into that, since page speed is definitely a ranking factor.

I used tools.pingdom.com and set the test location to Dallas, so one could say the test is 'agnostic'.

[cbizzle]

Thanks for your response. Life Point does blog more than Sylvania and they have a more prominent social media presence, so their performance may be CTR related. As for speed, Google PageSpeed Insights scores Sylvania Church substantially higher on speed than Life Point.

[Travis_Bailey]

It's always a good idea to use more than one tool. I like PageSpeed as well, but I think Pingdom does a good job when you need to pinpoint the actual issues.

I would like to do some tests with this - nothing invasive. PM me through my Moz profile if you're interested.

[MiriamEllis]

I just now found this conversation and I want to commend Travis for digging in.

Some other things to consider:

1. Age of the domain and also of the local campaign. If Lifepoint got an earlier 'start' on the web than Sylvania, this could have something to do with it.

2. It does not look like an industry centroid is at play here, because both churches seem fairly equally distant to what I see as the cluster for 'churches in tyler tx'

3. Could Sylvania have any negative issues like duplicate listings that could hold them back?

You might like to check out:

http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures