Posted on May 1, 2017

How Your Organization Can Flourish on .BIBLE: American.Bible Case Study

Posted on May 1, 2017 by .BIBLE Registry Categories: Case Studies, SEO Research

Before making the jump to join .BIBLE, you might have a lot of questions.

We had a lot of questions, too. This is American Bible Society's story about why we joined .BIBLE—and about how American.Bible, our .BIBLE site, has proven itself to be a valuable asset to our organization’s web presence.

Why should I make the jump to .BIBLE?

When we asked ourselves this question, we already had a strong .ORG website. So we had to ask ourselves, What’s the benefit of creating another website with .BIBLE?

We learned that the benefits of a .BIBLE domain are that it allows us to:

  • Emphasize American Bible Society’s dedication to God’s Word
  • Shorten our domain name for easy memory and communication
  • Align ourselves with a community of trusted, relevant organizations committed to reach the world through the Bible

Because these benefits complement our organizational strategy and objectives, we jumped at the opportunity to leverage the high value of the top-level .BIBLE domain. So, on May 10th, 2016, we launched American.Bible, which now runs parallel to Americanbible.org. Because of its value, we chose to dedicate American.Bible as a place for us to curate content for our major financial partners.

Won’t moving to .BIBLE hurt our SEO?

In 2015, when ICANN announced the addition of more than 500 new top-level domain (gTLDs), many businesses and organizations looked forward to claiming a domain name that would reflect their branding niche. But some of those same organizations wondered, Will a new top-level domain name hurt our SEO?

We wondered the same thing… for about three seconds. But within seven days of launching American.Bible, we were ranking on the first page of Google for our brand name. By July 2016—just two months after the site launched—we ranked in the top five organic results on Google for our brand name.

How did we do it?

“Using the domain American.Bible allowed us to launch a new site with a short URL that closely ties to our brand name, a rare situation in the increasingly crowded namespace of .COM and even .ORG,” explains American Bible Society’s Web Services Senior Manager Jeremy Gimbel, “That, combined with SEO best practices—such as appropriate keyword usage in page titles, descriptions, and URLs—helped us quickly rise to the first page of Google search results.”

American.Bible is just one of many .BIBLE success stories. Want to learn more about how other organizations have leveraged .BIBLE? Check out these stellar .BIBLE sites.