To the Levite Jewish Community Center’s members, The J’s website can be a useful tool to keep current on the organization’s news while checking the calendar and group fitness schedule. But a growing group of virtual visitors from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and around the world has been flocking to bhamjcc.org for a little education.
It turns out The J seems to have become a great source for information about Jewish holidays.
Created last December, the site’s “Guide to 2024 Jewish holidays” page quickly gained momentum as a resource, with tens of thousands of visitors. “We were actually a little suspicious of the numbers,” says David Gonnerman, communications manager at The J. “But then our friends at Infomedia who host our site assured us that not only was everything good, but that that particular page had gone a little viral.”
A ‘High Holidays’ high
Things really took off with the approach of the Jewish “High Holidays” in the fall. From August to October, Google displayed a link to the LJCC’s Jewish holidays page more than 6 million times to people who had used any of 500 search terms related to the holidays.
Those 6 million impressions spurred more than 60,000 users from 176 countries to click through to The J’s site and hopefully learn something new about Jewish culture.
“While your primary mission on the website is to grow membership, you have a mission as an organization to educate,” explains Pam Sanderson, director of account development at Infomedia. “This page is a prime example of how that mission can be achieved by following best practices with Google to encourage strong organic traffic.
“You have achieved something fantastic with this page.”
Driving the narrative
Carrie Rollwagen, Infomedia’s vice president of strategic planning and host of The Localist podcast, notes the importance of becoming a thought leader online. “Yes — this information can help your primary readers, but it can also help contribute to a broader global conversation,” she says. “Because The J’s holidays page is so successful and attracts so many visitors, it can help drive a broader narrative. This is extremely important in fighting the misinformation that can be so rampant on the web” — misinformation that can be increasingly antisemitic, we might add.
So now the next time someone asks you for details about Jewish holidays, you know where to send them…