“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”—William Arthur Ward. These are words of wisdom which can also apply to your nonprofit. Let’s say, you may need to improve your website for your nonprofit marketing strategy.
The website is the first thing people will see, so you need to make sure that it aligns with your branding strategy in order to attract the viewers that you want. The branding strategy includes the visual look and feel as well as the messaging strategy. Once you get those right, you need to focus on your website ranking and categorization in search engine results. This will help your nonprofit to make a bigger impact in your community through more views.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the action of increasing traffic and activity on websites through “organic” search engine results rather than paid advertising. This is important because the majority of traffic to websites comes from search engines. For content SEO, you will want to include key, trendy words that have a large enough search volume for people to find your website, but not so large that now you are having to compete with other websites to be at the top of the search results. Try to add key words that are highly specific because it decreases the amount of competition and increases the chances of people finding your website that are interested in its content. Specifically, you want to have long-tail keywords, which are phrases with 3-4 highly specific words.
The best places to use these keywords are in the title, first paragraph, subheadings, meta description, and URL. Your title should be no more than 60 characters long, or it should have keywords in the first 60 characters. This is because on the search engine results pages, long titles get cut short. Additionally, there are many free tools that you can search for online that can help you to find keywords.
Another way to increase traffic to your site is through internal linking and external linking. Internal links are links on a page of a website that leads the visitor to another page of the same website. This helps the visitors to explore more of your website and allows search engines to better categorize the pages on your website. External linking is when you have a link to another website that has a lot of traffic, which allows search engines to better categorize your website based on its relevance to other websites. Additionally, when you are able to add a link to your website from another website with more traffic, that will redirect some of the traffic from the high-ranking website to your website. For example, if you post an article or idea on a news website or social media, you can include a link to your website.
An important point to know is that the quality of the traffic is more important than the
quantity of traffic. For example, if you are getting a lot of ”bounced views,” then it is like talking to people that are not listening to you. It is more important to have a few people listening to you than to have an audience of 1,000 people with nobody listening.
CLASS helps nonprofits with marketing, IT, and other business consulting services. Specifically, CLASS helps nonprofits with digital marketing and social media, web strategy, online tools and infrastructure, and much more. Having a website is an important part of these strategies. If you would like to know more, you can read our case studies here and testimonials here.
If you want to reach more people through your nonprofit’s website, you need to make it attractive and easy to find. This means that you need to work on branding, SEO, driving traffic to your website through internal and external links, and valuing quality over quantity of traffic. Your website is an important way to communicate about your nonprofit, so make sure you have an audience to listen to you.
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The CLASS Consulting Group is a trusted advisor to the board of directors and senior leadership of the bay area nonprofit organizations. It is a boutique management consulting firm headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area that provides consulting services to senior management and board of directors of nonprofit organizations and offers community leadership opportunities to professionals.
Since 2002, CLASS volunteers have been assisting nonprofit organizations in the SF Bay Area and supporting the communities in which we all live and work. Learn more about our mission and story.
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