Getting visitors to your nonprofit’s website is the first step towards raising more money, contacting more legislators, changing hearts and minds.
So what can you do when your nonprofit website doesn’t have enough visitors?
When I work with a nonprofit to improve their website, one of my goals is to have a healthy three piece “pie” of traffic: one third from search engines, one third from referrals and one third from direct visitors.
(If you don’t know what *your* nonprofit website’s traffic pie looks like, stop reading right now! Head over to my website analytics page and get your own custom dashboard that you can use with your Google Analytics account.)
Here are three easy things you can do to improve each piece of your website’s traffic pie
Your first step to getting more visitors from referral sites…
A “referral” is when another site links to your site. Sometimes these referrals are from standard websites and sometimes they are from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
For your first step, focus on getting more referrals from sites that have a .gov, .edu or .org domain. These websites have a little extra Google juice because they are considered more “trustworthy”.
Contact your partner organizations and funders and ask them to link to your nonprofit’s website. Help visitors that come through that referral link to understand what to expect once they arrive on your website. Give each organization specific language that you’d like them to use as your link and the specific page you want them to use as the destination for the link.
For example, email your city’s homeless services office, ask them to link to you with your paragraph full of information about homeless services and ask them to link directly to your “Healthcare for Homeless Veterans” page.
Your first step to getting more visitors from direct links…
Add a specific call-to-action every time you include your URL on printed collateral. Your goal is to give someone a specific reason to pull up your website on their laptop or mobile device. Promise them additional content that they can’t get via printed material.
For example, when you add your URL to the annual report, include a call to action such as “Watch Amy tell you why she loves our after school program” or “Scroll through our slideshow of legislative victories”.
Your first step to getting more visitors from search engines…
Go through the pages on your website and edit their titles and URLs to include more keywords. Start with the About, Services, Contact, Careers and Leadership pages, since these are always among the most popular.
For example, rename “Our Services” to “Healthcare for Homeless Veterans”.
Instead of http://OurNonprofit.org/aslkmds.aspx change the page’s URL to http://OurNonprofit.org/healthcare-veterans. (Just remember to forward that old URL to your new keyword-smart URL!)
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