3 Quick Wins to Improve Your Nonprofit's Website

Not every marketing success comes from a big campaign. When you're a nonprofit operating under budget constraints, big campaigns aren't always even an option. Sometimes, it's the little tweaks that can yield a boost in results. In some cases, the tweaks correct an issue that's been holding your website back.

We're going to dive into three areas where you can make some quick changes that can kick off strong change. 

1) Maximizing Your SEO Strategy

You have a clear SEO strategy based on your research of your prospects most pressing questions and concerns. You've identified what words and phrases they're using to search for information online. But is it being executed as completely as it could? Each page on your website and each blog post should be optimized around a single keyword or phrase that your ideal constituent is searching for on Google. More keywords than that can dilute the organic power of your main keyword.

If your organization isn't blogging yet, get going ASAP. A blog is the constant stream of fresh, SEO-focused content that search engines will use to drive traffic to your organization's online presence. 

For a quick overview of blogging for nonprofits, check out this free ebook >> 

Take a look at some pages and posts that aren't attracting as much traffic as anticipated. Review them to make sure they're focused on a current, high performing keyword. If they are focused on a single keyword, this is a good time to re-assess if that keyword should still be a part of your SEO strategy.

You can also optimize your high traffic pages and posts. Have you optimized each element on the page? Many people overlook optimizing their images for SEO. Look at everything from the image's filename to its alt text and title text to its loading time.

If you've seen an overall drop in organic traffic or your place in search results, it's probably time for a more comprehensive review of your keyword strategy.

• Have you done your SEO research based on what your prospects want to know, or only what you want to tell them? Inbound works because of an "educate first – ask later" approach.
• Perhaps your current keywords have gotten stale. Are they focused on what constituents and prospects are concerned about now? Prospects interests and pain points may have changed since you last created your keyword list.

2) Creating More Opportunities to Convert Visitors

Inbound marketing is a journey, just like the one your future constituents take. If your only calls-to-action (CTAs) on your website are calls to join, donate, or get involved – you're ignoring a lot of conversion opportunities.

Most of your website visitors aren't ready to make any sort of commitment to your organization just yet. That doesn't mean you can't get them into your database. 

Pick one of your high-value, free resources and make it gated content. This could be a report on how use different credit union resources to rebuild poor credit or a 10-year outlook forecast on the direction of your cause. 

Whatever the topic, it should be of sufficient interest and value to prospects that they'll happily give over their email address to get it. It's the starting point of an active relationship between your organization and a prospect that enables you both to learn more about each other, which ideally ends with the prospect joining your organization.

Placing CTAs to your gated content throughout your website and blog provides a low stress entry point for people who are still just looking for information and aren't quite yet ready to commit.

3) Treating Mobile as Mobile

Your mobile site can't just be smaller version of your primary website. Part real estate, part use case, the ways visitors interact with a mobile site are very different than a desktop site. Slightly more than half of all digital media is consumed via mobile, so optimizing your organization's mobile experience is critical to capturing and converting mobile traffic.

Let's start with real estate. Do use responsive design so your website design works on mobile screens. Since mobile visitors will see less with a first view than on your desktop site, make sure that first impression clearly communicates who your organization is and why the visitor wants to explore more.

When you visit your mobile site, do you see a lot of text? Consuming blocks of text is difficult and off-putting for mobile visitors. Break up monotonous text with bullets, color, or an image.

Your phone number should be click-to-call, for people who want to reach you immediately on their mobile device. Yet many people visiting your mobile site don't want to call you.  They want information. So make sure your mobile CTAs reflect mobile usability — you’re your requests simple — ask only for an email address. A CTA to apply for membership or donate now should make it clear they'll get a link they can use to apply online that they can complete later from anywhere.

Last, Google constantly changes how it optimizes its mobile search results and user experience. Its latest approach is cracking down on annoying mobile pop-ups. If you have liberal use of pop-ups on your mobile site, or use big pop-ups that block out the content behind it, you'll want to get rid of them. 

Staying Ahead of the Curve

It's easy to lose track of the little things when producing a lot of content, especially when the best practices of digital marketing change so quickly. Optimization is a never-ending process. But that just means you can always find ways to get some quick wins off your website when you're in-between running larger campaigns.

Author: David DeMambro
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Achieve 1,000% more shares on a blog post – Case Study

You’ve created a blog because everyone says blogging is a great idea but you don’t see the point.

You get a little bit of traffic but the blog is a real chore.

Not many shares, no comments (or maybe a spammy one!!)

Imagine if your opinion changed for blogging…

Imagine if blogging was a key revenue generator for your business.

Blogging is super powerful and it’s the reason why our business exists…

….but don’t take my word for it!

We have a great community called RazorBlazers where we train a couple of hundred businesses and marketers on an ongoing basis on a wide range of topics.  Recently, we set our members a blogging challenge and there were some very interesting results we want to share.

The Blogging Challenge

The challenge was to write one awesome blog post.

Over the last few years we have built up a lot of experience with how you can attract a lot of traffic to a blog and we wanted to share what we have learned over the years so that they could achieve great results on their blog too.

Here’s an example of one of our posts that was shared 24,000 times.

24,000 shares

So we shared some of our tips and tricks and set them the challenge to come up with a blog post that was much more popular than any other piece of content on their site.

The results were very interesting and there is lots to learn from them.

Achieving over 1,000% more shares than other post

Liz Alexander is a futurist strategist and while she has mixed opinions about blogging, she always loves a good challenge.

So Liz decided to create an influencer post where she got the opinion of other futurists:

40 futurists contributed

Let’s take a look at the number of shares this post achieved compared to other posts on Liz’s site using Buzzsumo.

The first two posts were both related to this article:

Shares on Liz’s content

So as you can see Liz got over 1,000% more shares on the article she wrote for the challenge, over the other posts on her site.

So how did she do this?   Well let’s take a look at what Liz did to promote her post:

• Set up a schedule on Buffer for tweets
• Used the embedded Click to Tweet feature – sent out every day
• Shared a summary of the post (twice) on LinkedIn
• Shared it to her Facebook page
• Wrote to all 40 contributors and they shared on Twitter, LinkedIn and FB
• Based on a comment saying that this post should be shared with all school principals around the world, Liz began identifying educationalists on Twitter and included their handles in her tweets, which attracted a lot more shares.
• She did the same with two educational associations that produce newsletters and magazines, that go out to this audience, too.

What were the results?

• Liz picked up several business opportunities: A New York business association has offered her a paid speaking opportunity to talk to their members — which could result in future clients. And a University has asked her to come and talk to both their faculty but also lead workshops for their students. Again, paid consulting gigs!
• Over 1,000% increase in shares over previous posts.
• It was shared by a number of prominent associations to their members, including NACE (National Association of Colleges & Employers); NASSP (National Association of 2nd School Principals), and several school districts, like USC (University of Southern California school district).
• The author of a career book asked if she could quote this post in the updated edition of her book (to which Liz said yes, of course!) – her publisher is Penguin and that book will come out early next year, so Liz’s post is going to “live” for a very long time in the pages of You Majored In What? by Dr. Katharine Brooks.

I think it’s safe to say that Liz is now very interested in blogging.

Rapid growth in traffic with just 3 blog posts

Gareth and his partner are building a social media tool called Content Sleuth, which provides social media automation, analytics and outreach for content marketers.

Gareth has only written 3 blog posts on his site so far (it’s a new site!).

For the challenge he wrote a post titled ‘26 of the best and worst SMM apps reviewed‘ (these were social media management apps)

Gareth did the following promotion:

• Sent two emails to his list of email subscribers – an initial email promoting the initial release of the article and then a follow-up.
• Contacted influencers to contribute their opinions and then encouraged them to share the article.
• Used BuzzSumo to check who shared out his previous article on Twitter and went through each one letting them know about the new article
• Sent several posts out to all his social media accounts
• Scheduled posts to go out over a period of several days
• Posted in relevant groups on Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook
• Setup ads on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, including specifically targeted ads and remarketing ads.
• Tweeted quotes from the influencers who contributed.
• Contacted every tool we reviewed in the post and let them know about it.
• Used Quuu to promote the article in the relevant category.

What were the results

• Over 500 shares of the post
• Email subscribers increased by 35.8% over a 7-day period
• Now ranks on page 4 for ‘Social Media Management Tools’ in the US (this is awesome for a new blog post on a new site)
• Some additional sales for their product – hard to work out the exact number that was directly related to the blog post but more relevant traffic = more sales
• A nice increase in traffic.  Remember, this site is very new so it’s great to see the traffic growing.

Content sleuth traffic growth

Signing up coaching clients after a blog post

Marie Collins said that writing blog content didn’t come naturally to her so we were delighted to see her post on 3 essential improvements to make on your Facebook page doing really well.

Digipulse

She promoted it across all the social media channels and invested a little in Facebook ads.  The increased level of promotion makes a big difference.  For any blogger out there if you are writing content but not promoting you won’t do every well. With a little extra push it makes a big difference!

What were the results

• The most shared post ever on Marie’s site
• Marie got a coaching client after publishing the post.

Summary

A blog is a hugely important part to your online presence so if you’ve left it behind maybe it’s time to resurrect it again.

If you create the right content, use the right tools and promote it in the right way your blog can drive significant traffic to your site.

More relevant traffic = more opportunities to sell.

Author: Ian Cleary

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