3 Strategies to Drive More Nonprofit Website Traffic

Say you’re standing in line at a coffee shop, waiting to get a cappuccino. To kill the time, you strike up a conversation with a stranger about your nonprofit. You tell them about your mission and recent fundraising events, and before you go your separate ways, you direct them to your website for more information. That’s where you want them to go, right?

Your nonprofit’s website is one of your biggest assets. But for many organizations, the challenge of leveraging this asset comes from figuring out how to boost website traffic and get people to actually use your website as a resource.

So, aside from suggesting to strangers in coffee shops that they check your website out, how can you drive more nonprofit website traffic? Here are three strategies that can help:

1. Create high-quality content.
2. Employ SEO best practices.
3. Integrate your website with social media.

With these tips and a website building tool created for nonprofits, you can direct more traffic to your website, cementing it as a great resource for your supporters to get information about and contribute to your cause.

1. Create high-quality content.

One of the most important things you can do to boost website traffic is to ensure that you’re posting high-quality content on your website. After all, you want to give your audience a good reason to visit it. And, according to Morweb’s guide to the best nonprofit websites, having great content on top of a solid website design will do the trick.

Here are some ways you can ensure that your content is high-quality:

• Create a donor communications calendar that outlines the website content you want to publish.

• Consistently publish on your blog to demonstrate that supporters can come to your website on a regular basis for fresh content.

• Incorporate multimedia elements into your content such as images, videos, interactive graphics, and audio clips or podcasts.

Whatever content you choose to create, be consistent in developing and publishing it. Consistency will signal to your supporters that your organization is actively moving its mission forward and interacting with its community of supporters.

2. Employ SEO best practices.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating website content that will help increase your visibility on search engine results pages. SEO can seem intimidating at first, but it’s actually pretty easy for anyone to improve their content’s rankings. Here are some actionable SEO best practices you can start using today:

• Incorporate keywords into your content: Keywords are words or phrases that people type into search engines. Use relevant, non-competitive keywords throughout your content that will help you rank higher on search engine results pages.

• Make your website accessible to everyone. In addition to helping you connect with more supporters, optimizing for accessibility can help improve your SEO rankings. Add alt text to graphics and images and provide captions and transcripts on videos so all users can interact with your content successfully.

• Create useful meta tags. Meta titles are the titles that appear on a search engine’s results page. Similarly, meta descriptions are the text underneath the meta titles that inform a user (and a search engine) what your page is about. Make them specific and informative. Also, try to keep your titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 155 characters. Otherwise, Google might cut them off.

SEO may require you to take a few more steps in the content creation process, but in the end, implementing best practices will help you drive more website traffic as search engines will have the information they need to see your content is valuable to users and rank you higher on results pages.

3. Integrate your website with social media.

Connecting your nonprofit website with your social media profiles can create a stream of two-way traffic between these two tenets of your online presence. For example, if someone discovers your nonprofit through a Facebook post about an event, they might follow a link in that post to your nonprofit’s website.

Here are some ways to boost traffic between your social media and your site:

• Share your website content on your social media profiles.
• Include social media icons on each page of your website and encourage your website visitors to share those pages with their family and friends.
• Add a live social media feed to your homepage so visitors can see you have an active social media presence and can click through to your profiles.

Getting your supporters moving between your social media profiles and your website will create a constant flow of traffic between them. This is also a great strategy for connecting with prospects you might not have had access to before, as you’ll be able to connect more easily with your supporters’ personal networks on social media platforms.

As driving nonprofit website traffic becomes a constant part of your marketing strategy, you can empower your nonprofit to raise awareness, welcome new supporters to your community, and pull in more donations.