Your website is the main way someone can get to know you, your mission, and your business. You have about 30 seconds to make an impression, so it’s incredibly important that you get the point across quickly and effectively. If it’s not up to snuff…. it’s likely that visitor won’t return.
Your business or organization and the work you’re doing is important, but a bad website is quite possibly worse than no website at all in 2022.
If users don’t quickly know what you do and who you work with then your site is not serving you like it could be.
Why Websites for Nonprofits & Social Impact Organizations Matter
Social impact companies and nonprofit organizations are in a very unique position because your website needs to highlight what you do or sell, who you serve, AND also your mission and values.
You’re held to a higher standard than other types of businesses and building trust with your audience is critical. When folks are looking to donate funds or donate their time they’re searching for an organization they can truly connect with.
Social impact and nonprofit organizations must give website visitors the opportunity to:
- Understand your organization
- Dive deeper into your work
- Stay engaged
An Optimization Plan to Improve Your Organization’s Website
Step 1: Focus on SEO
SEO is the best way to help drive traffic to your site. When doing SEO research look for keywords relevant to your organization and audience. Once you have some great keywords, start to create content! Don’t forget to promote your content to start driving some initial traffic there.
Step 2: Monitor Your Website
Watch the bounce rate and time on page metrics in Google Analytics throughout this time (weekly is fine). Are these numbers changing? You’ll want to set goals for reducing bounce rate and keeping folks on your site longer
You can also look at heatmaps through a user testing platform like Hotjar (See my other video about that!) You can also monitor user interaction rates through Google Tag Manager. This method can help show you where folks are engaging most, which CTAs are working best, and possibly where folks are encountering issues. Being able to watch as users interact with your site can have huge benefits! It’s quite likely you use your website differently than your users, especially new users.
Step 3: Make Changes
Once you have a good list of items you’d like to test or change, go ahead and make those changes. Make a note of the date in which a change went live though, this can be helpful in the future to see the work you’ve done! Then continue step 2 and 3, monitoring behavior to ensure it’s heading in the direction of your goals, and then making more adjustments as needed!
