When membership prospects want to find a new association, they’ll start online. Therefore, it’s important to ensure you are optimizing your web presence to make it easy to interact with your organization, and for it to be found.
Here are five things you can do to improve your website rankings:
Avoid repeating unnecessary keywords
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is constantly changing and evolving as search engine algorithms become more intelligent and move away from the traditional HTML <meta> tags for descriptions and keywords. SEO methods that have worked in the past, including packing your content full of the same focused keywords used over and over, now can hurt your search rankings more than help them.
Publish quality content with helpful formatting
Today’s search engines rank your page based on the quality of your links and content. Keywords that are helpful to the user, for instance in section heading tags which visibly break up the text on the page, can assist users in finding the information they are looking for (e.g. <h1><h2> for those of you who enjoy HTML), as well as the use of image alt attributes. Instead of trying to hack your way to the top of the rankings, focus on building a quality website with semantic HTML and you will see success.
Guidestar and Wild Apricot have a other great tips on formatting articles and blogs for better rankings.
Setup Google Analytics and learn how to use it
Once your audience has found your site, you are going to want to know more about them and their online experience. If you aren’t already using Google Analytics or a similar reporting tool, we’d suggest installing some sort of analytics tracking on your site. Some great stats to keep an eye on are total visitors, new visitors, time on the site, bounce rate and total page views. This help give a high-level overview on whether people can easily find you if they are finding information of value and how engaged they are with your content. Additional insights on mobile vs. desktop, referral sources, geographic audience makeup and top pages help ensure you’re meeting the full needs of your digital audience.
However, these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to insights available through your analytics tool. There are some great how-to articles and videos available to assist with finding new ways to leverage this available data into a strategic plan for your website. Here are our favorites:
Udemy Ultimate Google Analytics Course
Be where your members are
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention social media. There are so many options available, but not all are the right fit for your members. Various associations and societies we work with have found success on one or multiple sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. If you have a video outreach initiative, a vibrant YouTube channel is your best social presence option. The key is to find where your members are most active and meet them on their turf.
Be dynamic
SEO improvement is not a one-and-done situation. Frequently publish quality content, stay up-to-date on Google’s algorithms, use data to experiment and grow, and periodically check your links and photos to make sure everything works.