Nonprofit blogs: How to increase your traffic
In the busy and resource-constrained nonprofit industry, keeping blog content fresh may be easy to put on the back burner. However, blogging is a great way to engage an audience, showcase the organization’s accomplishments, build a trusting relationship with the community, gain free publicity, and drive traffic to a website.
That last point — more traffic to a website — is key to an organization’s growth. Traffic means more exposure, which can lead to interest and engagement and help you increase organizational support. Here, we’ll share a few tried and true ways to increase traffic to nonprofit blogs:
How to increase traffic to a nonprofit blog
Increase the frequency of content. Search engines tend to prioritize websites with fresh content, so updating a blog is a great way to rank higher in searches, translating to more traffic. Keep content relevant, interesting, and useful, and remember that more words mean more SEO opportunities.
Research keywords. While more content is great for SEO, more content incorporating target keywords is even better. Research what keywords the audience will likely search for, and select which ones the site could potentially rank for. Strategically incorporate these in blog posts by ensuring they appear in the title, URL, meta description, and body of the blog post.
Share, share, share. Develop a top-line blog distribution strategy for each blog post. This can be as simple as deciding what social media platforms to share each post on or who to tag to encourage social sharing. And don’t just share once! We recommend sharing each blog post five times or more to ensure maximum exposure and frequently sharing evergreen content throughout the year.
Encourage others to share as well. Speaking of social sharing, adding social share buttons to a blog is a great way to encourage readers who are enjoying the content to share the link with their followers. This can attract new eyes and increase overall traffic.
Add photos or videos. Adding photos or videos is a great way to make content even more compelling. People tend to prefer visual content; a study from the University of Minnesota School of Management and the 3M Corporation found that presentations that contained visual elements were 43% more persuasive than those that did not—the same holds for blog posts. Make sure to optimize images and videos so they don’t load too slowly, and leverage assets for social media sharing.
Promote to your mailing list. Is there a distribution list of those who have opted into email marketing from the organization? Use this list to share new blog posts as well. It’s an easy way to keep interested community members engaged, and continue to have them visiting your site.
Consider paid promotion. While paid ads on social media can be expensive, they don’t have to be. Boosting a Facebook post, for example, is a relatively inexpensive way to get more eyes on posts and drive traffic to the blog.
Make sure visitors can subscribe to your blog. It’s easy to click a link once, read a blog, and never visit again. To stop this cycle, offer subscribe functionality, which allows visitors to sign up to receive an email every time a new blog post is published.
Click here for more from advice on writing and promoting nonprofit blogs, as well as an interview with Vanessa Chase Lockshin, President of The Storytelling Nonprofit.
Once you are successfully driving traffic to your blog, consider adding additional features to your website. Our Partner Network of nonprofit and patient advocacy partners shares dynamic content daily with their communities through Match, our clinical trial search tool. We also help our partners with clinical trial educational materials for their communities. Contact us to learn more.
