Every website - nonprofit or not - has three main types of visitors: The Skimmer, The Digger, and The Search Engine. Each of these visitors is looking for specific things when they land on your page. Have no fear, though: it’s easy to please all three types with a little bit of finesse on your part.

Here’s how to optimize your site for each type of visitor:

The Skimmer

The Skimmer is the first-time visitor to your site. She’s taking a few seconds to decide whether she trusts you and is interested in learning more about you. 

Let me be Captain Obvious for a minute here.

Our brains could easily be overwhelmed with the amount of content we consume every day. But because our brains are also highly flexible, we’ve adapted in some pretty spectacular ways to our 24/7 digital culture.

One way we’ve adapted is by becoming crazy fast at deciding whether a website is what we’re looking for or not. Like 50 milliseconds fast.

The first thing you need to do to get your website past that 50-millisecond decision point is to make it look as simple, beautiful, clean, and modern as possible. It is imperative that your nonprofit website design and copy NOT be stuck in 2004! (Or 2014.) You are losing people right out of the gate when you do that. 

Great website design has never been more accessible for individuals and organizations of all budgets. Having an out-of-date, cluttered home page is the equivalency of paying rent for office space in a half-empty strip mall. You may be doing amazing work, but you’re not making a great first impression.

A major part of modern web design is making it really simple for visitors to immediately get the gist of your mission and your call-to-action.

Share only the most important stuff first, making it skimmable, then provide opportunities for people to dig deeper by clicking on a strategic few buttons and links from your home page. Get everything that’s not of primary importance off of your home page. You want visitors to be able to know after a few seconds what you do and what you want them to do.

Then, on every one of your other webpages, make your content skimmable by making use of headings, white space, bullet points, bold/highlighted/italic text. Make your paragraphs shorter than your English teacher told you they should be. 

This isn’t about dumbing down your content; it’s about accepting that we all read differently online than we do when we’re reading hard copies of books and articles.

Ways to satisfy The Skimmer:

• modern design/copy

• minimalist home page with your mission stated as simply as possible

• clear CTA front and center

• make liberal use of bold/highlighted/italic text

• use bullet points

• write short paragraphs

The Digger: 

The digger is the visitor who wants to dig a little deeper and get a better sense of who you are and whether you are trustworthy and relevant. Maybe they’re a little skeptical; but more likely, they’re just a little further along in the process of getting to know you. Perhaps they’re considering a donation or wanting to volunteer but want to do a little more research first. 

These are the people who are going to do some poking around on your site. 

They’re going to go to the blog and skim through topics. They’re checking the dates on the blogs to see how often and how recently it’s been updated. Even if they’re not consciously doing this, if they see that your last blog was written many months ago, it’s a signal to them that you’re not keeping on top of things online. 

They’re going to look at your “About” page to get a sense of your organization’s history and whether your team seems experienced, knowledgeable, and trustworthy.

[Your “About” page, by the way, is the place to add your awards and honors as a leader. You can have testimonials about the power and importance of your organization’s work on the home page, but leave the personal accomplishments and accolades for your “About” page.] 

They’re looking at stats about your org’s work in the past year. Is it clear how many people you helped and how much it cost?

They’re hitting play on any videos you have. Does it look well made and polished? Do the stories being told seem authentic?

They’re wondering internally through all of this if there’s a place for them in your work. Does your organization need people like them? What do donors and volunteers have to say about your work? Do people like them already participate and find meaning in it?

These Diggers may not stay on any section of your website very long, but at each point, they’re gathering both head knowledge and a gut instinct about whether your organization is a good fit for them. 

Ways to satisfy The Digger:

• Do you have a regularly updated blog?

• Does your blog cover a wide array of topics related to your cause, demonstrating your expertise?

• Are your financial docs and impact statement available and updated?

• Do you provide lots of “Learn More” buttons that link to another page on your site with further details?

• Do you provide in-depth research about your cause and proposed solution?

The Search-Engine: 

Ah, SEO. It seems like a game with rules that are always changing, right? 

The reality is that Google does seek to reward the best content. It’s in their best interest that people be able to find what they’re looking for when doing a search. So if you’ve done the work to optimize the back end of your website for SEO with things like header tags, internal links, image optimization, etc., you need to move on to consistently putting out content that is valuable and well-written.

I recently saw a post that Tim Ferriss shared that went like this:

Seek to get noticed ------> do mediocre work.

Do quality work -------> get noticed.

Seek to do quality work consistently online, and the results will follow. It may take time for your SEO analytics to catch up to your hard work, but it will happen.

Again, Google is trying to find the most relevant, informative content for their searchers. One way they determine relevancy is by how frequently a site is updated. So adding fresh content (and using keywords that people are actually looking for) signals Google that your site is active and that real, responsive humans are behind it.

Research shows that blog posts of 1000-2500 words, posted at least once a week, are a reliable way for small businesses and nonprofits to increase brand awareness and web traffic.

It might seem counterintuitive: I’m asking you to make your content skimmable, but then I’m also asking you to put 1000-2500 word blog posts up on a weekly basis. Do people really read all of that?

Maybe, maybe not. They are probably skimming, and so you still need to make it super easy to skim - clear headings, bullet points, short paragraphs, etc. But the Search Engine is trying to weed the clickbait and the fluff from the truly informative and helpful, and one way they determine that is by referencing content that is longer rather than shorter. That 1000-2500 word mark is a great place to land if you’re trying to both make your posts accessible to visitors interested in your nonprofit’s work and make it stand out to the Search Engine.

Below are a few more ideas for tweaking your site in ways that Google seems to reward. (This list could be endless; there’s always more to learn! Start somewhere and keep chipping away at it!)

Ways to satisfy The Search Engine:

• Consider adding a video to your homepage. 

• Use Google Trends and Ubersuggest to find out what topics related to your cause already have some traction online, and plan content around those.

• Add photos to your blog posts (Pexels is a great source for royalty-free images).

• Write blog posts between 1000-2500 words regularly (at the very minimum, once a week).

• Aim for a balance of blog posts that are specific to your location and those that are more general. (So, a Chicago-based arts nonprofit would write about both local arts news and larger issues in the arts world).

• Also, aim for a balance between compounding and decaying blog posts. Decaying posts are about topics that will lose their relevancy very quickly (e.g. “Updates on the ‘Stop Homelessness Now’ Project for April 2020”). Compounding blog posts cover topics that could be just as relevant a year from now as it is today (e.g. “Top 5 Reasons Women Become Homeless”).

• Partner with other nonprofits to share each other’s posts on your sites and social media. Ask other nonprofits for the chance to write a “guest blog” on their site, and give them the chance to do the same on your site. This gets you backlinks, which are valuable for SEO.

• Another way to get backlinks to your site is to sign up as a source at HARO and respond to queries relevant to your work.

Which of these ways to optimize your website for 3 types of visitors can you implement today? This week? This month? Chip away at it, and you WILL see your web traffic grow!