Daxko experts Wendy White and Nick Lindauer share key insights on optimizing your digital footprint to captivate and convert members during the New Year’s gym rush.
Guests
- Wendy White is the Chief Marketing Officer at Daxko.
- Nick Lindauer is the Vice President of Demand & Digital Services at Daxko.
Mentioned in the Webinar
- 11 Features Every Nonprofit Website Should Have
- A Guide to Creating Audience Personas for Nonprofit Marketing [Free Template]
- 5 Nonprofit Trends Transforming Community Centers in 2023
- Google Ad Grants Playbook: A Nonprofit Marketer’s Free Digital Advertising Playbook
Key Takeaways
7:01 – Focus on Creating Content That Makes Sense to the User
You want to consider two to three SEO topics. Keep honed in on your topics. Think about not just SEO, but also think about the new year and your January joins. Think about topics that those users are going to be interested in. You want to aim to create four to six blogs around those key topic areas.
Also, consider what areas you have gaps in. So, take a look and triangulate there that way. Then, when you actually do publish that content, make sure you link those internally. But make sure you link those blog posts together so that a user can go from post A to post B.
Make it make sense to the user. If it doesn't make sense to the user, it's not going to make sense to the search engines. And that's where you really want to target it in.
15:53 – Reach Members During the New Year’s Gym Rush With Digital Marketing
The next level that you can actually still enact between now and the end of the year is digital marketing. We're talking about Google Ad Grants and Facebook ads. If you don't have any of those running today, you can get those live by tomorrow if you wanted to.
Digital marketing is the channel that you can turn on as quickly as possible to have a high impact and a very cost-effective channel. It is a great channel to use to tell your story, embrace your mission, and convert prospects and members. We know that's what they're going to be doing during that time period between Christmas and New Year's. They're going to be on their phones and they're going to be searching. They're going to be on Facebook, they're going to be on Instagram. They're going to be on all the social media channels, and they're going to be searching.
So, you want to make sure you're there where they are. And digital marketing, again, you can turn it on. You can't get a billboard to market that fast, but digital marketing, if you don't have it going, you can get it going.
24:20 – Engage Members Quickly to Improve Your Conversion Rate
We don't tend to think of ourselves as selling in the YMCA movement, but you should. You should probably think that selling is an okay word because I guarantee you the health club down the street is selling.
So, one thing I want you to know is that you're competing against them. They probably have a dedicated sales team following up immediately after somebody hits their site, fills out a form, or stops by.
It’s not surprising, but 78% of customers buy from the first company that responds to their inquiry. Being fast is super important to your conversion rate so you're not missing out on bringing members into your association.
The other thing I really want you to understand is this concept of the speed to lead. The reason why the conversion rate drops off is because when somebody is at their desk filling out a form and they get up and move away and go cook dinner, whatever their motivation was trails off.
So, if you don't get to them, they might still be interested. But if somebody else got to them first, or they just get busy, then it's hard to get in touch with them. They might not convert.
Full Transcript
Wendy: (1:37)
I'm Wendy White, the Chief Marketing Officer of Daxko. We're coming to you with a sprint plan for how you can approach the new year, primarily focused on digital marketing. This is an area of particular expertise for me and my co-host, Nick, who leads our digital services team.
We're both 20-plus-year veterans with deep expertise in digital marketing, encompassing websites, advertising, SEO, email marketing, and lead engagement. Today, we're going to share some tips and tricks to help you prepare for the New Year rush, hoping you'll find some valuable nuggets.
Please use the chat to ask questions as we go. Either Nick or I will be monitoring it, depending on who's speaking, and we'll answer there, offering as much help as possible.
All right, next slide, Nick. So, what are we going to talk about today?
We'll discuss how to acquire, convert, and nurture new members to maximize your membership for 2024. Specifically, we'll cover what you can do in the next 30 days to sprint toward a successful January. It's not too late to implement some of these strategies.
We'll also introduce a few ideas for things you can reset in 2024 to improve your digital marketing throughout the year.
And with that, I'm going to invite Nick to pop up.
Nick: (3:23)
All right, so, as Wendy mentioned, we're focusing on a 30-day sprint, but in reality, if we look at the calendar we have on the screen right now, we've got 12 business days between now and Christmas. So, nobody panic or freak out.
We put this calendar together to outline what you can do between now and the prime peak period that happens in the fitness space between Christmas and New Year’s.
There's a one-week period where search volume goes through the roof. It actually continues through probably the first week in January.
But you still have time, using some of the tools and tricks that we're going to show you here in a minute, to maximize the impact for your Y, or for your community group, whatever you're working on.
Between now and then, we put this framework together to show you how everything works together as you start assembling the puzzle pieces, like getting your campaign set up, getting your competitive keywords, your ad copy, and working through that.
And we highlighted that week between Christmas and New Year's because that's a peak week where volume is going to go up.
Nick: (4:33)
You're also going to increase your budgets. So keep that in mind as you're looking through your budgets for now until the end of the year, that you're going to need to increase spending between Christmas and New Year's because of that volume increase.
And because you're not only increasing volume, but everyone else is also increasing volume, cost kind of goes up during that time period.
But, we'll actually be following up with this calendar so you can use it and customize it however you want.
But this is something to look at, how all the pieces work together as you work through this busy sprint period. And we actually didn't include everything in here, but there's a lot to consider in this time period.
Nick: (5:11)
And we're going to talk about the first of those impact areas that we're going to discuss, which is acquiring new members, as Wendy mentioned.
What we want to talk about first is SEO. Can they find you? So, part of acquisition is being visible, right?
One exercise we'd like you to do, and nobody likes to Google themselves, but we're asking you to go Google yourself. Go to Google, type in "site:" and then your domain.
What you're going to see here is Google is going to report back to you all the pages that they know you have. Hopefully, you don't see any spam. We did have a client the other day who had a big spam injection. They had over 200 pages of spam that we had to go in and correct.
This is the first thing you want to check. Do you have any spam? Is there anything in there?
After spam, let's hope that doesn't happen to you, but after that, do the web pages read correctly?
Do they make sense to both you and, the fifth point there, do they make sense to a user? Just because you call something a program one way, is that actually what your users are searching for?
Because this is, if we're looking at this list Google reports back to you, it's what users are seeing, and so you want to make sure that what users are seeing is what you intend for them to see, to help drive click-through rates to your website.
Because if it's not interesting to them, they're really not going to click through and engage with your website.
This is really the first step in this process to actually acquiring members, is making sure that you can be found. And when you are found, they're engaging and actually reading those page titles correctly.
Nick: (6:51)
And are we recording this call, Wendy? That was a comment that just came through. Somebody's recording it. Thank you.
All right. On the couple of things you want to get ready here for your SEO content. We're going to talk about chat GPT. We don't want you to go too crazy. Like, you don't need to do a bunch right now.
You want to consider two to three SEO topics. Keep honed in on your topics. Think about not just SEO, but also think about new year, new you, your January joins.
Think about topics that those users are going to be interested in. You want to aim to create four to six blogs around those key topic areas.
Also, consider what areas you have gaps in. So take a look, triangulate there that way.
And then, when you actually do publish that content, make sure you link those internally. Real newbie, I'll get to you here in a second in the comments.
But make sure you link those blog posts together so that a user can go from post A to post B, make it make sense to the user.
Because, if it doesn't make sense to the user, it's not going to make sense to the search engines. And that's where you really want to target it in.
Don't just do a bunch of links for the sake of doing links for SEO. As Alyssa just asked in the chat, that is Search Engine Optimization. That is natural search. It's also free search, free traffic if you can get ranked for those keyword terms.
So, that's something that. We want to, we want to set the groundwork now, [You] may not be able to capitalize on free traffic for the next 30 days.
But, if you set good groundwork now in 2024, you're going to see success.
And with that, we're going to go to some ChatGPT prompts to actually help you get ready for this content.
Wendy: (8:38)
Yeah. So let me, let me first advise you. So Alyssa, the question you asked about SEO.
You know, SEO is critical for your site for you to be found. I think one thing that we don't think about often in the why movement is that we're actually competing against the gym down the street.
Right. And so, you have to really infuse your content with keywords that Jim is also using and make sure that that Google knows where you are, your business settings are set up, etc. There's a lot to be done there.
If you're concerned about any of that, I'm going to show you on Office Hours next week. You can come or you can just ping me and Nick after. We'll give you our addresses and we'll get on the phone and give you some advice.
So, Nick talked about making sure you had a small body pot of content. I'm going to tell you how to get some content really fast, really easily out of chat GPT that you can, you know, quickly get up onto your website to help you get and start building your SEO now. So, the first thing is just open up chat GPT.
You don't have to have an account. If you want to pay the 20 bucks, it actually makes it a little faster. It gives you a little bit more help, but you can use it today without a paid account.
The first thing you have to do is tell ChatGPT who they are. You have to say, I want you to, you know, act like an expert in this area.
Wendy: (10:00)
You tell them to, you know, reduce the pros that keeps them really focused on giving you a short and sweet answer that you can understand.
Tell it your tone, the style, anything you wanted them to know about your YMCA and then tell them how creative to be. And in the instance of like, the first thing we're going to do, we're going to ask you to give it your keywords.
You just tell it zero. so next slide. Nick.
So, here's an actual prompt. You would go into chat GPT. You would say, good morning. It loves when you speak, when you speak nicely to it.
Good morning. Can you be an expert at, and then you put in your, your market at my YMCA, at my Jason Z or my boys and girls club, and tell it you have a deep understanding of SEO.
Tell it to brainstorm 10 keywords that capture whatever you're working on. In this instance, the motivation of individuals to kickstart their fitness journey and join a gym, a fitness association, etc., right?
And so here's the example.
Again, we'll give you these slides. You can copy and paste this exactly out of the slides, and then it will tell you the exact keywords.
The good thing you need to know is you can also ask it. Give it your domain and ask it, how well does my domain do on this? Give it your website address and it will tell you how much you match those keywords or areas you can improve. Okay, next slide.
Wendy: (11:30)
So now you know those keywords. Now you want to say, what content can I write to support those keywords?
So then, you just ask it again. Just tell it to be your virtual marketing assistant. Can you give me additional keywords related to fitness classes? Can you suggest blog topics that would relate to these keywords?
And again, it gives you that output and keep going. It's just like, think about this as like, keep going.
It answers the questions. It remembers where you're at. Keep going.
We're just, we're just going levels, deeper
Levels, deeper, right?
So now you have the blog topics. Next slide.
Ask it to write you a blog, right? You're the world's leading creative writer for blogs, and you're still an expert on my, organization, my gym, my YMCA, my, you know, Boys and Girls Club.
Wendy: (12:16)
And then you tell it exactly what you want. I want a blog that does this, right? And then look, well, look what happens. It gives you the, it gives you, you know, the output.
And so you have just accelerated something that might have taken you an hour or two and you've done it and like, 3 minutes. Right and you can do this again, you can say “great, make it now, make it more friendly, like turn up the creative temperature,” right?
Make it more community marketed. Use some words that I like that we use when we're describing our association. You just have to tell it.
“Give me another version that does this” and it will give you another version. In about a half an hour, you can produce those five or six blog templates or blogs that Nick talked about and quickly get them up in your site to start building SEO today.
The good thing if you're using chat GPT, do you need to reference that when posting? You don't actually need to reference it, because you're giving it your intellectual property, telling it the things you want it to do.
You're shaping the content. You can also, if you're really worried about, it looking too written. You know, take a minute when you copy it over, paste it and edit it a little bit to give a little bit of your oomph to it.
But, you know, I wrote. Personally, I use ChatGPT right before General Assembly and ask it to help me write a pillar page about General Assembly for our website. And I told it three or four times some additional things I wanted and a pillar page is just an SEO page you put on your site.
And then I ran it through a checker. There's a tool called writer. com that checks is, does this sound like AI or does it sound like human, and it came back saying it sounded like it was human.
Why? I was telling it what I was wanting. I was constantly, you know, refreshing the message. Say no, go a little bit more like this or add these things in, and you know, it's, it's kind of magic. So…
Nick: (14:10)
And I would say with that, Wendy, one of the things I like to do is once I get that blog post, I like to say, okay, now please use the tone of “this”, and then usually you can, you can give it the website.
Say, if you already have an existing tone and approved copy, you can ask it to use the tone of your existing website, and it'll rewrite based on what you already have out there and use those guidelines that you have.
Wendy: (14:13)
Yep. So, it sounds like you. All right. And then the next thing you can do once you have that, that blog is ask it to write the social media copy for you.
And I always ask it to give me two, three, four, five, so that I have things to choose from, or maybe I use them all and I just use them all over different days.
Again, you guys are going to get all this material so you can read it and use these for ideation. All right. Next slide. Okay.
Nick: (14:59)
I was going to say, Wendy mentioned it, but we are going to have SEO and AI office hours next Wednesday at 10 am central. We've got a couple of topics we're considering, but if anybody wants to join, just put your email in the chat or reply to the follow up email and we'll, we'll include you and get you an invite to that.
We're going to cover whatever you guys need us to cover related to SEO and AI to give you all the tips that you need to have a successful 2024.
Wendy: (15:26)
Also, it thanks Cassandra for commenting. If you're a real newbie and you really want some additional help, don't hesitate to ask folks because Nick and I know that we, we're doing this stuff every day.
But if this isn't your day job, it can feel a little intimidating, and so that's why we want to make sure that you feel comfortable, because this can really accelerate your work in December. Okay, let's keep going.
Nick: (15:50)
All right. So. That was a, that was a very high-level look at SEO and AI, but the next level that you can actually still enact right now, between now and the end of the year is digital marketing.
So, if you do not have, and when we talk to digital marketing, we're talking Google ad grants or sorry, Google ads. We'll talk about Google ad grants and we're talking Facebook ads.
If you don't have any of those running today, you can get those live by tomorrow if you wanted to. These are, digital marketing is the channel that you can turn on as quickly as possible to have a high impact and a very cost effective channel.
It is a great channel to use to tell your story, embrace your mission and convert prospects and members because we know that's what they're going to be doing that time period between Christmas and New Year's, they're going to be on their phones and they're going to be searching.
They're going to be on Facebook, they're going to be on Instagram. They're going to be on all the social media channels, and they're going to be searching.
So, you want to make sure you you're there where they are. And digital marketing, again, you can turn it on. You can't get a billboard to market that fast, but digital marketing, if you don't have it going, you can get it going.
I will tell you though, one big tip is you, if you have it going, please go in and check your budgets and make sure that you have, all of your billing set up correctly between now and the end of the year, because what can happen is with this increased cost between with the increased volume, you could run out of budget and all of a sudden you're asked to go dark.
And if you're on vacation and nobody's checking it, you miss out that entire week and it's such a short time period that we don't want you to miss that out.
So, just please go and check your budget settings, make sure you're set up and you're ready to go for that. But, you know, digital marketing, what you can do, how to turn it on right away.
Nick: (17:33)
Don't be afraid to advertise. As Wendy mentioned earlier, think about competitors in your space. Use AI, use a couple of those prompts to get some competitive keywords.
Competitors are going to be all the other gyms and fitness centers that are going to be heavily advertising in January.
Don't be afraid to buy their brand terms by their program terms if you have something that's closely related to them, because you can get your campaign set up on a Monday, you can get your competitors determined and you can get ad copy and you can be launched by the end of next week if you don't already have something going on.
And we keep talking about that week between Christmas and New Year's, but you're going to want to increase your spend on your competitive terms during that time period. Take advantage of that increased search volume.
And then you can turn them off come the, you know, second week of January. Get back out of that play, but again, really capitalize on that time period right now.
And then I mentioned it earlier, we don't have time. It takes 30 to 60 days to get a Google ad grants campaign going. But if you are qualifying 5013c, you can get $ 10, 000 free from Google.
We're happy to help you go through that application process so we can get that set up, but you can use that for search advertising. And if you don't have it, you can get it for 2024 and then this time next year, you'll have that money ready to go.
Nick: (18:54)
Talk about acquiring, let's talk about converting new members. Let's make sure we looked at Google how Google sees your website. How does your member see your website?
So, one of the things through our research, what we found is we need to make sure that your website answers these questions.
Let's not let's not panic and think we have to do a redo a website in 12 days. You can do a landing page. You can do one page that your digital marketing or your social media drives to, but you want to make sure you answer these questions. You want to make sure that users know where you're located.
We want to make sure they know what you offer, what membership packages are available, what do they cost, class schedule is huge. They want to know do you have a class that works with their schedule? And then how do they book a class? Once they find the schedule, can they find how to actually book a class?
And then, events. You know, what does your member, your package offer event wise, community wise? What's the engagement there? So, that's a high-level look at your landing page, what they what it needs to answer. Now, this great January landing page, a membership that does more. We're clearly showcasing the fitness amenities.
We're communicating the organization's purpose. We're actually, you know, in this example, we've segmented down by age group and shown the prices starting at certain months.
We’ve Highlighted senior packages, family packages, adult packages, and we're emphasizing childcare services farther down on the page.
But this is a great landing page to drive for both paid search and social media to convert those members because, once they get to your website, you want to convert them within 1 or 2 clicks.
You don't want to drag them on. Don't make them look for it. Give it to him right then and there. Bring them back real quick.
Wendy: (20:39)
Okay, so if you are a newbie and you don't know what a landing page means, it's the place you point your advertising to when you have a click in an ad, it's the place you, you land them to.
Terrible idea to land them on your home page of your website. You want to take them to a specific place. Google gives you, um, Google rewards you for making the website page you send them to match the copy in the advertising.
So, if you're talking about joining a gym, January join, getting back in shape, you know, you know, being part of rejoining a gym community, and then you just take them and dump them off onto a regular page.
Google, will over time charge your ads more because you're not fulfilling what you advertise.
So just make sure that you think about your ad copy and your landing page just really lining up on intent and you'll get rewarded for that on your, Google advertising because the pages will convert better.
Nick: (21:32)
Yeah, it's the relevancy that they really care about both Google, but also your users, right? If you're using a keyword that says cycling classes, that landing page or where they click through and where they land should say cycling classes. Bring it all the way home so the user can also make that connection.
And if the user can make the connection and it's very clear, then Google will make that connection. And that's the number one thing you need to worry about.
Wendy: (22:05)
Alright. Hopefully, that was helpful. So, I wanted to tell you just a little quick, story about the Mankato Family YMCA and we're going to talk about Google ad grants here again, because somebody asked us to circle back on it.
Google gives away 10, 000 dollars a month and free advertising to any 5013C that can qualify. And to qualify for it, you have to have a Google-compliant website. Meaning, it's got to be optimized for SEO. It's got to meet the requirements of the program in terms of the site fulfilling best practices.
And then, of course, your advertising has to run and meet their requirements as well. So, you know, probably not surprising to some of you, some wise out there don't have an expert digital marketer on staff. They just don't. And so, maybe the website doesn't actually meet the requirements for that grant.
Well, that's exactly what happened to the Mankato family YMCA. Mankato was right down the street from where I grew up in Minnesota, Southwest Minnesota. It's right in green giant country. It's a great little town.
They did not have a compliant website. So, they came to us after they applied for the grant and they were denied.
And the application process is about showing off the things you're going to advertise and the place you're going to send the advertising.
Click that QR code in the bottom left, and you're going to learn more. We're going to send you a guide on how to use a Google grant. Sp we redid their website for them, help them apply.
They qualified, and look at the impact that it had using the dollars, right? They were able to get more donations, more pledges, more program registrations for their swim classes almost immediately.
Back to what Nick said, you can't get this up by early January, but it's something you can start now so you can be ready for a great Q1. Obviously, reach out and we'll help you with this one as well.
Wendy: (24:11)
All right, keep going. Okay. Last topic. we said, acquire, capture, and convert new members. I want to give you one little piece of advice on an area that you may not always think about. We don't tend to think of ourselves as selling in the YMCA movement, but you should.
You should probably think that selling is an okay word because I guarantee you the health club down the street is selling.
So, one thing I want you to know is that you're competing against them and they probably have a dedicated sales team following up immediately after somebody hits their site or fills out a form or stops by.
So, not surprising, 78 percent of customers buy from the first company that responds to their inquiry. So being fast is super important to your conversion rate and not missing out on bringing members into your association.
The other thing I really want you to understand is, this concept that we just talked about, the speed to lead.
The reason why the conversion rate drops off is because when somebody is at their desk, filling out a form and they get up and move away and go cook dinner, whatever their motivation actually kind of trails off.
So, if you don't get to them, they might still be interested. But if somebody else got to them first, or they just get busy and then it's hard to get in touch with them. Right? Then they might not convert.
The other thing you should know is, um, that, if you don't catch them in that first minute, you have got to keep trying.
What I know, and what I've seen with lead follow up programs is a lot of times they're set to follow up to 3 or 4 times over a few weeks, as opposed to really having a cadence of “let me call them, let me shoot them an automated text, let me have email. If they open the email, let me send a new email in a few days.”
Like, there's actual best practices, cadences around these. And the thing to know is you can catch them fast, you're going to convert about 30% of them, 30 to 40% of them right away.
But, another 30% or 40% of leads or people that are interested don't actually convert until after the eighth touch. So, the best practice in the industry is to have about 13 touches in a combination of email, phone call, text, et cetera. So don't be afraid to keep your follow up going longer than a few touches.
Wendy: (26:24)
It is, I will guarantee you, most people will not find it spammy. It is really what's necessary to catch those people that are just busy being a mom, busy running, working, busy being a dad, busy with real life.
Like, those people exist and they probably appreciate when you finally get in touch with them and get them to come in.
Again, 30 something percent convert in that 8 to the 13th touch. So don't be afraid to do it. Go get a line with your membership teams right now and make sure that they're fully following up with those leads to make sure you're getting the best ROI of every dollar you're going to spend on advertising during this period. All right, that's it.
So, what we talked about today is increasing your visibility with SEO, using, AI to write great content, expanding your reach with digital marketing, doing Facebook and Google advertising, Facebook meta, I should say, which includes Instagram, do it during this period it's your, it's your best and highest converting period of the year.
Obviously, you need that landing page and a website that actually converts. If you don't have that, we can definitely help. And then, that really fast and lead follow up, but also those 8 to 13 touches that we talked about next slide.
So, we talked earlier. I'll let Nick this is his team. Why don't you talk about this?
Nick: (28:07)
Yeah. Um, there's, you know, when he said that my team oversees these categories, but the ways we can help, but happy to take a look at your website. We do website design development and we can optimize for both SEO and for Google ad grants.
We are experts in Google ad grant management and have developed the cadences to make sure everyone gets approved and we can maximize your dollars cause it's 10, 000 up to 10, 000. We make sure our customers actually get as much money as possible because it's free money. Free money means advertising. More advertising means more members.
And we also run targeted digital marketing campaigns with live reporting dashboards for you to access at any time. Those are three ways we can help, but I know I've seen a lot of chatter in the chat. I'm sure people have questions. So we want to open that up.
So, I'm going to go as quickly as possible. After this, we're going to follow up with a couple of helpful resources. You're going to get all five of these helpful resources to go over just general Google ad grants. We'll send you that playbook. We will resend the recording of this.
We're going to go through some couple of nonprofit trends and some email tips as well. Those are those, all those resources are available for you right now, but we will make sure to follow up with those. And just a reminder, SEO office hours, SEO and AI office hours, pardon me, are Wednesday, December 13th at 10 am Central.
Topics are TBD, but we're really going to be looking at ways to help you generate ideas and content, how to automate tasks. That's one of my favorite things to do with AI right now. How to leverage data, how to use AI to interpret your data. That's one that I'm really exploring and trying, not to geek out over too much because it is really cool.
And then writing, copying content. That's always that's the tip of the spear of what we can do with AI, but if you'd like to join, as we said before, drop your email in the chat or reply to the follow up email.
We'll make sure everyone has ways to get into that or just email me or Wendy or anybody else in the organization.
We'll make sure you get in there. Questions.
Wendy: (30:15)
Yeah, we tried to go super fast. We tried to be [quick] just give you a bunch of tidbits, but we're happy to stay on and take any questions you have now, or you can think about them and come to the office hours next week, or you can get an appointment and, meet with one of our digital marketing specialists too.
So we'll open that up. I think if you raise your hand, we can promote you to a panelist. So you can ask, or you can just drop it in the chat.
Nick: (30:43)
Yeah, and I will say if anybody wants us to take a look at your website to from an SEO or conversion standpoint, put that in there and we'll take a look at that and get you a report on, how's it doing, how's it performing, and maybe a couple of things you can fix or even to check and see if you've got spam.
Wendy: (31:04)
Seeing some more names, but no questions. I did see a few questions over in the Q& A, but now let's forget that exists and look at the chat.
Okay, someone's putting in their website. We'll definitely look at that.
Nick: (31:21)
Let's see if I can make sure I stop sharing and I'll pull, I'll actually, is it ever, if, is it okay if I pull up one of those websites? I want to make sure I ask the question before I pull it up.
Wendy: (31:31)
Let's go to the Mason City one.
Crystal, is it okay if we put your website up on the screen and do a quick, uh, look at it?
Sure, she says.
You see that one? It's Mason City YMCA. org.
Nick: (31:45)
Yeah, I'm pulling it up to make sure I get it.
Wendy: (31:46)
That makes it to Iowa. It must be, again, back close to home for me. I'm from southern Minnesota.
Nick is pulling it up for you. I love everybody's dropping their websites and we might not get them all on this call, but we can take a peek and follow up with you on email.
Probably, best to reply to the email you're going to get from us with a follow up with the recording and the materials and then we'll get you a quick phone call set up. And Sarah who's listening is getting all the names and websites written down and she's going to make sure that we're doing some good follow up.
Nick: (32:24)
So, the first thing, I've got Mason City pulled up here.
Alright. So, I'm going to go to Google. I'm going to look at Mason city. First thing again, like I mentioned earlier today, this is going to report back all the URLs and all the pages that Google knows that you have.
So, the first thing I see here, from an SEO standpoint. I see a lot of the titles don't always follow up with Mason City, like open swim schedules doesn't have the follow up title of Mason City. So, it doesn't tell me every time where you are. That's something to consider. It's also, you've got all caps.
It's not a bad thing. I'm just noting, noting that youth sports. Okay. So I'm not seeing a whole lot of spam. I'm going to scroll fast. So, I hope that doesn't bother anybody. I'm not seeing any spam issues. What I'm not seeing also though, is if I'm looking at, this is the usually pulled from the meta description.
If you don't have a good meta description, Google will pull that from your page content. So that's why you're kind of, kind of see a couple of different options there.
But if you do have an optimized meta description, it's not pulling through. And that's a great way to actually pull it, put in a call to action to encourage a user what to do on that page.
Make sure you put the keyword in that we're looking for. Maybe not this one. Not a great example. But also, you know, expand on what you're looking for there. Good thing is I'm not seeing any spam. I am seeing this is some weird, uh, images being indexed. That's pretty common. Sometimes you can get some things that shouldn't be indexed showing up.
You just want to block those with a robots.txt file or something on your back end of your website. You want to make sure you block that so that they're actually not getting into it.
Not that it's bad that the user sees that logo page. It's obviously not something bad, but it's also not a great experience, right?
You don't want them to click through on that and get that experience. If I were to quickly look at the page, the first thing, your first call to action here and become a member today. Great.
What else can I do? I can click there and that's really all I can do on the page. I would make sure that all of your contact information is clickable, at least on a mobile device that we're seeing it on the desktop device, but make sure it's clickable on a mobile device so they can pull that up on Maps. Click your number to call.
Wendy: (34:56)
And then go back down to the footer one more time. Nick, those ‘Donate Today’ or ‘Access My Account’ should probably be in a color so people see those as a CTA. Losing out on a conversion opportunity there.
Nick: (35:08)
Yeah, promote that. And then, you know, the Donate Today and Account Information should also be at the top.
Those are, you know, if your members are coming to your website frequently, they want an easy access. Don't make them scroll the bottom. And if donation is a primary call to action that you're looking for, that should be here as well. And if we click through Join Now, this is going to take us directly to Daxko Ops.
That's our landing page. We do have a plugin available. It looks like you have a WordPress website, so we can help you with this to have a better experience so that this is not the landing page that they see to actually help increase your conversions. That's something we can talk to Mason City about for sure.
But you might want to consider putting that, jump page between there. Like, what do you have for youth? Let's go to Child Watch. Pull this page up. Where's the call to action?
Here's the costs. And this must be very hard for you to maintain if your costs change because you're going to have to come in here and manually update these costs, it looks like hard coding.
Nick: (36:13)
Yeah, hard coded. But there's no call to action on the page.
Wendy: (36:16)
So, some opportunities, Mason City. I think that was just like a quick glance. Yeah. Happy to do that for some others as well. I see you all putting your stuff in. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. All right, any other specific questions to today's content?
Mason City, thank you for allowing us to be the guinea pig and [it] looks like you did a really great job on your SEO.
Any other questions? Are our websites already good to go if they've developed by Daxko?
You know what, Taylor our team has learned a lot. How many, um, how many nonprofit websites have we done?
Nick: (36:56)
Uh, over a hundred.
Wendy: (36:58)
Yeah. And so most of those for YMCAs, a few Jewish community centers and a few boys and girls clubs. So we've gotten best practices about the language of your customers, the heuristics of how your website should be organized to meet the needs of your of your members. So, I would say, you know, and obviously we've got a best practices checklist that we check off with all of them.
I'm going to brag a little bit and tell you that Nick's team has been winning awards for the websites that he's done in the nonprofit market, including a Webby award. it is an award-winning team and they are an expert in this market. So definitely ping us if he wants us to help with that.
Nick: (37:49)
Yeah, and, and Taylor's questions there just say, yes, the websites are always built with SEO in mind the best practices, but SEO is changing and your content changes too, so your content constantly needs to be optimized.
So that's always that thing that you need to consider is the content optimization. Technical structure is probably totally fine, depends on what's changed, how long it's been, but you want to look at your content optimization constantly and look at new keywords, new content and new integrations.
Wendy: (38:16)
Next question is from Michael, who asked, can you help getting the grant written or the applied for with the Google grant?
Why don't you talk just for a minute about what happens with that?
Nick: (38:26)
Yeah, so we, our team actually handles that entire process for you with applying for Google grants. We've gotten that documented and down and we know the steps to go through. We still have to work with you to get some materials and information.
Like, it's not totally handoff process, but we work with you to get all those documentation in place. We give it to you to submit because it has to come from you. But we're there to walk you through that process and then it usually goes through Google in about 30 days. And then we get you set up and off and running.
It's actually pretty, pretty slick the way it works.
Wendy: (38:59)
All right. Um, I am going to thank you all for coming. Thanks for the training. Yes.
We'll set up the slides and Matthew says “can you hustle to review our site so it can be ready for the year?”
We'll absolutely help you, Matthew. I must say thank you to everybody.
I hope this gave you some energy and some ideas and, you know, we're here and we're around to help, through the end of the year, to make sure everybody is in good shape to start off the beginning of the year.
And so with that, I think we will say goodbye and let everybody get back to their day and we'll see you next week on the office hours.
Nick: (39:36)
Awesome. Thank you everybody.
Wendy: (39:38)
Thanks everybody.