These terms and strategies are beneficial for those who have a thorough understanding. However, in most associations, each member of their staff wears five to eight hats and does not include any of them being White HAT, Black HAT, or Gray HAT.[1] Fortunately, if you can afford to invest in SEO, numerous consultants can help you in that regard.
But what if you don’t have staffing or budget? How can you improve your association’s website SEO? Incorporating a few basic techniques can significantly enhance an organization’s search engine ranking. Content, keywords, and inbound links (also known as backlinks) are three keys to improving SEO that are easily manageable by staff.
Keywords are phrases or words typed or dictated into the search engine. When your potential members say, “Hey Siri” or “Hey Google find me X,” the X is a keyword. To find relevant content, search engines query keywords. According to Feta Dennis (2022),
Because keywords come from search queries, incorporating these terms into your content strategy helps search engines rank your website pages and users find your content when looking for it.
Tip– Publish some of your content through your LinkedIn page. At the bottom of that post, add your organizational credentials and link to your topic on your webpage. Create a page of LinkedIn posts on your website, with each having the executive summary available on your webpage and a link to the entire post on LinkedIn.
Associations wanting to be accessible via mobile devices require mobile responsive design, not mobile friendly. Mobile responsive design reformats items on the website page to reproduce a desktop experience. Items may be enlarged, resized, and reformatted for the best use of the mobile screen. This includes enhancing the experience, whether the device is in a vertical or horizontal view (Constant Contact, 2022).
Mobile friendly design resizes the entire page to fit the mobile screen. While this type of design allows for all the content to be seen, it is very difficult for it to be usable. Clickable items are difficult to touch. Written content may be difficult to read. Mobile friendly design has its use cases; however, one use case is to deter visitors from browsing on their mobile devices (Constant Contact, 2022).
If the association’s goal is to attract Gen Z and Millennials by asking Google, or Siri, who is the most relevant for their search, then mobile friendly design is detrimental to achieving its goal. Make sure your current website is mobile responsive, not mobile friendly.
Baby boomers and Gen X are getting older. They are wealthy and tech-savvy. “According to AARP’s 2022 Tech Trends over 50 Report, over 75% of those over 50 use technology to stay connected (Gibson, 2022).” As these generations get older, the need for websites to be more accessible extends the lifetime value of a member. In other words, make it easy for a member to participate in your association, and they will pay dues for all the years they can participate.
Digital accessibility also gives associations access to a large pool that is typically ignored. According to David Gibson (2022),
People with disabilities are also a powerful consumer group. While not quite as large or wealthy as Boomers, the after-tax disposable income of the 61M people with disabilities is a whopping $490B.
In addition to allowing the association to serve more of the population, digital accessibility attracts and retains Gen Z and Millennials. These are socially conscious generations. According to Level Access (2022), “Consumers are increasingly loyal to brands that share their values of equity and inclusion.” It is not only the law; it also makes excellent business sense!
Digital accessibility also enhances a mobile engagement strategy. For a site to be digitally accessible, it uses several of the same basic principles used in search engine optimization. “How and what you write for assistive-technology users also improves how you rank with search engines, such as Google or Bing, which can drive more traffic to your website (Stanford et al., 2022). As a result, a digitally accessible website enhances search engine optimization. In other words, a digitally accessible site opens your organization to more members across all generations.
