I don’t hear many nonprofit marketing staff talk about their sitemaps. Maybe their webmasters, or the firms redesigning their websites, will encourage them to install a sitemap, but the internal marketing staff seem to consider it a technical project, and not too vital to their outreach or fundraising work.
But what if I told you fifteen minutes of work could get you more than 200,000 new visitors to your website each year, and 9,000,000 new impressions on search engines?
Because a sitemap can do that!
I have helped clients install XML sitemaps, the preferred technology of search engines, and one of the larger nonprofits I work with saw the numbers above roll in over the next year.
If it helps, I’ll put it into context:
200,000 new visitors were an approximate 20% increase in website traffic.
What would that mean for your website?
The nonprofit with 200,000 new visitors has an approximate 10% conversion rate on their website.
What would 20,000 new emails and donations mean to your organization?
Next Steps
My preferred website platform is WordPress, and Yoast is an invaluable SEO plugin. If you install Yoast SEO on WordPress, go to your Dashboard > Yoast SEO > Settings > General > Site Features > and scroll down to XML sitemaps. Toggle the feature on and click the option to view your sitemap once it’s ready.
You can take the slow road and let the likes of Google and Bing crawl your site in their own sweet time. Or you can submit your sitemap through your own Google Search Console. Don’t have one of those? I would be happy to help you set one up. You can also follow the instructions here. I especially appreciate that Google has broken down the instructions by level of time and interest in learning!
For some nonprofit staff, with too much to do and too few hours in the day, this may have already been TMI. I understand. So, let’s focus on the most important steps:
Install an XML sitemap by:
- Installing and enabling the Yoast SEO plugin
- sending your webmaster this blog post, or
- engaging me for a Power Hour
We work so hard to make the world a better place. Let’s make sure our website fundamentals are in place to give our work the best chance at success!
