Friday, June 1, 2007

An Example of How to See if You're Meeting Volunteers Online

I thought it would make sense to illustrate a real-life example of how to assess whether you are meeting potential volunteers online, and if you find out you are not, how you can make changes to your online marketing strategy to reach those volunteers.

Here is the example. By using the free Keyword Selector Tool, I did a search of how many people searched using the phrase help New Orleans rebuild. You can see the results below -illustrating how many people searched using that phrase in January of this year:
Keyword Selector Tool

Searches done in January 2007
Count Search Term
354 rebuild new orleans
32 help new orleans rebuild

Now the reason I picked those keywords is that one of our network members is VolunteerLouisiana.gov. I was curious to see if the volunteers who searched on those keywords found the statewide system in Louisiana that was built to connect volunteers to opportunities to serve (including in New Orleans). So by using the free Search Engine Keyword position tool, I was able to determine the following. Based on the keywords used, VolunteerLouisiana.gov did NOT appear in the search results.

Search Engine Keyword Position - SEO Tools
Results for: www.volunteerlouisiana.org

Keyword/Phrase

Search Engine Position
GoogleNot in top 100
MSNNot in top 100
YahooNot in top 100

To be fair, perhaps the potential volunteers found the website of our Volunteer Center in New Orleans (the Greater New Orleans Disaster Recovery Partnership) who is managing volunteers. Let me check:

Results for: http://www.gnodrpvc.org/
Keyword/Phrase

Search Engine Position
GoogleNot in top 100
MSNNot in top 100
YahooNot in top 100

Nope. It looks like the massive amount of frames and javascript used on that page might be one reason. The fact that it doesn't have those words on the page anywhere might be another reason.