Increasing Traffic to Your Website

Your newly interactive synagogue website is a portal to Jewish living and connections. But in order to increase site traffic and maximize the potential to engage more members, you must first step out with innovative programming and other ways of capturing members’ interest and involvement.

Here are several ideas to help you get more visits to your site:

• Increase your usage of social media tools. Get your Rabbi to blog. Get your lay leadership to blog. There is no lack of what to blog about in our Jewish lives; it’s just a matter of getting started. With a built-in congregational audience, blogging is an opportunity to create a social network around the synagogue.

• Shorten your weekly email newsletters, and instead rely more heavily on content links back to your new site. Use your e-newsletter to attract interest in your content, and then get the reader to take one more step to the website. For example, the announcement of your Passover family dinner links to your website for full information, as well as the ability to RSVP and pre-pay for the reservation.

• Encourage your committees to communicate using your website’s online forums. Task group efforts, committee discussions, and online committee meetings can all occur online, making it easier and more convenient for members to meet no matter how busy their schedules, how horrid the weather, etc.  

• Make sure that everything you mail out has an online connection.  Your goal should be that all communications have no dead-ends. See everything as an opportunity to drive traffic to your website.  

• Give your religious school a robust presence on your website. Connect parents, teachers and students--and watch your website traffic skyrocket.

Confront your biggest challenge--seeing the brick and mortar of your synagogue through website and social media filters--and you will soon be amazed and pleased at how quickly you are able to increase membership engagement through digital tools.