PRC Marketing Articles

Did you know...

Purchase a deluxe client website from Option Line eXtend, and you'll receive our basic pregnancy center SEO services included with the package!

What people are saying

Marketing Your Pregnancy Center Online

Simple tips for marketing your pregnancy center online

Let's say you work for a small pregnancy center--operating on an annual income of $200,000 (or less). Obviously, you don't have the funds the "big guys" have to run full scale online marketing campaigns. However, there are many things which you can at little or no cost.

Most importantly, you've got to have a professional online presence specifically targeting your clients. If you don't have this (or if your website is behind the times), I'd recommend you look into Option Line eXtend, operated by Option Line in conjunction with CareNet, Heartbeat International & CoolCoyotes. Cathy Foster of CoolCoyotes has creatively designed the templates (both for the basic sites as well as the deluxe sites), and Option Line eXtend offers a great client/donor website program at a very reasonable monthly fee. If you purchase the deluxe client websites from OptionLine eXtend, then my company (Sozo Firm) will be handling the basic search engine optimization (SEO) services for you website.

There are also many others who specialize in pregnancy center website design including Terwilliger Web Development, Ramah International, and Ken Freeman. Along with these, there are many local Christian website design companies & individuals who can help. Let me know who you recommend (and why), and I’ll gladly compile a list for everyone’s reference.

As funding for your center goes hand in hand with helping clients, a donor/supporter website should take the high second place in your strategy. Interestingly enough, with many pregnancy centers, more donors visit their sites than clients. Now, this doesn't have to work out that way, and that is why I strongly urge you to focus more on the client site than the donor site.

Your client site should have possibly 3 times as much content & resources as your donor site. Your donor site can readily link to your client site; it's your call whether you have the client site link back toward your donor site. With our generation of internet savvy teens & young adults, they'll most likely find your donor site, too--that is, if it's built well. Therefore, it's wise to very carefully construct that site keeping in mind who all will visit it. Overall, build & market both sites with the intention of having clients (and donors) find the client site; you want that one to appear first in regional web searches for your organization & its services.

Now you've got the client site and supporter site up and working. Let's take a break and market the pregnancy center online to potential volunteers. This is easily done by setting up a free account at Volunteer Match. If you like, you can even purchase a community leader membership for less than $75/year; this membership level will let you add several pictures, run your ads in bold, and permit you to deliver tailored content (through automated email) to prospective volunteers who submit inquiries. In your organization description on Volunteer Match, you can link to your website(s) and even link to specific requirements for volunteers (e.g. statement of faith).

One warning though: your ad & organization listing on Volunteer Match will appear high in search engine result pages (SERPs) so be careful what information you include in your listing as well as how you word your open volunteer positions. Volunteer Match is a well populated site and, properly harnessed, can work well for centers, especially those around well populated areas.

Fourthly, let's make sure that your center, its client website, and its contact information is properly listed under Google Local Business Center. They'll ask you to set up a Google account and fill out a form online with your business hours, email address, phone number, etc. You will then need to verify this information. If you are doing this from your center's physical location, you can have Google's automated dialer call you at that moment via the center's phone number you just listed; the automated attendant will ask for a pin entry from your computer screen. The other means of verification (which takes longer) is to request Google mail a postcard; when you receive it, you'll find a pin number which you'll need to enter in the Google map/business section in your Google account.

Along with Google maps, there are several other major listing directories where you can get free listings: YellowPages.com, MySuperPages.com, and Yahoo Local.

Along with "secular" directories, there are many nationwide/worldwide pregnancy center directories where you may want your center listed with its new website: Option Line (if you choose to get your website through their OptionLineeXtend program, then they'll include a link to your website in their pregnancy center directory), Lifecall, ProLifeSearch.com, Ramah International, Bethany Christian Services, CPCLink (an annual fee involved), and any affiliate websites you are associated with (Heartbeat International, Care Net, etc.).

If you have a regional or statewide pregnancy center association, then ask them to post your new client website url on their sites also. If your local supporting churches have websites, kindly ask them if they could link to your client site, too. Many communities now have several websites which (at no cost to nonprofits) will let you post a link and possibly even regularly updated event information. Take advantage of these free promotions--it will pay itself remarkably well in the long haul.

This strategic linking from these large sites will provide some traffic to your client site but it will, more importantly, help establish your client website as being more authoritative in the "eyes" of the search engine crawler. The Google Local Business/Map entry I have found to be the most effective of all of the above linking in terms of drawing in clients.

Not long after your client site has been completed, you need to submit it to the Open Director Project. Carefully read the submission guidelines and then submit your url with its brief description. Don't list the services you offer but rather briefly describe what is found on your website. If your site's submission is accepted to the Open Directory (that can take anywhere from a couple weeks to several months), then over the next couple months, the"authority" of your site will gradually increase as the Open Directory lends fairly great credance to sites it lists; after all, each site is admitted by human volunteer editors by hand. The description is crucial (and not fully in your control), as it will be forever tied to your website in Google searches for your organization by name (typically the two lines under the page title in SERPs).

People repeatedly ask me whether they should submit their new websites to search engines through mass submission forms or the individual search engine submission form itself. I have personally found over and over again that websites naturally linked to other well visited sites will be crawled by search engine bots and indexed almost immediately without having to be directly submitted to the major search engines. The average time in my experience to have at least the home page appearing in searches is less than a week. If you are only relying on submitting your website to search engines through submission forms, you may very well be waiting several weeks or even longer until your site is listed (according to their fine print). I have no problem at all with a mixture of careful submission along with natural linking. What you do not (absolutely not!) want to do is submit your website several times to Google or Yahoo just because it isn't appearing. Repeated submissions will be considered as potential spam and may actually hinder your website's appearance in that index.

Congratulations! You've just accomplished the initial phase of marketing your pregnancy center online. That wasn't really all that hard, was it? Ok, I readily acknowledge that some of the steps were more tedious than others (especially if you didn't already have a donor website). In future articles, we're going to take an in-depth look at optimizing your website and then we'll hit the touchy subject of paid internet advertising.

Andrew Jensen is president of Sozo Firm, an SEO/web marketing consulting agency which helps corporations, small businesses, colleges, pregnancy centers & churches effectively promote themselves online.

Consultant Services

Fee Schedule

Contact Andrew Jensen to learn more about our special discounted pricing for non profit pregnancy centers. One time consultation and/or search engine optimization services also available.