Doing more with less—the age old nonprofit catch phrase.
When it comes to nonprofit marketing and communications, the thing we hear most is “There are so many different channels and tactics…I don’t know where to start!” An effective (and also beautiful) website is often our answer. But after you’ve spent all that time building out a website that works for you, you must take the next step and engage in the oft illusive marketing practice of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The reality is, SEO is an absolutely mandatory marketing tactic if you want that shiny new website to be found by your constituents through search engines like Google. So as we enter October and quickly approach Halloween, we wanted to take this opportunity to de-spookify the topic of SEO. You need not be scared; there are several easy ways to improve your SEO.
Today, we will first, go over the basics of SEO and how it works, and then share a few concrete tips for how you can optimize your organization’s online presence.
What is SEO?
Search engines allow us to access relevant answers to all of our questions in just a few seconds. Ideally, the results at the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) are the results that most closely answer the searcher’s question. Search engines are looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher’s query. Your goal is to get your website onto that first page (or even the first three positions!) of the SERPs for keywords relevant to your organization. How you get there is SEO.
SEO is the process of earning traffic from search engines organically. By organic we mean that you aren’t paying for ads or sponsored content placement to earn that traffic. To earn that coveted organic traffic, you need to employ a set of best practices that demonstrate to the search engines that your site is the authority people need.
In short: SEO comes down to your ability to communicate the value of your organization (and your website) to search engines. It’s about helping them help you. There are millions of websites out there and search engines make money by being effective and sending users to reputable, accurate websites. You need to make it as easy as possible for search engines to understand what your website is about in order to prove that you deserve to be at the top of the list.
How Does SEO Work?
There are several different search engines out there, but today we’re going to focus on the most widely used search engine: Google.com. Google’s search algorithm consists of hundreds of ranking factors and is very user-focused, meaning it puts user experience (UX) first and prioritizes UX optimizations as ranking factors. Plus, it’s like a moving target as SEO best practices are ever-changing and developing and the search engine algorithms are updated all the time.
Google determines your website’s relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating, using an algorithm, whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, primarily based on the keywords it contains.
There are three distinct areas of SEO that your organization should focus on in order to rank higher: User experience, on-page and technical SEO, and off-page SEO.
The best practices we will share below primarily revolve around the first two areas, but a truly holistic and effective SEO strategy is also going to take into account off-page SEO. As an article on Classy.com explains it:
“Off-page SEO includes your social media strategy, guest blogging, and influencer marketing, but the most important aspect of off-page SEO is having a healthy backlink profile. When a credible source links to your page via a backlink, it helps boost your rankings and increases your exposure. A proactive strategy to encourage backlinks to your site will ultimately increase brand awareness and connect your organization to a larger audience and ensure the work you put into generating valuable content does not go to waste.”
With all of this in mind, below are four, relatively simple areas that your nonprofit can focus on to improve your SEO.
- KeywordsWhen creating relevant content for your website, it important to write with keyword(s) in mind. That is, think of all of the words that describe your organization or words/phrases that people might use when searching for your organization. Using these keywords when you’re writing the content for your website will help to communicate with Google the main focus of your content.To identify your nonprofit’s high-value keywords, you’ll need to have an understanding of the average number of searches that query gets per month and what the competition for those keywords looks like. There are several free tools out there (including this one from Moz) that can offer insight into those metrics.
- Content Have you ever heard the saying “content is king”? When it comes to Google and SEO, it couldn’t be truer. Google wants to see that you’re giving users the information they are looking for, and fast. The algorithm isn’t going to favor sites where visitors have to sift through massive blocks of text or navigate complicated menus to find what they’re looking for.The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and share content, but with that ease comes intense competition and saturation. It’s never been more important to produce differentiated and focused content.As Classy.com notes, you must remember that quality content is:
- Easy to read and uses simple language;Well-organized and remains on topic;Contributes to the dialogue surrounding the topic in an original way;Written for a specific audience; and,Written for a specific intention.
- 3. User Experience (UX)User experience refers to the feelings a person has when interfacing with a system. In this case, the system is your organization’s website and you want to give your constituents the best possible UX possible so that they can find the information that they need, easily, and complete the action you’d like them to do, whether that is to volunteer or give money. Google also rewards websites with good UX. Best practices for user experience include quick load time and page speed, intuitive navigation, and discoverable content (meaning it’s easy to locate the desired content on your website and takes a user no more than three clicks to find). Also in the realm of UX is the concept of website responsiveness, or the ability of your website to render well on both desktop and mobile. Nowadays, more and more visits are occurring from mobile devices, leading to Google prioritizing the importance of a mobile-friendly website in SEO.
- 4. Local SEO Opportunities Though it is often overlooked, local SEO is a crucial part of your overall strategy. Local SEO includes creating or claiming your Google My Business listing to ensure your organization appears for branded keywords associated with your organization’s name or local searches where keywords are used with localized qualifiers.To create your Google My Business listing you’ll be asked to:
- Add or claim your organization
- Verify your organization
- Add some photos or videos
- List your hours of operation
- Include a summary of your organization
- Monitor the review section and respond to reviews
- Respond to any questions
Not so scary after all, right? Keeping these things in mind will go a long way in improving your organization’s SEO.