Attract both new and existing donors to your cause by maximizing organic traffic to your sites.
Search engine optimization (SEO) for nonprofits is the process of optimizing your website to increase visibility when people search for events, education, fundraising campaigns, volunteer opportunities, or other happenings surrounding your mission.
Learn how SEO works and how it can help you elevate your impact, expand your reach, and further support your fundraising efforts. Increase your nonprofit’s online presence and rise through the search result ranks with these SEO tips for beginners.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of earning traffic from search engines organically. Using SEO effectively means you aren’t paying for ads or sponsored content placement to attract new viewers. Earn that coveted organic traffic by aligning your site with a set of guidelines and best practices that show search engines the authority of your content.
The goal is to get your site to rank as high as possible for target keywords or phrases relevant to your website. Doing so helps your content organically appear at the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) for users who are curious about a certain topic.
For example, let’s say we manage a food bank in New York City and are trying to improve our SEO by optimizing our website.
The first page of the SERPs is a worthy goal, but if you’re aiming high you might as well shoot for the top three positions. A Sistrix study reported that the first organic result in Google Search has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5%, with the second and third positions having a 15% and 11% CTR, respectively.
Clicks drastically drop for results carrying over to the second page with a CTR of less than 1%.
How does SEO work?
SEO is all about communicating your value to search engines and helping them help you. You want to make it as easy as possible for ranking systems to understand what your website is about.
In this blog post, we’ll focus on the most widely used search engine, Google.com. Google’s search algorithm looks at many factors to help determine which results are returned for someone’s search query. These key factors include:
- Meaning of your query
- Relevance of web pages
- Quality of content
- Usability of web pages
- Context and settings
The usability of your webpage is crucial. Google’s algorithm is very user-focused, meaning it puts user experience (UX) first and prioritizes UX optimizations. When Google Search identifies pain points on a particular site, it reduces the site’s rank to elevate those that are more intuitive.
You can also improve your page’s online presence by optimizing its on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. This includes your social media strategy, guest blogging, and influencer marketing, as well as having a healthy backlink profile.
With all of this in mind, below are seven SEO tips and tricks for nonprofits to help your organization get started on its journey to page one of the search results.
SEO Tips and Tricks for Non-Profit organizations
1. Use the right target keywords
Boost your content’s relevancy by writing with a keyword in mind or using keywords to inspire the subject of your piece. Doing so will help you communicate the main focus of your content with Google and, in turn, the types of queries it should rank for.
Remember, you’re speaking to a human audience and not a search engine. As you write, keep your keyword in mind, but don’t feel like you need to stuff it into your content in a way that’s unnatural.
Be sure to avoid:
- Unnecessarily repeating words or phrases
- Adding words that are out of context
Inserting blocks of the same keyword - Using irrelevant keywords for the topic of the page
Identify your nonprofit’s high-value keywords by looking at the search terms that are most relevant to your organization and potential supporters. - Beyond that, you’ll need to understand search volume (the average number of searches that a query gets per month) and difficulty or competition (how many other websites are competing for the same keywords). Various keyword reporting tools can give you insight into these factors.
SEO Tools for Nonprofits
There are numerous SEO keyword tools with varying price tags and a plethora of features that the casual user doesn’t need. Many of the industry favorites, such as SEMRush or Moz, offer free trials so you can get a feel for the software before making an investment. Depending on your budget and needs, you could also opt for a free version of one of these more robust platforms.
These SEO tools help you easily find target keywords and their search volume. They look at your website’s current rankings, and which sites are currently ranking for your target keywords. You can also monitor your rankings over time to understand your progress.
2. Create quality content
Google wants to see that you’re giving users the information they are looking for, and fast. Don’t make your site visitors dig through complicated navigation or massive blocks of text to find what they’re looking for. Instead, present information in a way that’s digestible and engaging and resonates with the reader.
The internet makes 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 something that stands out.
3. Follow on-page best practices
Use on-page elements to help Google understand your content and the types of keywords the content should rank for.
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- Headings
- ALT Text
- Internal Linking
- Anchor Text
4. Optimize your user experience
Prioritize user experience to meet the needs of your visitors, reduce your bounce rate, and signal to Google that your content is worth exploring.
To improve your user experience, be sure to:
Keep website load time under 5 seconds to avoid losing readers’ attention
Offer intuitive navigation to show your audience where to get key information
Make your content easy to read and understand
Organize your content to make it more easily discoverable
Meet the four principles for web accessibility
In response to the amount of traffic being generated from mobile devices, Google has opted to prioritize their mobile-first index. This simply means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of content when ranking, confirming that a mobile-optimized site is more important than ever.
5. Pay attention to off-page SEO
A credible source can backlink to your page, meaning that another site links to one of your web pages from their content. Acquiring backlinks helps boost your rankings, strengthen your credibility, and increase your exposure.
6. Leverage local SEO opportunities
Though 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 (e.g. “New Hope Food Kitchen”) or local searches where keywords are used with localized qualifiers (e.g. “food kitchen San Diego”).
7. Stay updated on SEO trends
Stay in the know with industry updates and trends by following Google Webmaster Central and other industry blogs. Some of our favorites include Search Engine Land, Moz, and Search Engine Journal.
SEO Reporting
Google offers a number of free tools that help you understand your website performance.
We highly recommend setting up Google Analytics to monitor your site and landing page traffic, and to better understand your top performing channels. Google Search Console is another Google tool you can use to monitor your website’s overall health and general keyword performance.
On Classy, you can seamlessly connect your Google Analytics and Classy accounts to track visits to your fundraising campaign and donation pages. You can even monitor the transactions that are completed. With this information you gain valuable insight into the donor journey to improve your user experience and generate more gifts in larger amounts.
