If you’ve recently read any marketing blog posts, you’ve probably heard of SEO. While SEO may appear to be just another digital marketing buzzword, it is critical for any modern business, including a Nonprofit Organization.
So, what exactly is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of modifying your website’s design and content to help it rank higher in search engines. This increases traffic from “organic” or “natural” search results on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
When expanding your Nonprofit organization, having the necessary exposure and awareness is an essential element of the equation. You will be successful if you are willing to go above and beyond with your membership communication plan. The increased visibility will result in more generous donations, new volunteers, and external help.
We’ll go through some of the most profitable strategies for increasing your nonprofit’s awareness and assisting you in meeting your objectives for your Nonprofit organization.
Why Does SEO For Nonprofit Organizations Matter?
Search engines are one of the most popular ways for people to locate your nonprofit website. Discovering your website means discovering your Nonprofit organization and information about your services, events, and donation page.
SEO is using a range of strategies and approaches to rank highly in a search engine’s search results page (SERP), such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., to increase the number of website visitors. With more people coming online, ranking well is essential to a Nonprofit organization’s success. An effective SEO strategy can help you achieve your goals, whether you want to raise awareness about an issue, increase online donations, or encourage volunteer registration.
How Does SEO For Nonprofit Organizations Work?
SEO does not make a distinction depending on your legal status. It makes no dissimilarity whether you are a for-profit or a nonprofit organization. In that way, SEO for NGOs is similar to SEO for other enterprises.
Search engines perform two primary functions: crawling and indexing and supplying search users with a prioritized list of the websites they’ve decided to be the most relevant. When someone accomplishes an online search, the search engine browses billions of documents (pages, pdf, jpg, etc.) in two ways:
1. SEO returns only those relevant or beneficial results to the searcher’s query.
2. SEO ranks the above search results.
8 Practical SEO Tips For Nonprofits Organization To Rank Higher
There are numerous factors that impact your site’s rating, but the following are the top eight Google rankings considerations that every nonprofit organization should consider:
1. Satisfy Search Intent
The core of any search engine is search intent. Search intent is simply the user’s intention when searching for a query. Google is more possible to place your page at the top of the search results if you deliver your visitors what they demand.
Your first goal should be to provide your visitors with what they require. This is precisely what all search engines desire, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing. There are numerous elements that are taken into consideration when ranking. However, this is one of the critical reasons for ranking higher on SERPs.
Here are a few practices to help you master the art of meeting search intent for a nonprofit organization:
1. Before publishing an article, do a Google search to see what types of articles are ranking. Examine their page to discover how detailed they have written. Try to write a more detailed article or blog than the first five results on Google.
2. Consider yourself a visitor. What would you like to accomplish if you searched for anything on Google? What outcomes do you anticipate? Reverse engineer this process and produce text to reflect it.
3. Make an effort to respond to the user’s question clearly and simply. Google prefers brief responses. This can also result in a featured snippet.
2. Improve Your Page Speed
You are in serious hazard if you ignore your website’s page speed. Page speed is now a recognized ranking criterion in Google search according to Google. Start today by improving the speed of your nonprofit organization’s website. Check your page speed score and identify your weaknesses using tools like GTMetrix and Google Page Speed Insights.
Here are some actionable practices that will help to increase the speed of your nonprofit organization’s website:
1. Make an effort to optimize your website so that it loads in less than 3 seconds.
2. Always optimize and compress your image files. Utilize plugins like Smush or Shortpixel if you use WordPress as your platform.
3. Improve the performance of your pages by using a CDN like Cloudflare.
3. Focus On Page Experience
Google officially announced that the page experience ranking factor would be implemented in May 2021. This page experience ranking factor includes core web necessities such as Loading (LCP), Interaction (FID), and Visual Stability (CLS).
Avoid being terrified by these complex terms. It simply implies that desktop and mobile users must have a positive browsing experience on your website.
Here are some helpful practices for improving your nonprofit organization’s website’s page experience:
1. Firstly, proceed to connect your website to the search console. When you’ve connected, search for the enhancements tabs on the left-hand side. There is an option titled “Core Web Vitals.” There you may see which of your website’s pages are lacking in terms of page experience.
2. Google page speed insights allow you to examine your core web vitals score. Try to improve on that score.
4. Get Your Suitable Keyword
Keywords are concepts or ideas that define the subject matter of your content. Keywords are usually words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, often known as “search queries” in SEO.
Using the terminology your audience understands is essential because you may be discuss your nonprofit organization differently. Find your keywords by chatting to your customers, visiting forums and community groups, and conducting keyword research with a tool like Keyword Explorer. Create a keyword list based on your study.
Here are the best practices to get your suitable keyword for your blog:
1. Use the keyword in your page title, preferably at the start.
2. Insert the keyword in the first 100 words and up to 15 times throughout the article. You will be penalized if you overuse the keyword.
3. Include the keyword in H1 tags.
4. Include the keyword in the alt text of each image.
5. Include the keyword in your meta description.
6. Include your keyword in the file name of the image.
7. Use long-tail keywords and Google Trends to find what people are looking for.
It’s best to describe what your nonprofit organization does in straightforward terms that people are familiar with and can find, even though graphics and creative languages are fantastic.
5. Write Better Content
Content is the king, particularly in terms of SEO. Blackhat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and cloaking are not recommended or sustainable, even though they may produce quick results.
Every day, search engines are getting smarter. To provide its users with the most relevant result, they continually change how they rank nonprofit organizations’ websites.
Making compelling content is the only method to optimize your website sustainably. Create informative, engaging, and shareable content that benefits your clients and addresses their queries.
Here are the best tips for creating informative content:
1. Target a different primary keyword on each web page. Typically, a very broad industry keyword will be the focus of your home page. Your articles, category, and product pages should focus on more niche demands.
2. Analyze your list of SEO Keywords to determine what types of previous in-depth publications you can incorporate those keywords into.
3. Interview experts and influencers. They are inclined to share your content on their social media platforms.
4. Create new, engaging, high-quality blog posts about your work. Nonprofit organizations have plenty of excellent stories to highlight your customers, volunteers, videos, images, reviews, interviews, etc.
5. Reduce or eliminate aggressive pop-ups, and make your photos compact.
6. Make a range of content, such as blog entries, videos, lists, infographics, guides, etc.
6. Allow Authorative Websites To Connect To Your Content
Other sites that link to your website also influence search engine rankings. The more websites link to your nonprofit organization’s website, the higher you rank. However, links from reliable websites that rank highly are considered more.
Backlinks are an ‘off-page’ aspect that affects SEO. This is how Google analyzes whether your site is reputable and trustworthy to visitors. Trust is becoming a progressively significant aspect of a site’s Google ranking.
Here are the best practices to get quality backlinks:
1. Request a news website to include a link to your website whenever you’re mentioned in a story.
2. Request backlinks from your corporate partners and sponsors.
3. Collaborate with other Nonprofit organizations and have them link back to you in a blog post.
4. Try blogging (guest blog posting) on other websites with a link redirecting to your website. Create unique content that others will naturally want to link to. Make your content lengthy, around 2000 words, so it ranks well in search results and inspires people to connect to and share it.
6. Add social share buttons to make it easy for people to share your content.
7. You don’t want to overuse it with backlinks similar to keyword implementation. Spamming sites with your links may result in your site being banned from search engines.
Furthermore, link building takes time and work, but it is an essential aspect of SEO. Don’t give up, and keep going.
7. Optimize Your Website
Mobile optimization is becoming a more significant aspect of SEO. Mobile optimization considers site design, structure, page performance, and other factors. Currently, mobile devices contribute to approximately 58% of all Google searches.
According to Google, even though their search index will remain a single index of websites and apps. Their algorithms eventually primarily utilize the mobile version of a nonprofit organization’s site’s content to rank pages for understanding structured data. Furthermore, snippets from those sites will be shown in their results.
Google’s mobile-first index prioritizes search results exclusively on the page’s mobile version. Here are the best practices to optimize your nonprofit organization’s website:
1. Check that all internal links and redirects are functional.
2. Improve the speed of your website. 53% of visitors quit the site if it takes more than 3 seconds.
3. Make your website responsive, which means that the design elements resize according to the device to provide users with an excellent visual and browsing experience. Responsive design should deliver a seamless surfing experience regardless of the device used.
4. Most mobile browsers do not support Flash. To ensure that Google can access all of your site’s content, avoid using Flash on your mobile sites.
5. Take care of the user experience. There will be no zooming to read the text, pinching, or buttons that are too close or small to click.
6. Keep track of the emergence of voice searches on mobile phones. People behave differently when searching with a search box and when searching by voice. This conduct demands a new type of keyword research.
7. Create accelerated mobile pages, or AMPs, designed to deliver quick mobile content. AMP is a scratched HTML version of your website.
8. Focus On Small Strategies
Mobile optimization, keyword research, high-quality content, and backlinks are unquestionably the foundation of SEO. However, there are numerous more minor factors that can improve the rating of your charitable website.
1. Don’t ignore other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.
2. Add a Google Maps graphic to your website’s contact page. Google prioritizes sites that employ its products in their rankings.
3. Make your URLs as brief as possible.
4. Create a sitemap. The sitemap can be published to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google understand the structure of your site.
5. Construct a Robots.txt file. This file assists Google’s web crawlers in finding and indexing your website while also providing the opportunity to exclude pages from being indexed.
6. Switch your nonprofit organization to HTTPS. According to Google, all communications between users’ browsers and websites should be encrypted.
Final Thoughts
To summarize this blog post, we believe that considering search engine algorithms frequently change even if you do your best to keep on top of nonprofit SEO. You don’t have to be an SEO specialist to increase the number of people who find your nonprofit organization via search, so work on it as much as your resources allow.
Remember that effect of search engine optimization takes time to deliver results. Therefore your efforts will certainly be rewarded within a month.
