What Your Nonprofit Needs To Know About SEO

What Your Nonprofit Needs To Know About SEO

What Your Nonprofit Needs To Know About SEO

If you work or are involved with any nonprofit, you are probably well aware of all the great work they do. Giving back to the community, or to an important cause is not a small task, and it shouldn’t go unnoticed. But for many organizations, operating budgets run thin and there just isn’t the time or in-house capacity to dedicate to any extra marketing. However, there a few helpful digital marketing tricks that can enhance your existing efforts and ensure that your cause never goes unnoticed.

SEO (or search engine optimization) refers to the creation of website content in order to generate traffic through search. It is the term given to any activity related to improving your search engine ranking. Having a high search engine ranking ensures that your website can be found when words and phrases that are relevant to what your site offers are being searched. Search engine optimization may be scary to some, but it really doesn’t have to be. There are definitely many complicated aspects to SEO, but this article will cover some basics that can help you succeed without getting too far into the ugly details.

One good thing about SEO is that it doesn’t take much complicated work to rank well on search engine results. It only requires two main components:

  • Understanding what your audience wants. In other words, why are people coming to your website in the first place?
  • Creating content that reflects what your audience is looking for.

If you have tracking enabled on your website, you’ll want to use it to conduct preliminary research regarding your website traffic. What demographics are visiting your site? Why are they there? Where are they going once they get there? And most importantly, are their needs being met once they arrive?

These are a few of the questions that will shape your SEO strategy. By doing keyword research and analyzing what people are searching for on your website, you can learn what your audience is really interested in, as well as how they search. This information can even lead to unexpected insights regarding industry trends, or related topics that your audience may also be interested in. Regardless of your mission, your industry will evolve and develop over time, so keeping up with search trends can help ensure that your site content is up to date and can prevent a potential decline in traffic.

So now what? You’ve developed a good understanding of who is on your website and why they’re there. Now its time to utilize what you’ve learned and incorporate it into a meaningful content strategy.

Content refers to any information that lives on your website. When incorporating your content with your SEO strategy, begin by examining your goals. What are you trying to achieve on your website? Increase donations? Encourage subscriptions or sign-ups? Whatever your goals may be, it is important to keep them at the center of your content strategy. Once you have an understanding of your goals, redesign your website content around your new SEO insights.

By understanding your audience and why they’ve come to your site, you can tailor your content around their needs and desires. For example, if you’re targeting Millennials, you may want to focus your strategy on frequent updates containing images and videos. You also might want to ensure that your website is optimized for use on a mobile phone or tablet, for an on-the-go audience. Tailoring your content to suit the people visiting your site can ensure more website traffic, and further increase your likelihood that those people will actually engage with your content and perform a desired action on your site (i.e., sign up, volunteer, donate, etc.).

If you are one of our clients, we’ll help you out with this step. Any time you have an event, fundraiser, or update, email your account manager, and we’ll give you some advice about how to add it to your site! By utilizing the Google Grant and Google Adwords software, we can not only help you add content to your site, but also use your content to create ads, and bid on key words that will bring even more relevant traffic to your website.

Its simple. If you have a great mission, people need to know about it. SEO can be complicated and overwhelming at times, but if you use some basic best practices, you can optimize your site so that your mission can be discovered by more and more people each day!

If you have any questions about SEO or having Cause Inspired Media manage your Google Ad Grant, contact us. We’re happy to help!

By: Emily Dietz, Business Development Strategist