This guide is aimed at you, the layperson running a smallish non-profit organization. To that end, I’ll cover some basic Search Engine Optimization concepts with the understanding that you cannot afford a professional SEO agency, and that your ultimate goals will be very different from the clients an SEO agency would normally retain.
So I’m going to be translating and summarizing in a way that will horrify an SEO professional, but hopefully will make this subject matter more approachable.
It’s a vulgar rubric, but largely true, that SEO is just content and links. That is to say that a site gets matched with user traffic insofar as it has content which satisfies the user intent, and it has the links which gives the search engine confidence in the content. Content is stuff you will have to write yourself and authority (links) is determined by the rest of the internet and whether or not they want to give you mad props. For a non-profit, the latter will be fairly easy, but the former will take some strategizing.
Matching User Intent with Non-Profit Mission
Here’s the magic of SEO: If someone wants to hire a plumber, they’ll Google with a search query that has the word “plumber” in it. They have signalled exactly what they want at the moment they want it. You don’t have to put up a billboard offering plumbing services, reaching a large number of people but few people who need a plumber, you just have to get your plumbing company into Google’s search results.
So do people turn to Google when they want a non-Profit? Kinda, yeah. Queries like “Austin volunteering” and “Austin non-profit” have about a thousand searches a month.
But let’s back up a bit. What exactly is it you want, as an organization? We know there’s no commercial intent, because you’re a non-profit, so that’s going to cut the legs out from under SEO, because everything in SEO starts with commercial intent. But you probably have some important goals as an organization which your web presence can address. Here’s some guesses as to what those might be:
Donors: The purest form of commercial intent, getting money without providing a service in return! Surely every non-profit needs more donors and more donations.
Volunteers: There’s people out there who want to get involved, so you just have to reach them.
Community Awareness: Does the neighborhood know you exist? They will if you start popping up in their search.
New Board Members: This is a slightly different intent than getting volunteers and might require a separate page if you’re accepting unsolicited applications.
Community Education: Maybe your content has a purely selfless reason, you have a mandate to put information out in the world and you don’t expect anything in return. But you need to make that information visible for it to do its work.
Your first step in your campaign is to determine your objective. Then make a list of the search intents which will lead users to those objectives. Don’t just think of the top tier searches I mentioned earlier, also think of the edge cases and specifics. What services and missions can you write about? There are people out there looking for history museums and public gardens. Ideally this list will never stop growing, you will always find new ways to get your organization in front of the public, and this list will give you an idea for how to build out your content and what to prioritize.
Content Optimization
There are two types of user searches: long tail and short tail. There are few short tail keywords, but a lot of people search them, like “Austin volunteering” or “Austin non-profit.” The short tail will be harder to rank for, because you’ll have more competition.
There are many long tail terms, but each one will have only a few (or one) occurrences of someone searching for them. These terms are easy to rank for, because no one is competing with you for them, but it’s hard to make the time and effort worthwhile, since the search volumes are so low and they don’t always express a user intent which is useful to the mission. A long tail search might be, “lilypad ponds in West Austin,” or “extinct lakes in Austin Texas.”
For short tail terms, the optimization is simply using that term in every page element you can: Title tag, H1 heading, H2 heading, paragraph content, and image alt tags. If you take a look at any personal injury attorney webpage you can see how this works. You can tell what keyword they’re targeting. (Note that unless you have a national scope, you’ll want to use the name of your city in most cases)
For long tail terms, the terms are too nebulous to target. The best strategy is to write blog posts which are interesting. If you have an article on the site which is well written, contains lots of facts, and would hold a person’s interest, you will probably grab traffic. The more articles the better, but they have to be of high quality, like articles in a professional magazine.
Links, Citations, and Authority
As a respected non-profit organization in the community, the process of getting links, citations, mentions, authority, all the sort of background chatter of the internet, will come fairly easy to you. Every time you hold an event and it gets listed on local event boards, that’s an authority signal. Every time a local news organization does a story on you, that’s going to mean the sort of link which a personal injury lawyer will envy. People like non-profits, so they’ll link to you and talk about you. It’s probably not worth your time to fret too much about this aspect of SEO.
Technical SEO Considerations
Most consumer grade website platforms will perform the basic technical SEO considerations. Basically, the crawler bots need to be able to read your site.
Here’s some specific considerations:
- The site should be fairly fast. If you notice it loading, it’s too slow.
- Images should be in the 100-200KB range, and not the giant 4MB size they were when they came out of your phone.
- Words on the page, not images of words. Not just images. Not just video. Words are the key!
- A dynamic sitemap with the
attribute submitted to Google Search Console (this sounds confusing but there are lots of step by step instructions online)
While most websites can do these basics pretty easily, the SEO-industry approved solution is a WordPress site running the Yoast SEO plugin.
Wix has the worst reputation in the SEO industry. Wix isn’t as bad as it once was, it used to be a suicide pill for ranking for anything, but it’s still not great. Is it worth abandoning Wix and designing a site on WordPress instead? Yeah, it might. Particularly if you can get a volunteer to do it for free.
Google Ads Charity Grant
As soon as you can, you should apply for the Google Ads Charity Grant. This is basically free money given away by Google to non-profit organizations. It basically gives you a monthly balance in Google Ads to pursue the relevant search intents we discussed earlier. For Google this makes sense because non-profits don’t have the money to advertise on Google anyways, so Google wasn’t going to make any money off those searches anyways. It’s free for them, and free for you.
However, Google Ads requires a deep understanding of the Google Ads interface, website analytics, and marketing principles. Managing this free money effectively is very difficult for a lay-person and should be done by a trained professional wherever possible. Google has tried for years to democratize their ad system, but they’ve only managed to make it more inscrutable.
Ideally you would have a volunteer or board member who can manage the Ads grant for you. But if not, you should reach out to me at Froglet Marketing. We can probably work out something which will be worth your while.
Analytics and Reporting
Google Ads is effectively impossible without analytics. The best way to go about this is Google Analytics deployed through Google Tag Manager. A layperson would have a tough time doing that. There’s a definite learning curve.
Google Datastudio can process the data from your Google Analytics and display it in an easily digested format. However, setting up Datastudio initially is probably too involved for the average layperson without getting into a lot of research.
So this is another area where it will probably be more time efficient to reach out to me at Froglet Marketing, and we’ll see if I can help.
GEO/AIO
Everyone wants to know how to optimize for AI. “Is SEO dead?” everyone asks for the billionth time. No, it’s not dead, but it’s metamorphosing into something even more challenging and exciting!
As someone running a non-profit you can stick to the same guidelines for SEO. Make sure you have words on the page. Keep a consistent and organized message.
The zero-click problem may pose a problem for you. This is the tendency for users to get their information summarized by an AI instead of visiting the webpage source of that information. In other words, the AIs will steal your content and use it for their own profit. If part of your mandate is informing the public, this may not be a problem, the public will get that information in the end. But if you’re worried about LLMs disseminating incorrect or misleading information while citing you, then you may consider blocking them from the site entirely. A number of services have sprung up to help you with doing this.