3 SEO Principles to Improve the Performance of Your Nonprofit Website
Reading Time: 6 minutes Is your non-profit website easily found on Google? Your website should be prepared to appear to the right person when they search for information related to your cause and even your institution. Here are 3 SEO principles that will improve your performance on search engines and attract high-quality traffic to your website.
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How can your website help your non-profit?
You should already know that working for non-governmental organizations is rewarding. However, the truth is that, in practice, non-profit has a hard time surviving and always need the collaboration of companies and the community in general to achieve their goals.
To make it even more complicated, for financial reasons, non-profit rarely invest in media and advertising, relying only on word of mouth. There are times when media companies support them.
However, when this does not happen, these organizations find it difficult to advertise their projects, suffer from engaging volunteers, and raising funds. In this scenario that digital marketing enters, which can help them to grow through the internet. Each charity indeed has several objectives, but we have listed two of the main ones so that you can see what digital strategies are capable of:
Find more volunteers
Volunteers are essential for the existence of any charity. That is why they are continually looking for people who can be sensitive to the cause.
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Digital marketing, specifically SEO, can help in many ways to attract more volunteers. First, you can create a blog to show the charity’s routine, the difficulties it faces, and its importance for the region where it operates, from images and videos. In SEO, content is key!
Get more donations
Fundraising can also seem like an almost impossible task. This may sound basic to you. A charity’s website must be well-produced and attractive to visitors. For that, it needs to involve readers, developing in them the need to be part of the organization and to help financially. The creation of a blog also comes here as a good option, as mentioned before.
A point to be highlighted is that, even if some people even hit the button to donate, they do not always finish this action and this problem can happen because your site is too complicated to navigate or takes too long to load. So, remember to use simple tools to improve this process.
How do search engines work?
One of the marketing strategies is to work with SEO. This work is valuable for the visibility and reputation of your non-profit. The first results of a search are perceived as an authority in a specific segment or subject. Let us be honest: the chances of users go to the second page of a Google search is very low.
Before you jump straight into the tips, let us take a look at how your website is ranking now:
When you search for the name of your charity, does the organization’s website appear or does it first appear when it appears?
For a term related to your main cause, where does your site appear on Google?
Of course, there are amazing tools available on the market to know precisely the keywords that you are ranking for and the other SEO metrics that are relevant for any marketing team. However, if you are looking for free solutions, SEMRush and MOZ have free versions available.
Have you thought about everything Google does every time you type in a search? To display a list of results that answer your question, there is a long process – although it happens in milliseconds!
Search engines basically work in three stages:
First, search engines crawl web content. The robots or spiders do this – in the case of Google, called Googlebot. They follow the paths that the links point, in search of new pages and updates.
Then, the crawled pages are indexed. That is, they go to the search engine index, which functions as an extensive library of web content. There, the pages are organized according to the information collected in the crawl, such as the page load time and the main keywords.
The crawling and indexing processes always happen. Robots are always up and running to find and organize web content. But the order in which they are displayed in users’ searches is defined at the time of ranking.
Ranking occurs every time a user searches – and that is where SEO efforts are concentrated. According to the keyword the user uses in its search, Google quickly scans its index for pages that match those terms and answers your question.
The ranking, then, is defined by the best keyword match, together with a series of ranking factors that make up the search algorithm. They serve to offer better user experience and, consequently, improve the positioning of your pages in search engines.
How to improve the SEO of your non-profit website
Now that you have an idea of how your website is appearing on the search engine check out the 3 SEO principles that will improve your performance on the search engine:
Loading speed
Loading speed is one of the main criteria for classification. Google itself has already spoken openly that speed is a ranking factor – in 2010, for desktop searches and, in 2018, for mobile searches.
Fast page speed does not rank you higher than your competitors. But a bad Pagespeed guarantees you will never make it.
For Google, the quality of the user’s search experience depends on the agility of the information, since nobody wants to wait more than a few seconds to find what they want.
It is not by chance that the search engine provided a free testing tool: PageSpeed Insights. The reports provide a diagnosis on speed, as well as tips to improve loadings, such as optimizing images and website codes.
Brand mention
Brand mentions, even without a link to your website, are already valuable for SEO. Google analyzes this criterion to recognize brands that exist and are well known in the market.
However, you can also search for these mentions without a link and identify opportunities to gain a quality backlink. Just contact the administrator, kindly, and suggest the inclusion of the link.
Images for SEO
Google still does not fully understand what an image says. To understand what they stand for, he needs your help. And how can you help it?
This strategy serves to provide data in text form about the images. We are talking about the alternative text (alt tag), file name, image caption, image URL, and the context (words around it).
The most important here is the alternative text, which is essential for the visually impaired experience since the screen reader reads the alternative text to the user.
Therefore, the alternative text should always be a description of the image and, whenever possible, containing the keyword.
All these elements make Google understand what the image displays, index it for the search on Google Images, and make it more a source of traffic. The optimization of images for SEO also includes some care with the size and format of the file, so that they are quickly loaded and indexed.
Extra: Google My Business
It is essential to register your company on Google My Business. This tool offers several registration features for local businesses. Google prioritizes showing businesses that have the most information on the platform, especially those with the most reviews and high marks.
Conclusion
It is important to understand that the result of a work in SEO does not appear overnight or from one week to another. The fruits appear in the medium and long term. Every quarter evaluates your website’s placement for your organization’s keywords. Start with the main ones, and then work on other related words.
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Co-Authored With
Gabriela Damaceno is a journalist and head of online content for Media Shark, an app development agency, Gold Coast. She is representing HK Certifiers, a company that offers Construction Certificates services. You can connect with her via Linkedin.
