Imagine you run a non-profit organization that is dedicated to rescuing endangered sea turtles. However, you are struggling to get noticed in the vast digital ocean. Despite your passionate efforts and heartwarming stories, your message is lost in the noise of the internet.
But then you met an SEO consultant that helped you implement some SEO strategies and your website suddenly begins to attract thousands of visitors each month. Now your compelling stories and urgent calls to action begins to appear at the top of search results, leading to increased donations and a surge in volunteer sign-ups.
When you understand and leverage the power of shareable content and strategic SEO, these are the results you’d begin to experience. As a non-profit organization, mastering these digital tools can turn a modest campaign into a widespread movement, elevating their cause and amplifying their impact.
So in this article, I will show you the the essential SEO tips and techniques tailored for non-profits, showing how you can harness the power of search engines to boost awareness, engage supporters, and ultimately drive meaningful change. But before we dIg deeper, let’s start with why non-profits need SEO.
Why Do Non-Profits Need SEO?
Today when you can do virtually everything online, people now choose to give more online. They go on search engines (such as Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.) or other social media platforms to search for non-profit organizations or groups that share the same values as theirs.
The search results of either of those two platforms are why non-profits should invest in search engine optimization (SEO).
Regardless of what goals you want to achieve during a particular period, you need good SEO strategies or techniques. Whether raising awareness for your new projects, raising funds for a specific program, inciting people to volunteer, or increasing general donations online, SEO will help you reach organic and quality visitors who want to learn about what your non-profit offers and how they can help.
For instance, you will get the below result if you search for “Autistic aid NGO in California.”
Getting ranked highly on the search engine result page (SERP) is very important. It helps non-profits to increase their website visibility without spending huge amounts as against traditional marketing practices. Beyond that, SEO helps you win the long-term game.
When you use an effective SEO strategy, its results or rewards are significant across the years compared to paid ads and other traditional and digital marketing channels. And it is cheaper.
7 Effective SEO Practices to Create Optimized Content that Ranks Well for Non-Profits
Now that you know why it is important to leverage SEO for non-profits, let’s cover some effective SEO practices you can use to create contents that rank for your website.
1. Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research is crucial for your SEO success. Keywords, also known as search queries, are the pillars upon which you build your SEO strategy. They give you extensive insights into search terms your target audience is looking for on search engines. Likewise, you will have an idea of the various combinations of related keywords your audience uses to discover your non-profit service as an organization.
With that, you find it easy to build an SEO strategy for:
- the keywords you want to rank for
- improving or retaining the keywords pages on your website are ranking for
To begin with, you can use some keyword tools such as Keyword Everywhere, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic to understand what your audience is interested in and build quality blog content from there. Likewise, you can use tools like SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool, AlsoAsked, and Moz Keyword Explorer to gain more insights into how best to design your content outline to create contents that rank.
The above result can become starting points for you to create informational guides that amplify your organization’s mission and vision. Thus, making it easy for your target audience to find you.
2. Topic Cluster Strategy
Sometimes, it can be a herculean task to rank for some keywords due to the high competition for those keywords. This is because of the high-ranking websites that are winning the SEO game with those keywords. In this case, you might need to create several contents to cover different subtopics under the same keywords.
Instead of going through such stress, you can maximize the advantage of the topic cluster strategy. With a topic cluster, you create a single page which is the pillar page. The pillar page is a detailed overview of the topic and you will optimize it for the targeted highly competitive keyword. However, you would have the pillar page linking to other pages, the cluster pages, that explore deep areas of the topics.
Meanwhile, the cluster pages also link back to the pillar page. This sends information to Google and other search engines that the pillar page is a highly-valued resource. This improves the search performance of the pillar page.
When you use the topic clusters strategy, your non-profit website:
- turns into an authority website
- achieve high ranking for competitive keywords that are difficult to rank for
- has well-structured content both from SEO and user-friendly point of view (POV)
One tool you can use to achieve this is SEMrush’s Topic Research tool. This enables you to come up with subtopics you can use to build clusters around a pillar page.
3. Effective Backlinks Strategy
Backlinking is an effective SEO strategy that non-profits can use to boost their SEO performance. Non-profits are known to have a large network of media partners. As a result, their activities or campaigns tend to have wide media coverage. Sometimes, they get featured on the government’s website, corporate’s or partner’s site.
As a non-profit, your organization can tap into that rich partnership to enhance your SEO strategy. This can make your website more authoritative in your niche and can increase its ranking performance. You only need your partners to link back to your site when they mention your non-profits on their websites.
Some of the tools you can use include
- Semrush Backlink Analyzer
- Ahrefs Backlink Checker
- Moz Link Explorer
- SE Ranking
- Buzzsumo Content Analyzer, etc.
Ensure to reach out to your partners who aren’t showing up after your backlink analysis and get them on board to help you win the SEO game.
4. Local SEO
Regardless of your current goals as a non-profit, you should make it easy for people to find you—especially those in your local community. You can achieve this by using local SEO to increase your awareness within your community. With local SEO, you are establishing and optimizing your online presence to read more people from your local community.
This strategy is essential for non-profits with a physical presence in a specific area. It enables them to show up on Maps and search engine results for relevant keywords.
When you tap into your community, you have a significant resource of active and engaged individuals ready to partake in your mission and share your vision. When you diligently set up your local SEO strategy, your target audience finds you among the search results while presenting them with useful information about your organization.
You can achieve this by:
- creating a Google Business Profile (GBP) for free listing
- listing your non-profit in local directories
- using the local target keywords when publishing content on your website
- creating location-specific pages for different offices where it applies
- getting backlinks from local businesses and other non-profits
- getting backlinks from high-authority local news
All of that will help show up for “near me” search queries on Google and other search engines.
5. On-page Optimization
On-page optimization is one of the three types of SEO strategies. It includes optimizing your website pages for search engines while making them more appealing to users. Although there is no definite template for SEO content, there are specific website elements you must optimize to rank well. They include:
- meta title, blog title, or H1 heading
- meta description
- other headings such as H2, H3, etc.
- optimized URL
- alt text for any graphical element
- accurate and descriptive anchor text linking to other relevant content on the same website or high-authority websites
All that helps put your website pages in a good SEO health condition. Search engines receive information that your website is well-optimized for ranking.
6. Technical SEO
As you perfect your on-page SEO game, ensure that your website does not have any technical issues that can disrupt the success of your SEO strategy. As far as technical SEO is concerned, there are two important things to note:
- ensuring that search engines like Google, Bing, and others discover, crawl, and index new website URLs on your site
- ensuring that visitors have a good user experience such as fast loading, mobile usability, and effective accessibility practices.
You can make use of tools like Semrush, SE Ranking, and Sitebulb to assess your website and provide you with potential technical issues your website might have. Likewise, you can use Google Search Console to detect any potential indexing issues.
7. Publish Thought-Leadership Content
The internet is filled with regurgitative content around different specific topics. This gets readers bored as there is no new content from experience and expertise as they used to be. But recognizing this and tapping into it can give you a ranking advantage. It doesn’t necessarily qualify as an SEO practice, but it has been proven over time that such content improves SEO performance.
That’s because content produced with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) practice in mind helps build trust with readers and can generate a huge load of backlinks. In turn, it improves website ranking on search engines.
You can achieve this by encouraging in-house experts or consultants to write about what you do as a non-profit. Also include their names and a short bio showcasing their expertise and experience. This convinces Google and readers that the contents are truly authoritative.
3 Tips for Non-Profits to Create Engaging and Sharable Content
By now, you have ideas about the kind of content you want to put on your non-profit website. While SEO might serve a good purpose in helping you become discoverable, it might not solve the problems of making readers care genuinely about your mission and vision. And if content can’t do that, it failed already.
The starting point of any SEO practice is to understand your audience by looking into their persona. Then create content that will connect them with your mission. And this requires you to strike their emotional chord while leveraging SEO to get discovered. Below, we discussed five (5) tips you can create engaging and sharable content for non-profits.
1. Storytelling
People don’t connect to facts; they connect to stories. Stories are etched in people’s memories for a long time. They hold onto it tightly until there is a new story to replace that feeling from the old story. This is because stories trigger their emotional notes and enable them to feel exactly what the storyteller feels. And remember, people decide based on emotions.
Infusing storytelling in your optimized content enables you to attract organic visitors who, in turn, will be compelled to take specific actions dictated by the content. This is because your content is solving a specific need or filling a need they can relate to. With storytelling, your SEO content enables you to speak to your audience instead of talking about your organization.
2. Create Visually Appealing Content
Your content design and layout play a vital role in attracting your visitors, turning them into readers and donors as a non-profit. Aside from creating compelling content that holds them down, visitors get attracted to content that is well-designed and placed. This involves using various graphical content to appeal to their readership while sharing your stories as a non-profit.
Your readers are interested in the content on your non-profit’s website, but you have to draw them in totally with a well-designed page unique to your organization. This includes making your content scannable using paragraphs, bullet points, and other notable means.
This will help support your SEO strategy as you stick to your content guidelines. Likewise, you can tap into your SEO dashboard to examine metrics of various content, assess what’s working, and put them to test.
3. Employ Effective SEO Practices
Effective SEO practices are as important as creating content that engages your readers and that they can share with their network. It gives you the advantage of knowing how best to serve your audience. Most especially, quality keyword research and strategy play a critical role in helping you create engaging and sharable content. This means that you are solving your target audience’s problems and they want to be a part of it.
As much as keyword research, strategy, and placement serve a crucial purpose, stay away from keyword stuffing. It is an SEO practice that not only affects your ranking. It also triggers your readers to abandon your blog or website due to the unchecked repetition of the same words across the website. It can sometimes cause what we regard as reading fatigue.
How Non-Profits Can Increase Reach and Influence with Their Content
It is not enough that you are great at your SEO game. You want to be in people’s faces and have them think about you all of the time when they want to engage in the service or be part of your non-profit mission.
Maybe you want to increase your awareness, raise funds, or enhance your credibility, below are a few ways you can achieve that.
-
Leverage Social Media
Social media platforms are becoming an integral part of branding for non-profits today. This is because social media shifted from messaging platforms to where brands, groups, and organizations build communities.
By consistently posting quality content and engaging people through the comment section, your non-profit can build a huge following and redirect organic traffic to your website. In turn, you improve your SEO ranking and performance.
-
Engage in Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is now a critical part of digital marketing today. It is a kind of marketing partnership that exists between organizations and popular social media personalities known as social media influencers.
These personalities have large followings and partnering with them can increase your non-profit’s awareness, boost your social proof and, in turn, lead to increased donations. You can use tools such as Buzzsumo to curate a list of influencer marketers for your non-profit.
-
Partnership with Other Organizations
When you partner with some organizations that share your non-profit’s vision, it gives you access to an extensive network, credibility, and resources to boost your message and impact. This enables you to build solid relationships and execute joint marketing campaigns that can yield outstanding results for awareness or fundraising.
Conclusion
If you’re not harnessing the power of SEO to create shareable content in your non-profit, you’ll be losing in on the game-changer experience to expand their reach and enhance your impact.
By integrating strategic SEO touchpoints like keywords resrach, topical clustering, backlinking, optimizing for user experience, and crafting compelling narratives, you’ll create content that resonate with your audiences and elevate your visibility and drive significant engagement.
