SEO for Nonprofit: What Charities Need to Know

Search engine optimization refers to the strategies used to increase your rankings on a search engine results page (SERP). It’s a tool that all businesses use, including nonprofits, as effective strategies could drive more engagement and traffic to your nonprofit, without the need to pay for every impression, click, or lead.

It’s those strategies we will discuss here.

How Can You Benefit from SEO as a Nonprofit?

Google doesn’t differentiate between for-profit and nonprofit. As long as you’re producing good content and getting everything else right, you should rank highly.

There are some exceptions to that rule, but not for the reasons you might think.

For instance, gambling sites and adult sites often have a harder time getting results, but that’s because few sites want to link to them, and Google partially restricts them.

SEO for eCommerce is also harder, but that’s primarily because they have a lot of pages and elements, and this can slow the site down, increase the bounce rate, and even lead to duplicate content.

Nonprofits don’t suffer from any of these issues, and with a good SEO strategy, they can:

Boost their reputation
Become a leading authority in their field
Drive more traffic to their domain
Build a more user-friendly website

Tips for Building an Effective Nonprofit SEO Strategy

The easiest way to get to the top of SERPs is to trust an SEO expert who can do the work for you. At Optics In, for instance, we have worked with numerous companies all over the world and have achieved significantly improved traffic and conversions for all of them.

If you decide to do the work yourself, you’ll need a lot of time or a dedicated team and should consider nonprofit SEO tips such as:

Focus on the User First

Google doesn’t care about SEO experts and writers. It only cares about the user, and it wants to provide that user with the best experience possible.

So, forget about tricks to exploit the algorithm. If you can create a website and content that keeps users happy—easy to navigate, easy to read, and engaging—Google will reward you.

Create Excellent, Relevant Content

Your content needs to be the best that it can be, and it also needs to be relevant.

Although search engines can’t judge the quality of each article that they index, their algorithms do have a good idea of what an ideal article should look like.

They know, for instance, that the best content will contain helpful external links where appropriate, as well as images and videos that enhance the user experience.

Lenth is rarely important. Many webmasters get hung up on the idea that an article needs to be a specific number of words. In the eyes of the search engines, it should only be as long as it needs to be.

So, if you’re advising readers on how to make a cup of tea, a few hundred words should suffice. If you’re telling them all about the history and benefits of tea, you’ll need a lot more.

Build Authority

Backlinks are no longer as important as they once were, but they still play a role and shouldn’t be ignored.

A backlink is simply a link on a third-party website that points back to your site. As a nonprofit, it may be easier to acquire these links than it would be for those practicing SEO for cannabis brands, as well as any companies that are driven by profit.

Keep Your Content Updated

Even if you’re writing evergreen content, you should still return on occasion to update the content. Make sure it stays fresh and relevant, removing anything that is outdated.

You should also audit older content on occasion to see if there are any ways to update the content, and potentially improve your results.

Brand stories are a great way to connect with your customers. It attaches a meaning to the brand and ensures it lasts longer in the user’s conscious. It also means they are more likely to share content from the brand, view multiple pages, and engage with posts, ideas, and other content, all of which can help with search rankings.

The great thing about SEO for nonprofits is that they usually have a lot of interesting, inspiring stories to tell, as well as a captive audience that’s willing to hear them.

Don’t Overuse Keywords

Most SEO experts recommend a keyword density of less than 3%, which means a specific keyword should not appear more than 3 times for every 100 words.

You’re not on a mission to cram as many of those keywords into the article as possible.

By the same token, you should try to use various similar keywords and longtail keywords, including questions and phrases.

Don’t use more than one major keyword per page. Brand names are okay to pepper throughout the site, as are the main service keywords, but you shouldn’t be doing that with all of them.

Clean up Your Navigation

Website navigation is a big part of the user experience.

If a user can’t find what they’re looking for, whether they need information on your business or information on getting in touch, they will leave, which is bad for the bounce rate and your rankings.

Clean it up. Simplify. And keep the user in mind at all times.

Increase Your Page Speed

Page speed is another thing that impacts the user experience. People have very little patience for slow sites and will typically give up after a couple of seconds. Optimize by reducing unnecessary code, resizing images, and changing how your pages load content.

Examples of Successful SEO Campaigns for Nonprofits

At Optics In, we have worked with companies of all sizes, and these include nonprofits. For instance, we previously ran successful campaigns for the US Vote Foundation, active on the following websites:

Conclusion: Start Your Nonprofit SEO Campaign

If you run a nonprofit and want to see what an SEO campaign can do for you, contact us today. We can give you a quote, talk you through the process, and discuss your options.

We help companies of all sizes and budgets, proving that SEO doesn’t need to be expensive.