SEO Essentials for Nonprofits
Ilia Jones | May 2021
Figuring out how to create engaging and strategic content that will be easily found by your target audience is not as simple as one may think. There is however one key way to get your content ranked higher on SERPs. That is by following a few essential SEO best practices for nonprofits. In our SEO Essentials for Nonprofits webinar, we dive into the steps needed to optimize your nonprofit website, here we summarize the key takeaways from this webinar. Watch the webinar here.
Short and Long Tail Keywords
It’s important to include both short and long-tail keywords in your website copy. When determining the keywords you want to rank for, be sure to look at both short and long-tail keywords. Short tail keywords will be the more general keywords that get a higher search volume. These keywords attract an audience that is higher in the sales funnel. For example “housing” or “food bank”.
Long-tail keywords are more precise and include more than one word. They do have a lower search volume which can make them seem less important. Butt this actually makes them vital to acquiring potential customers who are further down the sales funnel and thus more likely to convert. The ideal ratio for short to long-tail keywords is about 1:8, so keep that in mind when creating an SEO strategy.
Adwords & Google Ad Grant
We recommend that every nonprofit set up an Adwords account to help in the creation of an SEO strategy. Adwords gives you a deeper look into the level of competition for the keywords that are relevant to your nonprofit. While nonprofits don’t necessarily compete on a service level. From an SEO standpoint, there is competition for the keywords you will use. To see this information, you can use the keyword planner in Adwords. Any nonprofit is also eligible to apply for Google’s Ad Grant program which gives funds towards Google Ads. This can be incredibly helpful for your SEO strategy.
On-Page SEO
Any on-page copy or content should be created with your SEO strategy in mind. This means that the keywords that you have chosen to rank for should really drive the content creation process. It’s important to avoid thin content – so consider that the minimum word count for a “healthy” page is 400 words. Longer form content will be much more competitive in SERPs and should have a higher word count. Things like metadata, tags, alt text and linking should also be considered when creating on-page content. Your focus keyword should always be used in the copy on the backend of your website, like the meta description.
