Getting found by your ideal customers and donors on Google . . . it’s the Holy Grail, isn’t it? It’s one of the main reasons you created your website, but you quickly learned that it isn’t a “build it and they will come” scenario.
Or, is it?
While it’s not easy and it does take time, there is one method that you can’t overlook if you want your nonprofit or social enterprise to show up on that coveted first page of Google: Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
By this point in Internet history, you’ve probably heard the term, but you may be lost as to what it is and how to make it work for your mission. I know I was. For several years, I tried to learn from the latest guru but kept getting overwhelmed and scratching my head—until I met Meg Casebolt of Love At First Search.
Meg is the first person to make SEO click for me, and she’s going to break down some of the basics for you below. If you start to put her advice into action, you will see results. After taking her course, I have seen a steady uptick in new leads and clients from Google! And it’s exciting every single time.
Your work deserves more attention and with Meg’s advice, you can help ideal customers and donors find your social impact mission on Google.
Let me guess, when you first announced your nonprofit or social enterprise and launched your website, you expected people to come to you in flocks. And maybe they did . . . at first! Who wouldn’t? You’re awesome and you believe in what you do, and it’s having an impact on the world!
But now that the initial excitement has worn off, your social media channels aren’t getting as many clicks as you’d like and it seems that all your efforts are falling flat. You know that you have the power to change lives, but people just aren’t finding you.
What if I told you there’s a way to help more people find your amazing cause online?
When people want something, they search for it, and if you set your website up correctly, it can show up around the clock to lead them to learn more about your cause. The secret to getting those new leads from Google? It’s called search engine optimization, or SEO.
I know it might sound intimidating or even a little sketchy (we all get those spammy emails!), but I promise that the SEO tactics below are all based in solid business practices. Good SEO, applied to your blog posts in particular, will help every part of your online presence so that more people are aware of the beneficial work you’re doing.
Wait, What is SEO?
To put it simply, SEO is a collection of activities to improve the amount and quality of organic traffic reaching your website from search engines. It’s the way that people find answers to their questions on traditional search engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) and also on sites you may not think of as search engines (like YouTube, Pinterest, eBay, and Amazon) and even industry specific directories like Charity Navigator or Guidestar by Candid.
Optimizing for search means that you’re trying to get search engines like Google—the world’s most popular search engine—to see your website and blog posts or other content as both knowledgeable and trustworthy, and to lead people to it quickly and efficiently.
And the combination of more people finding you plus being seen as knowledgeable and trustworthy means an increase in sales or donations.
There are three main components of SEO:
Content (pages, blogs, videos, podcast show notes, infographics, etc.)
Search engines are constantly reviewing new and fresh content on the internet. When someone types in an online query, Google searches through a huge index of text and tries to find content that has the information they’re looking for.
When it comes to content, a major part of the SEO process is keyword research (aka figuring out what people are searching for) by finding the intersection of:
What you want to be found for
What people are searching for
What doesn’t already have a gazillion results
Ease of Use
When search engines deliver results, they want people to get the answers they’re looking for quickly and easily. So, if your site takes forever to load, is hard to read on a phone, or has tons of dead-end links, Google doesn’t want to share those results with people. Search engines want to recommend sites that not only answer people’s questions but also look good doing it—just like you, hot stuff!
Reputation
Google relies on other sites to tell it how credible and trustworthy your site is. So, how do other sites give you the digital equivalent of upvotes? By linking to your site. And for once, the SEO gods have given us an easy-to-understand term for this: backlinks.
Backlinks are any links from other sites to yours. The best backlinks come from websites in your industry that have high authority (aka they have a lot of backlinks going into their site).
You can write the best blog post in the world and have the smoothest user experience, but if nobody trusts you? Womp womp, sad trombones.
What are some easy ways to get great backlinks for your nonprofit? Sign up for popular directories like Guidestar by Candid and Charity Navigator, post your job listings on Idealist, write guest blog posts for the Chronicle of Philanthropy or Nonprofit Quarterly . . . and make sure they all link to your website.
For you guys in the social enterprise space, you can become a member of the Social Enterprise Alliance, register as a B Corp, participate in 1% for the Planet, or any other number of organizations that have trusted online directories.
Even more PR-related opportunities like being a guest on a podcast (that has online show notes) or being listed as a speaker on a conference website helps to build those coveted backlinks.
Local SEO for Nonprofits and Social Enterprise Businesses
If you serve a specific geographic area with your services, you also want to consider Local SEO tactics.
The first step for Local SEO is to set up a free Google My Business account, where you can easily tell Google where you’re located (if you have a brick and mortar location) and/or where your service area is (if you’re a home-based business or meet your clients at another location), as well as what you offer and who you serve.
Google My Business is a great tool not only for you to directly share your business information with Google, but also to solicit feedback from your clients, who can add reviews and user-generated content like photos directly to your account. This would then allow searchers to see them in Google Maps and/or local listings . . . like the B Corp company that installed our solar panels, which shows up in search results for terms like “green energy rochester ny.”
But how do you FIND those phrases that people might be looking for?
Keyword Research for Cause-Focused Organizations
You probably already have some ideas for topics you could show up for like “educational charity atlanta” or “community gardening initiative” or “microfinance for poverty alleviation.” And you might have those words plastered all over your website.
But is that really what your people are looking for? How do you know what they’re typing into Google?
Simple: keyword research.
Keywords are the phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines.
And often, the words that WE use (as people who deeply understand and care about our missions) are different from the words that new people search.
For example, TOMS shoes starts their website with “we’re in the business to improve lives,” but do you know what keywords their traffic actually comes from? Keywords like “booties” (they get ~5000 visitors/mo from that), “wedges” (3500 visitors/mo). And “slip on shoes” (~2500 visitors/mo).
And it’s not just those large categories that TOMS shows up for . . . they also get about 75 people per month for “black canvas shoes” and 65 for “captain america shoes.”
Those people aren’t specifically looking for TOMS because of their mission or corporate giving program, they just need new shoes, and it’s not until people get to the website that they find out about the company’s social impact. That’s not necessarily what they’re searching for, but it might be why they trust the company and want to buy once they discover it.
Here are three steps to help you get started with keyword research:
See what people are asking about your topic
The best way to answer people’s questions is to go to the places they’re asking them and look for trends. So poke around the web! How do you know what phrases people are actually searching for once they get to Google? Easy! Use a keyword research tool.
Type your topic into an idea generator tool like Answer the Public or Also Asked to get some fun ideas of the types of things people are looking for.Find the right keyword phrases
One of the best free keyword research tools is Ubersuggest. It gives a ton of keyword research data to you—for free—in a user-friendly way. Using a tool like this, you can do some research on the keywords and topics you want to get out to the world and get an idea of how many people are searching for it. You can also get an idea of the SEO difficulty of these keywords, or how competitive that search term is. The lower the number, the easier it is to rank for that search term.
Choose 1 primary keyword and 2-3 secondary keywords
In order to be super clear with Google about your topic or expertise, you should choose ONE KEYWORD that is most important to your end goal so that your writing has something to focus on. Then, you can sprinkle a few other keywords throughout your writing to make sure Google knows that they’re related.
If you’re having trouble narrowing down a keyword, don’t worry about it! Select a group of keywords for a specific post, and then if you find other keywords you like, write another post to talk about those!
You can create as much content as you’d like, and you can rank for infinitely keywords. The Red Cross has over 300,000 keywords pointing to over 10,000 pages on their site—heck, they have 14,000 keywords just about CPR!—so don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to a top three for your entire site.
Keyword selection criteria
How do you select a good keyword, you might ask? For my visual learners, these are the three qualities of a good keyword. We’re aiming for that sweet spot in the middle).
And here are some examples of how detailed your search terms can be, so you can start thinking about the level of detail that you need to rank for a high volume, low competition keyword:
Let’s take a look at what comes up when we search for “social impact” in Ubersuggest.
Here, we see that people are indeed searching for “social impact,” and we can see all the important metrics. VOLUME is the average monthly number of people searching that phrase, CPC and PD are about how many people are running Google Ads and how much they’re paying, and SD is “search difficulty” (how easy it would be to rank for that term).
So when you’re looking at these numbers: The higher the volume number the better, and the lower the “SD” (aka SEO difficulty, aka competition) number, the better.
And if we search “social responsibility,” as seen below, we have even better volume numbers, meaning more people are looking for content relating to social responsibility! So, you may want to focus on a blog more catered to this topic.
Alright, so you’ve done your research and you have a keyword now, but I bet you’re wondering where it should go on your site or in your blog . . .
Where Do I PUT the Keyword in My Content?
There are seven key places where you can include your keyword in the text of your website and your content. You should aim to include it in all these places, but if it doesn’t quite fit into one, it’s okay. It’s more important to be easy to read than to have the perfect placement.
Your SEO title (the blue text in search results)
Your URL slug (the part after the domain)
Meta description (the black text in search results)
Headline (the title of your post and your H1 headline)
In a subheading (H2-H6: you can have as many of these as you want)
In your image description(s) as an “alt” tag
Sprinkled throughout the body copy
The most important place to include your keyword is your SEO title, which is the blue text that shows up on the search engine results page. You want to include a keyword, but also write a title that people actually want to click on!
I like to use CoSchedule’s Headline Studio to double check my post headlines (and email subject lines) to make sure they’re the right length, follow a great format (lists and questions do well for SEO titles), and include powerful word choices that make people more likely to click.
If you can’t immediately convince people who see your site on Google to click on it, it doesn’t matter how good your content is! You have to make an immediate impression. And your SEO Title will do just that.
Questions to Ask Before You Write a Single Word
Now, before you go writing a few pages and invest hours into your next blog post (or whatever content you plan to create) to promote your stellar social enterprise or nonprofit, ask yourself these four questions to get clear about how that content can get found on Google and turn your readers into customers or donors:
Why does my audience need to know this?
If you can’t identify why you’re writing the post: don’t write it. BUT. If you can pinpoint the problem that you’re solving or advice you’re giving your reader by writing a post? By all means, continue.
How is this different from existing content on this topic?
You’re probably not the first person to write about whatever is on your mind. But you do have a unique point of view to share with your audience. Take a look around at what’s being written by other people in your industry. Think of a new approach to what’s already been said. Showcase what makes you different.
How can it help me when someone finds this?
Remember, everything on your website should help lead the reader to becoming a customer or donor. What’s the end product, service, or mission that your audience needs or should know about?
What do I want the reader to do after reading?
What’s the goal of this post? What will be the Call to Action (CTA) for the reader to thank you for generously sharing your awesomeness? Should they make a donation, buy a product, subscribe to your newsletter, or attend your event? Make sure everything you write is leading to that CTA.
Going the Extra Mile: A Quick SEO Blog Checklist
Now that you know what people are searching for and you’ve got those keywords selected and prioritized, it’s time to get writing! To make sure you really have all your ducks in a row and to ensure your blog is in the best position to get noticed, follow the below steps before publishing anything.
Choose your topic
Research keywords (remember: specific, relevant, uncommon)
Draft your title (Include your keyword and keep it intriguing!)
Write the thing!
Break up your ideas with subheadings
Work in your keyword and related words naturally (ideally every ~250 words)
Add images (you should have at least one as the featured image)
Name the file with your keyword
Add an alt tag on each
Add internal links to other resources on your site
Add external links to relevant places around the internet
Prep the listing
Make sure the title is 30-65 characters
Update the URL/Slug (include keyword here!)
Write the meta description (155 characters)
If you have Wordpress, double check your Yoast traffic lights.
Get the full comprehensive SEO checklist here.
Need some hands-on support with SEO for your social enterprise or nonprofit?
If you don’t want to DIY your SEO, come check out my Attract & Activate membership, where we help small businesses and cause-focused organizations to reach and convert their ideal customers and donors through the power of SEO.
(KP note: I can attest first-hand as to what a patient and fun teacher is! There is a strong learning curve for a lot of us when it comes to SEO, but Meg will do everything in her power to make sure you can understand and implement her ideas. Plus, after those leads start coming in, you’ll be glad you took the time to learn a new skill!)
Meg Casebolt is the owner and founder of Love At First Search and has been helping online business owners create beautiful, search-friendly websites and strategic content for the past eight years.
Before launching Love At First Search, Meg spent nine years in the nonprofit sector, working in the development teams at Big Brothers Big Sisters and Partners In Health, while earning her Masters in Community Economic Development.
She’s your no-B.S. bestie who makes it super easy for your dream customers to find—and adore!—your organization online, resulting in effortless web traffic, consistent customers, soaring profit and donations, and SO much more time (and sanity)!
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I’m Kristi Porter, and I help cause-focused organizations understand and execute effective marketing campaigns so they can move from stressed to strategic. Your resources may be limited, but your potential isn’t. Whether you’re a nonprofit, social enterprise, or small business who wants to give back, I’ll show you how to have a bigger impact.