Soapbox Engage Blog

If you’ve read anything about marketing, you’ve heard about SEO. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is an essential tool for nonprofit organizations. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to increase visibility when people search for events, education, fundraising campaigns, volunteer opportunities, or other happenings surrounding your mission.

If you feel overwhelmed by the process of optimizing your website for visibility, read on! We’ve got you covered.

• How does SEO work?
• SEO Tip 1: Get your keywords right
• SEO Tip 2: Optimize your user experience
• SEO Tip 3: Create quality content
• SEO Tip 4: Get backlinks from quality sources
• SEO Tip 5: Stay updated on SEO trends

How does SEO work?

When a person performs an online search, the search engine scans billions of documents (pages, pdfs, jpg, and more) and does two things: first, it returns only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query; second, it ranks those results.

SEO is all about communicating your value to search engines and helping them help you. You want to make it as easy as possible for ranking systems to understand what your website is about.

Search engines will aim to deliver relevant results to searchers by trying to understand what the site is about through keywords, and will also display more user-friendly sites.

Here are some SEO Tips to make sure you are setting your organization up for success!

Top SEO Tips for Nonprofit Success

Get your keywords right

Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines. It’s important to use the language your audience uses because you might be currently describing your organization in slightly different ways.

Find your keywords by talking to your community members, and doing your own keyword research. There are a variety of keyword research tools that can help you.

Optimize your user experience

Prioritize your user experience. The more time people who visit your website spend there, the more you signal to search engines that your content is worth exploring. Here are some ways to improve user experience:

• Improve your page speed. You want to keep website load time under 5 seconds to avoid losing readers’ attention.
• Satisfy search intent. The people who visit your site need to be getting what they want. (This is part of why selecting the right keywords is so important!)
• Make your content easy to read and understand.
• Organize your content so it’s easily discoverable, and offer intuitive navigation so your audience can find key info.
• Make sure it’s accessible.

Create quality content

Content is key! Keywords can only go so far. Search engines are consistently altering how they rank their sites, in order to show the most relevant results to customers. The only way to sustainably optimize your site is to keep creating content that is relevant, valuable, and shareable.

Here are some tips to help you create valuable content:

• Look at your list of SEO keywords and see what kind of in-depth posts you can work those keywords into.
• Interview experts, influencers, and figures with large social followings. They are likely to share your content via their social channels.
• Write fresh, engaging, high-quality blog posts relating to your work. This not only has the benefit of improving your SEO, but also helping supporters understand your impact.
• Create a variety of content (blog posts, videos, lists, infographics, guides, etc).

Get backlinks from quality sources

Search engine rankings are also determined by other sites that link to your site. The more the other websites link to yours, the higher you will rank. However, links by trusted websites that rank highly themselves are taken into consideration more.

Here are some tips to help you get quality backlinks:

• Ask news websites to add your website link whenever you get featured in a story.
• Ask for backlinks from your corporate partners and sponsors.
• Collaborate with other nonprofits and have them link back to you in a blog post.
• Write guest blog posts on other websites and include a link back to your website.
• Produce great content! In addition to the reasons illustrated earlier, producing quality content will ensure it's something others naturally want to link to.
• Include social share buttons so that your content can be shared easily.

Link building takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s a crucial part of SEO, and can make a major difference. You don’t want to skip it!

Stay updated on SEO trends

As we mentioned, search engines are consistently altering how they rank their sites. That means you need to stay up to date on trends, in order to continuously stay optimized. Check out this article to learn all the SEO trends for 2022.

And there you have it! There are so many different pieces that impact SEO. The good news is, that means there are so many changes you can make to continuously improve! The better your SEO, the easier people who need your organization can find you, and the more good you can do in the world.

Here are a few more resources to help you with your marketing journey for your nonprofit:

• A Complete Guide to Meaningful Nonprofit Storytelling: In order to get the word out about your organization, you need to be able to tell your story properly. This blog post serves a guide to help you meaningfully tell your story.
• How to Leverage Social Media for Fundraising: Social media is an essential piece of the marketing puzzle. This blog post shares how to best leverage your social media for successful fundraising.
• 4 Steps to Build a Cohesive Nonprofit Marketing Plan: If you’re looking to improve your marketing in 2023, you need a plan. Check out this blog post for four steps to building a cohesive nonprofit marketing plan.