Soapbox Engage Blog

How does your SEO measure up?

Raising awareness for your cause can be a tricky business. You may have clipboard people on the streets and special ad placements in print and web publications, among other things. What about search, though? There are a lot of people thinking about your organization's mission, either directly or indirectly. These people could become donors, volunteers or supporters very easily. As a result, you should be looking at ways to improve your search engine optimization, or how you're seen and discovered on search engines. By doing that, you'll get more people to look into the projects your nonprofit is working on.

But how do you measure your SEO? Being a nonprofit is quite different from being a media page. You don't have people placing ads on your site, and you're not necessarily looking for page clicks. So here are some tips to get you going in the right direction, using basic analytics tools:

Bounce rate

Page visits aren't everything. A lot of people will simply visit your site on the principle that they found something cool or interesting on there. Then they'll click elsewhere when they're finished reading your blog post or watching your video. The rate in which people leave after visiting your landing page is called the bounce rate. If your bounce rate is higher than half, you're losing more than half the potential supporters just because they got bored and moved on. The bounce rate is a great way to determine if something's wrong with the way the page is set up as well.

Pages per visit

However, the bounce rate shouldn't be main priority, according to SEO blogger Avinash Kaushik on his personal blog. Finding out that metric is a good first step in determining the types of people entering your site, but it won't help you find out if they stick around. One method of determining where else they went is the average number of pages per visit. You're able to track, from the starting point, how many pages on your site were visited before they stopped or clicked off to another site. This information can be used to assess the overall quality of traffic, with a higher number usually meaning that people are getting more out of the visit.

Time per visit

Another mechanism that can be used in conjunction with the number of pages per visit is the length of time your visitors are on the nonprofit's website. Sometimes, a high number could simply mean that they jumped through a lot of hoops to get the information they needed. Comparing the time to number of pages visited can make a great impact on the quality of your traffic.

Volume of unbranded search traffic

Analytics firm LunaMetrics points out that searches take two forms: Branded and non-branded. Branded search traffic comes from people who actually typed your organization's name into Google or Bing to look for you. While it's great that people are looking for you specifically, non-branded search traffic is superior. It means that people simply looking up your cause are able to find you. That creates a lot of new traffic as well as new supporters. Taking advantage of that through CRM software can help bolster your ranks and funds.