SEO for Nonprofits: 5 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Website

Your nonprofit may already have a website, but is it good at what it does? There are simple ways to optimize your website and make it work towards your organization’s goals.

Nowadays, an organization’s website is a big part of its identity. Websites make supporting a cause and donating to nonprofit organizations a breeze. They’re great for introducing people to your organization. They’re amazing tools that can convince people to support, donate or even volunteer for your cause. But, websites can only help you if the right people find them. This is where SEO comes in.

But, before we turn to all the simple ways you can optimize your nonprofit website, let’s take a quick detour first…           

Why Nonprofit Organizations Fail

Your nonprofit organization exists for a cause. And you know in your heart that it’s a good cause. Why else would you spend time, effort, money, and a significant part of your life letting people know about it?

More than 50% of nonprofits fail, but it’s not because of the nature of the cause they support. Nonprofit organizations fail mostly because of a lack of strategic planning. Strategic planning requires the leaders to have a vision for the organization. These plans require efficient and effective nonprofit marketing efforts.

If your nonprofit still doesn’t have a website, now is the perfect time to create one. You can use a non-profit website builder, and you can get started on optimizing your website as early as today.

They’ll know tips and tricks that will help your website land the first page when people search for your cause on Google. Having an expert take care of your website will ensure that your website is just as optimized as with any other professional website.

What is SEO and How Does It Help a Nonprofit?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. To make something SEO-friendly is to apply SEO practices to increase site visibility through better search engine page rankings. These practices also aim to improve the quality of traffic that websites and web pages have.

The main goal of SEO is to increase sales and brand awareness. Its goal is to drive traffic to a website and convert leads into sales. In nonprofits, this translates to bringing more website visitors, getting the visitors interested in your cause, and ultimately getting them to support it. The better your SEO rankings are, the more visitors you get to your website. The more visitors your website has, the more chances it has to gain supporters. In other words, SEO is a marketing tool.

5 Ways to Optimize a Nonprofit Website

Implementing SEO for a nonprofit website isn’t that different from implementing it for a for-profit one. Both are highly concerned with website content.

A website that offers its visitors valuable and relevant information tends to rank higher on search engine results. A website that doesn’t provide much value tends to rank lower, and visitors aren’t likely to revisit websites like that.

Do you want your nonprofit website to reach a wider audience? Here are 5 of the easiest and simplest ways that you can optimize your pages for SEO:

1. Find Your Keywords

SEO rankings are based on different factors, but one of the most important is keywords.

Keyword research involves finding the right keywords to target. It provides insight into which keywords are easier to rank for. The keywords you choose must relate to your organization but shouldn’t be too competitive that ranking first on search engines would be next to impossible.

Keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can give you keyword ideas, alternatives, and other information.

2. Create Quality Content

After finding your keywords, the next step would be creating content that makes use of the keywords.

Articles and blog posts are the best way to incorporate these keywords into your website. But, you can’t just copy and paste every keyword you want to rank for into an article and hope that it’ll suffice.

Remember that you’re trying to introduce people to your cause. The last thing you’d want is to confuse them with too many keywords and low-quality web content.

3. Optimize Your Meta Tags

You’ve already written some top-notch content. Don’t skimp on writing quality meta tags!

Meta tags are HTML elements, and you may not see them on your website. But, you can trust that they’re there and they’re doing their jobs. Meta titles and meta descriptions are the title and site descriptions that people see when your page finally appears on Google search results.

They don’t necessarily have to be the same as your article title and content. Still, you’d want the meta tags to be descriptive and make use of the keywords.

4. Optimize Other On-Page Elements

Providing your users with the best reading experience will make them want to know more about your nonprofit. Great content can impress visitors and increase website traffic. However, you need to optimize other on-page elements too.

This means optimizing the title tags and making use of headings. It would help if you used relevant anchor text to link to other pages on your site. You should use ALT text as well since search engines really can’t see your images.

5. Take Advantage of Local SEO

While many nonprofits have a global presence, many more concentrate their efforts on local areas or states. If this sounds like your nonprofit organization, it makes total sense that you take advantage of local SEO opportunities.

Incorporate areas into your keywords so you can target more specific audiences. Don’t forget to claim your organization and optimize your listing on Google My Business too.

Final Thoughts

Strategic planning in nonprofit organizations is important in ensuring its success. In the information age, a strategic plan will undoubtedly make use of online presence and SEO practices. Nonprofit organizations can enjoy all the benefits of optimized websites by keeping a few things in mind:

• Keyword research;
• Quality content creation;
• Hidden page element optimization;
• On-page element optimization;
• and local SEO opportunities.

A nonprofit organization that wishes to increase awareness, get more support, find more donors, and reach wider audiences should know how to use SEO to optimize its website. And any organization, be it one that’s for profit or not, can benefit from SEO.