Small Nonprofit Series: Our Nonprofit Is Too Small for SEO

Get the SEO Basics Anyone – on Any Budget – Can Do

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SEO – search engine optimization – can easily feel like a ravenous, insatiable beast that is forever unsatisfied and ungrateful. It coaxes you to keep coming back to “do more”, then rewards you with questionable results that are hard to attribute to anything you’ve actually done.

There is always a new program, a new service, a flashy new tool or method or strategy that ‘everyone’ is doing, and it’s impossible to keep up – especially for small nonprofits. It takes and takes and takes. But does SEO ever give anything back?

This is why many small nonprofits don’t even bother with it, if they even knew where to begin in the first place.

But the reality is – yes, SEO does reward you when done right. With more traffic comes more volunteers, more donors, more advocates, more petition signers, more P2P fundraisers, and eventually more major donors.

And today, you have good news, because you’re going to get something that’s actually helpful. Something you can actually do. ProActive Content has created this Small Nonprofit SEO Guide, part 4 of our ongoing Small Nonprofit Series, built specifically for you.

So – let’s get to it.

What Is SEO?

At its core, SEO is nothing more than being found online. It represents all the things you can do to make that happen. And no one is too small to do SEO, because that’s actually one reason the internet was created. That is part of its promise, that anyone, of any size, can be found online.

And if you do it yourself, unlike paid advertising, SEO is free.

The Basic Process of SEO

The secret to SEO is targeting. You want your ideal audience to find you online. And you can do this by creating content that aligns with what they are searching for.

Examples of content you can create include but are not limited to:

Once you have the content created, you put it on your website, give it a good SEO headline, and then wait for the traffic to come in.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Now, is there more to SEO than that? Of course. Much more. It’s a whole industry.

But we’re talking about small nonprofits. You’re not going to spend $1000 a month or $5000 a month building up your SEO. There are businesses that spend more than that.

If you start doing even the most basic tasks of SEO, one thing you will discover is, hardly any other nonprofits are using them. So you will surpass your competitors (yes, you do have competition, like it or not), attract new supporters, volunteers, and donors, and grow your email list and impact in the community you’re serving.

A Small Nonprofit SEO Investigation

Let’s pick a random topic: healthcare for single mothers.

Do any nonprofits serve this need?

I did quick search for that exact term: ‘healthcare for single mothers’. Mostly what came up was government and media stuff. But there was one website called Single Mothers Grants. And honestly, the site is pretty bad. It’s very hard to use, unclear how the process works, and cluttered with too many ads.

Now, if I add the word ‘nonprofit’ after healthcare, you get a few more options. But here’s the point: For any nonprofit actively serving this need in your local community, no one is doing SEO very well. So for a small nonprofit serving that need, do a little basic SEO, and you can show up on page one for a variety of search terms.

Whether you fight homelessness, help former prisoners find work, advocate for clean air, run a museum, or send missionaries to Antarctica, you operate within a niche, within a specified corner of the nonprofit world. You can narrow your competition to any entity producing content related to your niche. No one else matters. You don’t have to worry about Amazon, Nike, Apple, or Starbucks, because you don’t do what they do.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Like the runner in the photo, your competition is a lot smaller than it first appears.

So do a web search for a general term related to your nonprofit. Try “nonprofits working on ______”, and put a term or phrase related to your mission in the blank. See what comes up.

If the first page of search results is littered with news articles but no nonprofits, then you have a wide-open shot at ranking for terms related to that. If there are other nonprofits showing up, now you know your online competition.

“Okay, great,” you might be thinking. “But what do we DO with all this?”

To show up in search results, you must create some content and post it on your website. It works best if you can do this somewhat regularly. The key is to create content that your ideal audience – prospective donors – care about and are searching for.

Are there people out there who care about single mothers who don’t have health care?

What might those people search for?

“helping single mothers get healthcare”

“how can I help single mothers”

“how many single mothers don’t have medical care”

There are ways and tools to see what people are actually searching for related to this term. But you want to keep this simple and low cost. And the simple truth is, you know what your nonprofit is about. So come up with topics and questions related to your mission that people might search for, and create content around those.

You can also start asking your existing volunteers and supporters how they found you. If they found you online, ask what they were looking for and why. If they found you through a person, ask what attracted them to your organization?

Whatever your supporters care about, that’s what your content should address.

So, are people angry about how many single mothers can’t afford health care?

What content can you create around that? Let’s consider some examples:

Creating SEO Content that Targets Your Supporters

Here’s a quick brainstorm of ideas related to the question just asked:

Blog:

Why healthcare remains out of reach for many single moms

Social post:

Tons of single mothers in our city don’t have adequate health care. Find out why! (then link to an article or report with more)

How good is your healthcare?

See how your healthcare compares to what Congress has

Video:

See what happened to a single mother with poor healthcare when her kid broke his arm

Interview:

Nonprofit CEO explains why healthcare keeps leaving single moms out to dry

Special report:

The state of modern healthcare for single moms

Hopefully, you’re starting to get the idea here. Note that, for every one of these, a nonprofit that works in this field will be able to create all this content. They have the stories, the background knowledge, the data, and probably enough connections to make all this happen.

If this nonprofit committed to producing content like this for an entire year, they could create far more than this.

Turning Good Content into Good SEO

So what do you do with all that content? Once created, you build a web page with it.

A quiz or a survey needs a starting page. That’s a web page. A video has to be placed on your site somewhere. That’s a web page. And no – don’t put it on Youtube. You can host it there if you want, but make it so it plays on your site. You do NOT want your visitors watching your stuff on Youtube. Why not? Because like the Hotel California, they might never leave.

Every piece of content you create requires a web page. And that web page can be infused with specific Basic SEO components that will serve to help people find your site when they search for related terms.

Let’s take a look at the basic components of SEO.

Every page must have a headline. In code-speak, this means an H1 headline. If you use WordPress, this is NOT the space at the top where you give the page a name. You should leave that name off your site. You want the H1 headline to be the first line of content, and you can format as an H1 headline using the dropdown menu they provide that has ‘paragraph’ as the first option.

In that headline, you want to use the primary keyword of this page. So, for a quiz on healthcare for single mothers, your headline might be “Take the Quiz: See How Healthcare for Single Mothers Compares to Congress”.

Under that, you might add an H2 headline to fit another keyword in, like “Healthcare Quiz reveals disparity between single mothers and well-connected”.

See what’s happening there? You’re arousing emotions and giving the visitor something to do. But you’re also using keywords like ‘healthcare quiz,’ ‘single mothers’, and ‘healthcare for single mothers.’

Those phrases and words signal to search engines like Google what your page is about.

If you are a local nonprofit discussing a local issue – make sure to include local references in your headline and throughout the page.

Page Title

This one and the meta description next are both ‘off-page’ SEO. They are what show up in search results. Here’s a screenshot of a search result that came up in a web search:

The Page Title is the phrase in blue: “Grants benefitting nonprofits…”

This is not the same as your headline. And it is not what gets put in the page name space above the article if you’re using WordPress. This phrase will most likely not appear anywhere on the site. It is designed for one purpose: to help search engines like Google identify what your page is about, and to motivate the searcher to click on it.

This is what they see, and if you write a good title, your ideal audience will click on it.

You want to be sure your main keyword, or a close variation of it, appears in the Page Title.

Meta Description

The Meta Description is the phrase in black, below the Page Title in the search results. For the example above, it says “Read about recent grants to nonprofits….”

In WordPress, there are plugins such as Yoast SEO that allow you to insert text for the Page Title and the Meta Description on every page on your site.

If you do not write this text, Google will just pick random text off your page and fill it in as it thinks best. Sometimes this is fine. Most of the time it’s a disaster. You want this text to reflect what’s on the page, use the main keyword, and motivate someone to visit your site.

Anytime you put an image or a graphic on any page of your site, you can actually add text ‘behind’ it that search engines like Google and Bing will see. This is a place to improve your SEO by inserting more keywords.

ProActive Content does this for every page of our site. Go up to the screenshot above and right-click on it. Then select ‘View Image Info’. The specifics of how this part works depends on your browser, and I’m not going to get into all that.

But in the box that opens up, you can click around to find the image text. For that screenshot, you should find this phrase:

“screenshot showing a search result for small nonprofit seo example”

That’s the image alt-text I created for that graphic. Notice what I included in there:

There is a lot of leeway on what you put in an alt-text. But the main goal is, keep it short, include the primary or secondary keyword or some variation of it, and relate it in some way to the graphic or image.

Keyword Placement

Your main keyword should appear in your top headline. Some variations of it should appear in other headings down the page. Yes, you want headings. Don’t just fill your page up with paragraphs. Subheadings like you see on this page are something Google looks for. You want H2 and perhaps some H3 subheadings. These are just different sizes. You can find them all in the ‘paragraph’ dropdown menu in WordPress.

Also, try to get the primary keyword in the opening paragraph, and then sprinkle your main keywords around the page as appropriate to the writing..

What if the page just has a video?

Even the video should have text surrounding it. The page will still have a Page Title and a Meta Description. There will still be a headline. And a good video page will include a summary of the video, or if it’s an interview, the full text of the interview, written out below it.

Why? Will anyone read that? It doesn’t matter!

You put it there for the SEO value. All those keywords contained in the video are now in the text on your page. Yes, you just want them to watch the video. But you also want maximum SEO value from it. (And, like it or not, some people prefer to read than watch videos, so you’re serving more people this way too).

Yes! Your Small Nonprofit Can Do SEO

Now, take a look back at what you’ve read so far.

All of this can be done just by one person. And it doesn’t take long. It’s just part of the process of producing any web page for your site.

And it doesn’t cost any money. You don’t have to pay anyone to do any of this. Now, could someone else do it “better.” Like a copywriter? Maybe, but for a small nonprofit, that doesn’t matter. Simply having this content, with the right SEO components, puts you way above most other organizations.

So don’t stress about making it perfect.

It should NEVER take you a full day to produce one web page. Unless it’s your very first time doing this. But once you get the basic idea, if it does take you all day, you’re probably overly stressing about non-essential details.

Image by xiarimemecha from Pixabay

Write the page.

Do a one or two-pass revision.

Post the page on your site.

Write the off-page SEO content.

Publish it and move on.

Now, obviously for videos, quizzes, and interviews, there is more work to be done on the front end. But you get the idea. The webpage itself should not take that long to create.

As marketing guru Dan Kennedy puts it, “Good is good enough.” Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

It is better – far better – to create and publish lots of content that has imperfections than to have little or no content because fifteen board members and supervisors and graphic designers haven’t finished approving and fine-tuning it yet.

The wall in the photo isn’t pretty. But it’s a wall. It’s built. And it’s doing its job.

Next SEO Steps for Small Nonprofits

As you get the hang of this, it gets faster.

Then, you can start posting on social media sites and put links back to your blogs and other content. Also, this gives you a reason to have social media accounts. Even if you never use them, simply having these accounts is good for SEO because it gives you a link from a reputable source back to your site.

These sorts of links are called backlinks, and Google salivates over them. Okay, that’s a stretch.

But you want some links back to your site, and social media pages are the easiest way to get them.

Then, try to get listed on a few local nonprofit directory sites, for the same reason.

This Is Too Much! We’re a Small Nonprofit!

No – it’s not too much. Everything worth doing requires a simple commitment and the choice to follow through.

Let’s break it down this way:

What if you scheduled just two hours per week, setting that time aside for just one person in your nonprofit to work on your SEO. Even if you’re a one-person show. Can you commit to this for 2 hours per week?

In one year, you will have spent about 100 hours working on your SEO.

How much can you get done in 100 hours?