4 SEO Strategies for Nonprofits

No matter your mission, vision, or values, you’ll have a hard time spreading the word about your nonprofit unless you optimize it. To help you get started on a strategy fit for your community program, academic institute, or other nonprofit organization, we’ve laid out the top SEO practices to try. 

1. Practice Local SEO 

While your main goal might be to spread the word on a global level, you can bring a lot of benefits to your nonprofit by starting on a local one. Local SEO, the practice of ranking in local search results, will boost your SERP rankings when users look for similar nonprofits in their area. To rank locally, however, your nonprofit must have consistent listing information across your Google My Business page, social media profiles, and website. Once you’ve gone through those listings to ensure that your nonprofit’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) are identical on each, you’ll start to rank higher when users search for similar organizations in your area.  

2. Leverage Your Social

Another way to step up your SEO is to turn to other digital marketing practices — like social media. Whether you’re running a time-sensitive campaign or hosting an upcoming event, social media is a great tool that can bring users to your site and help you generate a larger audience. Using your social profiles, you can post content, such as blogs, videos, and infographics, which leads right to your website. By encouraging your followers to share that content on their personal pages, you’ll further extend your nonprofit’s digital reach and direct additional traffic to your web pages — both of which can play an indirect, but largely influential role in your overall SEO goals. 

3. Pile up Backlinks

There are a lot of changes to make on your own website if you want to rank higher, but other websites can also have an impact on your search results. For example, posting a guest blog on a high-profile website with a backlink to your nonprofit’s site will not only help you to rank higher in search engines, but also help you attract new members of your audience. But instead of grabbing for backlinks at every opportunity, carefully vet the websites you work with to ensure they have high domain authority. This way, you’ll only build high-quality links that will best benefit your rankings.    

4. Always Optimize

From blog titles to title tags, there’s endless content to optimize. And by carefully optimizing such content, you better your chances of ranking for keywords relevant to your organization. To bump up your search engine spot and put your nonprofit in front of users looking to take action or give back, pay close attention to the following: 

• Title tags: Use relevant, creative title tags that include your primary keyword(s). For best practices, try to limit title tags so they are 50 to 60 characters long. 
• URLs: To optimize a URL, try to keep the URI character length as short as possible while also including your focus keyword. 
• Meta data: Carefully written meta descriptions may not affect SEO directly, but they can heavily influence click-through rate when enriched with keywords. Limit yours to 155 characters. 
• Body content: Long-form content provides a lot of SEO opportunities. Focus on making sure your keywords naturally fit into the theme, topic, and style of each blog you post. 
• Image alt tags: Significant to SEO and ADA compliance, image alt tags should be relevant and specific. If you can make it naturally fit, try to include your target keyword as well.  

A Nonprofit Niche in SEO 

Whether you’re in an SEO rut or don’t have any SEO strategy at all, the digital marketing crew at Think Integrated can get your rankings to the right place. Depending on your specific SEO goals, we’ll start your strategy with either a local or widespread campaign tailored to your mission, vision, and values. To get insight on more SEO tips necessary for nonprofits, contact us today.