Confused about SEO for your charity website? Andy Pearson is here to help guide you through website optimisation.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can seem like a black art. Charities typically face two potentially difficult questions: why should I worry about SEO, and how do I go about optimising my website?
Because search engines change their approach so often, it can feel impossible to stay current, but by avoiding 'quick fixes' and instead mastering the basic principles of search engine strategy, you can set up your charity for long-term success.
Understand your website's goals
SEO is only ever a tool to promote your website, and your website is a tool to promote your charity. Unless you define clear goals for your website, you will never understand whether SEO is an important tactic, or how or to employ it effectively.
Your website goals should be measurable. Some examples are:
- Increase newsletter sign-ups
- Increase online donations
- Increase event attendance
- Sell more training resources
Link SEO goals to website goals
If you approach SEO through the lens of your website goals it will immediately be clearer why it is (or sometimes isn't) important.
For each goal, you should consider the path a user takes to complete that goal. For example, if your goal is to get more people to donate to you, then you should understand the journey a donor takes to reach this goal. Such a journey is likely to be relatively long and/or complex, because giving you money requires a high level of engagement that is unlikely to come on first contact.
SEO is typically more relevant to goals that require less engagement with your charity. Common examples include promotion of events, training and resources.
Define your 'keywords'
Your SEO keywords are the key phrases and words in your online content that help people to find your site through search engines - for example, 'homeless charity Birmingham'. A well optimised website will speak the same language as potential visitors through these keywords, making it easier for supporters or beneficiaries to find your site. It's therefore worth the time and investment to ensure your SEO keywords are relevant to your audience. Thankfully there are free tools out there (this one, for example) to help you identify them.
Ensure your website is optimised
As well as optimising your website for search through keywords, there are steps you can take across your whole website to ensure that it ranks more highly in search engines. Search engines will penalise sites that aren't optimised - for examples, if they load too slowly.
These days, much of this can be handled automatically by your website content management system. In any case, make sure that whoever has developed your website has installed any relevant optimisation plug-ins - i.e, those that will ensure your web pages are structured in a way that search engines like (creating sensible page titles and URLs, automatic creation of sitemaps, etc.)
There are a few important elements of website optimisation that are often overlooked. You should ask your developer about these:
- Speed: search engines will penalise sites that load slowly.
- Image descriptions: do you have the capacity to add descriptions for all images? Are all staff in your charity doing this?
- Mobile optimisation: is your site optimised for mobiles? Google has released specific guidance on SEO for mobiles.
Write good content and write it frequently
By far the most important thing to do is to write good content, which includes your relevant keywords. Don't get carried away with the keywords through; focus primarily on your users. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers: avoid jargon, and write good-quality, simple copy.
Frequency is also an important factor. Keeping a regular flow of content is widely thought to improve the reputation of your website in the eyes of the search engines. It also makes it much easier to build your website's authority - see below.
Build your website's authority
Google wants to serve high-quality content to its users, and so the authority of the website publishing the content is important for SEO. Google infers quality from the reputation of your website. So, after you have written high-quality content, you should then turn your hand to building the authority of your website.
The simplest way to do this is by attracting high-quality links. Here are a few ways you can do this:
- Get press coverage
- Write guest posts, articles or resources on sites that are well regarded in your sector, and ensure they credit your charity
- Publicise your high-quality content so that people will recognise its quality and link to it from their websites
Measure your effectiveness
In the long term, you need to know that SEO has an impact on your charity's overall goals. It is never enough to talk about general increases in traffic because, though this might make you feel better, it is not actionable date.
Measuring your SEO efforts is never easy, but start simple:
- Refer back to the website goals that you highlighted.
- Track the proportion of traffic coming directly from search, using a tool like Google Analytics. (You can read about how to use Google Analytics here).
- Consider the link between this traffic and the number of conversions you are experiencing on your goals (there's no point getting loads of traffic if it's not actually helping you achieve your goals).
- Experiment with different content and different keywords.
- Learn from what works - and do this more.
If you'd like to find out more about SEO when writing your web content, you can attend our training session on how to Run A Great Charity Blog
Andy Pearson is managing director of White Fuse, a digital agency that equips charities and nonprofits to communicate creatively and effectively through digital media and technology. He regularly posts tips and information on the White Fuse Blog.
