SEO for charities. What you need to know.

Getting to grips with keywords

Keywords are the words people use to find you, and the road signs Google reads to direct traffic to your site. That’s all well and good, but with 170,000 words to choose from, how do you know which ones to use? Research. That’s how. Do not just use the first five words that pop into your head. There will be a difference between what you think people are searching for, and what they are actually searching for. Good SEO understands that.

 

To lockdown the right keywords you need to take a step back and think about the terms people could use to find you. Once you’ve got these, plug them into a keyword researcher (we love Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest) and check out the volume and difficulty for each one.  

 

Volume: estimated number of searches every month.

Difficulty: competition for top spot.

 

Are your words yielding massive results? That means it is time to get strategic. Because when it comes to keywords, high search volumes are not always the answer. The term charity, for example, gets over 40K hits a month. With a difficulty rating of 55 it is going to be hard to hit top spot and a waste of time trying. You need to narrow your terms. Try ‘Charity London’. With 1,600 hits a month it might be less popular, but it will be much easier to be number one.

 

Do you see where we’re going with this? Even though there are fewer people searching, the traffic you get using ‘long-tail’ keywords is more specific to your cause. This means better quality traffic, lower bounce rates, and more conversions. Just don’t go so far down the tail that no-one is looking for you. Good SEO is all about balance. Find yours, and people will find you!

 

Top tip: To generate your base keywords you need to understand your service offering. What do people need from you? What problem is your organisation is looking to solve? Think about the solutions you offer and the terms people use to find them.

 

Optimise your content strategy

Once you have identified keywords that work, you need to optimise content towards it. Page copy, news articles, blogs. The trick is to develop a content strategy that marries up with searcher intent. Don’t go overboard though. Once again it is all about balance. Dropping too many keywords on one page will sound robotic. Write the words as you want to write them, and when you’ve got to the end look at your keywords and adjust a few phrases to fit. Google loves authenticity. So keep your content true to yourself and to your audience – all whilst holding the SEO ball!

 

Top tip: Want to know what Google’s looking for? Use search engine results as an indicator of what google sees as good quality and successful. Check out the type (and length) of content that makes top spot and try to hit the same markers.

 

Make each page a winner

Next you need make sure that each and every webpage is SEO friendly. Most of this is easily done through your CMS, although you might need to ask your web developer for support with more technical pieces. Here are a few quick wins that are easy to implement:

• Keep your page URLs short and keyword savvy.
• Make sure your titles, headings and sub-headings are keyword gold.
• Optimise your images with alt-text.
• Hyperlink to internal pages to show your content is connected.
• Add authenticity and credibility by linking to external sites and sources.
• Adding meta titles and descriptions (the text you see on search engine results).

Ask your web developer for help with:

• Making sure your website is mobile responsive.
• Optimising your URL structure.
• Setting priority pages for Google to crawl by using a robots.txt file and restricting Google access to pages you don’t want to be found.
• Boosting page load time.

 

Top tip: The above points don’t just make for good SEO, they’re an important part of your user experience. That’s because SEO and UX go hand-in-hand. Relevant, quick loading, mobile friendly, connected content makes it for a great experience and tells Google you’ve got a website people want to see.

 

The importance of links.

Did you know that links are one of the factors that help you to climb Google's search engine rankings? It’s true. The quickest and easiest links are the ones that direct users to other pages on your website, or to external sites and sources. These show Google that your site is genuine, and your content is connected. Don’t stop there. If you really want to hit top spot, you need to get some good backlinks. That means other people and organisations linking to your website. You can pay for this, but Google knows all the tricks. Ultimately, it makes more sense to get fewer links from high-quality, relevant websites, than lots of paid links from random ones.

 

Top tip: You’re a charity, so why not ask your donors and partners to link to your website (or better yet, co-create a PR strategy and content). If they’ve got a brand their website will carry weight. The perfect backlink to boost your SEO.

 

What next? Five actions you should take.

We know SEO can be daunting and we hope this post has gone some way to demystify that world. Before you sign-off, we wanted to leave you with a final checklist. The five golden tickets every charity needs to kick-start their SEO journey.

 

• Do your keyword research.
• Optimise your content plan and start producing SEO-friendly content.
• Make the most of your CMS by creating optimised URLs, titles, headings and alt-text.
• Internal links are great, backlinks are even better!
• Talk to your website developer about priority actions to optimise your site.

 

We look forward to seeing you on Google. Good luck!