1. Not focusing on the user experience of your audience(s)
In the past, techniques such as keyword stuffing might have helped your site appear more on search engines like Google. Keyword stuffing could mean putting certain highly-searched phrases every other sentence on your website’s pages and posts. It’s not really helpful anymore and could even be harmful. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter about sniffing out these poor techniques. Focus first and foremost on providing a great experience for your users.
To do this, you, of course, need to first define the target audiences. On your donation page, this would likely be donors, but try to get a lot more specific as far as demographics than that. Make sure that the content is relevant to them and inspires them to take the action you want them to take. And of course, having good general website maintenance like no broken links, slow page load times, and good quality design helps. These tools can help diagnose website issues. First and foremost, think about the people on the site, not the search engines.
2. Doing poor keyword research – or none at all
While search engines have gotten smarter, it does not mean you can forget about keywords. After defining your audience, think about the terms and phrases they might use when they are searching for your nonprofit or nonprofits like you. Of course, for your nonprofit’s current stakeholders, you want to come up when they search for your name. But you also want to come up when new people are searching too and they probably are not searching for your nonprofit by name yet.
Think about the kind of people you want to attract and try to find out which terms they are searching. Putting together content with those keywords in the back of your mind can be helpful to getting traffic from search engines. Again though, write with your audience experience in mind – these nonprofit website copy tips can help. As far as SEO, keep in mind that longer phrases more specific to your audience are often the most effective. Targeting broad keywords alone such as “donate” and “charity” probably won’t get you any traffic as there is too much competition. This brings us to the next mistake.
3. Not researching other nonprofits
“Competition research” can easily turn into a taboo word for nonprofits. Phrase it however you want, but you need to look at what other nonprofits are doing. Keeping up with the best practices in your industry and having a healthy working knowledge of others working in the same space as you are both crucial to helping ensure you are doing the best job for your constituents. Who knows, perhaps you might even find a future partner. As far as SEO, if there are 30 other nonprofits that show up in the first few search result pages when you search for a phrase on Google, you cannot expect good results focusing on that phrase. That is, unless you have a very in-depth and long-term SEO strategy.
4. Not planning SEO properly
SEO can be overwhelming the more in-depth you try to improve it. Plus, as with most online marketing strategies, best practices can change rapidly. Don’t be overwhelmed or try to do too much at once. If you do not have an SEO strategy, create a checklist of things you can take on over the next month. And get started. Next month you can revise this and think more about a longer-term strategy. However, it’s crucial to get started with a short-term plan with some low-hanging fruit. This could be defining the audience persona of certain pages, honing in on the perfect description of your homepage, adding another page or two, checking broken links or putting together other nonprofits that come up when you are searching on Google for terms related to your nonprofit.
5. Not using the right amount of analytics
Beyond doing general keyword research, you very likely should be using analytics to improve your SEO strategy. But it should be scheduled – e.g. not one a random moment once in a while when you’re overwhelmed by other work and want to feel like you are doing something simple and productive. Plan out what you’re checking, when you’re checking and document it. Your nonprofit’s program should not suffer because of analyzing SEO ad nauseam. First things first. Of course, if you’re the digital marketing manager or webmaster for American Red Cross this advice might change slightly. If you’re a small to mid-size nonprofit, make sure you have a general way to measure your SEO impact and check in on it weekly, monthly and/or quarterly. This depends on your role and the nonprofit’s online goals.