Raise your hand if you’re in nonprofit communications, you’ve heard the phrase “SEO,” but have no idea what it is. Keep your hand up if the idea of SEO intimidates you. Hand still up? You’re not alone.
First, let’s define SEO. It’s a phrase that’s bandied about here and there frequently but a lot of people forget that it’s an acronym for search engine optimization.
In its simplest terms, SEO helps your audience find you when they conduct a search on a search engine such as Google or Bing.
Hooray! You just cleared the first hurdle: identifying what SEO is. Next, it’s important to understand how search engines decide which pages to display where.
- Ranking: Search engines rank pages based on a variety of factors to decide where they fall on search engine result pages (SERPs). Chief among these factors is whether your content offers valuable resources and information compared to other sites.
- Authority: Search engines want to promote sources that they view as authoritative. If you’re not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword’s SERPs are loaded with sources you can’t compete with (like the American Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity), you have a lower chance of ranking. Good news is you can showcase authority by regularly publishing relevant, informative content!
- Relevance: You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it’s not really doing you any favors. Focus on creating and producing content that is relevant for keywords that generate more traffic than a ghost town.
Understanding Keywords
Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages. The key words you use determine what kind of traffic you get. They also must be relevant to your audience. When a user looks up information, they are typing in phrases or words — your key words — that direct them to your page.
For example, you might use technical language within your nonprofit organization, but to an outsider, they may not have the same shared language you have. What terms might they use instead? That’s often a good place to start with when it comes to thinking about how people may find you.
Bonus: the insight that you get from researching your keywords can inform your content strategy. Rather than creating content around what you think is important, use keyword research to create content that your audience is already searching for.
AI & SEO
You might have noticed that many search engines are now showing an AI overview at the top of their SERPs, which summarizes multiple links into one or two paragraphs. You may have also used AI to create content, or at least get you started. Does that mean SEO is soon to become a thing of the past?
No, argue many marketers. Instead of going the way of the dodo, they see AI being used to enhance SEO. AI can help pinpoint the types of stories that would be attractive to your target audience, along with the keywords to help them find you. But they can’t write the stories for you and layer in that personal narrative that compels your readers to support your mission. At the end of the day, your content is being read by a human — anecdotes, testimonials, and all.
As AI evolves, the trick will be to find the right balance between activating AI capabilities and finding ways to stay true to the heart of your mission and your people.
Stay tuned for Part II, where we go deeper into the world of SEO for nonprofit communicators!
