 Welcome everyone to SEO for Beginners, Simple Steps for Non-profits and Libraries. Thank you all for joining today's TechSoup webinar. We are really glad to have you on the line with us. Before we get started we want to make sure that you are comfortable using ReadyTalk, our platform that we are on today. You can chat into us anytime using the box on the lower left side of your screen to ask questions of our presenters. Let us know that you have technical issues or need help, or just to say hello and let us know from where you are joining. We will keep all lines muted today to ensure a nice clear recording for you to refer to again later and to share with your friends and colleagues. Most of you are hearing the audio play through your computer speakers so if you are hearing an echo you may be logged in more than once and will need to close any additional instances of ReadyTalk. 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We are recording today's webinar and it will be made available on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. And this is where you can find our list of upcoming webinars as well as all of our archived recordings. You can also find them on our TechSoup video channel on YouTube. Within the next few days you will get this full presentation, the recording that you can listen to and watch again at your convenience, and some of the links that we will discuss today. If you would like to tweet with us you can do so at TechSoup or with the hashtag TSWebinars. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the webinar program manager here at TechSoup and I'm really glad to be your host for today's event. We are joined by George Weiner, the founder and CEO of Whole Whale and PowerPoetry.org. Prior to Whole Whale George was the CTO of DoSomething.org where under his leadership the organization became an innovator in social media, mobile technology, and social cause. During his seven years at DoSomething.org he oversaw the complete overhaul of their website twice where they won a Webby Award and were nominated. He's helped to build a community of over 1.5 million young people who are taking action for social change. He founded Whole Whale in 2010 with the goal of helping more nonprofits benefit from digital strategies that he used at DoSomething. Since then he's been working with nonprofits to increase cause awareness, multiply their meaningful online engagement, and train teams to implement strategic use of data and technology. And he has spoken at many conferences and workshops worldwide including on a webinar with us last year on using Google Analytics. And you'll see on the back end also assisting with the chat Julie Leary who was on a webinar with us not too long ago on Google AdWords. So if you're interested in specifically Google AdWords I'd recommend going to that archive section of our site and looking for that event. You'll also see Susan Hope Bard, TechSoup's Education and Training Manager who will be on hand to help answer your questions and help you with any technical issues. Looking at our objectives for today we hope that you will come away with an understanding of the basic principles of search engine optimization or SEO. We hope that you will learn some best practices for keyword research and use. So learning how to find out what keywords people are actually searching that are related to your organization's mission or topic or theme, and to help you learn how to use them better so that you are attracting people with your keywords. We hope that you'll come away with the basics on link building to increase your site's traffic. And that you'll gain some insight on what actually matters in your on page versus off page content for your SEO. So what matters when you come up with a title for your content or when you're writing on your site and putting up pieces of work or blog posts or what have you so that you can understand what really matters and pay attention to what's most important because we know that as nonprofits, libraries, and churches, small organizations that many of you don't have a lot of time to do this. And so we hope you'll come away with those real fundamentals that will help you better use the time that you have to increase your site traffic and make sure that your site is found so that your supporters can get to you and access your resources or services if you provide them. Before we get started with this content I'm going to go ahead and just do a quick overview of TechSoup for those of you who may not be familiar with us. We are everywhere on the map that's blue in this picture, which is almost everywhere in the world. And we are providing a dynamic bridge that connects civil society organizations and social change agents around the world with the resources that they need to implement solutions for an equitable planet. We are a nonprofit and we've been around since 1987, headquartered in San Francisco. And so I would love it if you, our participants, could chat in to let us know from where you're joining us today. Where are you on the map? And we are, TechSoup.org is primarily focused on serving organizations in the United States, but if you are joining us from any place else in the world we recommend visiting TechSoup.global and selecting your country from the drop-down to see where you have either an in-country or regional donor partner who can provide you with technology resources where you are. And I see some folks chiming in from DC, Texas, Washington State, New York, Portland, Ontario, Canada, Augusta, Georgia, all over the place, New Hampshire. So thank you to everyone who's chiming in in the chat. We know that you can't see one another's chat messages, but if you share any useful or interesting tidbits about your own use and experiences with SEO, we'll happily share those back out with our audience so that everyone can benefit from that information. We have been delivering this connection of resources to donors and product partners and grant makers to the tune of $5.4 billion, and that's with a B. And prior to joining TechSoup, I worked at three small nonprofits in Washington, DC, and Oakland, California where I was personally a beneficiary of TechSoup's program. So happy to be on staff and to be your host for today. With that, I'd like to go ahead and bring on George Weiner, our presenter and expert today, founder and CEO of Whole Whale, to talk to us about SEO for Beginners and give us some of those simple steps for nonprofits and libraries. We're going to start simple. We're going to start with some of the history, but we are going to get more involved and more advanced and give you some opportunities to really expand if you are already doing SEO so you can continue growing in this area. Thanks for joining us on the program today. We're glad to have you, George. We're big fans of TechSoup. That is a lot of resources to have given away and we're thrilled to be here on our third webinar with you guys. So love jumping into this topic and that we have got a bunch of people interested. Everything sound good and we're ready to roll, Becky? You sound great. So let's take it away. Perfect. All right. So if this is not why you joined, you should leave now or hang on because this is going to be SEO for Beginners. We're going to have some fun talking about some simple steps to get going for your nonprofit and your library. In terms of the contents, we broke it up pretty simply. Look, it's how it works and then the part two which is the real approach, the SEO process, looking at keywords, content and links and what you should be doing. I imagine there's going to be some confusion potentially as we go through a very complex topic, but I'd like to get an idea frankly from you of what are you looking to take away most from today's webinar? Is it the beginner points? Is it the things about keywords, how to build links, or other which you can of course comment? And ultimately look, I know that this is a very complex topic. There is no way that I can possibly explain everything you need to know in a short period of time. So we've got an approach that will hopefully give you an 80-20 and I'll get into this, but like what you should be focusing on in terms of what do I do tomorrow? What are the next steps that I can take given the fact that this is a wildly complex topic that even quote-unquote experts have been studying for many years and still frankly there's a lot to get in with. Where to start with SEO seems to be taking the lead. I can wait on a couple more responses but that's good. That's good because we'll be covering those elements. If there's something else that folks want to learn that it's not listed here, go ahead and chat that in. We're going to go ahead and wrap it up and show the results in just a second here. So get your votes in now. Click on one of those radio buttons on the screen. And if you don't understand how to build links means or what content to create, you can let us know that too so that we can make sure that we're defining things clearly as we move through the content. Great. Yeah, we have some very talented people including Julie Leary answering questions. So her goal is to finish with a net zero. So ask away as I talk about different terms or topics that you may not understand. All right, so again about 31, getting to or approaching statistical significance on this group. Great. So mostly we're talking about where do we begin? Which is I think a good jumping off point. I'm going to move forward on this Becky. Okay, how it works. So let's just make sure we're on the same page frankly because you're asking the question. SEO, maybe you know it, maybe you don't. Search engine optimization. So it's like activity, the practice of improving and promoting a website in order to increase the number of visits to the site that we're receiving from search engines. This is organic, quote unquote, organic traffic that people are typing in things like giving Tuesday ideas, happy giving Tuesday everybody. But if you're typing that in, giving Tuesday ideas, the top part here that you see the little green icons there are the ads and then you get into the results. Google has shifted it so that the ads at the top are the first things that show up and then we get what we're talking about here which are the organic results. And guess what? Humble brag here, 28 ideas for giving Tuesday from Whole Whale, one of our resources is number one thing that shows up. Now we did that by leveraging a lot of the strategies you'll get into but guess what? That helps us because people are searching that are nonprofits to get ideas and we love supplying great content for nonprofits. So basically it's about ranking higher in the search engine based on specific keywords related to your site or to your content. Okay, what Google Search is doing? Fundamentally we're talking about an organization that is organizing the world's information. They're helping you find what you're looking for and frankly they're monetizing it and taking over the world. They're monetizing it through AdWords. That's why they're a billion dollar with a B organization because they're able to monetize every single search with those ads. Behind what they're working on here is the concept of narrow artificial intelligence, narrow AI. What this really means is that there's no single human on this planet that can fully comprehend and understand and explain how this algorithm is working because of its now newest levels of complexity that it's reached. So if now we're dealing with narrow AI, narrow artificial intelligence, we need to understand what its real high level goals are. And this is where we can simplify it frankly. Everything that this algorithm is doing is trying to create fast, accessible, and relevant results. Fast meaning does the result show up quickly for this person? And once they click on it do they end up getting that result as fast as possible? So that's when you start talking about how Google looks at how fast your site loads and those types of performance issues. Then you look at accessibility. Wait a minute. What if they're on mobile? The algorithm is like, oh okay, is this site going to be mobile friendly? Is it going to be accessible to screen readers? Is it allowing the different type of people to find the information that they need to? And then finally the relevant results. And that has to do with the reputation, the keywords, and the link building to make sure that it knows when you type in giving Tuesday ideas it's not throwing up junk, but quality information is going to help that human get to ideas that will help them generate more money for giving Tuesday. Here is my brief and selective history. Just to give us some context, we have the dawn of time until about 1994 in this funny line. And then suddenly Sergey Brin and Larry Page create these crawling spiders that go through the Internet indexing links and treating links as votes. They develop something called PageRank which allows them to rank individual sites and domains and says, okay, here's how reputation works and then the links are acting as votes. I'm showing you this because ultimately there's this evolution where spammers mess with links or content or something to that effect and Google then changes something in order to crush it. And so this is a warning basically to say, as smart as you think you might be, whatever you may read out there that is like a time like, hey, if you just do this trick or this tactic or someone's trying to sell you some junk to beat one of these algorithms to quote-unquote rank higher, don't fall for it frankly because these things become outdated. So even if they work for a short period of time you can get in trouble doing it. And just as a quick example like this, don't mess with Google if history has taught us anything here. This is an example of something a tactic called cloaking that German BMW did and Google figured it out where they had one set of content for a search engine, another for a user. And they were blacklisted. Same thing happened with JC Penney a couple of years ago. And so again long story short they're constantly adapting and evolving to figure it out. So quality content is the key ultimately that you're going to end up with. If you look at this timeline though there's definitely this progression toward this more voice-activated search and intelligence and knowledge graph which is the automatic search results. But it is absolutely continuing to evolve in this direction and getting smarter. As you look at that we also end up looking at mobile search. There's about a trillion daily searches, 50% on mobile and tablet. However I don't like looking at the overall average because it's important to look by the actual individual keywords. So these are searches by maternity and new parents which you see is disproportionately actually mobile and tablet. So just because the average 50% your keyword may be disproportionately desktop or mobile. And you can imagine the parents in the audience being like if you ever wonder why mobile is it's because you have a baby in one arm and you need to figure out how to swaddle and figure whatever those search terms out as you're in the moment potentially. Page rank I mentioned it briefly before but this is the 0-10 scale of how Google on the back end it's not technically public but on the back end ranks different organizations based on its reputation, links, how long it's been around, the quality of content, and a number of other factors that it's helping build up. Links are votes and this is important to remember as we get into our link building a little bit later but this is the entire Internet example. So if the entire Internet were just these little circles first off it would be very boring. But we can look at specifically B and C, the relationship there. So these little arrows are links back and forth. So B has high reputation because many things point to it. But it just takes one link over to C to transfer that type of link value. And so this is a note to yourself when you're creating links, a bunch of these little purple circles, these 1.6s you can go after a bunch of super small sites that say hey, link to me, hey, link to me. But it's nothing like getting one link potentially from the New York Times or a major publication source that has got high reputation. So weighted toward high value is how you are going to think about links and how that value is transferred. When we talk about SEO, search engine optimization we've got two major buckets. The two major buckets are on-page and off-page. And on-page we'll be talking about the content and keywords. These are things that we can control on our site. Literally you can go into the code, you can go into your content management system if that's what you use. And you can be creating content around the specific types of keywords and you can also control your site structure. And this is again getting into some of the coding but the things that are in there are you using H1s or H2s or H3s and these are the headers for different types of text as you're creating it in your layout. Does your site, is it mobile responsive? Does it load quickly? Someone recently also asked about the image tagging. And so SEO for images as well you want to be considering whether or not. You're adding information to the back end of alt and title text alongside your images when you're adding them. I will say that image optimization is much less important because the quality traffic there is simply not there. Those are image searches that are really people looking for one-and-done type of browsing experiences. So I really like focusing on the core content that answers questions for users. When we look at off-page it begins and ends really with links. This is the stuff you can't really control as much, how other people link to you, your social reputation, social reputation of people that are sharing you, the anchor text of what people choose to link back to you and relate different keywords to your organization, your domain authority, that page rank component, and by the way 200 other factors. This is where I'm talking about the artificial intelligence. So while you may hear like, oh what about this, what about this, what about this? And we could have on I'm sure we can and you feel free to ask these questions what are all of those different factors? Well here's another more complex slide that comes from Search Engine Land that gives you some of these like just the tip of the work, tip of the iceberg on on-page content, HTML, and architecture, and those factors that go in there, which is why I like taking that step back and saying is it fast? Is it making it accessible? Is it making it relevant? Because that's what this narrow AI is doing with regard to search engine optimization. Okay, I covered a lot because that's what I do. I speak pretty quickly. Fortunately this is being recorded. Are there any unanswered questions or clarifications, Becky, that maybe I can take a step back and look at for people as I before I jump into the process? Sure. Well we had one question we answered it on the back end already but just in case other people weren't sure, Ellen asked what a content farm is that was mentioned a couple of slides ago. Can you explain what content farms are and why they are not any good? Yeah, unlike an organic farm that produces vegetables this is like the exact opposite. So there's a group of people in say India churning out tons of content around red sweaters and they're like knitted red sweaters, woven red sweaters, fabric red sweaters, and they just create junk content. Sometimes this is actually algorithmically generated and ultimately what they're doing is just building up narrow focused bunches of content. So it's like have you ever ran across like one of these like really, really useless sites that are like redsweaters.net and it's bunches of junk content? So that's like a content farm that will like generate sites like that in order to rank and then send traffic to somebody maybe selling red sweaters. Terrific. I think we can go ahead and move forward. We do have some other questions coming in but I think we can address some of those later or you may as you move through with your content. I will take the lead from you based on what I should be talking about. Okay, so search engine optimization process, 80-20 rule. Just for fun here I Googled it and this is an example of the knowledge graph and work where it automatically gives you that result there. And ultimately we're talking about the Pareto principle the 80-20 the fact that you know roughly 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. So what my approach is for you all is to give you an idea of what that 20% of effort can be to get 80% of the results from SEO. Because we have a short amount of time I'm going to be talking about it in that frame not talking about everything under the sun but the elements that I think you literally can do as beginners to start this engine to begin to increase your organic traffic. So keep that in mind. I'm leaving you a lot more to research but these are the areas I'm going to focus on and I know I'm ignoring these other components. In this SEO process we're talking about research and analysis is step one starting at the top. Then moving over to identifying keywords and opportunities. Then on-site coding and implementation which we won't talk about hopefully for using the content management system like WordPress or Drupal or any number one of these things. They're doing this automatically. Then we go to the copywriting. So we're going from identification of keywords to how do we write for this stuff? I'm going to ignore the site speed and performance stuff because that's for your developers. And then get into some of the link building but most of our work in terms of what I'm going to be sharing with you is going to be coming from this step two and step four area though the team can't answer any number of questions for you. So feel free to challenge them. Jumping in, SEO process keywords. Okay what do I mean by these keywords? We're up here identifying the keywords. We've done the research, some of the research and analysis. And I'm going to treat you like you are an agency, you're a firm. And I'm going to share exactly, literally exactly the tools that we use internally pretty much to do this phase of the research for it. So there's Search Autocomplete inside of Google. There's Google.com slash Trends. We can use the Google Ad Planner. We can use keyword ideas out of that. We can also use a tool called SimilarWeb. We can use the Google Search Console, Moz.com slash Content, which is a very powerful search engine tool. And there's a free version, a paid version there. Fun stuff with Think with Google and also YouTube as the search results. We're going to go through each one of these. Alrighty, first off I have bad news. You all have the Curse of Knowledge. The Curse of Knowledge is basically the fact that you're in a box. You're in your own organization and you speak your own language and you have your own acronyms. And unfortunately once you understand a topic you can't imagine that there was a world or somebody who didn't understand it as well. So this Curse of Knowledge absolutely happens with keywords. It also happens in the game Cranium. I don't know if you've ever had to do that humdinger where you start humming something. I could be humming something in my mind. It sounds perfect. By the way, that was James Taylor, but you wouldn't have gotten it for quite some time because I knew the song. I'm humming it and just confusion. So these tools are a way of breaking you out of this Curse of Knowledge where you sort of talk about your own topic with insider knowledge rather than what other people potentially want or are searching for. So in breaking this, some of our first steps I'm using a case example from one of our clients, National Black Public Media, a great organization that is providing content about the black experience in America through documentaries and helping film makers. Fantastic work, check them out, especially Giving Tuesday here. But internally they had a conversation. So their organization name is Black Public Media. But the question is, what do people search for more? So we can use a tool instead of just our gut, we can use a tool called Google.com slash Trends which gives us search volume over time comparative in the US. So this is the United States past 12 months. And guess what? Though they may be more biased toward black media as a keyword, they should actually potentially be using black film when they're writing. Main area is the content, potentially building information architecture, like their, sorry, IA Information Architecture is their menu, right? So how they're organizing things. Because there is a higher volume, almost 2 to 1 in this case. And you can compare several different keywords against each other to get that search volume and understand more about the topic. The keyword volume add planner used inside of Google AdWords gives you even deeper information. So we can take that keyword, black film, and say, oh, interesting. Now we're getting a mobile versus desktop breakdown. Remember what I was saying before that's going to vary? And we get seasonality here. So very interesting we get these peaks at different times of the year. So we know, hey, maybe we should push more content around this type of year. Maybe we can be actually expanding as we get relevant keywords to this of black filmmakers or even black directors. Interesting. Maybe we can have top 29 black directors of 2017, 2016, 2014. These types of ideas then grow from this. And we didn't start from inside the box on that. When you have that curse of knowledge, you're not necessarily coming up with these ideas because you're not thinking about the way people are searching for or thinking around your topic. And so that's what we're trying to do when we do this type of research. So I mentioned Google AdWords. So quick TV time out for anybody that is a 501C3 in at least the United States and other countries as well. But focused here, you get $10,000 per month to user lose on Google AdWords search advertising. Again, you can go to google.com.com.com. And we have a discount code for you because we have the one and only actually for some reason online course that trains people souped enough how to apply for and maximize this Google AdWords grant. And Julie can answer, nope, there she goes, off in the chat room. So it's a phenomenal tool. You get free money to spend. And again, come on, free money. All right. So as we're thinking about our keyword research, there are short and long tail keywords to oversimplify. We're thinking about the relevance and freezing of how it goes. And so in this graph we have competition on one side in terms of the total monthly searches on the side here, use my little arrow. And then we have the probability of conversion. And frankly this seems obvious but I'm going to walk you through it. So let's say you're trying to index for the word shoes. Well you're going to have very, very high competition. But it's also low probability of conversion because somebody is typing in shoes as a keyword, you know, God, they could be selling shoes. They could be buying shoes. They could be throwing away shoes. Who knows what they're doing. But as soon as you get to red Nike men's running shoes and connected in New York maybe, we end up over here in this long tail. And somebody who searches for that is much more likely to convert. When I say the word convert, that means they're going to do some desired action on your site such as sign up for a newsletter, donate, register for a program, fill in the blank for what you're doing, your sale, your point of sale moment. And they're more likely to do that as we think about that long tail. So that sweet spot is somewhere in there. We don't want to be going too far over here in terms of the volume because then nobody will search for it. But there is that sweet spot. But don't get fooled by these short keywords. They're like, oh, I just wanted to show up where a bunch of people are searching because it's going to be too competitive. And by the way, a lower probability of converting. So the auto-complete for long tail keywords. This is using this amazing artificial intelligent robot that tracks everything going on. Did you ever notice when you start to type, it begins to try to finish your sentence? And it's doing that based on a volume of searches. And if you're in an incognito window, you're not logged into Google. It's going to give you the overall volume of people that do that. So if I start typing in black film, it says, oh, people then usually refine into black film directors or black films in 2016. So interesting. Maybe there's an opportunity for 2017 or black film festival. We can think about the content that people then refine their search and then what kind of content would you write around that? That's the next question that we'll be moving to. So auto-complete ideas continue. We can do this with black movie and see what people start to auto-complete. It's giving away the information for you. It's getting you to break out of that curse of knowledge using the most powerful algorithm that is yet to be created. It gives you human intention. So it's sitting right there, information for free to understand how people are thinking about your content and refining their searches and move through it. YouTube.com also a search engine. It's the number two search engine next to Google search. I know it's crazy. They own quite a bit and it does the same thing. So I can type in black film and suddenly get, oh, interesting. These are people now looking for movies or black films on YouTube to watch. And this can potentially give you other ideas on how to refine your content or if you're building out potentially your YouTube or your video strategy. Keyword research continued. So Google, Hummingbird, don't ask me why they all name these silly things, but we're moving into phrasing that people are now going to be speaking their search results. So think about the way you type versus how you'd say, for example, what are the best black films? And as you see Google Home roll out, there's going to be a significant amount of searches that then happen via this voice-activated search. The long tail is to understand why people drill down. If you search, sometimes you also get searches related to, in this case, we're using the black movie list, how people are then refining it. And this is the automatic list that Google gives in search results as you scroll down. So you're looking for these hints as to how does this algorithm seem to want to direct me or direct general people that have made this search in the past, and then how do I show up in that flow of traffic? Google Search Console, this is something that you need to set up and configure for your organization. I know I'll also cover this a bit later as well, but this will give you information based on how people are typing in keywords to your organization and how people are already ending up on your site through these queries. So this is an example taken from PowerPoetry.org, the largest teen poetry platform for young people in the US, and showing me generally how many clicks come from, for example, teens writing how to write poetry, how to write slam poetry, or how to write Node, or spoken word poetry as a query that may end up on the site. So again, Google Search Console is something that you have to set up and configure. Competition, we can also learn from the competition. We can put in our own site to this, or a competitor's site. So I've used PowerPoetry as the example I tossed that in. This tool is called icepianage.com, and even the free version gives us some general idea on the SEO traffic and value, as well as the relevant organizations and top competitors. So you can find your competitors if you're like, I don't have competitors. Sure, maybe you have frenemies, but frankly it'll give you this information and we can use so, oh, interesting, poem hunter over here. I can go and look up how they're doing in terms of SEO traffic, but also their keywords and what kind of things are driving to them to see how competitors in my space are also driving in traffic and how I might be able to borrow like an artist from them. Okay, so let's take a pause for any questions before I move into our SEO process content. How are we doing? We are chugging away. Chugging away. Can't get the right word out. Chugging away at questions on the back end. And so answering a lot of them. And we've got folks weighing in with some of the long-tail keywords that they might search and do research on to see if their organization, see who's using those terms, who's searching those terms. And so we've answered most of the questions in the queue at the moment, but we had a question that I think is important. And then when you figure out those long-tail keywords that you think might be right or the combinations of those, what do you do with them? Where do you use them? Or do you just plug them in on the back end? Do you use them in your page titles? What do you do with them once you figure out the keywords? We couldn't have planned this better. Or did we? SEO process content. I've got the keywords, George. I have a list of keywords. Now what? So it's not as simple as just plugging them in to the header of your site or doing some stupid code trick that wildly brings people. There's no shortcut here. We've got to do the work now. We've got to do the work to create value for the people looking for those terms. We have to understand the psychodemographic, the motivations of somebody searching for top black films of 2016. What does that person want? What is likely to index for that? And this is where we get into copywriting and implementation. You've got to do the work. There's no shortcut to be like, oh great, I just buy a domain and I'm all set. You really have to adopt a particular strategy. And this is one that we really love. This concept is called evergreen content. I've got a classic evergreen tree here, so it's perennially green. You go in July, still green, has the pine needles. Go in December, and when we're chopping it down to put in our house in Park Slope, still green. So here's the idea. It's not about time-dated content like blog content that a lot of people push for. I don't like time-dated content that is one and done. As soon as you post something about the news that just happened in September, it's outdated the next day. You have precious time. And so I like to focus types of content that philiperenial need that answers a unique question on an ongoing basis. It can serve as a timeless reference. So for example, our Giving Tuesday ideas are going to be relevant every year around this time. It can seasonally be affected. It can be a reference and can reference other authorities creating a top list of those authorities, so top crowd fundraising platforms, or top nonprofit podcasts. It's like the page of the book you've dog-eared, and it's ultimately designed to hook users from search onto your site so that you can bring them down your content marketing funnel, which we will get to. Okay, so here's a list example. You know what? I showed you before Giving Tuesday ideas. We index, and then here's a traffic coming from Google Analytics. So what happens is you click on this, and then we can actually tell the total page views as well as the bounce rate and the people that actually convert to become potentially on our email list. And it drops off as you see after this point. And so again, as we're in 2016, it's starting to pick up, but I just wanted to show you. It's like this little bouncing ball higher and higher and higher, and then drop off. So every year we can expect this out of this particular type of content because we've indexed for Giving Tuesday ideas. Now what we didn't do, so you can see Giving ideas for 2016, and here's my little secret that I'm giving away to you is this is the same piece of content it was for 2015, except I went in there, I spruced it up, and I changed 2015 to 2016 and changed the title. How'd I create it back in 2015 or 2014, just the 2019 ideas for Giving Tuesday and left that, and I was like, oh, I need to create a new blog post for that. I wouldn't be building up the SEO value over time. It's like I chopped down the evergreen tree and started from a stupid little seed again, instead of dominating the search by updating and creating the anchored piece of content. So this is an important topic because we get a lot of this, oh yeah, I have a blog, I'm doing it. You have to structure it in this way that you're upgrading it, updating it, and treating it as this ongoing resource that you build over time to make it the best possible answer to the question of, in this case, Giving Tuesday ideas. What is that person looking for? They need specific ways to raise more money, and this is the best resource so far according to Google. Okay, the content funnel as we think about it has these three phases. We're trying to, in terms of content marketing, which is creating content around keywords to capture people, we want to drive up organic traffic to our site so that we get more referrals and social shares so we reach a new audience. Then we want to engage those people on the site. We want to create the content to help them learn about the programs that are related to your organization, and then hopefully convert them. We want to design pages or calls to action that get people to actually take that next step, whatever it may be driving toward the outcomes of your organization. So Capture, Engage, Convert. This is how it looks for PowerPoetry.org when you search for, and I showed you this before, how to write SLAM Poetry. So a team just got this assignment from a teacher. They type it in because they're like, you know what, I want to do this. I heard SLAM Poetry is super cool. And boom, it's actually the first result here. And we get how to write SLAM Poetry from Power Poetry. Click and you go to the site. Same thing with how to write an ODE poem, how to write ODE poems. These guys are beating us but not for long because I'm going to take them. Six tips for writing ODE poetry. So you click and you end up going to the site. You're looking for information. And boom, this is what you get. Six tips for writing ODE poetry. We now need to convert this person because otherwise you're going to look at our content and then walk away, unfortunately. So the site is very specifically designed for calls to action pop-ups and we also A-B test things. So here are some of the calls to action you land on this page. Up at the very top we have Add Your Poem or Log In or Register. We also have the Share buttons which is a quasi call to action but not as strong as when you get to the bottom of the page. Hey, create a poem about this topic. Literally click this button. And then we have a trigger pop-up when you get to the bottom of the page and make an action that you're about to leave saying, hey, join over 230,000 poets. Add in your information. Become a user. Click here to join. So it's a very heavy call to action. And you may think to yourself, that's really annoying. You don't have to do this on every single page. But if I'm giving away free information, free content that I worked hard to do, it is not annoying to ask for them to join or take that next step on your site. Getting that permission to talk to them after the fact is that next action. Otherwise you really aren't doing enough with your content. You're simply going to be driving high amounts of organic traffic for no particular reason because it's not driving toward that goal. Okay, an important point. But this is how Power Poetry, not even two or three, 340,000 poets as a result of this type of work where we were able to grow organic traffic over time. So this is from 2012, 2016, showing you all the sessions that came from different sources of traffic. These are basically your four main sources of traffic. There's other pie that break down beyond that. But we're looking at organic search as almost 50% of where all of this activity has come from. And it's grown bit by bit by bit by bit over time, certainly fluctuates seasonally, but it's growing over time to become a significant source of traffic. And so this is a great place to start for your organization as you're saying like, look, I want to build an empire. At least I want to build a strong amount of traffic coming to my website because I understand that this traffic relates to the goals of my organization. And so you can do that over time with organic search. The paid search, this traffic has come from the Google AdWords Grant which is also very potent. But over time you realize, oh my gosh, if I do this right, I can really build. In this case, they've had over 3 million sessions come from organic search. And Power Poetry has been a client of Whole Whales since the very beginning and we've been able to work with their team and implement it. It also helps that I'm the co-founder of it and sort of cheat and work my butt off to get this done. But we do that for everybody. Next up I'm talking about the funnel to goal conversion. And this is what it looks like. So this is Whole Whales funnel. You're welcome to copy it. We go from aware, interested, engaged, and then they're a poet. And so on the aware side this is the top of the funnel where we're creating content if you're the client. So things like how to write a note poem. We then get them to become interested, engaged. So we're getting there potentially we're getting them to sign up for an email or become a user. And you can define this for your organization and track it in Google Analytics ultimately making sure that they're maybe becoming a donor or you're creating giving moments if they are becoming donors once you have the permission to talk with them over time. But this is how you sort of make the case to saying like wait a minute why do we write content to begin with? Where does content marketing fit in? We're trying to open up the top of this funnel so that we have more trickle down ultimately toward our business goals and defining them. When we move into another tool and understanding what's going on out there switching over to maz.com. Really great learning resources is there as well. But we can actually find general topics that are certainly trending and what people are sharing in terms of social reputation and what people are interested in to give us more ideas. And so looking around black film we can say all right what is actually trending around online with regard to shares and this topic and say hey can we either generate links from this list reach out to them to say if they want to link to us or create our version or our frame of that piece of content to learn what's working around these different topics. Copywriting. Okay look here's the fact people judge an article by its title first. It's all we have to do. You know this is true in subject labs. We send emails and it's definitely true when we're looking at a Google search result. So we really want to make sure that we're writing titles that are awesome. Here are some tools that we can use for general ideas. There's a lot of junk in here but there is general ideas that come from HubSpot and Headlines and we'll show you how we sort of did that with black public media. So we typed in some of their main keywords and these are just literally just general ideas. 14 common misconceptions about black film, why we love black TV, and you should too. 15 best blogs, the follow-up blogs it just automatically generated it and it's based on a lot of like some of these like kind of junky sites but frankly they can give you ideas on how do I reframe some of our content away from maybe our internal curse of knowledge topics that we may frame it as and more about something that interests a potential user. Same thing with headlines.sharethrough. We can test. So let's say you've heard me talking about that idea before, best black films of 2015. In this it's looking at about 300 factors to give us an engagement and impression score saying like all right had you do average versus below average but it's suggesting that maybe we could do a better job with our ideation around our title. So here's a little change, why the 11 best black films of 2015 didn't get the credit they deserve and suddenly we have a much higher level of engagement as well as impression. You know it's based on their internal algorithm but you can realize they're like yeah I would be more curious about this topic than the other and frankly it's still a list of 11 best black films of 2015 just phrased in a different way and it's amazing the difference that can have. And if you don't believe that you can look at a news company called Upworthy. They're Upworthy's editorial process that they talked about how important it is to write 25 different headlines just to ideate. You can also use Google AdWords to test some of your more important headlines but the idea is that like in the same way that with an email subject line we want to test different subject lines because we know that's the number one reason someone is going to open it. It's lunacy to spend two hours writing an article and then just you know one minute or one second putting together a title that you think represents it because people are judging so hard based on the headline. So here's an example of just two headlines, the exact same video that Upworthy had and the difference was 100x and it was literally remember Planet of the Apes it's closer to reality than you think because one title and the other was two monkeys were paid unequally see what happened next and it was a 100x difference. I'm not promising that you're going to get 100x difference on all these things but you get it. You get the fact that people are judging content by its title. It's incredibly important to really spend the time on that title. Look, I understand that I just showed you Upworthy and like these junk websites and you may be thinking to yourself we are academically minded. We care about those calls. We're not going to sell out. I don't want you to sell out. What I'm trying to get you to think about is the spectrum here and move a little bit from purple to red to move a little bit from communism to liberal. Whatever it may be shifting just slightly taking the ideas from some of these spammy websites and news sites because they get traffic and I know that if your organization has got traffic you could do great things with them. You could help them connect with the causes they care about and move the mission forward. So this is my acknowledgement that I'm aware that I just showed you Upworthy and some junky, listical junk that you're saying our content doesn't fit this. I'm saying try it a little bit. See if it works and let the data help you decide it. But I always like that disclaimer. Another disclaimer is around creating some of this content. I want you to be Mary Poppins, that spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, right? A little bit of a listical, right? That little like, oh that seems a little poppy and superficial to write about our topic. It does help you get those conversions but don't drift toward idiocracy, a really great documentary, future documentary about what happens when we serve too much junky content. Put that on your list for later. We are moving toward polls. How are we doing? I believe that increasing organic traffic through SEO will help my organization. Let's see if we can get some thoughts here. How have I done on swaying it? Go ahead and click on those radio buttons or if you have something else to say feel free to chat it in the chat box to us. We imagine that many organizations would really benefit from improving their SEO and increasing that organic traffic. Some of you may not have much of a web presence yet, so it may be a mixed bag or maybe only help a little bit until you get yourself more established with a website. We have quite a few organizations that just use Facebook or have more of a brochure site where it's just a single page that doesn't have much on it. So those types of websites would really benefit from increasing their content before increasing SEO work most likely. So I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results so everyone can see but feel free to keep on voting if you haven't done so yet. And it looks like the great majority of people are saying they think it's helpful. All righty, you guys are in the right room. You're in the right room. Fantastic. I'm so excited to see this. I understand that it is a new and somewhat confusing field but it seems like you understand that there's value here, which is good news. All righty, I'm going to move into SEO process and link building. In terms of our process, you notice I've skipped over to here the marketing and link building process that you hear so much about. When we're looking at link building, it is in fact another process where we have discovery, outreach, and execution. On the discovery level what we're doing is first, I'm assuming you've already created great content. Great content is like you brought up brochure site. If you have a one-page website you must have deeper content. You must have more pages than that. You must have like an entire resource section or a tip section, something like that because we're not talking about generating a bunch of links to your home page and hoping more people go to your home page. This is about creating those. Think about Power Poetry that how do I write an ODE poem to capture that young person who just got a teacher assignment so that they become a poet of your site? Translate for your organization. So we need to choose this content, make sure that it's been written well, targeted for different keywords, and then we know the keywords that we optimized it for. So once we have that we then choose our target. What are the blogs out there? What are the communities online that are potentially interested in this? And you can find those communities on LinkedIn and a number of other places in forums saying, hey, I just written this. Feel free to link to it and share it because I wrote it for you all. We can look at competition. Remember I talked before about the Ice Biennage and also similar web is basically the same thing relatively speaking as Ice Biennage where we type anything in a website and we get what our competitors are doing. And then maybe we can reach out to that list saying, hey, would you mind linking to it? We can look for online resource list. So one of the things that Whole Whale actually has is if you Google nonprofit podcast list or nonprofit podcast, Whole Whale actually has this long list and it's great nonprofit podcast or focused podcast reach out to us and say, hey, can we get on that list? Can you link to us? And so you can either create that resource or ask other people that maintain those lists to link to you and we're more than happy to do that. You can outreach to social influencers that can share this online because social links are links as well as well as the chance that other people get and pick it up. And you can also create partnerships. So we are a part of one partnership which are similar types of organizations that we all create content with this type of strategy but don't overlap too much. And we link back and forth to each other to help us build up this organic link relationship. So you can look in your sector, you can look in your near sector, or you can potentially even look on this list saying, hey, I'd love to join a partnership with anybody out there as long as we're semi-related and not creating just random links because it has to be somewhat contextually relevant. You can't have the horse farm linking to the person trying to save grapefruits in Canada. Those aren't real things but you get what I'm talking about. The next step is outreach. Thinking about how we then do that phase for execution. So I'm going to go to our next. What about outreach? So now we're driving into outreach. There's the good old fashioned one-on-one pick up the phone, drive the email, say, hey, let me build a relationship with you. Talk to them on social saying, hey, I really respect your content. Like I said before, sometimes we get those questions to us and we reach out. You can also broadcast it out to press release or an email blast to your list and then social pushes. You can also do pay-to-play, paid search. Now paying for advertising on Google does not guarantee and does not relate to your SEO ranking. However, there is a sheer fact that the more people that look at your content are more likely to share it and link to it. And by the way, we talked about the Google AdWords Grant. That is one of those uses for your Google AdWords Grant driving traffic around this topic. In terms of shareability, I'm talking about shares a lot. This is an important matrix where we can understand how we make people feel when we create our content and then to share this and add this are just ways to make sure your content is being shared. But where you want to be is high intensity emotions. The things that make people invigorated, confident, challenged, and joyful. And kind of stay away from the, you know, definitely the low left here where you end up with, you know, hopeless and defeated. Like that is not getting someone to share, right? If I'm suddenly talking like this to you, I'm like, I don't know if I feel like no one is going to share this. You almost just dozed off just now. Also, which can work but is just, you know, an asterisk, be careful. You can go with the anger and the fear and the type of content that drive people, us versus them. You know, we certainly saw the impact and effect of that in our current electoral cycle. But it is dangerous to play with that type of motivation though it is high energy and can potentially work. When you execute, we love building a spreadsheet with your keyword and your content targets to build links and then track your progress. So if you're having an intern go through and do this, if you're having volunteers go in and do this, say, all right, here are all these keywords that we do. So this is what we do for a client. We actually go through. We pick a key term and then we say, all right, Google Analytics. And then we say, all right, here's the long tail. Google Analytics averages are Google Analytics problems. We create the content. Sometimes the content is the same. And then we work on link building as we go through it. We analyze in Google Search. So in terms of the Google Search console, you can use the consoles I said before to understand who's linking to your site. This will actually tell you who's linking to your site. So you can reach back out to them saying, hey, you've linked to us in the past. Would you mind linking to this? So you can build from your own pre-existing list, which is a good strategy and look for similar sites. But as we move toward the end, I just want to acknowledge the fact that I went very quickly through link building because I think it is not as close to that 80-20 rule. I think really it's about creating great content up front and making sure that you have the right ammunition to start before you get into like, all right, let's just build a bunch of links. I think people look at SEO as this. All right, how do I shove more links at this home page so I can index for my search term? You know, that doesn't work once you get beyond your own branded terms. So once you own the search, for example, the whole whale or whole agency, once you've got that and you need to expand beyond, you need to be creating new pieces of content. And that's where the majority of the work should be in the beginning. So I know I didn't talk that long about link building because I think the first step is really doing your homework on this, sitting down and writing great content. Let's get some results here though on this current survey. I want to make sure we respect everyone's time. All right, playing the cool sites. Guys, I gave you a lot of cool sites. I spoke really quickly, so I totally respect rewatching this. I have a lot to do. Some others in the chat. I wonder if there are any questions though as we begin to move toward the end, Becky. You know, we've had a lot of great conversation happening on the back end and a lot of questions that we've answered. I think you've covered a lot of really needy action items that people can take with them. And just to clarify, Jerry asked earlier about the keywords. And I think this is important to stress again. Do you use a combination of single words or do you recommend that people use mostly phrases? Do you have recommendations specifically on how to litter your content with those types of keywords and what the best practice is? Yeah, the best practice is check your doctor results may vary. We gave you the tools in order to see the volume of search behavior. So if you've chosen a long tail phrase like what are the weather patterns in West Kentucky on Tuesday, that's too narrow. So there's a certain diminishing return to scale in terms of the volume that you want to make sure that there is behind the search term. So if you have a high level phrase in general, you're not going to win if you're going after a term like shoes. You want to think about what the phrase is around that and then the core keywords that are unique to that. So you don't necessarily have to, for example, how to write an ode poem. Like we know people are searching for that and significant enough volume. So we didn't choose ode poem as the anchor because we didn't know what the content would be around that. So use the tools we talked about, check the volume, and then write for the answer to that. How do I add value to the human looking for the answer to that question? Great advice. And I think it is really important for those of us, particularly, I feel like nonprofits have a lot of end libraries, public libraries, and churches. We all have our lingo. We all have our little silos where we talk to one another. We talk to ourselves an awful lot. And don't really realize how the rest of the world might be talking about our issue or issues we work on or the communities we serve. So I think that initial research is really important so that you are putting the right types of words and keywords in your site and in the content you are creating so that you are actually making that connection. Even if you have terminology you prefer people use because maybe you don't want to be perceived a certain way. If the general public that you are helping and hoping to reach is using that other terminology, you may need to pull that in anyway just so that you are connecting the dots more clearly for them. So I love it if you go ahead and share those resources you have and then look at ourselves wrapped up. We've got a lot of great questions that are still being answered on the back end. Thanks to Julie's help in doing a lot of that on the back. Yeah, thank you Julie. So wholeway.com.sh, University Code webinar. That is going to give you access to our courses with I think at least a 50% discount. So you know what? Happy Giving Tuesday, Cyber Monday to you. And then wholeway.com.com.seo is going to give you tons of our content such as best SEO tips for nonprofits in under 10 minutes and SEO steps and content marketing tips. There's so much more to learn here. These are all short, quick video snippets and things that you can do to build up your understanding and confidence in the topic. And remember if you are able to increase that organic traffic and drive toward those conversions you will help your organization do better work. And you are all doing incredible work. And thanks to TechSoup for letting us share these tips that help you do more. Thank you so much for that, George. A lot of really, really great resources shared in this very compact amount of time. And we hope that we've wet your appetite to go take some of these best practices, take some of those simple first steps to really improve the content on your site, and do that keyword research so you can start getting your content, your services, your resources found by the people who need them or the people you serve. We would love it if you would go ahead and chat in one thing that you've learned during today's webinar that you're going to take back and try to implement. And we also hope that you'll check out those other resources. We understand that this is just the start of your SEO process we hope today and that you'll be taking those next steps, whether it's to go watch some of the short videos on WholeWheel or signing up for one of their courses, whether that's going and doing that keyword research, maybe it's starting Google Analytics for your site and getting that content evaluated and seeing where your traffic is currently coming from. We hope that you'll also share this with your friends and colleagues and feel free to re-watch it. It is Creative Commons license. All of our webinars are, so we hope that you'll look at it, use it, share it. And we also hope that you'll give us your feedback in our post-event survey that will pop up when you leave the room in just a couple of minutes. Before you do that though, we'd like to invite you to continue your learning by joining us on TechSoup's course platform at techsoup.course.pc. And you can see our full catalog by just typing in slash catalog at the end of that where you can see a variety of courses that TechSoup is making available, both free and some new paid options for you on everything from training your staff on using technology to your technology planning. And we'll be rolling out new courses on this platform in the coming months. We also recommend that you join us for upcoming webinars that may be of interest to you. We'll have one on Adobe Photoshop Tools and Filters next week, followed by a webinar on how libraries can support social good by connecting with their local nonprofits. So whether you're a library or a nonprofit, you may want to join us for that one to learn about how libraries and nonprofits can work together. And then we'll have a webinar right before we close up shop a bit for the holidays on how to use it and don't lose it. So for those of you who may have some technology budget still available, the different programs that are available to you before the end of this calendar year where you may be able to get some new hardware, get some tablets or computers, and get some additional software and services. Thank you so much, George. Really appreciate all of your help and expertise being shared today. We know you worked hard. So I hope you'll get to give your voice a rest in the rest of the afternoon. Thanks so much, Julie, for helping to answer questions on the back end. And thank you to Susan for her help as well in helping you with your technical issues. Thanks to ReadyTalk for the use of this platform, which they provide to us so we can present these webinars to you on a regular basis. If you are looking for your own webinar tool, you can learn about their donation program at TechSoup.org slash ReadyTalk. Thanks again. And please take a moment to complete that post-event survey that pops up when you close out. Have a terrific afternoon, everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.