 Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. As we wait for everyone to join. We'd love to know where you're joining in from so feel free to put in the chat who you are where you're joining from. Michael from Victoria. Thanks for joining us. Portland, Oregon, Indiana, Florida, North Carolina. Nice. Arkansas, more Florida, Illinois. Great, we have a good crowd. San Diego, me too. I'm here in San Diego as well. Great. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. We'll go ahead and get started. So welcome. In our first ever open to the public quad event, we'll have our SEO expert Julian Grace walk us through some SEO best practices for nonprofits. We'll get to that in a moment. First, let's discuss how you can engage in today's event. If you have questions, use the Q&A feature at the bottom. Don't forget to check your inbox after the event will be emailing you the replay slides and resource links within a couple days. And if you learned something cool, feel free to tweet at us at TechSoup with hashtag TechSoup Quad. And also just a reminder that closed captioning is available. You just turn that on with the CC button located in your zoom menu. Now, before we get into today's content, I want to welcome you to the TechSoup global network, especially for those of you who are new here. At TechSoup, we believe technology like smartphones, internet connectivity, training and more have the power to serve our communities better. And today's speaker will give you a good taste for what this looks like in action. Now, before we jump into the presentation, I want to point out again that this is our first ever open to the public quad event. Normally, these events are closed to only quad numbers. And so for those of you who are unfamiliar with Quad, we have TechSoup's Aaron Dowell to give a brief intro of our newest initiative. Hi, Aaron. Hey, even. Thanks a lot, everybody. So, yeah, Quad is our new subscription homegrown subscription offer. And we know it's for our product catalog and a lot of resources we have on our site. But you may with the product catalog you may do like a one off transaction you come you need QuickBooks you log in you get any leave. But you may want more support from that. And to try and rectify that we wanted to create a subscription model, a feature like a year long subscription with a set of features that provide wrap around support for the products you get. So we worked with 62 different org organizations for about a year and a half, trying to understand and get feedback from them about what a subscription model would look like that would be successful, and what features that they would want. And they told us of course they want products, they want courses, but also they want a space where they can talk to each other, kind of share ideas and solutions around their common issues and kind of harness their historical experience with each other. And here's what you get. You get a community space that we built out with a members only curated knowledge base. You get products without admin fees and courses, and you also get support. Okay, next slide. So I'll break it down a little further. Quad is $200 for the year. We base that off of the average annual spend of our members so we're really again conscientious around cost. I will start with the middle column. So with quad you, we remove the admin fees on all products courses and services. So this is great of course if you have like a tech plan for the year. This, this value will go way beyond $200. If you have product needs if you have course needs we have a great list of courses to help with the skill set of your staff. And then to the right is individualized support that's me. I'm the one that could help you out over the course of the year that's part of the extra features and support you get a wraparound support you get with the products. If you have any questions you can come to me you can email me, we can talk about it I can find some assistance and support for you. Lastly to the left I wanted to showcase the column here is the big deal for us. I think this is the best part about the quad membership for a lot of people which is the, this community space that we built out. Again the space includes members only content. We, every day our content team or every week is filling it with really deep knowledge useful posts. It's a space where you can again post something if you have a question about a tech issue that you just haven't resolved. You can post it in there. I will tag people in that space. We also have unique events in their members only events as well. You can add 10 colleagues or nine colleagues for a total of 10 staff in the community space or really trying to encourage engagement. Okay, next slide. And then here I just wanted to showcase what the community space looks like. If you open it up to the right you'll see our upcoming events. We have biweekly office hours in here, but we also have unique members member only events as well, based off of the feedback in terms of the topics we get from our members. Also, of course, to the right we have the trending posts. So you can kind of see what people are talking about to the left is kind of the main area where we house all our content. And you can kind of get an understanding of how to get started as well. We have our members here you can find out who's who you can post a question in the advice section. We have communities of purpose we did start out with food and food and security, but by no means are they the only type of organization in here. We have about 190 to 200 organizations in here right now. Mental health organizations use service organizations faith based orgs community service orgs food and security orgs. We have a lot of gamut and they all at least share something in common around technology how to use it how to get adopted for staff for volunteers how to feel confident using it as well. So there's a lot you can gain again from the shared experience and historical experience from your colleagues. We also have communities of practice. So we started with Microsoft cloud. It's great. We have a lot of really really useful articles and posts in there. A lot of unique things that you might not have known as well how you can utilize Microsoft 365. We also posted a new community communities of practice topic, which is emerging tech. That's really good. We've already posted a lot of good things around AI and they're really useful too. And then of course to the left down here you can see our upcoming events and our archived events as well. Then the middle we have our conversations. This is one of the most recent posts in our mood and emerging tech section again getting started with chat GPT part one. Okay, next slide. And then here I just wanted to show the article section in the community space. My colleagues are great these are really in depth are you know articles and posts around standard topics that nonprofits and standard issues and nonprofits are dealing with as well. And then next slide. And then I just wanted to show some examples really quickly to the left we have examples of my colleagues posting weekly in the space a lot of again important topics around things like Microsoft 365 website engagement with Wix. And then of course, to the right I just posted an example of some of the posts from the members in the space around the things that they're asking about and they want to get advice on. You see it sort of really runs the gamut electronic vouchers, micro grants, antivirus software website best practices. So the space is a really good area where you can, you know, if you have a lingering tech issue that you just haven't found resolution on you can come here you can post it. Or again we have biweekly office hours. So you can, you know, sign up an RSVP for them and you know get your questions answered with my colleague Kevin more. So that's, that's great and again, additionally we have these unique members only events and the events really are tailored around the topics that we see in the space. So really trying to be strategic around what's important to the community. Okay, next slide. And then so yeah so we have the community space again with members only content, a peer engagement by weekly office hours, special events. And then we have products and I just show this slide to showcase the value you can get through quad. Again it's a $200 membership for the year. These four products are all donated products with an admin fee total $307. That would be removed with a quad membership. So I just want to kind of showcase the impact and value of what you can get through the year if you have like a deep, a good and big ambitious tech plan you can really, you know, gain a lot through this membership. Okay, next slide. Then here are some of our courses. We have, you know, it says 170 but I think we now we have maybe 200. But a lot of really useful courses Excel 101 201 and 301 that's really popular. You know, grant writing and management course that's a high value and very popular courses well. A lot of courses that meet the needs are that are intended to meet the needs of raising the skill set of your staff as well. We have new ones around AI as well as Adobe products to so we're continually trying to understand the topics are important to nonprofits and how we could, you know, create courses that meet those needs to. Okay, next slide. Then we also services we partner with three different organizations, known entities in the sector that work with nonprofits to provide services as well. This is a great one shot. It's a call from one of our tech partners. So again, you have a lot of ways to get support through quad. You've got the office hours in the community space. You have your peers that can answer questions in the space, then you have help desk services as well. So again a lot of ways to get some answers from some lingering tech issues that you may have. Okay, next slide. Okay, and as we're wrapping this up if you have any questions for Aaron regarding quad, please put them in the chat. So yeah, that's it again just a quick recap products courses and services with that and fees removed members support through me we would do an assessment. I get an understanding what you want to get out of the course of the year. I would help support you in all the ways that you need supporting around placing requests understanding products. Again, the tagging you in the community space if it's a relevant conversation, a relevant topic that I think you'd be interested in. And then of course, yeah, so that's all three community space products courses and services and members support. What I will do is I will put the link to quad in the chat. So you can actually just go online and search in the search field and text.org for quad as well. But again I'll put that in the, in the, oh it looks like maybe Andrew already did that so thanks Andrew. But yeah, any questions you can always email us and we'll be happy to answer them. And that is all thank you very much. Thank you Aaron and we did have one quick question in the chat. Cal asks, are there memberships for individuals. There are not currently we work with 501 C3 nonprofits and we have an emerging space for fiscally sponsored orgs as well. But it's not specifically for individuals per se. But so you know you can email me there are some, I guess exceptions, but those exceptions typically around people that helped build it out for us. But still, you know I'd like to talk to you anyways about what the possibilities are so you can email me we can have a conversation as well. Great. Thank you so much Aaron. You're welcome. And yes, if anyone ever has any questions about quad feel free to email us at community at TechSoup.org. So one more reminder that we will be sharing the replay from today's event, including the slides any links mentioned within a couple days. So, now let's jump into the SEO content. Now for our presenter Julian Grace. He's a digital solutions manager at TAP network with over eight years of experience in digital marketing. Julian is an expert in developing and executing data driven marketing strategies that increase his clients efficiency and effectiveness. He is skilled in various digital marketing disciplines including search engine optimization SEO web development and integration social media marketing and email automation. Julian is passionate about using digital marketing to make a positive impact in the nonprofit sector and he has worked with dozens of nonprofits to help them achieve their fundraising and engagement goals. And with that, I will let you take it away Julian. Thank you very much happy to be here. So today we're going to be talking about SEO search engine optimization. And as you can see by this outline here, hopefully by the end of this I hope to have you very comfortable and understanding not just what's out there but what's when what you're going to need to do specific to your organization you know, get the most benefit from SEO itself. So we're going to start a little bit about what SEO is get into goals and how to figure out what you'd exactly like some of the technical parts of SEO. Then actually executing on that plan, the social aspect which is the backlinks, then figuring out okay after we did all that, how do we determine the impact of it. So that's the high level overview of what we're going to talk about today. So jumping right into it, the, the first step here is we're going to understand the purpose of search engine optimization. And so, for the most part when we talk about SEO, we are talking about Google and how sites are indexed by Google, how that works and what you appear for. And search engine optimization is also not necessarily a task but a result. A lot of things go into it. You have UX content writing. You have the technical side of things and all of it contributes to an optimized state of your search engine performance for a lot of benefits to this. So increased online visibility is a really big one. For the most part, you know people who are on your email lists who are following your social media stuff like that, they already know who you are by really focusing on SEO you can get new people people who are searching for maybe general terms. You know just looking for information, people who aren't aware of you yet SEO is a great way to sort of get new people in your sphere of influence. So it's a great way to do the only thing that you really need to focus on, you know, or really spend when you're dealing with SEO was your time, and hopefully by the end of this presentation you're able to understand, you know, how to best spend that time. Targeted traffic. So when we talk about targeted traffic you're not just know blasting out and hoping to get you know, hit any personally other side, really trying to get people who are searching for specific information, have specific problems, or going to be otherwise to the organization. And the final thing, by just optimizing for SEO, you tend to have more authoritative content out there, which shows you as a leader and whatever sphere you're operating in. So there's a lot of reasons to pay attention to SEO. And there's also quite a lot of benefits out of it as well. So as we move on to step two, we're going to try and focus on how to set these specific goals for your, for your website. So the first thing is to really understand who you're trying to reach. What keywords and phrases are they likely to use when searching for information related to your nonprofit's mission. I have a client they help individuals in Washington State deal with the health system if they have you know kids with behavioral health issues. And we would often try and optimize for things like behavioral health, health systems navigation, things like this, but the people they were trying to reach and people they were trying to help for searching for things like how to help my child who's running away. What to do with a child with anger issues how to fill out form XYZ by understanding who exactly you're trying to reach that will help you focus on exactly what you need to do in SEO. Okay, what are these KPIs. Some of them you know standard going to be things like website traffic engagement, we have conversion set up either in a form or registration or something like that. Really spend some time to determine what's going to be the most important for your specific nonprofit, then set specific goals for each one of those. You're not going to want to you know have really unreasonable ones. We're a big fan of smart goals here at tap specific measurable attainable relevant and time bound. That's a great way, especially when dealing with SEO great format to these KPIs and. Next thing, before you even go ahead and selfie now I'm going to do some SEO tasks, really going to need to understand where you are right now. So do an audit of the website. See, you know what you're showing up for now, who some of your search editors are, are there any gaps, even in the in the user flow on the site, really figure out your baseline so you have something to measure against as you're making all these changes and optimizations. Those measurable goals really think smarts and make sure that you're doing things that you're going to be able to get feedback on and results from so you can iterate moving forward you're always going to want to get no information for the next time you do something. So if you have an action plan with digital marketing in general and specifically SEO it's really easy to tread water. You can be spending a lot of energy and not really get anywhere. So if you have an action plan you understand where you are, and where you want to go, you'll be able to split that up into manageable chunks and really get a lot accomplished in an efficient manner. So, when we're talking about SEO. A lot of times the main thing we're talking about is keywords. So search engines really the scan your entire site for live text, a common example maybe that you you have images for maybe an events, or a fundraising drive you're trying to do, and you know you work with a designer they're looking really nice, but they're they're baked in as an image search engines can't see that so you don't get the benefit of having that as a keyword on your site. So search engines really focus on live text, and we'll get into a couple different areas where you can put that live text to have an impact. But inside that text you're going to have keywords, you can want to use the words and phrases that you're hoping people search for and have you show up for in your website content. And there's a couple different types of keywords. So you have head keywords body keywords and long tail keywords. You're going to have a good mix of all of these, you know, on each one of your website pages. And those keywords are going to be those things that you think are going to, you know, be the most applicable, you know, they're going to be a little bit shorter and there's going to be a lot of people searching for them. As you get further down, you know, things, you may have some stuff called body keepers in there that may be more specific to the things you do. Maybe it's technical jargon specific to the communities you help, or even just ways you like to phrase things you know maybe you like use formally incarcerated rather than prisoners or something like that. You know, to use that language specific for what you want to target and finally long tail keywords. Those are really good for things like like questions, and maybe you have an FAQ or resources page where people can download materials. Having those helps you show up. If there's common questions that your organization solves. I want to think of keywords. Really look at, okay, what are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to get in here? Figure out a bunch of keywords, you know, make a list in Excel or a Word document and plan out all the things you'd like to show up for. Then maybe do a little research there are plenty of SEO tools that will help you understand what your competitors are using. And competitors doesn't necessarily need to be a negative thing. It could just be people fighting for the same keywords and search, but you may be in completely different areas of the country, different spheres of influence. Finally, take all that information, refine it down, remove the extraneous ones that you don't think are going to easily integrate into your content and develop your action plan from there. And so once you have those keyword, that list of keywords are we're going to get into the technical side of things. So there's a couple things with SEO you want to be careful with. See even if you bump to the next slide for me please. Thank you. So one thing I always like to point out a lot of people use WordPress for their sites. There is a little tiny checkbox in your settings that says discourage this page from being indexed by search engines. You know, if you're having some trouble showing up for SEO things it could be something as simple as that. You know, other website platforms are going to have a similar thing that's going to, you know, depend on the specific platform where you find that, but make sure it's indexable. So really take some time to familiarize yourself with the SEO fundamentals and key concepts so you can understand. Okay, we know what keywords are. We're going to start to, you know, maybe look at some of those metrics and Google search console, something like that, learn about the technical elements. So figuring out how to exactly lay out your sites, you know, optimizing it, you know, maybe paying attention to the size of the images you're uploading. So Google's not saying, hey, we're not going to show this, this website is high because it takes so long to load, people aren't finding what they need. It's always good, like I mentioned, not just for a content audit but a technical audit, make sure that you have things like your robots.txt file, instructions for website crawlers. If you have anything that you, you know, don't want to be indexed, you can have specific rules in there really allow you to customize what you're going to appear for in Google search and other search engines. Finally, figure out, you know, any of those, those key problems you find in the audit and get them set up and fixed before you jump to the actual content development. Being able to give yourself a strong base to build off of, I think it's going to really help the effectiveness of any sort of advanced content writing and site layout stuff you're going to do. So pay attention to all of the technical aspects, it's going to vary depending on, you know, which platform you use for your website. But this should be a fairly one time thing, and then just keep an eye on things like your image uploads. If there's anything that you know, causing your site to load a little more slowly, removing them. But once you're set up, you should be good for a while. There are a couple places that we can put keywords. One thing we don't want to do is just say hey, we want to show up for this keyword. Let me type this 60 times at the at the footer of each page Google's going to pay you for that. It's not going to work. So while you're optimizing for a search engine, that search engine is trying to determine what's going to be the best for a user on the other end. So you guys want to make sure that what you're doing is going to be helpful for people actually using your site. A site is a tool for users and for yourself that allows them to complete an action, learn more about something get more involved with your organization. So make sure anything you're doing SEO is ultimately serves that goal. So some of the places we can put things are page titles. The second image towards the bottom that purple text is the is the meta page title. So when you see things like meta titles meta descriptions things like that's your page title. That's that's what we're talking about there that purple text, the meta description is that text underneath. So meta descriptions don't have a one to one effect on your SEO. So you want to have keywords in your page titles but meta descriptions are really for the users. I know a lot of website platforms are going to sort of automatically generate some of them based on you know the text that they see on the on the website, really take control of that it's really good opportunity to give people who are searching for maybe general terms are recent to click you're prompting them with additional information so they know that hey I'm clicking on this. If you want to get this information learn about this this seems relevant to me spend some time using keywords in that not because they have a direct effect on your ranking, but because they're going to help the people who are actually searching for those terms. Header tags are another big thing to pay attention to. I know a lot of folks, you know, maybe if you're using a template, you like to use header tags as design elements. Oh, I want text to look this way. Let me use an h3 tag. Let me use an h1 tag. Really think about using header tags instead of structural elements and styling things a little bit separately. So you want each page to have an h1 heading that h1 heading should have a keyword in it maybe a head keyword something short. That's not going to be like oh they obviously just stuff a keyword in there. You have to structure them out so you have a hierarchy of okay here's the overall content of the page. That's your heading for each one. Maybe you have two subsections that you talk about you know two different approaches. Those are each choose as you go further down structure content with those those header tags body contents the big one. This is very going to have the most opportunity to really one right content give people the information they want, but to, you can have opportunities to place keywords within your website. If you have a good amount of body contents develop you'll be able to say okay well maybe we'll turn this into a call to action, and that will prompt people to you know go to a different portion on the website if this isn't quite what they wanted. You have the ability to do some of those like question and answers, just more opportunity to putting keywords in helpful and useful ways. Finally we have image alt text. So that's something that will happen you know if you hover over an image it'll come up with the alt text or say an image doesn't load for some reason. The alt text will show in its space. It's also really good for website accessibility for people that use screen readers they can get an idea of what the image is all about. So include the target keywords and the alt text of the images. It really helps search and just understand what your image is about. So a lot of nonprofits tend to use stock photography that you know maybe highlights the words and their mission. You can still you know use helpful alt text to sort of make that stock photography work for you as well. It's especially helpful though if you're developing you know maybe custom graphics that you want people to find in Google search results or anything like that. Pay a little bit of attention to your image alt text. I find it's really helpful to do that when you're uploading the image. If you haven't done this before it is a little bit of work to go through your entire image library and set them as well worth it though and then moving forward you know you can upload the optimized images and add the alt text right there. It should keep your right on track. Now when we're talking about backlinks. This is the social aspect of SEO. So one of the ways that search engines determine you know who's going to show up above who and things like this is the page authority and site authority. One of the ways that they determine you know the the authoritativeness of a given page or a site is how many times it's referenced somewhere else on the Internet. So that's what a bank backlink is saying okay on a completely different domain. Somebody is linked to this website they've said hey this is is worthy content is helpful informational. You know that informative let's let's really take this and you know bump this up in the in the search results of it. So there's a couple of different ways that you can approach this one of them is donor partner websites. You know, especially if we're talking quad and creating this community of nonprofits, finding like minded organizations that you know, either either do the same thing or work really well together. See if you can just link to each other on maybe a resources page or partners page something like that. So what is media coverage new sites you know they'll they'll put up fresh releases maybe even do you know some more robust coverage. That would be a great way to get you know a little more page authority, because those new sites are putting out a lot of contents, a whole bunch of they have very high site authority scores and you can sort of say well, I'm linked to by a very authoritative site that's going to then you know have a positive effect on yourself as well. Social media profiles is a great one, not just for SEO but we're thinking about digital marketing, somebody's first touch you want to have want them to have all the information possible. So you know if they find you for the first time on Facebook, you don't want them to have to go to Google to search for your name, it should be able to go to your profile, click on your link and have all the information you know right there available to them. That really carries across any social media profile as well. You know some nonprofits are able to be listed on on neighborhood websites, or maybe even community boards, things like that. And then guess blogging. This is a really good one if you're an organization that provides a lot of information or maybe does impact reports research things like that. You can also get a guest blog post for a different website that's relevant to your nonprofit mission, don't necessarily want to do something like that just for the sake of doing it, but if you can find a organization or a website that really mesh as well with what you do and what you're trying to do. See if you can write a guest blog post, include some links in that post in there you'll be able to optimize for those keywords, get a little more of a page authority, and also get those backgrounds. And once we've done all that we know okay where we are now we know what we want to do, you know the keywords that we're going to try and implement, and we have a pretty good idea of all the place that we can input those keywords. So once you've done all that, how are we really going to understand you know exactly the effect this has had a really big one is Google analytics. So July 1 is the big date for the Google analytics for switch make sure you're converted over before then in Google analytics for they they offer a lot more things that used to be sort of wrapped up in tag manager or something like that. It's a lot more powerful than plain old universal analytics from there you'll be able to see where people came from you know the search term they use to get to your page, and also how they're using the site after that. So if people if you do do really well for a keyword in your ranking on there, and you want to be able to see okay well once people click on this page. What do they do after that are they going to different areas are they're leaving right away are they filling out forms or downloading files. Google analytics is a great tool to understand that search console is another Google product. That's basically how you interface with the Google crawler, you can upload your site map or even a link to your site maps that was always updated. So if you'd like to see how well your website was index. If there's any other sort of like errors that you might have search console will be able to tell you hey this is the last time you call the page. This was the issue with it is what you need to do fix it. So it's really worth going in there, you know, every couple weeks every couple months just to make sure there's no issues or if you're trying to troubleshoot a specific thing like, Hey, where are we ranking for XYZ will be able to do that in Google search console. Are we ranking things something like SCM rush is really good for keyword ranking tools to understand historically how you perform for a certain keyword. So it's not like there are, you know, people, you know, the website exists and then you come in and you're, there's a clear path to the top. Lots of organizations are doing SEO and you're always going to be sort of needing to update your content and really have a good plan for how to deal with changes in the content and different rankings. So using a keyword ranking tool you'll be able to see okay well we added these, you know, keywords to this page as way that we can see how this has impacted our rankings. Understanding that will help you sort of stop spinning your tires if you're doing a lot and you know not seeing results. This will sort of be able to tell you give you a little bit of data backing to understand the results of your actions. And that's the backlink analysis tools going on every website in the world and searching for your name is not going to be the most time effective option I wouldn't recommend it to use something again SCM rush is a great option there's plenty of them out there, but just understand hey, where else is this website being ranked, and it'll help you possibly even uncover new opportunities to say, Hey, I think this is really fit let's see if we can get a link on this website. I know I just threw a lot of information at you. I tried to keep everything very, you know, general so depending on what website platform you're using or anything like that, you'll be able to get the value of this. We have the rest of the time available for Q&A. And so if you have any questions please put them in the chat. I'm happy to answer and I know we're probably going to get some really good ones that are going to be valuable for everybody so please don't hesitate to ask any questions. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Julian I was really great, very informative and I, I feel like I learned a lot about SEO just now. Wonderful. So thank you. We do have a few questions submitted and yes if you have any questions please be sure to go into the Q&A tab right now and submit them so we can address them. One question, what tools would you recommend to find SEO keywords. There's a couple out there, something like Moz maybe a really good sort of just free thing to take a look at. Here at the agency, we're a big fan of SEM rush is a very powerful tool and allow you to do a lot of research. So, there's a couple other aspects to it though just beyond finding keywords that are available. Sometimes you might want to pull community members maybe people on your Facebook page, understand what they search for when they're trying to find information relevant to you. You might also even want to do something like if you're running Google ads, just like the point out that nonprofits get a really good deal on Google ad credits the Google for nonprofits, but really see okay what are people searching for that you're showing up for what are their search terms in Google ads that you can then turn into your SEO keywords. So if you're running a lot of Google ads you've been able to see hey we're showing up when people search these words, we're just having this be just in Google ads. Why don't we try and incorporate this into our content so we start ranking for that as well. So there's a couple of different ways you know you can always look at those technical tools like Moz and SEM rush, look into the Google ads and see what you're showing up for in your page search, and then just ask around so you always want to make sure that you're you're optimizing for the people you want to help and the people who help you help those people. So make sure that you're getting their input as well so they may be using completely different terms and you think it's really good to just get some grounding in real human interactions as well. Julie and one other question or we have a few more questions the next one. How often should you do a website audit. So this one is really going to depend on what you're auditing things like SEO audits are good, you know, eight months to a year. You know you can do it a little more frequently if you're making a lot of changes, but you know, taking a look at your SEO on that level. You know you're not going to want to do that too often because you want to spend most of your time making changes and fixing them and then you'll be able to analyze results a little bit of a longer term. So looking at things like content, I find that's really good to do, you know, on a six month basis, you know organizations aren't static things are changing all the time program offerings are different people come and go, really take a look at the text on your website and understand is this still relevant. I'm not used to all are there any opportunities there. Then finally for a sort of technical side audit. Try and just check in on things if you have a site like WordPress that uses plugins, try and check in on that every week or every other week really make a plan to make sure that's staying up to date. So that way that doesn't turn to a bigger problem down the road, be able to get things as they update you know if there's a big version updates we will tackle that and you'll be prepared for it. I know what you're auditing is a little bit of a timeframe but I hope that's a helpful answer. Great, thank you Julian. I know you've already mentioned some great tools. But are there any other free tools you recommend that would be helpful with SEO. So I think part of that goes into SEO is actually the results. So depending on what you're trying to do as an SEO task. There's a couple different ones. So if you just want to understand how your site is being optimized on a very quick level, look at Google search console that's going to be your direct interface with the Google search and their crawler. You're looking for, you know, maybe some design UX layouts, using something like web aim. I am. That's going to give you like a accessibility overview of your color contrast is off if you know the text is too small. So things that the search algorithm might penalize you for that's going to give you a great high level of your things like that. And then finally, like I mentioned some of those other keyword keyword tools are going to give you the benefit of finding new stuff. And then what you're trying to actually incorporate that user writing tool so you don't necessarily need to do all of your writing in the website platform itself you can take that off. You sent them like Grammarly. I know the big thing is AI right now so there's a lot of tools out there that will help you write things. I don't let AI write all of your content for you but you can use it as a, a helpful tool to, you know, get you started, refine things make things a little more readable. Great, we're getting some other great questions and what free keyword ranking and backlink ranking, ranking platforms, do you recommend. And in fact, a lot of that stuff is going to be behind a paywall. The big players are are Moz and SCM rush they're going to give you I think the most helpful information. Depending on exactly what you're trying to rank they may have some free web pages where you can just do some basic it might give you like your top 10 keywords things like that, just to get you started. There's a lot of either accurate or helpful free options for that so that tends to be the thing that, you know, they put behind the paywall because everything else can be indexed and other tools. You can do your Google search console stuff, all that for free. So the way these platforms are really making their money is based around, you know, providing access to that sort of information. Steve says the last time I looked at Google Analytics, it was only available for large organizations and big websites is that still the case. No, everybody's available to do it for free. You know from an individual to a corporation, you're able to just sign up at Google Analytics. You're going to want to, even though July first is coming soon you're still able to create the old property. And they let you do that but make sure on Google Analytics for it's going to give you a lot of helpful information there and it's completely free and open to everybody. Cool. A few more questions. How can you influence frequently asked questions on Google search results with SEO. So that one is a little bit complicated. So there are things in, you can basically optimize a website page some additional information so you might see if you're running a Google ad, you can add things like site links and callouts and additional information. That's called structured data. So that's basically taking information on your site and putting it in the structured data format to then make it available for things like, you know, the frequently asked questions or it'll pop up in like a little box. Google controls that while they do make some portions of their algorithm available to us. And we know some of it from tools that are like doing research and trying to basically build the Google algorithm backwards. There's not like a you do this, you show up in the FAQ is there, it's going to be all determined on Google's end. So the best you can do is have that helpful information there. So if you're running a Google ad, you'll be able to specify some stuff in those site links and callouts. A really structured data is going to make you available for those things but you won't be able to directly influence that. Great. This might be a big question but George asks, how do I go about changing my Google analytics. In the left hand corner that's your admin section. And for any given accounts, you're going to have a properties option. And then there, you're going to see something called the GA for setup assistant or just set up a system. That's going to be the easiest way to transfer if you have universal analytics thing set up, whether you have custom stuff in there or not, it's going to walk you through creating it. And then your domain name and the big change in Google analytics and instead of just putting in a piece of code, all the data is brought into a property through something called the data stream. So it's going to walk you through creating a web data stream and show you how to put it on your site, either you copy and paste a little strip of code, or depending on, you know, the website platform you have it may have a first party integration. So we have a lot of WordPress sites we really like using Google site kit, but there's also you know, plenty of other ones out there, and that's going to give you the basic configuration. The big note I would say is if you're setting up Google analytics for make sure in the data stream and you're going to have an option called enhanced measurements. That's going to give you data beyond just page views is going to give you things like hey when did somebody scroll to the bottom up 90% of the page. When did they start or submit a form or when did they download a file play video, things like that. So make sure you turn on enhanced measurement for you know the most robust information out there. But that setup assistant is going to be the easiest way to bring things over it's going to help you if you have custom conversions and stuff set up in universal analytics, allow you to bring them over to the, to the new platform as well. So all of your old data available in the universal analytics property, but because Google analytics for looks at data in such a different way used to be there's page views and events. Now everything's an event page view is an event. So it's just you won't be able to have data in the same place, but all of your old data will still exist and just make sure to do that before July 1. Great, thank you Julian. Just a reminder, if you have not had your question answered yet, please be sure to submit them in the q amp a tab, as we're answering them right now. Jennifer asks, is there a website audit tool to do list or sample you can provide to us. I can definitely see if there's something we can send along, you know, one of the things I do here tap network because I do a lot of technical and SEO audits. That tends to involve a lot of stuff though so depending on what exactly you're trying to do. Like I said before this could be different tools available to you, or really I think if you break it down from a, we want to understand the technical configuration. Okay, we're going to make sure we have all of our meta information up there. Blocking ourselves and being indexed, you know we have all the appropriate files up there. That's one side of it. Then you might want to do a content audit to understand okay what exactly are we ranking for what are we saying how are we saying it. So you can look at different things for basically setting up a checklist for yourself like on this page are we mentioning, you know the things you want to be mentioning if not, you know how can we integrate them. So really depending on what you want to do, it's going to vary but I can definitely see if we can send something along. Right, and yes if we have any resources will be sure to share those in our post event email, along with the replay in the slides. If you have any other questions please be sure to submit them into the Q&A tab. We do have some other questions. How can organizations create a keyword strategy that is unique from our competitors that likely use the same keywords. So the first step of that is going to be to understand what your competitors actually use to doing something like a competitor audit for example to go off that last question. Really trying to run some of those keyword tools on competitor websites, it's going to give you an idea of what they're ranking for. Maybe different from what they're trying to rank for and you know hopefully you're going to do a better job at SEO, but really just make a list of what they're doing, and then see how that how well that matches up with what you actually want to do and what you want to do. Any gaps that exist there. So sometimes you may be able to rank for a keyword that's more specific to your organization, you know maybe a different phrasing or a different approach to the same information. So when you're really trying to deal with competitors a lot is just going to be looking at what's tagged as a keyword by any of these tools or by Google search console or even if you're trying to look at like I mentioned some of the search terms in Google ads which is a little bit different from the keywords. So taking a look at that, and then just having two lists and comparing them, seeing you know the density of one hey they use this word quite a lot or there's, there's a score on some of these tools called keyword difficulty, which is basically on a scale of zero to one, how difficult or how much work is going to take to rank for that keyword. So see okay maybe there's some really difficult keywords you want to spend a lot of time trying to rank for, but then you know maybe we'll have maybe 60% of our other keyword strategy that's really focusing on you know lower ones things that are more available gaps in the search market, things like that. Hey, thank you Julian. Another question. I know you mentioned a few different types of keywords to use on the website. But is there any idea of phrases or individual keywords usually work better for SEO. What I'm going to come down to primarily is what kind of information you're looking to rank for so it's really going to depend on. Okay, some, some organizations are really be really focused on things like q amp a is or providing solutions to you know, common questions and that example of you know navigating the health system, you're going to want to have longer keywords, rather than general ones. So other ones you know you may be providing very similar services to you know maybe even for profit options out there. So in that case you're going to want to really focus on those general keywords to have a higher search volume, and then you can add sort of, I guess, additions onto those keywords that you know maybe make it more specific to your organization, you can do things like a nonprofit XYZ, something like that. Something maybe you may intend to write something as a, you know, long tail keyword, but it's being indexed by Google as a single one. That's still good. You know maybe we'll be able to figure that out like hey we're really ranking for this one word in the middle of the long tail keyword that we implemented in our strategy. You know three months ago, you'd be able to see that you know in your, in your analytics and stuff like that. So that will help give you insight into what is actually happening. But you know try to write the most helpful informative information you can really focus on the user on the other end of the computer. And from there, apply all of your SEO knowledge from that point so don't just say hey, you know hamburgers are ranking really well on Google let me try and include hamburger in here. That's not going to be relevant or helpful to the people you're trying to to reach and interact with. So focus on that, and then within that frame of reference apply all the knowledge you have from SEO here. Great. Thank you Julian so much. If you have any other questions be sure to quickly put them in the chat. Otherwise we will move on. Great. If you have any questions, be sure to submit them in the text to community forums and we'll make sure one of our SEO experts can address them there. And we'll make sure that link is sent in the post event email as well. So before we close out we'd love to hear from you. What's one thing you learned today about SEO. Oh yes, people are putting things in. I heard that Google for nonprofits have become stricter for the 10 and I believe she she means the $10,000 month in credits. They have become stricter in some ways but they've also opened up quite a bit in the past so you used to not be able to do single word keywords you used to have to do phrases, they removed that they also opened up. You know, display ads as well. So one of the things that they are a little more strict about sometimes is nonprofits tend to deal with a lot of community issues and try and really solve problems. Sometimes the phrasing of those problems is deemed as you know inappropriate for some advertisers. So if you're a nonprofit that's trying to help with you know maybe drug abuse rehabilitation, or you know maybe domestic violence or a lot of even things about, you know, first time home buyers if you're an organization that does something like that, Google is going to give a lot more sort of attention to, to your accounts, and you may have to do some you know manual appeals and stuff like that. So, while while there are, you know some things that they are stricter about is not going to be, you know broadly applicable to everybody, but if you are one of those organizations I would say really just be conscious of the way you're phrasing this. I mean I'll leave a lot of the, if you're getting hit for like a repeated offensive to Google not generally keyword, you know maybe include that on the website page but find a different way to talk about that for the advertising so you can make the $10,000 a month. One of the things that we see nonprofits run into quite a bit is that you're working in such niche communities or niche problem areas that the search volume on the terms you're trying to reach, you know preclude you from using that full $10,000 a month you might be only using, you know $700 a month just because hey 30 people a month of searching for this. It's still a worthy cause you're going to help those 30 people and get them the information they need, but just sort of be aware there are a lot of caveats with that and it's very hard to reach the full $10,000 utilization each month, especially for nonprofits that are doing you know very specific and helpful work. Great. Thank you Julian. Brian shares guest blog posting is a great idea. Learning about new SEO tools or ones I haven't tried in a long time is very helpful. Thank you for sharing Brian. I guess we have one more question in the chat. Before we wrap up tea says I learned about good console and not quite sure what is going on with Google Analytics before July 1. Can you explain before so for quite a while the way that Google Analytics was working is that it had something called universal analytics, and it was a fairly standard existed for quite a while. And then you know they've been developing Google Analytics for for a couple years and still in development but they're having the hard launch so the sunset in universal analytics, meaning that the way they're capturing data, you know, you know usage data, you know scrolls events things like that in universal analytics, it's basically so different that you know they need to have a complete version update. So with that something that's really important to know is that you need to install the new tag and get that information in the proper format. The way did they do that now is they just track events, a page view is an events. You know like I mentioned a file download click as an event, things like that. So just changing over the way that they intake data means that they need to really separate the old stuff from the new stuff. So July 1 is the date they provided we're saying hey, the old way, not going to get anything new if you want any new data from July 1 onward need to be on the on the new platform. Great. Thank you so much Julian. And again if anyone ever has any other questions, please feel free to post them in the text to community forums will make sure one of our SEO experts can answer that for you. So thank you again, especially to the behind the scene producers and staff at TechSoup who made this event possible. Before we say goodbye, please be sure to complete our post event survey. You'll find it in the chat and it'll also pop up automatically once you close zoom. Again, we will be sharing the replay from today's event, along with the slides and any links mentioned in the email within a few days. Thank you everyone for joining us. We hope to see you soon.