 and live. So welcome everybody to this webinar hosted by TechSoup. This is SEO strategies for your nonprofit boosting visibility and traffic to your website. I said it right. That's a tongue twister but it's so so important. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here. I'm going to show you how you can engage in the webinar in just a second. I know many of you have been here before but if this is your first time what's really important is that this is being recorded and it's going to be sent to you with the slides and the video replay within 48 hours probably tomorrow. We would love if you would type your question in the Q&A. As I said a few seconds ago there's hundreds of people who will register for this webinar so a lot of times we will miss your question if you put it in the chat. We'll try our best to capture it in the chat but please put your questions in the Q&A. If you need the closed caption somebody has already turned it on just click on the CC button at the bottom of your Zoom menu and you'll be able to see the captions at the bottom of the screen. So I'm going to get ready to tell you about something really exciting here at TechSoup. It's called Quad. I'm going to put a link for Quad in the chat in just a moment. I'll do it throughout the program but it's a peer-to-peer community. It's something new we're doing here at TechSoup. You're going to have exclusive events and expert technical support just for you. What I love about Quad though for the courses. We have hundreds of courses here at TechSoup but if you are a member of Quad then 10 of your people in your community or in your nonprofit say you want somebody to take a course in Excel. It doesn't have to be just you. It's going to be 10 other people who also be able to take that course for free. So that's exciting. I want to share that with you again. I'll be dropping the link in just a moment. But you're here to learn about SEO. So I'm getting ready to turn this over to our speakers here from our partners at TAP. And I want to introduce Julian Grace. He's going to tell you more about himself in just a moment and Jason Spangler. So Julian, I'm going to turn this over to you. Thank you both for being here. Good afternoon. Hey, man. Happy to be here. So my name is Julian. I'm the Digital Solutions Manager here at TAP. So I work a lot with analytics, troubleshooting, a lot of SEO related things, touch on a lot of the nitty gritty of keeping websites and other products up to date and functioning properly. And I'm Jason Spangler. I'm our Director of Business Development. I kind of sit on the front lines on the TAP team to where a lot of the inquiries from TechSoup members that are coming in looking for help. I help them kind of identify what their biggest needs are and then reasonable ways to achieve them. So oftentimes a lot of the conversations I have lead to people like Julian on our team. A little background on TAP network. We're a full service digital marketing agency that has partnered with TechSoup now for over eight years. Together we have been able to provide a tremendous amount of marketing thought leadership and expertise to thousands of their members. While there are many ways to engage with our team today, we really want to focus on SEO and the impact it can have on your digital presence. A little overview. So today we're going to go over what is SEO. We're trying to keep this very conversational and interactive on your end. How SEO can gain you new users and visibility and then practical applications. So jumping right into what is SEO. So what is SEO? For short, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. By definition, this is a set of practices designed to maximize your website's discoverability and relevance to search engines. These practices include optimizing UX or user experience if you've heard the term, copywriting, content strategy, and technical configuration. Why is it important? Is it is directly responsible for increasing your search visibility and mission awareness? Yeah, I think it's pretty straightforward, but now there are some rules to this. It is a zero-sum game and only the search engine does a score or Google. Let's be straight for this. I mean, this is Google's game and we're simply invited to participate. I mean, modern societies are reliant on Google's tools has led to really an all-out competition or warf in what we call SEO. This is a competition where your organization is vying against others to establish and maintain that digital relevance to ensure that you get the visibility you deserve. Julian, why don't you kind of go over some of the number two that you cannot cheat the system? I think this is wildly important. Definitely. And so when we hear that all these people are really up against all these other organizations to rank for a certain keyword, people are always looking for an edge, or to find some way to circumvent things or do something that other people don't know. It's really not possible here. There's no way where you can type the keywords you want 100 times in invisible text or buying backlinks or things like that. Those are all going to hurt you in the long run. There's no shortcuts or really things you can do. The best you want to do is optimize what you have based on the guidelines that we're able to see from Google. Focus on the quality of that, and then also make sure you're putting out enough content. It's not just do a whole bunch of pages so you have a lot of pages on your site that have the same keyword. You need to make sure they're quality too so you can't sacrifice any one end of the scale. You've got to create a balanced experience and do the best you can for your sites and really move forward from there. There's no way that you're going to be able to get the edge on Google to make yourself show up number one for anything you want in the world. That's important, Julian. I think the other piece here is that SEO, your success is limited, and that's because it's not a one-and-done process. This is something that your results are going to vary based on multiple factors. Some are your competition, your targeted space, who you're after, your ability to make adjustments when Google's making continuous updates to their algorithm and how search is done in general. I think even with the rise of AI, we're seeing it's all about establishing that relevance and not diluting yourself, ensuring that your content is relevant and it directly speaks to other, let's say, points that are very well established or have good authority. Definitely. I'm going to give you some handy terms. As you know, we're going through a lot of SEO stuff. I want to make sure that you're familiar with some of the things that you're going to run into either in this webinar or as you're doing some other Google searches or we're doing some personal education. The first thing is organic and paid. Organic is when you're basically not paying for something just the way that you'll show up in normal searches. Then there's two sets of terms that match with those. Organic and paid keywords and organic and paid competitors. Keywords are the things that you're trying to rank for. They could be terms, not just necessarily specific words, but terms or phrases that you're trying to rank for. You can do that organically where Google indexes your site, crawls it, and then spits out your ranking from there. You can do things like Google ads, if you don't know nonprofits, get $10,000 a month in Google advertising. TechSoup verifies that so you're able to do that. Paid advertising is usually good to fill in the gaps that you see in your organic keywords. You can supplement that with some paid keywords there. Your competitors aren't even necessarily people who do the exact same thing as you, but those are the people who are ranking for those same keywords as you. If they're trying to run ads on the same keywords, they're a paid competitor. If they have the same sort of number of keywords and similar rankings, they're a organic competitor. Backlinks are a fairly social aspect of the internet. They're basically the number of places that your website is linked to elsewhere on the internet. You can sort of qualify that. There are tags you can add that we can get into where you say, hey, I want to link to the site, but I don't want to give them a backlink. You can specify that. Basically, the more places that your page or site is linked to on the internet, that raises your authority score and it will also raise your ranking as well. Those are really good things to have. It's not something you can necessarily set up yourself, and that's why I call it a social aspect. You really either need to reach out to people or just get noticed enough where your site is then linked to elsewhere. Readability is another big one. The quality of your content does matter for your searches. Readability is basically there are some algorithms out there that output a score. It's basically how easy and simple it is to read the text on your site, how well it communicates the message on what you're trying to get across. Another thing I want to call out is we call them SERP features or search snippets. These are things that Google might pop out on top of any search results. Perhaps if you search a business, you'll see the business sidebar. That's the type of snippet. If you search for who's the king of France in 1500, Google now tries to give you the answer right away rather than trying to get people onto the actual sites that they're listing below. This can be pretty frustrating because then the only person that benefits is Google. They're benefiting from the content that everybody's putting on their websites, but those websites aren't then getting the traffic on there. There are desirable snippets and there are undesirable ones. The basics for all of them is that you structure data. If you want to learn a little bit more about structured data, you can go to schema.org. It also is Google's choice. There's no way to sort of say, hey, I want this to show up here. I want this to pop up in exactly this manner. Same thing, even if you put in some meta descriptions as we'll get in later, Google ultimately decides what's being shown there. If you want to see if your page is eligible for any of these, you can go to this URL, type it in, and it will very matter of fact, they tell you, hey, there's no feature snippets available for this page. You might hear them or see them be called SERP features or SERP snippets. Those are search engine results page. That's an acronym you might want to know. Moral site, here's all the things that are going to show up on this site. That can be really helpful just to see what exactly your site is going to appear like for those. Some other terms, I mentioned those meta. There's a meta title, meta description, and meta keywords. Those are the major players there. The meta title, that's the blue text in a Google search result. You can set that specifically. You want to make sure that it's formatted correctly. It looks good. It also does have a heavy rank effect. If you want to rank for a keyword, a good thing to do is to include that keyword inside the title of your page. You want to make sure it ultimately makes sense. You don't want the title of your page to just be our random string of words together, but it does have a heavy rank effect. You want it to be unique for each page that you have on your site. The meta description, on the other hand, doesn't affect your ranking at all. However, it has a lot of effect on the actual human experience of the people who are searching for things. For the users that you're going to gain through search results, they might not be familiar with you. They have put in this general term and they're given a list. If you have two ads up top and 10 results on the bottom of the page, all these people vying for their attention, really put some time into writing out those meta descriptions so that they prompt action. They get people a little bit of a preview of what's on the site and shows them the value of clicking through. Sometimes, these also duplicate as the open graph descriptions or titles. Open graph is very similar to this meta information, but it's for social media. When you share a link on Facebook or LinkedIn, the title that appears there and the specific text that happens afterwards. There are also things called meta keywords. These have since been phased out and we consider them a waste of time. Specifically, setting a keyword isn't going to affect your ranking. It might be good if you're trying to use some tools to help you analyze how well your page content works for a given keyword, but overall, really focus on the meta title and meta description. The final term for today is robots. You might see it be called robots.txt. These are basically instructions you can put on to say, hey, Google, here's how I want you to call my site. So for example, you might have pages just for members or private pages that you're not quite ready to share yet. You can have things in there that say, hey, crawl these pages, don't crawl these pages. You can say for your backlinks, no, we want to give this backlink juice to these folks. We don't want it for this one. So there's some handy terms that, hopefully, as we go through the rest of this, we'll give you a better idea of what exactly we're talking about. So jumping into section two, how SEO helps you gain new users. I think that's the whole reason everyone's here. And, Julian, I know this breaks out into multiple parts. Some of these become much more technical, which is more in your expertise area, but I think it's typically broken up into three main sections. One is on-page SEO versus off-page and technical. For today's discussion, I know we're going to start talking about on-page and technical because that is your website and then technical SEO. Off-page typically has to do with social media and more of the backlinking that we refer to up front. So we're going to kind of shy away from that in today's discussion. Why don't you take over? Yeah, exactly. Off-page tends to be all the other digital marketing things that you're doing there. So we're going to keep it a little bit focused today. If we're looking at on-page SEO, there are some things that you can do just to sort of give you a brief overview of them. The first one you want to take a look at is your site user experience. So when we look at sites and analyze them and determine, hey, what work needs to be done or sort of how can we score this, the main metric we use is, how can this site be used as a tool? And we want users to be able to complete certain actions. We don't want somebody to just visit the website. We want them to sign up for an event, make a donation, volunteer with you. All these things, this site should work as a tool for your users, also for you to take off some administrative burden there. But we really want this to flow well. People should be able to find the content that you've spent so much time on and have it laid out in a really easy to use way. When we look at the site content as well, the copy on your entire site should reflect your ideal user's knowledge and language, not just your own. I've had some clients where they use very technical language that makes sense for them and the way they talk to maybe their government partners or things like this. But the actual language that their users are using is much more simplified. So you want to make sure that your content speaks to the people who you're trying to reach and not necessarily being just a reflection of your own knowledge as experts and leaders in that field. Another thing you want to take a look at is accessibility. There are a lot of things in 2022. There was an addendum to the ADA. So there's still not a formalized path for requirements for accessibility. There's a thing called WCAG that we go off of a lot of. But for the most part, you want to make sure that you're paying a little bit of attention to accessibility. Use things like HTML and heading tags so your site is structured. Even for people who are using screen readers, make sure that people can navigate through the site with their tab button and take a look at your color contrast. All these things are going to improve the actual experience on your site and then also help your ranking, as Google does take that into effect for how they're scoring your site. One big thing you really need to do is that your site should serve your user first and Google second. So all the things we mentioned before, while they do have an effect on your SEO, they're a huge benefit to the people who are using your site. Now, I think that's very important, Julian, because a lot of people, they need to remember who they're targeting. What is the message they're ultimately trying to say? Because long-term, I know with the rise of AI, search is changing and it's changing pretty rapidly. And I think ensuring that your messaging is speaking directly to your target audience is what's going to help keep you towards the top of these results. Exactly. When we take a look at technical SEO, these are the configuration things that you need to do to make sure that your site is technically sound. So one thing you want to take a look at is your site speed. Speed is a huge portion. One of the biggest things that I see when people are coming in for slow sites is huge images. So not just huge in dimensions, but file size as well. So really optimize your images either by adding a tool on your site that optimizes them for you or before you upload them. Make sure that you're keeping them definitely under one megabyte smaller if possible. And also see if whatever host you're using has a site cacher. A cache is basically a copy of your site that's served, ready to go that will update when you make updates, but otherwise it just speeds things up to get people to your site content a lot faster. Now the thing you want to take a look at is your site maps. So we're going to talk about Google Search Console a little bit later, but a site map is not necessarily the menu or the links in the footer where people can see all of your pages, but more like a technical document that you can then upload to Google and say, here's all the pages. Here's how they're organized. Here's what I want you to crawl rather than relying on the crawler itself to find all the pages. If you have a very complex site, sometimes there are things that the crawler might miss by uploading the site map. You can say, here's everything I got. Use this to crawl the site. We talked about that structured data. So that does seem to be the future that Google is moving towards by sort of trying to provide answers and context for things right inside of Google rather than on individual sites. So just keep that in mind. And then also one thing that we're going to look at is there's going to be a lack of a universal ranking. So as Google tries to provide these answers for you and really understand what you're asking, it's also going to say, okay, well, I'm going to try and understand the searcher a little bit more. These are going to be the way I'm going to organize the search results for this person. And it's going to have a slightly different ranking for other folks. Really just sort of pay attention to how you're structuring your data. So no matter what Google does or what other search engines you're going on, you just put your best foot forward. I was going to say on this structured data, I know you and I have gone back and forth on this, but I would love to hear you weigh in on your thoughts with how Google does serve up those answers without you going to their website. And if you think that's either a benefit or really it hurts nonprofits with what they're trying to drive with their mission. It can definitely hurt nonprofits, especially if you know you're running an awareness-based organization where you're trying to bring statistics and really help illustrate a problem. That's not to say that people who just see that answer don't then go click and learn more, but it's definitely sort of you lose the benefit. Some people who just want a quick piece of information, they're going to search it, see it, and close out of the tab before clicking anywhere. There are other options where you know there's things like business listings or other sort of knowledge-based items where you know that can lead to some more people getting in there or at least show that, hey, you're an authority. You're mentioning the source that you're an authority on whatever that piece of information is. So it's a double-edged sword. The way that I think you should handle it is really if you have it good, you're eligible for it. It's never going to hurt you to be eligible. It's just the structured data as a whole, those features, snippets, and things. Those tend to be a little bit of a net negative for individual websites. The benefits of the users can be debated, but for the actual websites, this tend to be a bit of a net negative. Seems like it gives you less control of your ability to frame the discussion. Correct. It isolates that information outside of the context of the rest of your site. And just the last thing I'm going to mention here is mobile responsiveness. Make sure your site works well on mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. So the speed of that, the layout of it, that's what it's going to take into consideration over the design of the desktop version. Really pay attention to that. Most of the people who are doing these Google searches are going to be on their phones now. This has been the case for quite a while, but just numbers have continued to shift where it really is the dominant method of, or I guess, dominant screen size that people are going on. So jumping into the last section we have here is SEO implementation and practical applications. Just kind of jump into what people can be doing today and how to get started, or when to ask for help. Yeah. So I want to outline some day one steps for success. These are things that you can do today that's really going to set you up to be incredibly effective managing your SEO moving forward. So the main thing I think I recommend for you to do is to install Google search console and Google analytics on your website. There are a couple of ways you can install them on a very basic level. You just put in some pieces of code in your site header, but this enables a couple of things. You can monitor your search engine performance. We'll get into how that happens and what you can do there. You'll be able to measure changes as you try and optimize for SEO. You'll be able to say, okay, this is where we work. This is where we are now. You'll also be able to know when to stop. So just by having metrics for how your site's performing, the availability of other improvements, you'll be able to say, okay, you know what? We're really, really well optimized now. I want to focus more of my attention on some other areas, maybe other campaigns, creating new pages, doing anything else that busy nonprofits are doing. I'm not sure if I've ever met a nonprofit that says, you know, I have so much time available. I'm really looking for, you know, some additional really nitty-gritty tasks to do in SEO. So knowing when to stop, these tools will give you that peace of mind to know, hey, I've done a lot of good work here. I'm able to move on to some other things. The end result of just installing these two tools, before you even get into anything more advanced is you'll have a baseline for long-term comparison. So it's not just a matter of making a change and then quickly viewing Google to see how that affects things. These things take time. They happen in time. So, you know, people are searching for different terms at different times of year. It's not like every day people search the exact, you know, the exact same number of people search for the exact same terms. It varies. More people search for charcoal grills, you know, during barbecue season than they will in the winter. So you're really going to need to look at these things on a longer timeframe. And then as you install, you know, analytics, you'd be able to see, hey, how are people actually getting on the site? What are they doing once they're here from Google Search? I was going to say, I think that handoff is important, Julian, because while we're talking about SEO today and how we get people to your site, ultimately we want to be able to track not just how they got to the site, but then how do they ultimately interact? And that's where the analytics comes in, correct? Exactly. So there's a metric inside of Google Analytics. It's called, you might see it as the source slash medium or just source, but you'd be able to separate your traffic from people who are clicking on direct lengths or typing your URL into the browser versus people who are getting there from organic or even paid search to be able to sort of isolate them and see, okay, well, they're getting on this page. Are they getting to the conversion options we want? Are they signing up for events? Are they sort of filling out the volunteer forms or getting involved with the program the way we want them to? You'd be able to see all that data inside of Google Analytics. It's a really powerful tool. It's free. And the sooner you set it up, the better. There's no way to access past data. So as soon as you get it on there, it'll start collecting all this information and then you can do stuff with it. One of the things you can do is set up some SEO reports. So there's a couple reports that you might want to do when we talk about keyword research or competitive analysis or things like that. But on a very basic level, if you just want to be able to see, hey, what are people searching that lead them to my site? What do they do after that? You can set up those reports and then take a look at them every month. Like I mentioned, this isn't an instantaneous thing. You're not going to want to be sort of monitoring this on a daily basis or things like this. But you'll be able to set this up and have that information that's most important to you ready to go. And I know I mentioned Google Search Console before. This is a really powerful tool because it's your direct connection to Google. You'll be able to upload site maps. You'll be able to see if there's any indexing errors, be able to see if there's any sort of feature snippets or things available for you. This is the main thing that you want to install. The way that they do it is you basically say, hey, I want to see all the search data for this website. And then they'll say, hey, do you own the website? There's a couple of different ways you can verify. One of the easiest ways is just adding a little record in there. Or sometimes if you have WordPress, the Google site kit plugin is the first Friday plugin will take care of all that for you. And then you'll get access to all that data. You'll be able to see the search terms, track rankings, see a little bit of search volume in there. There's a couple of different Google tools that are all involved. That's a very powerful tool to just see if there's any errors and really get started. You're able to see like, hey, why is this meta description that I updated still showing as the old one? You can log into that, see, when was the last time this page was crawled and say, hey, that's old information. I'd like to request you crawl this page again. And then we'll be able to set that and then Google will go about as it does. And Joey, when you say crawl it, that's because Google has to, you have to update its knowledge base, correct? So whenever you request a crawl, you're actually asking for it to update what it's serving to end users. Correct. Google doesn't have omnipotent knowledge of everything on the internet. They have tools that go out there, they're spiders or crawlers, that basically say, hey, we're going to go through the site, collect all this information so we can create our own index of it. And then their algorithm is what determines the order of all those results that they have. So one of the reasons that I mentioned that you want to have the live text on your site is that that's the way that Google is identifying what terms are on your sites. They're not looking at images or things like that. They're saying, okay, well, this site has this term on it. Let's put it in the pool for the potential rankings. And there's millions of results for each Google search you're going to want to do. And so there's a lot of these factors that come in and basically say, hey, well, this is the order we're going to put them in. This one seems to be more relevant to this user and this term based on the performance of the site, the authority of the site and the page itself. There's a lot that goes into it. And so sometimes you'll just need to sort of give a little nudge and say, hey, stuff has changed. Come back here, stick the tool on our site, and get this new information on there. One of the big things that after you've done all that technical setup that you're going to want to look at is the keyword research. So once you have Google search console, there's a couple of tools out there you can use, but really you're going to want to say, what am I making for? It may be completely different than what you expect. You're obviously going to want to rank for things like your brand name or sort of the area that you're in, but you're also going to want to rank for some general terms. So if you do, if you help people with maybe the down payment on their first home, you're not going to want to rank just for your organization name, because people who are going to be searching for them won't know your organization yet. You're going to want to be in the running for things like down payment assistance or first time home buyer, things like that. There are some tools out there with different free and paid levels, things like SEM rush, Moz, Ahrefs, just some plain old Google search things. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for long term planning, but just to get an idea of, hey, where do we show up for this? Just put it into Google and incognito browser and see what you get. There are different levels like I mentioned of this. Some of these tools have free versions where they might give you a little bit of information or maybe 10 results for your top 10 keywords and things like this. And then you might want to partner with an agency like TAP to get some more detailed reports and really in-depth technical analysis or sort of keyword planning there. And once you have these keywords, you can say, okay, well, we're ranking really well for these things. That's good to know. Or we need to include some more of these keywords on our site because we're ranking 41. That's going to be on the fifth page of Google. One was the last time that you've been on even the second page of Google for search results. It's not very often. So once you sort of have that plan to say, we want to rank for these keywords, these are doing well, these are completely gone, you can apply that to all the things that touch your website. So when you're auditing your content to maybe refresh it for updated information, see, hey, how can we incorporate some of these keywords and what we're putting out there when you're writing new blogs or our post event updates, things like that, include some of those keywords that just increases the visibility for everything on your site or even calls to action. One of the things that can help improve UX as well is instead of just having things like learn more or get involved, things like this, you can really put in some custom texts. It gives you an opportunity to put in a keyword there and it's going to be more relevant and prompt a little more action than just a general call to action on your site. So there's a lot of stuff you can do and keyword research is really the meat of all the things you're going to do when it comes to search engine optimization. You get those tools on there so you can understand what exactly you're doing. Then you do the keyword research to see, are we ranking for these terms? What terms are we ranking for that we don't want to be? Where do we need to sort of fill in the gaps or manage the distance between those two things? I think that's fantastic, Julian. I think overall, that really helps. So the goal of being able to measure all this is really so that your team, your mission, can be more intentional. You can see what's working, you can see what's not or maybe it'll highlight areas that you want to target instead, that had more relationship than you realized. Exactly. And there's some things to keep in mind with this as well. One is that this is not sort of a static item. There's not like, okay, well, here's the rules of SEO and they're going to be the same forever. There's small and major updates all the time. It can be helpful to just sort of maybe once a month check in some, check in on some articles with some sites to see, hey, has there been any movements in the search engine industry? What are some things that I might need to know about? Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of organizations change. So you might have a different name. You might be building a new website. You might delete or add pages. One thing that you're really going to want to pay attention to is how you manage to redirect. So you never want to have a page that was indexed by Google then lead to a 404. That's going to hurt the ranking obviously for that page because it's not going to show up anymore, but also for your whole site because it's going to have some 404 errors. So as you're, maybe if you're migrating to a new site, make sure that you have a list of all of your current pages and add redirects, 301 or 302 redirects to all the new pages. Or even if you're just deleting a page on your site, maybe you have an event page that goes away after the event's over, make sure that that page then redirects to maybe your general events calendar afterwards. Or you change the content on that page, then show, hey, this event has ended. Click here to register for the next one. So that's a big thing I want to keep in mind. For everyone else out there, a 404 error, just so you know, means the webpage doesn't exist. Just I joined highly technical and phenomenal at this, but I'm just trying to make sure everyone is able to follow what he's saying because it is truly impactful. In other words, you don't have dead links. Exactly. Exactly. So how can you reach out? Our team does a lot of things and that's one of those biggest, biggest questions I get in a lot of the conversations I have around, what are people's go-to-market strategies? What are those your biggest needs? What are the best places to get started? So we do have a couple of different ways for you guys to engage with our team as well as TechSoup. This is directly through their website. The biggest one, if you go to the link once these slides are sent out, how we can help, this is a way that you could book some time with Julian to have this discussion. He can answer some of these more in-depth questions because a lot of these, they're one-offs. What he answers and what he responds to, he's going to oftentimes be very specific to your unique goals and what you're trying to accomplish because it's not something, again, to your point, Julian, earlier, you can't copy and paste this from one site to another and expect success. In fact, it can be the opposite. But yeah, we do full website rebuilds, we do everything and all of that, it's interesting when I start looking at the redesign discussions for websites that I often have, a lot of that mirrors this because we need everything to be on point, everything to match your strategy. So all your messaging lines up and then you have a seamless client experience so that they can find you from their initial search, they get to your website where they're made aware of what you do, they can make that transition into someone that wants to get involved. And ultimately, we hope that you can make them into an evangelist, someone that's going to turn around and get you involved in their mission. Yeah. And like Jason mentioned, there's not sort of one set of rules out there that you can apply broadly to everybody. There are good steps that you want to do like, hey, include the key as you want to rank for on your site. But one method that works for an organization is not necessarily going to work for the other one. So we're going to jump into the Q&A and I think there's going to be a benefit for everybody, just sort of hearing how we're going to go through some of these questions. But definitely, if you have anything that you feel like isn't being covered, put it in the Q&A now. We definitely left some time to be able to answer all of them. I see we have quite a few already. So we'll just sort of go through these now. So we'll start from the top. One of the first ones is somebody applied for Google for Nonprofits, the Google ads, and they were approved for they're getting charged on their credit card. I would say one of the biggest things to see them stuff like that is just that you might not be using the Google ad account that is tied to the Google for Nonprofits thing. So you shouldn't be getting charged at all. With that one, I really just take a look at make sure that the account ID is the same that you're using and being charged on is the same as what's in the Google for Nonprofits area. And if not, you can sort of mitigate that. You also need to have a credit card in there. But the sort of trick I like to do with that is however many ads I'm running, I just make sure that the maximum spend I set is never above $9,999. And at that point, that's sort of safe enough for me to be able to say, okay, now we can go about some things. Next one we have here is Gabriella from Philly. I'm in Philadelphia as well asks, is there a way to test readability? There is. So there's quite a number of tools out there that you'll just be able to if you just type in readability test on Google, there are things we can put in your URL and it'll sort of give you a score there. There are also tools that you can install on your website. For example, if you're on WordPress, Yoast is a great SEO tool. One of the biggest benefits that it does for SEO is that it gives you a bulk editor. So if you're reading this and you're like, okay, well, I really want to set all my meta descriptions and my meta titles, you're then going to have to go into each page, hit edit, scroll down, type in all that stuff, hit publish, go back to pages and repeat that for each one. One of the biggest benefits I found for Yoast is the fact that it just gives you all that in the table and you can write each one there but also gives you things like readability, analyzes your site for the keywords that you're putting in to say, hey, I really want to make sure that this page ranks well for this term. And I'll say, maybe you can do some improvements or maybe the description's too long, things like that. Great tool out there but there's so many out there. Next one. I can pick the next one if you want. Scott, I understand you're looking to engage in a lengthy consolidation of two websites. First off, yes, I understand and condolences. This is a difficult task. The other is you ask, in the future, you want a single website that'll serve all your audiences. Are there any pitfalls you should avoid in this consolidation effort or things you can do since we're kind of wiping the slate clean with our current SEO on our sites? So from a website perspective, and I'm going to have Julian then weigh in on the SEO end, I think it's very important that you identify the content that needs to one transfer over in its current state. The content that then needs to be updated to match your new, let's say, forward appearance of your organization. The old content that should be deleted because you don't want it to impede your SEO performance or user experience. And then what needs to be added? Once you have that content bucket, that'll give you an idea of what you're trying to create. And then Julian, are there any things that you think are important when he makes that transition with those two sites that he needs to do from a technical aspect? Yeah, I definitely think redirects are going to be the big thing. If you're keeping one of the .org domains, you're not going to be starting with the completely clean slate. Obviously, things are going to be very different. But if you're able to keep just one of them, you won't be building from zero from there. But really just manage all the redirects, make sure that any sort of link that you have in there sends people to a page with something on it. That's the biggest thing you can do. And then beyond that, you can just upload a new sitemap to Google Search Console, request indexing, and that's really the best you can do, at least from that. There are all the other challenges that Jason mentioned, important to taking into consideration, but as far as the rest of the search stuff, it's fairly straightforward. Next, Carly asks, what are the main differences with SEO to be aware of when using a dynamic template or site instead of a static site? So both a dynamic site, like a WordPress and a static site, like maybe something built on a Jekyll or a Hugo or something like that, you're both going to have pages and each page should have the area for a title or a meta description. If perhaps you meant that if you're using a site that maybe only has one page, but all the content changes on it, depending on what you click, that's a little bit different. There are definitely things that you can do with whoever's building that site. So if you have one of those sort of very dynamic one-page site that adapts, you're going to be working with it like a little bit more of an advanced web tool. There are going to be ways to basically say, hey, it's going to be one page, and then you can tell Google when people go to this link, this is the content that appears. So it's like a little bit of a technical bit of like magic and sleight of hand, but there are tools out there that can adapt that. So depending on which way you meant dynamic and static, one's going to be very simple where they're exactly the same. The other one is a in that process of building that one-page website, there are going to be tools out there to install that availability of separate pages on that one-page website. So they're indexed separately, but also just appear as one. Someone asks, so if our site comes back as no rich results detected, what do we do? Well, there's two options from there. One, you can do nothing and move on and that might just be fine. The other one is add some structured data and take a look at schema.org and see one of those things that would warrant, you know, having a rich result of some kind in there. So I don't necessarily think it's worth chasing, but if you're like, hey, no, this makes sense. We should appear for some of these things. Just add some of that data on your site marked up with the proper structure. Gabriella again asks, is there a way to test accessibility on existing website? So there's a couple of different levels to this. There are some things you'll be able to do on your own and other ones you're going to want to partner with some folks who have access to some more advanced tools. Some things out there are GT metrics, might be a good one, or web aim, AIM. They have a tool called Wave. It's basically, I think it's website accessibility. I don't remember what VE is, but I'll test things like, hey, is your content structure properly using the right H1 tags? You know, what's the color contrast look like? Is your background light and your text light, is it hard to read? Are you missing alt text on things? That's a great way to get a quick overview of the accessibility. From there, that grows into more technical configurations and more advanced options. Especially when you're looking to resolve some of those issues, that's where it can get a little bit tricky. Identifying them is one thing. Resolving them is another in there. The next one, Julianne, for me. What does functioning within HTML mean? Sorry if I missed that when we were talking. I was trying to keep everything where it's easy to follow. Describe that for us, Julianne, because I'm also confused there. Yeah. I think there's a little bit of a misreading in this. You don't necessarily function within HTML, but everything on the internet is usually in HTML language. That's basically saying, hey, when there's a paragraph, it's in these P tags. There's a little carrot, the P, and another carrot, and then it closes itself. When we want to be HTML compliant, one should happen automatically, but the most important text should be in H1, and then you're going to have one of those on your page. Then if we have subsections on that page, use the H2 tag, and you might have two of those. In each one of those H2 tags, you might have some subheadings. You might have two H3 tags in one of them. The reason that's important is, one, it makes things usually lay out a little bit better. There's usually some stylings that make things appear, give a visual hierarchy as well. You don't just want to be using the heading tags as, oh, I want the text to look like this. Let me make this an H3 or an H1. You want to use these more structured things, but also people using screen readers, it really helps that technology parse the information on the site a lot better. It structures everything out and really helps people who aren't using, who are using maybe visual assistance tools or things like that. It really helps them out. John asks, would you be able to give a plain language explanation of Google console? Also, we get these SEM Rush reports all the time. Is this information that is actionable? I'll answer this in reverse. Depending on what that SEM Rush report says, possibly. It might just say, hey, your ranking went down for this, and you're saying, okay, well, we optimized this best we could. It is what it is, and you move on with your life. They're saying, hey, we're detecting that there's an issue on your site. There might be a broken link on this page, or this page now leads to a 404. That can be really important to say, okay, hey, I really need to take a look at this. Let me jump in. A plain language explanation of Google search console is it's your direct connection to the Google search engine. So if you want to see when things were last crawled, there's any crawling errors on the sites. If you want to give them a sitemap to look at, that's your direct plug into the Google search engine. It's your ability to provide them the ways you want to be viewed. That's the easiest way. John, I think it's also important, as Julie and I go back and forth on this, Google doesn't provide, it's not a full transparency. This is something that they provide you the amount of information they want. They don't necessarily always provide you all the ways, because if they do, arguably some of their search isn't organic. It is controlled. So they try to keep some of it vague purposely to ensure that you're served up the real results and not the results people are marketing towards essentially. Audrey asks, can you recommend a WordPress plugin for site caching? We really like the tools by SiteGround. So it's just called a speed optimizer inside of SiteGround. That being said, there's a whole bunch of them out there. If your site's on WordPress.com, instead of just WordPress, there's options that come with the default like a Jetpack stuff. Really, I would just take a look at, if you're looking for a site caching tool, you probably won't need to pay for one, but just look for one that has a good number of ratings, a good number of downloads, and has been updated fairly recently. There's so many things out there for WordPress. It's hard to say, here's a comprehensive list of good ones and bad ones, but really just go with the crowd consensus there. If it's really bad, people will let you know in the reviews and the ratings. So really just look at some of the more reputable ones, but like I said, we are a fan of the SiteGround plugins for this. MHTC asks a really good question. If we're using HubSpot for our website, do we still need to use Google Analytics Research Console? I think the same stats are available within HubSpot. We love HubSpot here at Tap. We use it all the time. We're a HubSpot partner. And while you might get some similar information to Google Analytics, I still think it's important to add Google Analytics. They work really well together, just because Google Analytics is going to give you some information that HubSpot necessarily won't. If you open your data stream, and this may be a little more advanced, we can always talk about it if you want to learn more about Google Analytics. But there's things called enhanced measurement where you'll be able to track file downloads, form interactions, things like this on your site that give you additional information than just what HubSpot is doing. So HubSpot might say, okay, this person filled out this form, they're added to your CRM automatically. That's great. But you can also just get a little more context of that information outside of the HubSpot ecosystem, on-site of Google Analytics. And then for Google Search Console, I still think that's an important tool because that's going to give you the information, your connection directly to Google, and that's something HubSpot won't be able to do. So in short, adding Google Analytics to HubSpot only gives you more information, can be very helpful there, and you can still build all of your reports in HubSpot. And then Google Search Console sort of stands on its own. That's going to give you a lot of benefit and some additional information as well. Pretty much user action prior to getting to your site. Mm-hmm. Paul asks, I've been trying for months to get our 16 content pages indexed. Google Search Console got to 13 and then took two more out again and spent weeks with just 11 out of 16. All content was updated in September. So one of the first things you can do is make sure that you have a sitemap installed and it'll usually be an XML file. So sitemap.xml or whatever the URL is going to be and say, hey, Google, here's my sitemap. Take a look at index things. And once you upload that sitemap, instead of just saying, hey, we indexed 11 out of these, it'll say we indexed 11 and we didn't index these five and it will give you reasons why. So once you have that sitemap installed, you'll say or crawl all of these and for whatever reason, you know, they don't index some of them. It will give you the reason why. And I think that'll be your best step to get the information as to maybe this configuration error or it's just sort of maybe they're heavily orphaned pages or something like that. Upload that sitemap and then try again. It'll give you some additional information. Someone asks thoughts on Google Analytics. Google Search Console. Yeah, they really, they do two different things. So Google Search Console is how you're interacting with a search engine and Google Analytics is saying, how are people using the site? And within Google Analytics, you can say, how are people who got here from Google Search using the site? So you can sort of separate that out. So they use two things that they do two things and they're quite different. They work really well together. Sometimes you can get confusing. There's so many tools out there like Google has a keyword planner where you can do some keyword research. And but it's not necessarily connected in any way to Google Search Console or Google Analytics or even Google Ads. Some of them can be connected, but they're not inherently connected. So sometimes you can get a little bit confusing just because there's so many things out there. But really just take a look at what they're doing. And for those two specifically, I would recommend them both. Pat asks, does GoDaddy automatically set up my website with Analytics and Search Console? It will not. It may have a wizard to help you get those set up, but it won't do it automatically. One of the things you're going to need with Google Analytics is a Google email address. So if your business hosts their sort of work or enterprise email through Google, you can use that. Otherwise, you need to create a Gmail address. And that way that you'll get, you'll get those metrics inside of Google Analytics, you'll be able to create an account and sign all that up. For Google Search Console, like I say, they have all that information. And when they're saying, okay, well, somebody wants to view all the search engine information for this website, we want to make sure that they actually own the website. We don't want to just give this out to anybody. So you're going to have to authenticate that in some way. So GoDaddy may provide you some tools to sort of assist with that. But for the most part, it's going to be something you're going to need to set up manually. Someone asks, do you recommend requesting a Google crawl on a periodic basis and or whenever you make major changes on your website? I would not. Maybe you do it for fun every six months. But for the most part, this is going to be managed fairly efficiently by Google. I would say the main thing you can want to do is if there's any errors or you notice saying, hey, I updated this, you know, a couple of days ago, maybe last week or earlier in the month, and it's still not there, then you can request indexing. But for the most parts, it'll happen automatically. And you should be good to go with that. And I think tied to that question, they follow up and say, how long should we plan to wait after installing Google Search Console and following the correct path to keyword research, et cetera, to expect results? So I say, if you're, you install Google Search Console and you say, okay, this is what people are getting here for. And maybe you do some keyword research and you say, these are the 10 new keywords you want to start ranking for. I've included them on our sites, you know, added them to the contents, waits close to a month. You know, you might get stuck within like two weeks, but it really needs time to sort of filter out. One, you need to be indexed with the new information. Two, they need information on whether people are going to click on that or not. And then three, you're going to want to have enough information to go off. Like I said before, where people search patterns, differentiate, some months people might search for a lot more stuff than others. So really think of this as a long-term process. And one of the reasons, this is also one of the reasons why we say, serve your users first in Google Second. So you can make these changes and say, hey, we really want to rank these keywords because it seems like this is what's going to be most helpful for the people we're trying to reach and help. You know, you can change the site for them, include that information for those users. And then the secondary benefit is that you're going to get that increased search performance in there. And if you don't, you're only going to really be able to see that on a longer time. So I say, you know, three weeks to a month is when it's going to be worth checking out the data to measure any impact of those changes. WP staging is in our URL. Is that killing your SEO? So that can depend on a lot of things. If you're using a staging site, it probably definitely is because a lot of staging sites are not indexed by search engines. Another thing that this sort of brings up is if you use WordPress in the Settings tab, and I believe it's reading in there, there's a little checkbox that says, discourage search engines from indexing our site. Sometimes people come in with SEO issues like we just can't rank for these terms. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, let me check it out. We'll see what we do. We uncheck that and they're good to go for the most part. So it could be that it's just a matter of using a staging site instead of the live one. Maybe you just need to deploy that live site on there. But still, that's a very general URL. So I would really recommend getting a unique URL. If it's for whatever region you're using, like one of those default ones, you can usually pick up a domain name for like $14 to $25 a year. Definitely take a look at that. You said that setting a keyword will not affect the SEO rating. Is there any value in adding a keyword on web pages at all? Yoast still prioritizes it. Yoast still does prioritize it. We just consider it prioritizing it for Yoast itself more so than Google. So it can be helpful to sort of, hey, we want to rank for this keyword. No, you also say which keywords you want to rank for. Put them in here. We'll analyze the content on your site. So it can be helpful for you. It just won't affect your ranking. And then there's another one that we talked quite a bit here at the agency about, are there any suggestions for using artificial intelligence to optimize SEO? And so there are tools out there that might give you suggestions for SEO that use AI. I would not recommend just sort of connecting one up and having it run your SEO wholesale. You really don't want to be, you want to create unique contents that you sort of only you can create and using AI to sort of do some of these things. It might just be chasing that Google ranking. And it might also just be wrong. That's the other thing that people sort of might not take into consideration. It might give you bad suggestions. So it can be helpful to sort of say, hey, give me some suggestions for how to maybe add this keyword in the meta description. Say, and that doesn't seem quite right. I don't think people would really read that. Hey, you sort of take their suggestions, but I definitely wouldn't recommend hooking that up to manage your SEO wholesale or just sort of automatically update your content because it's going to be pulling from different sources. They want to make sure that the stuff on your site is unique to your site. Correct. And it can be it's pulling from existing stuff stuff that contents already been pulled. So it's not going to be forward thinking and to your point, Julian, it's not going to differentiate you at all. You're just going to blend in more. Exactly. So we have four more questions and five minutes. I think we can get through them all. So definitely if you have more, you can sign up and talk to us afterwards. And you also get some of these slides to sort of replay back some of the answers. I know we talked kind of fast this Q&A. Is it crucial to have evergreen content to optimize SEO such as a newsletter or blog? So I'm going to answer this in two parts. One, it is important to have evergreen content. You sort of want to have those core sometimes they're called like pillar content or things like that. I want to say this is what the site's about. It's going to be there. Newsletter or blogs are not going to necessarily be evergreen content, though, because your newsletters and blogs are going to get updated constantly. So they might live there for quite a while and in turn become evergreen. But just sort of the functionality of putting up the archive of your newsletter or writing new blog articles, that sort of refreshes your content. So it's going to keep things new until Google, hey, there's new stuff being added to the site that's being actively maintained and updated, maybe sort of increased their ranking a little bit. So yes, on two ends, but in two different directions. Caesar asks, when I search my blog at times does not show up on the search engine. One of the biggest things they see just from the link you shared is that it's using HTTP. So in order to be indexed properly, you need to have a SSL certificate. There are a variety of tools out there that can get them for free, depending on sort of what host you're using. Sometimes if you're not eligible for a small yearly fee, you can get one, but you want to be on HTTPS. The other thing that you might run into is that you're using a blog.blogspot.com domain. So what that means is your actual domain is blogspot.com and you have a slice of it in there. So you're getting the benefit of having all the stuff for blogspot.com on there, but you can't really control any other information or how it prioritizes all of its subdomains, because everybody else is also getting whose host on blogspot also has it on there. So I think the two steps you're going to want to take is one, make sure that you're optimizing for just a few number of keywords, and you get that SSL certificate on there. And I think if you can take a look in Google Search Console, they'll be able to tell you if there's any other errors or stuff you need to pay attention to. Mark asks, I don't know if I missed this, is there a tool that will do keyword research for your site? There's quite a number of tools, SEMrush, Moz, Ahref, Google Keyword Planner. The first three have free and paid options, and it'll just change the amount of information and sort of sometimes quality of information you get. But those are, I think, enough to get you started. And just once again, SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner, there's maybe like 20 more that would be recommended worthy, but we just don't have time to go through today. And last question of the afternoon, Monette asks, what about sites created by Flip Cause? So I'm going to sort of expand this into sites that are created on any number of platforms. So these things that we're talking about are not necessarily platform dependent. You heard me talk about sort of that dynamic and static site difference before, but for the most parts, Google Search doesn't necessarily care if you coded your website by hand or you use WordPress or you use a Wix or Flip Cause or anything like that. It's really saying, hey, there's an HTML page out there, hosted somewhere. Does it load fast? Does it have a good user experience? Does it have these keywords on here? Sort of what other pages are on there? Is it being linked to by other websites? That's the way that Google is calling those sites. It does not, at least that we know of, does not prioritize any sort of specific web, web builder at all. All the information that you got here will work across any website. So those are just good rules of thumbs. You can check everything with the same amount of tools. No matter what you use, the biggest difference is going to be using, you know, WordPress has plugins versus Wix doesn't. They might have apps. And, you know, if you're coding it yourself, you're completely on your own. You need to type all the stuff out manually. So things like that. That's the last of the questions we got to do quite a lot today. I appreciate everyone joining us today. This has been very impactful. Again, to Julian's point, we would love to further these chats and questions if you have need. And we invite the opportunity. So appreciate you all. Have a wonderful day.