 Everyone, we've got about a minute before the webinar really gets started. Before we hit the three o'clock hour at Eastern Time, I just wanted to make sure that you guys can all hear me and see my screen. You should see the title slide now, and I'm just gonna move between a couple of slides. So if you can see me and hear me, if you could just let me know in the questions box on your GoToWebinar panel, I'd really appreciate it, just so I don't start presenting to the ether. All right, looks like you can all see and hear me, which is great. So we'll just give everybody a minute to log on and then we'll get started. All right, well, thank you guys for joining me today for our Mighty Causes webinar on SEO for non-profits. It's a really interesting topic and kind of a different one for us. So I'm really excited to get started. My name is Linda Gerhardt, and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager for Mighty Causes. I've been with Mighty Causes since 2016, and my background is in digital communications for non-profits. So one of the things I help with at Mighty Causes is our SEO strategy, and that involves a lot of different things we'll discuss as part of this webinar. But I do have firsthand experience with SEO as part of what I do every day. And I hope I'm able to share some information that'll help your non-profit optimize your website and rank higher in searches. Here's a look at today's agenda. We're gonna try to keep this webinar as an intro to SEO and not get too lost in the weeds because SEO is a big topic and a full-time job. But because we know non-profits have staff members that wear a lot of hats, we're gonna go through the basics, give you the background you need to understand SEO, and share some tips and some quick wins that will help you start focusing on it at your organization. Just as a bit of housekeeping, just to keep things rolling, I'll be taking questions at the end of the webinar. So if you think of something you wanna ask while I'm presenting, just stick that question into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And I'll make sure that we make time to answer your question at the end. In case this is your first webinar with Mighty Cause or you're not familiar with who we are, I just wanted to take a minute to introduce the platform to you. Mighty Cause was founded in 2006 as Razoo, and we changed our name about a year ago when we became an employee-owned company. We're one of the only platforms left in the industry that is not funded by venture capitalists, and we're a full-service nonprofit fundraising suite. And we have the most affordable pricing in the industry with our new pricing guarantee, making our platform even cheaper to use than PayPal. But instead of just a PayPal button for that price, you have a full suite of products at your disposal. Our primary customers are small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations. And since we were founded in 2006, we raised over $650 million for causes on our platform. I wanted to give you a quick peek at the product suite for Mighty Cause, which is really designed so that entry-level users and experts can get just as much out of it. Nonprofits on Mighty Cause all have a beautiful, customizable nonprofit profile where you can tell your story, collect donations, share photos and videos that illustrate what your nonprofit does. We also offer peer-to-peer fundraising along with the best team and event fundraising tools on the market. So if you have an event coming up this summer or this spring and you want to incorporate some peer-to-peer fundraising, we are definitely the best platform for that. Our event fundraising technology was upgraded at the beginning of the year, and it's better than ever. You also get a bunch of tools to collect donations, such as a donation widget and donation forms. And you've also got the ability to customize the checkout process so that you can be sure you're getting the information you need from your donors. We offer a comprehensive reporting on your donations and you have full control over your donor data. We will never contact your donors. We will never try to sell your donors anything. Your donors are yours and all we ever do is send them receipts and transactional emails. But you have full access to all of the information that they provided. We never hold it over your head or make you jump through any hoops to get that information. If you are familiar with Mighty Cause and you're an existing user or you just want to make sure that you have access to all the tools we have available, one thing you can consider is a subscription to Mighty Cause Advanced. It's just $99 per month, which you can pay annually or monthly based on whatever works best for your nonprofit and your budget. And with a subscription, you'll gain access to some additional tools that will help you take your fundraising to the next level, including our supporter CRM tool, which creates records for each donor, each fundraiser and each volunteer, advanced analytics to dig into your nonprofit's fundraising metrics. And this is new and you're actually getting an exclusive announcement here today, but we just launched Text2Give, which is available to all advanced subscribers. So that's just a glimpse of what you'll get with a subscription to Mighty Cause and an overall look at the platform before we start digging into SEO. So we're going to start talking about SEO in a very obvious place, which is what even is SEO? And SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. So basically SEO is about being seen. It's about ranking higher in search engine results so that more people can find your nonprofit and get to your website. You do this with a combination of site design and content that's built on your website. And the idea behind it is not getting anyone and everyone to your nonprofit's website, but getting the right people to your website at the right time for the right reasons. So through SEO, you'll increase the volume of traffic you get to your site, but you'll also be working to improve the quality of the traffic you get to your site. And we'll talk a little bit more about what that means specifically in a few slides. For the purposes of this webinar, when I say website, I mean your nonprofit's own domain and not your Mighty Cause page. Because while Mighty Cause has a lot of tools that you can use to support with your donations and it can sort of act as that first online space that you have as a new nonprofit, we really own that domain. You own your domain. So you don't really have a lot of control over what happens on Mighty Cause in terms of SEO, but you have total control over your own domain. So that's really what I'm talking about on this webinar. When I say your website, I mean something that you maintain yourself through a content management system or CMS like Wix or WordPress or Squarespace. SEO is a topic that really does have its own language. So before we get too deep, I wanted to take a moment to define some terms that we'll be using in this webinar and you'll also see over and over again if you do some research into SEO on your own. The first term is SERP. That's S-E-R-P, which is a search engine results page. So basically when you Google something, the SERP is what you see. It's the results that are given to you by Google. And it's worth noting here that your SERP may look different from someone else's SERP or my SERP. These days SERPs are very much individualized based on what search engines and the companies who own them know about you, which is quite a bit if you're Google. Next is keywords and keywords are so important in SEO that we have a whole section of slides just on keywords. But all you need to know right now is that a keyword is a term that is used to describe your page and also how users might search for your page. A keyword can be just a single word, but it can also, as most often, an entire phrase. So if you're searching for some shoes and let's say you wanted to specifically find wide-width black flats, that whole phrase would be your keyword. It would not just be flats, not be women's flats. It would be wide-width black flats because that is specifically what you are searching for. Organic is another word that you'll hear a lot and it's got a very different definition than what you'll see at the grocery store when it comes to digital marketing and SEO. Organic basically just means unpaid. Organic search is your ranking on a SERP or search engine results page that you did not pay for and is entirely based on a search engine crawling your page and deciding to show that link to a user because it decided it would be useful to them. And organic traffic is the volume of users who are getting to your page through unpaid channels like a link in organic search results. SEM is something you'll see a lot and that's just an acronym that means search engine marketing and that's an umbrella term that describes anything you do to market your website and your brand through search engines. So that can include organic search and SEO and it also includes things like Google ads that are paid. And then finally we have spider or crawl which are kind of creepy ways to describe the same thing. A spider is a piece of software that crawls the worldwide web gathering information and then the spider takes that information or that data it collects back to the search engine. Now Google doesn't just crawl the web specifically for you so if you're Googling how Game of Thrones ended it's not going to crawl every website on the internet to try and find that answer for you because that requires an incredible amount of work. So instead what the spider or crawler does is it stores the data in indexes so that when you do search for those Game of Thrones spoilers it already has that data stored and can quickly pull up the most relevant web pages for you so that you can find out who sat on the Iron Throne. It recrawls web pages and updates these indexes periodically it doesn't do it every hour or every day. So that's why sometimes if you make a change to your web page or your website and then you Google it you may not see that reflected immediately. That's because Google needs to recrawl your page and get that more up to date information. Alright so now that we've got some vocabulary out of the way we'll move into what SEO actually does. As we mentioned a few moments ago SEO helps increase the quantity of your traffic. It basically brings more front people to your digital front door because you've made it easy to find you and it also improves the quality of that traffic meaning that the people you're bringing to your site are the people you actually want there it is meaningful traffic. So through the smart use of SEO you'll be able to help more people in your community find your nonprofit and hopefully filter out people who are searching terms in different countries or different cities and just looking for things that you can't really help them with because sometimes you'll find that with Google results too you'll end up on a page and you're like I don't know what this is and it doesn't have anything to do with me smart SEO cuts down on that experience for both you and the user. And it also just boosts your visibility being a first second or third ranking page on a high volume search can really be a game changer for your website and your brand and really just help you establish your online presence. If you have something in particular you're looking to boost invisibility a particular page that you're looking to get more eyes on being thoughtful about SEO can help you get the traffic and attention that you're looking for. And finally it helps you market your nonprofit without sinking lots of money into it. SEO may require the help of a webmaster and maybe a few tools here and there but it's otherwise totally free. You don't have to pay for this because it's organic placement in search engine results pager SERPs. It's just about editing your site structure adding a few things here and there and how you create content for your site. And if you do at some point want to decide that you want to invest in search engine marketing or some or get a Google ad grant SEO provides the structure you need to really succeed at those things. There are different types of SEO to and we'll hit on every one of these types in this webinar on page SEO is most important and it's usually what people are talking about when they talk about SEO and it's exactly what it sounds like it's the things you do on a page that helps search engines find that page and understand what it's for and show it to users who might be interested in it off page SEO are things you do outside of your own website and domain like getting backlinks which we'll talk more about later black hat SEO is sort of the nasty underbelly of SEO the name comes from old westerns you had the black hats who are the bad guys and the white hats who are the good guys and black hat SEO is basically that there are always people who will want to try and figure out how to game the system and they'll use tricks that are either unethical or unsavory or outright and to try and stick trick search engines into ranking them higher in SERPs for whatever purpose and usually that purpose is showing them advertising white hat SEO is the other side of that white hat SEO are accepted encourages encourage tactics that are shared by search engines that really don't skate the line of what's allowed or try to trick users or search engines so all of the recommendations I'll be making during this webinar are white hat SEO but we will provide an example or two of black hat SEO just so you can understand what that looks like okay so if I haven't totally lost you or this seems like it's too complicated to care about you're not alone there are for profit businesses that get confused and overwhelmed by SEO but I want to explain why this is important to nonprofits why we decided to host this webinar and really explain what your nonprofit can get out of focusing on SEO. Ultimately what SEO is really great for is building your brand and every time I've hosted a webinar about marketing for nonprofits there are always some people who are hesitant or a little confused about this one point which is that nonprofits have a brand but you absolutely do and for nonprofits it's really important because having authority being trustworthy being trusted is what gets people to use your services and donate to your organizations if people don't trust you they won't come to you for assistance and they definitely aren't going to donate to you and search engines really are our primary way of getting information on any subject these days so if someone is interested in volunteering or donating for an organization that does what you do or needs more information about the subject your nonprofit works on or maybe heard from a friend about your nonprofit and they want to learn more about what you do you're really doing yourself a huge to service if your website is a mess or it's hard to find you'll miss out on helping people you'll miss out on volunteers and you'll miss out on donors too because your website is the digital front door to your nonprofit and search engines are a map to get there the cool thing about SEO is that it's not something you have to pay for it won't even necessarily help you be better at it it's all stuff you can do on your own or work with your webmaster on and you really don't need to lay out much money to improve your SEO it's just a set of simple tasks and different ways of thinking about presenting content and information to people that will help boost your visibility so sometimes nonprofits are really quick to ask about paid advertising or to lay money out for paid advertising but SEO really doesn't cost you anything and can have a huge impact for your nonprofit and your brand SEO will also help you meet people where they are and while I usually use the phrase meet people where they are figuratively this time I mean it literally because you're meeting them where they literally are which is where most of us are meaning that we're on Google we're searching for information on our smartphones SEO will help you connect with your constituency when they're actively seeking to help or information with whatever work your nonprofit does so for instance if I found a lost dog I might Google animal shelters near me and the first result I find will most likely be the first place I talk to about the dog which allows the animal shelter to help both me and the dog I found and hey when I walk in your door to give you the lost dog in hopes that they can find its owner I may leave some cash for you to donate to your work so that this dog might have a better chance or to give another example if I'm looking for meals on wheels for my grandmother or another service like that I'm going to Google it and the first result or two are going to be places I contact for help taking care of my beloved grandmother so this can sound pretty technical and robotic and I won't lie sometimes SEO is a little bit technical and robotic but this is the heart of what it's really all about for nonprofits you're making that first contact with a human being in your community who needs your help or your expertise or your services or your guidance and even if you're not in the business of providing direct assistance to the public SEO can help you advance your mission for instance let's say you're an environmental organization and you mostly do policy work and political advocacy rather than getting your hands dirty dealing with the public SEO can still be a huge help because you'll be better equipped to share information environmentally friendly practices and common questions people have about climate change and the ways they can reduce their carbon footprint and you can also let them know about bills that are being introduced and ways they can get involved so an optimized page for something lots of people search for like for instance if you're the environmental organization you wanted to share some information about recycling and how to compost that can bring a lot of people to your page and if you set up your page correctly it can keep them ready to get more information about your nonprofit and about your work really one of the biggest benefits to SEO is that it brings a greater volume of people to your website and every single one of those people is a potential donor just as when somebody calls your organization on the phone or sends an email or walks in through your front door you have the opportunity to convert them into donors by providing them with information services and so on and you have that same opportunity for every visit visitor to your website so obviously a key part in this is having an easy visible way to donate on your website it should be front and center and that's where Mighty Causes donation widget can help you can embed it right on your website best practices to create a page that says donated page specifically for donations that contains all the boilerplate legal language you want to include and you can just embed the widget there but you can just embed it on any page where you'd like to collect donations soon will also be releasing some new forms that are a little bit fancy and allow you to get a little bit more creative so keep an eye out for that because this is a really key part of how you can convert website visitors into donors and make sure that you're getting donors at every entry point to your organization the final thing we'll discuss is the benefit of lead generation and what that means in practice is capturing information one of the frequent questions that I get from nonprofits is how do I get more people to sign up for my email list and one of the ways you'll really want to consider is through your website they're online and it's really easy for them to enter their email address and get signed up so if you've optimized for SEO and you're bringing traffic to your website you'll also want to install some contact forms pop-ups slide-ins and banners prompting people to sign up for your email list there are a lot of programs you can use for that there's a lot of information monster there's lots of plugins through WordPress if you have a WordPress site but this is another thing SEO is great for which is growing your email list and capturing leads so that you can start cultivating them and hopefully turn them into donors all right so next we're going to move into how to develop your SEO strategy the first step here is really easy it's just googling yourself and seeing where you are on SERPs try a bunch of different ways to see how that shakes out you can start with googling just the name of your organization and then get a little bit broader more realistic for instance if you're a food bank in Maryland Google food banks in Maryland or help with food MD or food pantry and the name of your city just about everything you can think of and just see where you land on SERPs keep track of the search as you try and where you rank and of course if someone else is ranking higher make note of it because those are the pages that you'll need to compete with so you will need to make your page better than theirs and right now their page is better than yours so you can take some notes and see what they're doing and sort of scope out the competition and come up with a way to rank higher than them secondly you'll want to take a look at your website and see where your website is and how you can improve for instance are you using google analytics if not you definitely should and as a side note you can also set up google analytics for your mighty cause page google analytics helps you see where your traffic is coming from which pages are getting the most traffic what people are doing when they get to your page if they're staying there or if they're leaving and so on so these are all things you'll want to know how people are finding you are they getting to your website from google or social media or is most of it direct traffic so I think that sent them right to a specific page so take a look at the pages you've set up are you targeting any keywords can you tell whether you were trying to rank for something and what are the pages that are doing the best most sites will give you some basic analytics but google analytics will allow you to really dig in and see what's happening on your website once you've evaluated where your website is you can look ahead and go deeper and see if you're looking at some tools to help you with SEO for keyword research which we're going to talk about more in depth later in the webinar you can use tools like Moz which is what we use here google keyword planner is something that we also use that's a tool that's provided through google ads and you can use it for free if you sign up for a google ads account ahrefs some rush these all have funny names so I'll make sure you get the slide if you're interested in any of these tools you can look at this slide and reference it as we mentioned google analytics is an absolute must and one thing I cannot recommend enough if you have a WordPress site is the Yoast plugin it's a paid plugin but it's not that expensive and it is worth its weight in gold what it does is it tells you as you're building a page how to improve its SEO so while you're writing the page and you're building it out you say your keyword density is way too high you need to dial it back or you should put the keyword you're targeting in your URL it's not there and then move it up to your first paragraph because you didn't say your keyword until the end it gives you that kind of feedback which is really helpful as you're building out content and just so you know we have no business relationship with any of these companies so these are just recommendations based on what I've used what I've had good experiences with and I want to be helpful to me and then you'll want to assemble your SEO dream team now one of the most important people on your dream team is your webmaster because for some aspects of SEO you will need to go into page code and if that idea totally freaks you out you'll want someone who knows what they're doing to do it for you so some of you may already have a webmaster who helped you create your website so you already know who that is otherwise see who on your team website design and website building you'll also need someone to learn Google Analytics and become your analytics guru and basically they'll just need to be able to understand the metrics on Google Analytics and share it with you on your team Google is really awesome on this front and they have lots of tutorials and guides that you can access for free so you may just want to pinpoint somebody that you want to become an expert in this for your team and then you'll need a content master this is the person who will actually get in do some keyword research write an edit copy which is the text on your website and help optimize your old content and build new content based on the needs of what you want your website to do and then finally you'll have a taskmaster who can oversee the whole SEO project and break it down into phases and specific tasks that are then delegated to your dream team members now I do want to say if you're one person because you run a small nonprofit and you are playing all of these roles that is totally normal and it's totally okay one thing I would urge you to do is if you're a one person show is reach out and see if you can get some volunteer help a lot of times we have skilled professionals on our volunteer basis that we don't even know about because we've never asked them for things like helping with SEO and they may be able to fill in some of these roles for you and get you this help for free and if you're really feeling truly on your own I would check with your board and see if they know anybody because often your board members are business professionals and they may know somebody who can help you get off on the right foot and start tackling some of this SEO so now we're basically just going to move into what Google looks for from a website all right so basically Google made its name on its search algorithm and that is what differentiated it from all of the search engines that existed during the AOL boom so Ask Jeeves Dogpile, Webcrawler, Lycos, Altavista they didn't really organize the information that they found well so you just kind of had basically a literal Dogpile of websites that you could click on and you had no real idea if it was going to be what you wanted or not but Google found a way they developed an algorithm that helped them organize the information for users in a way that made sense that was intuitive and helped users access the most relevant pages for their search and those algorithms have grown quite a bit they started out with PageRank which as a bit of trivia is not named because the algorithm helps Google rank pages but after the algorithm's creator Larry Page so if you're ever playing trivial pursuit that may come in handy they then released updates that would further refine search results they came out and they all gave them all really cute names Google Panda came out in 2011 to lead out low quality pages from search results and give priority to high quality pages so basically cutting down on spammy pages that just want to show you advertising Google Penguin came out in 2012 and that further weeded out pages that were using Black Hat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing and Google Hummingbird came out in 2013 and Hummingbird really changed the search landscape by focusing on sites that had natural conversational writing styles and sites that had used their recommendations to optimize their pages that weeded out a lot of the link so Google made its name on providing the best search results on the web and that is what they're still focused on to this day basically when it comes to search Google's only concern is how well a page answers a searcher's question if they deliver irrelevant search results they may go to Bing so they may use that loser and they want that user to stay on Google and they want that user to stay on Google so that's the top thing they look at and they just look at how well a page answers a user's question based on their search history based on their search term based on what's on the page and then they break that down into several different factors and we'll go into what those factors are in a minute but that's the important thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about SEO they're really not thinking about themselves or your nonprofit and what your needs are and what would be best for your nonprofit all they want is to provide the best answer to whatever the user is searching for and that is it you've probably noticed in the past years that Google is getting even more sophisticated in how it organizes its searches so that often you'll get a Google snippet that answers a question for you right on the SERP so that you don't even have to click on a link to get the answer. The funny thing there is that even if you have a Google snippet you're still going to get a ton of clicks even though the information has been given and the question was answered because that lends a lot of authority to your page so people are much more likely to click through and see what you have to say and one thing I do want to note is that Google is using machine learning and AI or artificial intelligence and so it's always been really hard to hack Google searches because they're light years ahead of the rest of us with their technology and because of their machine learning and AI it's even harder to do that so stay honest here because trying hacks or tricks is only going to hurt you Google can see what you're doing and they will downgrade any pages using black hat or shady techniques and I just want to note here that there are definitely other search engines out there like Bing and Yahoo and they're totally valid and fine to use I'm just focusing on Google here they're the fault leaders or the industry leaders they're the trend setters and all the other search engines follow what they do so if you do well on a Google search you'll probably do well on a Bing and a Yahoo search as well so that's all great information but what are you supposed to actually do on your web page right well here are the on page factors that Google is looking for these are those things that breaks down what Google is looking for is a site map available to Google and a site map is just a file that has information about everything that's on your website so that Google can crawl it and get the information that it needs Google looks at your page load speed because if your page takes a million years to load when someone clicks on it it doesn't want to waste users time sending people there because that's a bad experience they also look for a mobile friendly design which is becoming increasingly important because most of us are no longer conducting Google searches from a desktop computer but from our phones so if your website is not mobile friendly and people need to pinch in to zoom and read what's on your page that's a really poor user experience and it acts as a barrier between the user and information so it's important to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and that can really just be as simple as moving to a mobile friendly template on WordPress Google looks for brief descriptive page titles so if you look at the top of your browser and your page says untitled it's not going to rank on a SERP most likely because Google doesn't really know what your page is about because you didn't tell them with a page title it also looks at page descriptions or meta tags that tell Google and the user what is on the page so when you Google and see a little sentence or two underneath as describing the content on the page that's because someone added a meta tag or a meta description Google can pull that information from your page but it may not be what you want it to be and Google doesn't really like to do that so it's in your best interest to add that description and it also looks at your headings which are your h1s and your h2s and so on and the actual content of your page Google looks for structured data markup that's just to better understand your page and that's something that your webmaster really can help you with or you can find examples of it by Googling it it does involve going into the code and adding some things there but they do provide pretty clear instructions if you want to Google structured data markup SEO and finally it's looking at your site structure and hierarchy it's looking to see basically whether your website is robust structured in a way that will go into detail about in a minute or whether your site is kind of thin and only has five pages with no sub pages basically is trying to determine how trustworthy you are how authoritative you are so obviously the more robust your site is the higher you will rank so I know this is a lot of information and I'll make sure that you get this slide deck so that you can go through this list of on page factors when you need to a lot of these though are really easy wins that don't require a whole lot of work like adding a better title to your page or adding meta tags and adding headers or putting your keywords in your headers if you didn't do that the first time around so these are really quick ways that you can improve your SEO and going forward when you're building new content for your website make sure that you're taking these factors into account and building them in from the start Google also looks at off page factors and one of the biggest ones is back links meaning whether your site is linked elsewhere and whether those sites are trustworthy Google only wants to recommend good sources of information it doesn't want to be known for sending people to spammy sites so this is one of the ways that Google determines whether you're a trustworthy source of information because if other people are linking to you and those sites where you're being linked are also good trustworthy websites then it can feel pretty confident that you are trustworthy source of information and just the links themselves are not enough here because if you're getting back links through a site that's basically a link form which is a website that kind of just exists for the sole purpose of providing back links there's usually people pay for that Google actually dings you for that and it'll hurt your overall SEO things like mentions in those articles, press releases guest blogs and so on will help your SEO as well a presence on social media so one thing Google looks for and I recommend doing as soon as you can is a Google My Business profile it's free to use and allows Google to nicely package together a knowledge panel about your non-profit information you've probably seen this before if you take a look at the slide you can see Mighty Causes Knowledge Panel Google My Business it just has general information about your business it'll have any reviews, your business hours, etc so all you have to do is sign up for Google My Business verify your business and start filling out your profile so add your business hours, add some photos make sure your address is correct add a phone number and that last part is important because on smartphones when you have a Google My Business profile people can just click a button on their phone to give you a call so it makes it really easy for people to get in touch with you and Google likes it too because it's more helpful for the user and the difference in a SERP with a filled out Google My Business profile and without it is really stark it really and truly does make a huge difference in how attractive and prominent your business information is on Google so this is a quick win and whether you do anything else we talk about in this webinar this is a simple easy thing you can do that will help your non-profit be more visible in SERPs and just to be clear you're not targeting any keywords here this is just something so when somebody Googles the name of your non-profit and they want to find out some information they want to get to your website or they're looking for your phone number or directions they can easily find it and it nicely packages that together for the user alright so we've mentioned keywords a whole bunch of times so let's dive into what keywords are how they work and how keyword research works so as we mentioned earlier a keyword is a search term but in a more general sense it's a term that describes the content on your page and will help users find and understand the content on your page a keyword can be a single word but more often it's a few words or a phrase with keywords there's a tough balance to strike between being broad not being so specific that you have a keyword no one actually searches for for instance if you were running a cat rescue the keyword cat is way too broad but cat rescue in Denver with same day adoptions that has black cats is way too specific so you'll need to strike the right balance of having something that is broad and can answer lots of questions but is not so specific that nobody actually searches that way and most importantly once you choose a keyword you need to actually build a page with content that supports the use of that keyword so to go back to the cat rescue if you decide to target the word cat adoption on your page and then you spend half the page talking about dog adoptions that keyword doesn't work for the actual content on your page so it's not a helpful page for somebody who's looking for information about cat adoptions so in that case you need to either edit your page so it's more about cat adoptions or just choose a different keyword to target and talk about adoptions more generally keyword targeting is considered on page SEO since it's something that you're going to do on the page itself sometimes choosing a keyword can be really easy and obvious but in either case it helps to use a keyword explorer or a keyword planner during the process the programs we talked about earlier like Moz and Semrush have keyword explorers that will show you what pages are currently ranking for a keyword and also what the volume and opportunity is so to go back to cats because clearly I'm a cat lady and I keep bringing up cats if you are looking to rank for a page that you put together on cat behavior you could try the keyword cat behavior and plug that into a keyword explorer but you'll probably see that because that's so broad it gets a lot of volume but there's a ton of competition from really well established robust websites so you can use the keyword explorer to hone in on the right keyword for your page so most of these explorers and planners track volume and opportunity so you'll want to find a keyword that gets decent volume people are actually using this term to search but also has a high opportunity score which means that there's room for your page to be included because there's not a bunch of really great pages already ranking for that term and again your content has to be relevant here so in your keyword research you may find that cat behavior is a really crowded playing field but there's a lot of opportunity for a page on a specific cat behavior like cat scratching couches so you could change up the type of content you end up making you could pivot to addressing a more specific page on cat behavior instead of just having one general page and targeting keywords with high opportunity within the general subject you're looking to create content on you may also decide that hey our blog is a great place for a lot of this so instead of creating a landing page you write a blog post instead the key the thing with keyword research is to keep in mind what question is being asked with the keyword and how well you're answering it so you want to choose keywords that are questions people are actually likely to ask and that brings us to the types of things that people tend to ask Google the first and most common type is informational queries such as what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow which any Monty Python fans in the audience probably know how to answer these are just straightforward questions with straightforward answers the next is navigational queries so for instance if someone is looking for our blog they may Google mighty cause blog these are straightforward they're just looking to get to a specific page on the internet and asking Google to help them find it next is transactional queries where a user wants to do something like stream game of thrones Google will find them a website where they can stream game of thrones it's very easy and very simple next you have commercial investigation so if someone is looking for instance for the best nonprofit fundraising platform or the best running shoes or the best gaming monitor they Google those terms and Google would fetch them information comparing those different options so it wouldn't point you to a website necessarily that sells running shoes if you were looking for the best running shoes it would point you to a webpage that is comparing different kinds of running shoes and if you were to Google that you would probably find that a lot of shoe companies are creating pages on their own websites so they can sell their product but also capture that traffic looking for the best running shoes and then finally you have local queries which are getting popularity as we carry our smartphones around and that's just looking for stuff near you so since Google knows where you are and pretty much everything about you you can Google animal shelters near me or coffee shops near me and get a listing of what is near you with distance and directions through Google maps so for the most part with keyword targeting you're going to be looking at informational queries and local queries with some exceptions because for instance if you accept blood donations at your nonprofit and someone wants to know where they can donate blood near them you'll want to get them to that page with that information so it's also important to keep in mind what kind of query you're optimizing for when you're doing keyword research and then the question is once you've got your keyword where does it go it goes in your page title in your headers and your sub headers which are the bits on your page the slightly larger bolder text in your description in your actual content on your page your URL your alt text which is the text that you put behind images for screen readers for people who are not able to read them so they'll actually be read by a screen reader and your anchor text which is basically just another way of saying hyperlinks if you do any editing inside of your website CMS or content management system which for instance would be something like WordPress or Squarespace or Wix you can probably stick your keyword in these places pretty easily it's built in to help you do that but you can also ask your webmaster to help you do this for you especially if you're having a hard time finding the alt text and description so keywords and content are BFFs they're best friends they have a super close relationship and they need to work closely together to complement each other your keywords have to be fully integrated into your pages content so that it's natural and it sounds like it was written by a human for a human and it must also be relevant again Google is looking for pages with content that best answer the questions that the users are asking so if these things are disparate if they don't make sense together adult fully mesh it's not a helpful answer on a page so when you're working on SEO you'll basically be using your keyword to audit your content or create your content and make sure that they're totally meshed make sense together and they're intertwined I wanted to move on to some keyword do's and don'ts do's are pretty simple focus on search your intent and relevance as we've talked a lot about and use your keywords to refine your content so that it answers a question better focus on providing quality content meaning a helpful well-written page with skimmable information that answers the question that's suggested by your keyword and finally diversify your whole site is not going to be married to one keyword it won't rank for a keyword individual pages within your website will rank so if there's a keyword you want to rank for create a new page for it or write a blog post around it the more keywords you will market the more you will rank and the more people you will bring to your site overall and now we'll move on to some don'ts the biggest don't is keyword stuffing and that is just what it sounds like it's using the keyword over and over again in a way that feels unnatural and robotic for instance if you were trying to rank for the keyword apples if your keyword stuffing you might write something like apples are a terrific fruit there are so many kinds of apples Fuji apples gala apples pink lady apples Granny Smith apples and so on it sounds ridiculous and that's keyword stuffing and it'll actually hurt your SEO because Google sees what you're doing and it dings you so you want the keyword in there but present in those few key areas we talked about and you need for the content to sound like a human being wrote it and it's not something that a computer spat out for you another thing to avoid like the plague is hidden keywords thankfully Google changes have stopped this practice for the most part but hidden keywords are sticking invisible keywords into the page like putting the keyword a million times in white text on the page so that it's in the code but is not visible to users that's black hat and that is a big no-no again you really can't fool Google so don't even try and the last don't is don't skip your keyword research without researching keywords you'll likely find that your pages are unfocused and they aren't really ranking for anything because you didn't know what term you were going for when you created the page so make sure you do your keyword research before you build content so I wanted to touch on actual site structure and how those relate to keywords this is sort of advanced but I think it's important to go over and that's pillar pages and topic clusters so a pillar page is where you target those broader keywords like for instance again cats so you may build a page which is called a pillar page where you collect all of your content about cats so you think of it as a tree with branches or Russian nesting doll in that pillar page you'll talk about cats and you'll also branch out into more specific subjects which are called topic clusters like cat behavior and all the pages that shoot off from that about cat behavior cat adoption is another topic cluster and that's where you'll share all of your information about adopting cats from your shelter maybe a topic cluster about cat health and answering some questions about cat health like what vaccines does my cat need how often does my cat need to go to the vet and so on this is a great way to build a robust website target lots of keywords and provide lots of information to the public and get traffic to your site and because you'll have this rich library of information people will spend more time on your site because you'll want to create a link between these pages so for instance when somebody is on the cat adoption page they can be prompted with a link to your other page about how to choose the right cat for your family and so on and this all helps greatly with SEO Google is looking for this type of structure so this may sound confusing and you definitely don't need to start here but when we're talking about a larger SEO project this is kind of where you want to end up with this big library of pillar pages and topic clusters based on keywords that you're looking to target so basically that that's pillar pages and topic clusters you can always email me if you have specific questions about this because this is a little bit more complex but if you're already doing well with SEO this might be the next step for you alright and to piggyback off of that big spiel about content we're going to talk about actually creating content for SEO so this is basically how you build a page step by step first you find your keyword or keywords so you know what you're focusing on then you come up with a short descriptive page title and you map out your headers which are the bits of big text that break up your page into different sections you'll want to make sure your keywords are represented in the headers though they don't have to be in every single one and then you'll just start writing out content long form content is ideal for SEO so aiming in a perfect world for 1000 words is great if you can get it at bare minimum you want at least 300 that is the bare minimum length you need to rank on Google if you can get in between those numbers you're good you'll want to add some images don't forget the alt text add video if you have it make sure you've got some other links to other content and link out to other websites just to round out and add anchor text to your page following this structure you can build a solid landing page and this is also how I build blog posts so this is really helpful this structure is very simple and it's a format that you can easily learn that's optimized for a search engine visibility so the kind of content that works is pretty universal as we discussed content that answers a direct question tends to do really well if you frequent any recipe blogs you'll see this a lot before a recipe for brownies you'll see a header that says how do you make brownies and then a paragraph that answers the question of how to make brownies you're there for a recipe but you've got it in paragraph form too and it's kind of confusing but the author did that for search engine optimization and a note on recipe bloggers too that's also why they'll have the long preamble about all of their childhood memories of brownies before their recipe so that they can get to that minimum word count for their blog post their recipe so that's actually a really great place to learn SEO if you're interested is check out some recipe blogs because it's pretty nakedly apparent on their sites what they're doing and you can learn from that structure but basically answering a direct question is really a great way to rank on a SERP moving on you want your content to be skimmable because most people skim web pages instead of sitting down to read them word for word so that's where headers and lists come in handy different kinds of content like images, infographics videos etc can help break up the content make it easier to read and also help with SEO and one thing we haven't really talked about much is calls to action but they're also an important component to strong SEO where do you want the person that's reading your page to go next so for instance if you're a nonprofit trying to get people registered to vote a call to action would be okay here's a bunch of information about why you should register and here's a button where you can actually do it and this is a way of keeping people on your website because your call to action can be something else on your website like making a donation and good content also just has a clear focus and is written well like it came from an actual human being and not a computer some things you'll want to keep in mind that content are keyword density and there is an actual number you're aiming for with the amount of times you actually mentioned your keyword and that is 2.5% of your total copy under that it may not register for the keyword and over that you could get dinged for keyword stuffing Yoast actually calculates this for you in WordPress and flags it for you if you're under or over so Yoast can be a really helpful tool here you'll want to make sure that it is in the right places like in the title first paragraph of the text and so on like we talked about and you'll want to stay away from creating multiple pages with the same keyword focus because you'll essentially end up competing with yourself and again you want to keep your copy short and skimmable you're not writing the next great American novel you're just trying to impart some information in a way that's easy to understand to the public so think Hemingway if you want to think novelists keep it short and punchy all right so I do want to talk a little bit about link building I don't want to get too deep into it but this is an important part of SEO so I wanted to briefly go into it backlinks are exactly what they sound like there are links to your website or a page on your website from outside sources and as we discussed Google looks at this to determine whether or not you are trustworthy source of information so when you're thinking of backlink strategy first try to think of anywhere that you should be linked but aren't like a news article where your executive director was interviewed or a partner organizations website if you get mentioned somewhere but don't get a link it's always worth reaching out and asking for a link because these do matter quite a bit and researching where you're mentioned and where you should be linked and asking them to provide a link on the page where you're mentioned can be a really great easy task for a volunteer especially one who's maybe interested in working from home so that you don't have to spend your time writing emails about backlinks the other side of this is finding opportunities to build your links for instance guest blogs are a really great way to build links and if you use Mighty Cause and you've run a fundraiser that you want to write about you can always contact me we're happy to publish guest posts on the Mighty Cause blog conferences and networking events press releases press outreach are really great for link building so we recommend making sure that you stay in touch with local press and make your organization available to media inquiries so that you can get those interviews where you're a subject matter expert and possibly get a link in a news article alright so we are in the home stretch and I just wanted to quickly go through some best practices for you and summarize some of what we've talked about first you should know that SEO is a long game the results are not immediate it can take a little time to start seeing the effects of SEO on site traffic signups for your newsletter and so on so be patient keep track of what you're doing celebrate your small successes and if you find yourself tempted to farm this out to someone else that is offering hacks or making crazy promises about quick SEO results be very careful because some of them can be kind of scammy and a waste of money and time SEO is something that you build over time not something that you can do quickly to see a massive jump in traffic it's more of a long term investment than a quick payout an important best practice is to track your progress and make sure you understand your metrics google offers free comprehensive guides to SEO analytics ppc or pay per click advertising which can be extremely helpful in understanding the ins and outs of search engine marketing so I definitely recommend taking advantage of the free resources that are available I do SEO SEO work here I've done it for nonprofits and I didn't go to school for this this is just information that's freely available it's democratized anyone can learn it the resources are free so just you know use what's available to you work with your web master to ensure your analytics are working properly and as with any project you want to define your goals so you can track your progress so your goal at first may just be to add page titles to all of your web pages and start writing monthly blogs for SEO and those are totally fine goals that you can work toward just make sure that you actually take the time to set them and you want to also set KPIs those are key performance indicators and they work with your goals obviously so for instance if your goal is more traffic to an important page on your website then volume of traffic to that page is a KPI that's the metric you're looking at to measure your success so set those check on them at least monthly and you know just make sure you're on the right track one thing that's helped me a lot is just staying on top of trends for SEO so I know that when something is changing if Google's releasing an algorithm update and reading blogs is also really helpful some of my favorites are the Moz blog there's this guy Neil Patel who is so good at SEO that if you Google literally anything related to SEO a blog post of his will pop up so he's a great source of information and you can kind of see the stuff in action HubSpot, SEMrush they have great blogs and the Yoast blog is also a great source of information and of course I have to plug Mighty Cause's blog which I run and you can also find lots of great content there for fundraising strategy and finally stick with Mighty Cause we are focused on small to midsize nonprofits so all of our tools and trainings are focused on that audience and we're also priced for that demographic meaning we're affordable and can suit any budget no matter how small because you can use us for free if you want to we also offer free monthly trainings like this one and all the tools you need to put these tips to you so you can get more donations and grow your profit. All right so just under the wire we're right at the end of the presentation so I wanted to take some time to answer any questions that you guys might have so if you have a question just type it into the questions box of your go to webinar panel okay it looks like there's a question here do you recommend a Google grant yes I do recommend a Google grant with a couple of caveats so Google grants are wonderful it's a program that Google has created so that if you want to get into pay per click advertising which are the paid ads in Google searches that you see they provide those to nonprofits for free so you get an advertising budget through Google grants and you just create your ads and it will place those ads in Google searches at Google's expense it's a grant basically however with stuff that we're talking about related to SEO you need to have in place first because a lot of it's going to be really confusing to you and you're going to have a hard time succeeding if you still have only five pages on your website you don't have page titles you're not using keywords and headers because you're going to need to use all of those things with a Google grant so I would say the things that we talked about here today and I know it's we've just reached an hour so if you need please feel free but if you want to stick around I'll answer any questions you guys might have a Google grant would be the next step after you kind of have a handle on SEO as a general concept and you put some practices into place to have pages built out and keywords targeted and you also want to think about things like page load speed because those are things that Google is going to look at and with a Google grant just like any grant you do have certain benchmarks that you have to hit in order to keep the grant so they're actually fairly high so you want to make sure that if you get a Google grant you're set up for success and you have a robust website where you can promote it and use that grant for all it's worth because it's like $11,000 it's quite a bit of money okay what website builders do you recommend well my favorite honestly for me to you is WordPress especially if you need to be able to maintain your website on your own WordPress is great for that you can have your own domain you can self host it which means that you don't have to go through WordPress.com you can go through something like Dreamhost or Bluehost or GoDaddy or whatever you choose I recommend WordPress especially if you're getting your first website together because it's really easy to maintain a lot of this stuff is baked into it and very easy for you to do on your own without the help of somebody who writes code and there's also a lot of really excellent plugins that WordPress offers and a plugin is basically like the same thing as a widget if you think about a widget you just plug it into your website and it's a tool that's good to go and helps you do the thing that you want to do so I really recommend WordPress for your first site but yeah I mean there's also lots out there there's Squarespace there's Wix you could also create a site from scratch the only thing to consider there if you're using something like you know a CMS like Drupal a little bit more complicated you might need some help maintaining it so you want to choose something that's easy for you to maintain but I'm a huge fan of WordPress it's a very user friendly so even if you have no web design experience you should be able to put together a pretty good WordPress site alright so there's any questions I'll give you one more minute to enter them in okay so this is an interesting question we have someone who writes a newspaper article each month so how would we use this on backlinks well if it's something that's awesome most newspapers have a website local papers their websites might be a little bit thin but if they're also publishing the monthly article to their publications website just ask them you know can you please include a link to the our website or this particular page so depending on what they're writing you can work with them like I'm not sure what your line of work is but let's say if you were a food bank and you were addressing some particular side of food insecurity you could create a page to compliment that and say hey here's some more information can you include this in the article the other thing you could do if they absolutely do not have this article printed or published on their website as well is they can ask if they can just include a link in the actual text of the article that's published if it's a print publication you'll just want to make sure that your URL is pretty easy to remember you can create a shorter link that's like www.yournonprofit.com slash whatever your subject is so that people can easily get directed to the right place without taking of a bunch of print because they may be constrained when they're writing that kind of thing in but just email them and just say hey you know is this published anywhere else are you publishing this on your website is there any chance you can include a link to this particular page on the article that you're writing and just see where you go because they are probably journalists are very familiar with backlinking they get asked for backlinks all the time so just write them an email and see what's what and see if you can get them to include a link yes I will send the slide deck that's always a question I will make sure that you have the slide deck it's about four o'clock eastern time so you'll probably get it tomorrow but you will have access to the full slide deck this was a lot of information guys so I want to make sure that you have the slides to refer back to and you'll also get a recording of the webinar so if you wanted to share it with somebody that you want to work with you on SEO you can share it with them as well and I think that's all the questions we have my email is linda at mightycause.com so you can feel free to email me if you have any any follow-up questions for me or if you want to chat SEO or if you need any recommendations for any tools I'm happy to help out but you guys have been great thanks for sticking with me through this really technical topic I hope you got some helpful information and I hope you enjoyed the rest of your day