seattle tech4good seo for non profit organizations

"The days of SEO being a game outsmarting algorithms are over.

Today content strategy and valuable, sustainable strategies

are essential, not just tricks and links.”

~ Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, RKG

Meeting Presentation 06/26/14

SEO for the NPO

Seattle Tech4Good Meetup

Why it’s important for non profit organizations to know SEO.

WHAT IS SEO?

Search Engine Optimization | What does it mean?

SEO for Humans and Google What does your site look like to Google and what does it look like to humans?

Is there a clear call to action? Are headings and subheadings rational? Are you using Comic Sans?

Homepage for Humans Use Google Webmaster Tools to see how Google views and

renders your site. Look for headings, alt tags, etc.

Fetch as Google

Components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm According to 72 SEOs surveyed for SEOmox’s biennial search ranking factors.

Indexing

Content

Link Building

Google Bing

Other Engines

•  Page Exclusions

•  Page Inclusions

•  URL Redirects

•  Duplicate Content

•  Crawl Errors

•  Code Validation

•  Page Load Speed

Indexing

Organic Algorithm If we knew the algorithm, we would all rank for #1.

Online marketing made easy.

•  Keyword Integration

•  URL Structure

•  Title Tags

•  Meta Description Tags

•  Meta Keyword Tags

•  Heading Tags

•  Content

•  Internal Linking and Anchor Text

•  Image Names and ALTs

•  No Follow Tags

Content •  Inbound Followed Links

•  Linking Root Domains

•  Authority and Trust

•  Social Media Mentions &

Visibility

Link Building

WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT for NONPROFITS?

More reach means more chances to tell your story.

Bottom Line SEO can do good things.

Good SEO More Traffic More Awareness

More Donations/Volunteers

Mission Accomplished

Why Do Non Profits Need SEO? NPOs are businesses too and need to take control of their digital profiles.

You can’t afford to NOT be visible in the digital

world. You might have 1,000 or 2,000 facebook

fans, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to

the hundreds of thousands of people you can reach

with organic search.

Get Found We all hate to admit it, but you have competitors.

You are competiting for donor dollars. You need to

look like a a good steward of donor money and you

need to attract donations and volunteer talent.

Competitive Landscape You have a bottom line and answer to a board of

directors. You have fundraising goals you need to

meet and getting found online will expand your

reach to meet your mission objectives.

NPOs are Businesses


BACK TO BASICS

…so give people something to talk about.

Google wants to reward websites that people love.

Basic Questions Before you look at the technical side of SEO, start with the basics of your website.


Review your Google Analytics data and see what

pages are the most popular. Is there a cycle to what

content is popular? What are the top landing and

exit pages?

What do your visitors want? What is the most important message you want your

visitors to get? Is that message clear on the pages

you discovered are popular?

What do YOU want visitors to know? Do you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter?

Do you want them to donate? Is that action clear on

the top landing pages?

What action should visitors to take?

Common SEO Mistakes Excerpted from *Luna Metrics.

Board members are notorious for calling up the marketing staff with, ‘I just searched for XYZ on Google and I don’t see us listed.’ Search results are individualized by history, location, etc. What I see may not be what you see for the same search. Pick a tool to track rankings and agree to it as your benchmarking tool.

Obsessing over rankings

Bounce rates are good at finding things you suck at. It is a metric to help diagnose bigger issues. It is not a success indicator in that of itself.

Bounce rate as sole indicator of site quality

Are organic visits getting you more donations? More blog sign-ups? What is your success metric for visitors to your site and are your SEO efforts helping those efforts? Do not count visits as a single KPI.

Not attaching visits to bottom line

Consider carefully whether or not you should consider hits to your site from branded traffic (someone searching for your organization name) as credited to SEO efforts.

Not separating branded and not branded traffic

*http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/07/22/seo-measurement-mistakes/

Measurement Goals Decide how you will measure your success – get buy in from key stakeholders to avoid uncomfortable ‘ranking’ conversations.

Are you getting blog or newsletter

sign-ups from organic search visitors.

Are they engaging with your

organization in other measureable

ways?

Sign Ups Obviously, an increase in donations

from organic search visitors is

important. Both quantity and amount

of the donations should be analyzed.

Donations Large fundraising events are always

important to make sure you have a

full house. Are you getting

registrations or bids from people

who found the event via organic

search?

Event Attendance What other goals might you have?

Petition sign-ups? Auction donations?

Contest entries?

Other?


PLUGINS | TOOLS

Some of our favorite tools and plugins.

What Kinds of Tools Do You Need? Choosing your toolset can make your life a lot easier – be sure to budget for subscriptions as needed.


Historical reporting is really important to spot

trends, especially cyclical giving cycles. Make sure

you choose your monitoring tools early and get it

setup right early. Spend some time planning what

to track.

Data Gathering Is your homepage loading slowly? Do you have

duplicate titles and meta descriptions? Are you

missing alt tags? Did you suddenly see a jump in

hits to your 404 page? Monitoring your website

health doesn’t have to take a lot of time – just set

up some basic tools to get proactively notified.

Health Checkers Now that you know what you need to change, it’s

time to plan out the changes. It’s helpful to have

templates on hand to help such as Hubspot’s Blog

Grader and Hubspot’s title and meta description

planner worksheet.

Planning Changes

Data Gathering and Research Tools Some of our favorite tools to use for data analysis

Crawls sites for titles, descriptions, errors etc and allows you to quickly export the information.

Screaming Frog

Sign up and get 1 full report. It’s worth doing at least once if not every six months for an update. Not as detailed as SEMRush or other reports, but great for reporting to other stakeholders on bigger picture success.

WooRank


Of course, the best place to see how visitors found your site, what they did when they got there, what page they were on when they left etc. If you don’t use this yet, start today.

Google Analytics

This is one of the better SEO tools and is pretty much a one-stop-shop for analyzing the health of your own site and comparing yourself to others.

SEMRush

Get keyword ideas and check local keyword trends for your local audience. SEMRush is great to look at country-specific groups, but sometimes you need to drill down into just your city.

AdWords Keyword Planner

Health Checker Tools Some of our favorite tools to use for data analysis

Get a detailed analysis of page load times.

Gtmetrix – Site Speed

Sign up for free text alerts when your site goes down and when it goes back up. Perfect for those 2am notifications.

Pingdom – Site Speed – Up Time

Shows pagerank and pulls data from Alexa etc. for a quick look at sites and pages.

Chrome SEO Toolbar


Check the titles and meta descriptions on pages as you browse your site and your competitors. WooRank goes a step further and shows more info about pages. Both are similar.

Moz Bar and WooRank Extension

Detailed analysis of what domains are linking to your site.

Majestic SEO – Link Building

Right after you use GA everyday, start checking in with Webmaster tools on a regular basis. You can quickly get health reports like 404 error pages, duplicate content and duplicate titles on pages etc.

Google Webmaster Tools

Planning Tools Some of our favorite tools to use for data analysis

Put together a content posting schedule. Google rewards great, frequent content. Plan out months in advance. Generally you know your annual calendar so it should be easy to plan out your posts and web page updates.

Social Media Posting Schedule

This is one of the few sitemap tools that will crawl your current site and build a visual sitemap to help you find out where you need to make adjustments. It’s $30 a month, but you likely only need to do this once a year.

Slickplan


Although this is meant for blogs, it works well for pretty much any web page. It will help you organize your ideas and use key phrases effectively.

Hubspot Blog Grader

Another great tool from Hubspot. Use this to manage changes in your titles and meta descriptions so you can look back if you see an uptick or downtick in traffic.

Hubspot SEO Title and Descriptions Worksheet

Sometimes it can seem overkill, but keeping a blogging calendar can help you keep your ideas in order so when you hit writers block you can check back and get some ideas quickly.

Blog Calendar

CMS Plugins to Consider Some of our favorite SEO Plugins

Your host may offer a similar service, but getting flagged when links are broken is helpful since it’s an easy item to forget.

Broken Link Checker

Make sure you can specify authorship of an article, namely blog posts. You should be able to log in as yourself but credit the post to a different author. Board members do not need to log in to your website. Post on their behalf.

Authors Widget

The hierarchy of your site structure is really important, but many CMS systems can get too complicated in how they categorize posts. Setup your custom permalinks so you can get the exact structure you need.

Custom Permalinks


Get. This. Plugin. If you use Wordpress this plugin does 90% of what you would need for SEO work. If you get the paid version it will do 99.9% of what you would need and maybe a little more. We could do a whole session on this one.

Yoast SEO for Wordpress

Get a solid redirect plugin to easily add in 301 redirects as needed without having to access your htcaccess file or asking IT for help. Remember, if you change the URL of a page you need to redirect the old url to the new.

Redirect Plugins

Don’t deal with social media sharing tools. Get the AddThis Smart Layers plugin and use your free account. It will add all of the social following and sharing you could possibly need. With the paid version you can customize the look even more.

AddThis Smart Layers

SEO ANALYSIS SAMPLE

Washington Democrats – www.wa-democrats.org

Thank you to our volunteer…

SEO Analysis Process It is important to review onsite and offsite SEO and look at competitors for ideas.


First, we look at the structure of the current site.

What pages are included in the sitemap? Which are

excluded? Do the pages load quickly?

Indexing Are headings and alt tags used appropriately? Are

keywords and meta descriptions present and

accurate?

Content Who links to the site? Who SHOULD be linking to

the site? Who links to competitor sites?

Link Building

Indexing – Crawls & Errors Do you have any crawl errors? Can Google index your site?

Data pulled from SEMRush, but is available via Webmaster Tools.

Issue Id Issue Type Issue Failed checks Total checks

12 ERROR External links broken 4 634

110 WARNING IMG tag without ALT attribute 306 346

106 WARNING No meta description 35 82

102 WARNING Too long title 34 82

117 WARNING Page have a low word count 30 82

108 WARNING Too many on-page links 8 82

109 WARNING 302 redirect 2 100

103 WARNING Heading (H1) is missing 1 82

202 NOTICE External link use rel=nofollow 936 2241

Indexing – Load Speed Does your site load quickly?

Gtmetrix speed report.

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Indexing – Site Map Does your sitemap make it clear what content is the most important?

Content - Titles How do your title and meta descriptions look?

Data pulled from Screaming Frog. Title look good, but watch the length on some of the titles.

Address Title Length

http://www.wa-democrats.org/ Washington State Democratic Party 33

http://www.wa-democrats.org/events Events | Washington State Democratic Party 42

http://www.wa-democrats.org/blog/thank-you-convention-attendees Thank you, Convention attendees | Washington State Democratic Party 67

http://www.wa-democrats.org/people/links Links | Washington State Democratic Party 41

http://www.wa-democrats.org/page/people People | Washington State Democratic Party 42

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petitions Petitions | Washington State Democratic Party 45

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petition/support-shari-song-state-senate Support Shari Song for State Senate | Washington State Democratic Party 71

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petition/standwithjay Stand with Jay | Washington State Democratic Party 50

http://www.wa-democrats.org/blog/gov-ed-rendell-keynote-gala-banquet Gov. Ed Rendell to keynote Gala Banquet | Washington State Democratic Party 75

http://www.wa-democrats.org/about/board Executive Board | Washington State Democratic Party 51

Content – Meta Descriptions How do your title and meta descriptions look?

Data pulled from Screaming Frog. 35 pages missing meta descriptions including the homepage.

Address Meta Description Length

http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 0

http://www.wa-democrats.org/events 0

http://www.wa-democrats.org/blog/thank-you-convention-attendees We're inspired by the passion and dedication of the Democrats who attended our 2014 State Convention. Thank you to all who

joined us in Spokane! Pictures and more details to come. 179

http://www.wa-democrats.org/people/links

National United States Senate Democrats: http://democrats.senate.gov United States House Democrats: http://democrats.house.gov Democratic National Committee: http://

www.democrats.org Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee: http://www.dscc.org

244

http://www.wa-democrats.org/page/people Elected Officials Candidates Links 34

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petitions 0

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petition/support-shari-song-state-senate 0

http://www.wa-democrats.org/petition/standwithjay 0

Content – Onsite SEO Tool Try Hubspot on page SEO tool. Export from Screaming Frog and adjust in Hubspot’s template.

Hubspot tools, and all tool links are available on the Fujisan Marketing blog.

Keyword Position Search Volume CPC Url

Traffic (%)

Traffic Cost (%) Competition

democrat 9 14800 1.56 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 21.08 37.52 0.02

pco 11 5400 2.75 http://www.wa-democrats.org/content/become-pco 12.05 37.8 0.06

www.wa 4 3600 0.28 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 11.96 3.82 0.14

democrats.org 2 1000 0.56 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 6.17 3.94 0.22

washington state democrats 1 260 0 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 5.8 0 0.03

caucuses 6 2400 0 http://www.wa-democrats.org/page/2014-caucuses-and-conventions 5.69 0 0

what do democrats stand for 1 210 0 http://www.wa-democrats.org/content/what-we-stand 4.68 0 0.01

democrats.org 3 1000 0.56 http://www.wa-democrats.org/conventioninfo 4.27 2.73 0.22

washington state democratic party 1 90 1.58 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 2 3.62 0.08

democrats 17 9900 1.22 http://www.wa-democrats.org/ 1.88 2.61 0.09

Content - Keywords You want to make sure humans and Google see your site for the content you intend, not something else.

Content pulled from SEMRush – top 10 keywords driving traffic to wa-democrats.org.


Link Building How many domains are linking to your site and are they reputable?

.org sites are lowest in the ‘authority’ compared

to .gov, .edu, .com, and .net. For wa-democrats.org

it would be good to see a wider variety of inlinks

from some other top level domain types.

TLD Authority 58% from .coms | 38% from .orgs

Similar to the authority chart, it would be ideal to

see more .gov and .edu sites linking in. Of course

that is difficult with political issues. Perhaps a

college politics course would use your site as a

resource. Get creative.

TLD Distribution 189 .com domains

Use this as a benchmark for moving forward. You

want to make sure you grow legitimate links and

sunset bad links that have no authority. If you don’t

monitor them, Google will and it might not be

pretty.

Benchmarks Compare with competitors


Link Building – Social Media One of the easiest ways to build link authority is by having a robust social media program.

@WashDems

6,720 followers

Twitter /washdems

14.9k likes

Facebook

Link Building – Social Media Recommendations Make sure you integrate the website to social assets as much as possible.

•  Engage your audience on social media, but make sure you integrate to the

social sites in the header and footer of your website if not elsewhere.

•  Add social media follow buttons to the feed widgets. Currently you can’t click

through to the social channel to engage.

•  Add sharing tools (like AddThis Smart Layers) to make it easy to share every

single web page.

•  With such fantastic content, consider adding in calls to action such as “Tweet

This” to engage your audience further.

Social Media Recommendations

At Fujisan Marketing we believe creating a successful inbound lead

generation system is a journey to the top of the mountain. Each person’s

path and preparation will determine their long term success.

fujisanmarketing.com/tech4good2014 @FujisanMarketing | @MitchTresemer

Door Prize …and the winner of a free SEO analysis is…
