seo for marketers and fundraisers: you can't raise money if people can't find you

Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy

SEO for Marketers and Fundraisers: You Can’t Raise $$$ if People Can’t Find You 2006 Bridge to Integrated Marketing and Fundraising: July 14, 2006

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SEO for Marketers and Fundraisers:You Can’t Raise $$$ if People Can’t Find You

Jonathon D. ColmanSenior Manager, Digital MarketingThe Nature Conservancyhttp://www.nature.org/

Not all those who wander are lost.— J.R.R. Tolkien

www.nature.org


2006 Bridge to Integrated Marketing and Fundraising: July 14, 2006

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SEO for Marketers and Fundraisers: You Can’t Raise $$$ if People Can’t Find You



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I. Findability 101



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You’ve Got an Opportunity: The Web

• But: It’s big, really big

• And: It’s unstructured, ad hoc, random

• By the way: No standards for quality, value, credibility, or usability

• Did you know?: Your donors and competitors are already there.

• Don’t forget: It’s growing like a weed



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You’ve Got an Opportunity Challenge!

• Web publishing is not print publishing: Your users act as both

information consumers and providers

• Users decide what’s quality, what’s credible, what’s valuable • Your user experience is now part of your brand

• Users decide how to navigate the web:

• Users decide when (or if) to link to your site or your competitors

• Inbound links to your site are “votes” of credibility and relevance



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• Accidental

Wayfinding: How Users Get to Your Site

User

YourSite



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• Accidental

• Purposeful

User

YourSite



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• Accidental

• Purposeful

• Your goal: provide findable pathways to your site for both

User 1

User 2

YourSite



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Where is Your Audience on the Web?

• News sites

• Online stores

• Partner sites

• Local portals, communities

• Blogs, social networks

• Events, volunteering sites



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Where is Your Audience on the Web?

• News sites

• Online stores

• Partner sites

• Local portals, communities

• Blogs, social networks

• Events, volunteering sites

• Oh, yes, and... search engines



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II. Search Engines and SEO



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Search Engines = The Means of Wayfinding

• For many people, Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the Internet

• About 60 million American adults use search engines each day

• 61% of searchers think that organic listings are relevant

• Why? Perceived credibility

• Probably bring in a high % of visitors to your site

• These can be very high-value leads due to contextual relevance



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Your Business Case for SEO

• Good SEO draws new visitors, audiences to your web site

• Helps bring better leads to your web site

• Improves your positioning against your competitors

• Supports and builds brand strength, online reputation

• Gives you more data on how your target audiences find you

• If performed in-house, costs nothing but staff resources/time

• Saves money when compared to buying search ads



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What Can’t SEO Accomplish?

• Make your site the #1 top result for all searches, all the time

• Purchase ads if you need a guaranteed top result

• Be prepared to spend

• Optimize your site for all keywords

• Especially keywords you don’t use

• Un-optimize competitors’ sites

• Force people to visit your site



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5 Steps to a Successful SEO Campaign

1. Research keywords

2. Build optimized content

3. Solicit new inbound links

4. Create a positive online reputation

5. Track your position and success



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III. Researching Keywords



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Keywords: The Nucleus of SEO

• Single most important part of SEO

• The more effort you put into keywords, the greater your ROI

• Drawing more traffic, better leads to your site

• Determine whether or not you reach your target audience(s)

• Can save you money when purchasing ads on search engines



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Search Engines’ Analysis of Keywords

• No one knows for sure; dynamic updates = no guarantees

• Instances of exact keyword/key phrase

• Keyword density

• Keywords in near/far proximity to each other

• Keyword word roots/stems

• Other keyword variants, misspellings

• Keywords occurring in HTML headers, link text, bold/italics, lists



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Getting Started with Keywords

• Brainstorm with your colleagues

• Analyze your partners’ and competitors’ keyword choices

• Use web analytics to examine referrer logs for keywords

• Avoid ambiguous or overly broad keywords

• Be sure to select highest-priority keyword among your final pool



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Demo: Using Wordtracker for Research1When you login to Wordtracker, you’ll see a lot of research options.

Today, we’ll walk through the Keyword Universe function to look at how you can use Wordtracker to research keywords for your SEO campaign.



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Demo: Using Wordtracker for Research2Enter the Keyword Universe and type one of the words from your self-generated list into the textfield on the left.



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Demo: Using Wordtracker for Research3Wordtracker will return a list of terms that are related keywords for your original entry.

These terms may be variants, synonyms, or otherwise related terms to your original entry.



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Demo: Using Wordtracker for Research4Click on one of the related keywords and Wordtracker will generate data on the most popular keywords in the table on the right side.

Select the keywords that you’d like to research further to add them to your cart.



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Demo: Using Wordtracker for Research5Wordtracker shows you which keywords have the greatest potential for success via the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) score.

Strong keywords have a high amount of searches performed on them daily, yet have a low amount of competition.



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IV. Building Optimized Content



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SEO Mechanics Work on Many Levels

• Text: keyword density, coding practices



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• Page: <TITLE>, META information, structure



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• Site: architecture, navigation



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• Site: architecture, navigation

• Topical community/Sector: strategic linking, site positioning



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What Do You See on the Web?

• Design

• Page layout

• Interactivity

• Photos

• Graphics

• Colors

• Type size



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What Does a Search Engine See?

• Page <TITLE>

• <META> content

• Content (text-only)

• Navigation

• Headers

• Links, link text

• ALT text



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Optimizing Your Code for Search Engines

<TITLE> and <META> HTML tags:

• 6-11 words, 60-75 characters

• Place your high-priority keywords at beginning

• Avoid repeating words, using the same word side by side

Inline HTML tags:

• Avoid excessive use of keywords in graphics, Flash, or JavaScript

• Use keywords in header, bold/italics, list items, and link text

• Use minimal coding, compliant with W3C standards

Remember: Your content should still feel very natural, not spammy



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• Use search-engine friendly URLs

• Avoid URL appends, dynamic URLs, and page-level redirects

• Build links to your page(s) into site architecture

• Make them a part of universal navigation

• Use keywords as link text

• Cross-link to your page(s) from within your site

• Homepage link

• Make sure your site’s search engine can find your campaign content

Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines



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V. Soliciting New Inbound Links



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How Search Engines Use Links

• Crawlers, spiders, bots all follow links from one page to another

• Only pages that have links pointing at them can get indexed

• Pages with more high-quality links to them get indexed more often

• Pages that are indexed more often gain a higher ranking



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Links Support Your Business Goals

• Every link is a vote of authority, credibility, relevancy

• The more high-quality inbound links, the more trust in your content

• High-quality links from trusted, optimized sources greatly help

increase your search engine rank

• More direct links = more sources of traffic

• Local traffic

• Traffic relevant to context (good leads)



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Not All Links are Created Equal

• All links help get you traffic, but not all of them help with SEO

• “Organic,” independent links are better then Free For All (FFA) links

• More links are always better than fewer

• Never participate in paid submissions, link farms, etc.

• More contextually-relevant links are always better than random links

• A few very high-quality links to your page can out-perform many

poor-quality links



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How to Get New Inbound Links

• Make your own links



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• Ask others for links



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• Ask others for links

• Piggyback on earned media coverage • When placing stories, don’t forget to place links

• Include both traditional and new media outlets



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Where Can You Create Your Own Links?

• Directories:

• Yahoo, DMOZ Open Directory

• Discussion groups/forums:

• Craigslist, Yahoo!Groups, enthusiast forums

• Social networks, bookmarking tools:

• Care2

• Wikipedia

• Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon

• Blogs



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Choosing External Sites to Pitch

• Relevant, high-quality sites

• Sites that rank higher than yours in keyword searches

• Partners’ sites — you may already be linking to them!

• Other sites with missions that are similar to yours

• Sites that look professional, nicely designed

• Sites that do not include ads, pop-up windows, spam, spyware, etc.



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VI. Creating a PositiveOnline Reputation



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The Search Experience is Your Brand

• Searchers gain a sense of your brand’s strength through search

• 65% of donors visit the web sites of the charities they support

• 40% always go online before making a giving decision

• 92% of journalists use search engines to research stories

• Comments about your brand are continually being published

• These eventually end up in search results

• All your good work can be undone very quickly

• Just one super-activist can greatly affect your placement



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From Search Findability to Search Branding

• 62% of searchers click on a link appearing in first page of results

• 90% of searchers click on a link within the first three pages

• Your goal: move from mere findability to dominating the entire

search engine results page with your results or “friendlies”



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Organic Results vs. Ad Visibility

Organic Ranking Visibility: • Rank 1: 100% • Rank 2: 100% • Rank 3: 100% • Rank 4: 85% • Rank 5: 60% • Rank 6: 50% • Rank 7: 50% • Rank 8: 30% • Rank 9: 30% • Rank 10: 20%

Sponsored Links Visibility: • Ad 1: 50% • Ad 2: 40% • Ad 3: 30% • Ad 4: 20% • Ad 5: 10% • Ad 6: 10% • Ad 7: 10% • Ad 8: 10%

Lesson learned: There’s more to SEO than just being the #1 result!



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Another Site Outranks Me… for My Brand!

• If a legal use of search engine marketing, purchase ads and out-bid

your competitors

• If an organic SEO result:

• Analyze competitors’ inbound links, indexed content

• Optimize your pages, site for brand keywords

• Solicit new inbound links using brand keywords as link text



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Build Your Brand’s Reputation via Search

• Build first page of search results for your brand with your site(s) and

friendly/partner sites

• Move unfriendly/critical sites off the first page by optimizing your

site, linking to friendly/partner sites

• Saturate channels (regular search, news search, blog search, image

search, etc.) with friendly content that links back to you

• Pitch stories to new media along with traditional outlets

• ID and enlist super-activists to help you

• Start an organizational blog



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Examples of Branding via Search

• Good: Google Pontiac

• Bad: Google Splenda



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VII. Tracking Your Positionand Success



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Metrics to Watch in Search Engines

• Total # of resources on your site indexed in search engines

• Total # of inbound links, rate of increase in new links

• Growth in the total # of results for a search on your keywords

Note: The use of automated querying tools (such as WebPositionGold)

to find your position is officially discouraged by search engines

• Total # of places that your rankings rise

• Total # of places that your competitors’ rankings fall



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Metrics to Watch on Your Web Site

• Total # of unique visitors to your optimized content

• % of unique visitors arriving from search engines, rate of increase

• Total # of referrers of traffic to your content:

• Find domains that you contacted, compare # visitors from each

• Look for domains that you did not contact (viral growth)

• Search terms used by visitors to find your content

• Cookie, segment all incoming visitors by source

• Conversion rate by segment

• “Bounces”



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Helpful Third-Party Metrics

• Google PageRank

• Alexa rank, reach, and page views in relation to your competitors

• Useful only as “directional data”, not a precise measurement

• Use Alexaholic to compare many orgs at once

• SEOmoz Page Strength

• Age of your domain (via Wayback Machine, WHOis)



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Conclusions



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What Have We Learned Today?

• The importance of making findable pathways to your content

• The business case and goals for SEO

• The five essential steps of SEO:

1. Research keywords

2. Build optimized content

3. Solicit new inbound links

4. Create a positive online reputation

5. Track your position and success

• How search engine presence influences brand perception