This guide is perfect for nonprofit leaders, charity communications officers, small in-house marketing teams, and anyone passionate about mazimizing their mission's visibility online.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is often perceived as a complex, technical subject requiring years of experience. But this article debunks that belief - SEO is a science, not a magic! By showing you some superb free tools and tips, you can tackle SEO with ease, build your knowledge, and most importantly, help your organisation’s website stand out within the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) to attract more volunteers, donors, and people who need your services.
Keyword Research - Dominate Your Cause
When embarking on keyword research for your nonprofit's website, content, campaigns, and services, you are trying to understand and achieve the following:
- What keywords and phrases are potential donors, volunteers, and service users using to find us?
- What is the volume of searches for these particular terms (e.g., "how to volunteer," "local food bank," "donate to animal rescue")?
- How difficult is it for our site to land on the first page for these terms? (i.e., Who are we competing against for visibility?)
Here are a number of keyword research tools to help answer the above questions and arm you with the knowledge to decide on those all-important target terms for your mission-driven content:
Easy to Use
- Google Trends - Helps you to identify trending topics and causes which are increasing with interest. Could you capitalise on these keywords in a timely campaign? (PRO TIP: Avoid developing content on topics which are rapidly losing interest.)
- Answer The Public - Understand what your audience is asking Google about your cause. Can you generate content to compassionately answer these questions?
- MOZ Explorer - Create a free account and receive 10 keyword searches per month (up to 1000 keyword ideas in the results).
- Ahrefs Keyword Generator - Shows you 100 free keyword ideas related to your initial keyword, together with search volume and keyword difficulty data.
More Advanced
- Google Keyword Planner - Get keyword suggestions and search volume data. Free to use with a Google account!
Free Chrome Extensions
- Keyword Surfer - Type a search into Google and see keyword ideas and volume right on the SERPs.
- SEOStack Keyword Tool - Gathers hundreds of keywords from your one suggestion by scraping autocomplete suggestions from Google, Youtube, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay.
On-site Optimisation Tools - Boost Awareness and Engagement
Now that you’ve found your keywords, it’s all about making sure your site’s pages are optimised for them, and that they look appealing within the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). These tools help you optimise each webpage to improve its ranking for a chosen keyword or phrase.
Easy to Use
- SERPsim - With this tool, you can generate a SERP snippet and fine-tune how your website looks in the search results by inputting your title tag, meta description, and URL.
- SiteGuru - Handy on-site audit tool which runs through numerous page checks and delivers a report with suggestions.
More Advanced
- Rich Snippets Testing Tool - See if your markup is valid for Google to display Rich Results for your website (examples include displaying star ratings for your nonprofit on review sites like Charity Navigator).
- Schema Markup Generator - Free structured data generator to help you create the markup code for your website, with the goal of seeing Rich Snippets in the SERPs.
Free Chrome Extensions
- Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar - Gives an on-page data report to check title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags (crucial for content hierarchy).
- SEOInfo - Provides a nice snapshot of how the page is performing, if indexed, and structured data opportunities.
Technical SEO - Made Easy With These Free Tools
These tools and extensions check the health of your website and ensure everything is working perfectly from a technical level. They perform essential checks - from speed improvements to crawling and indexing - to help boost your website performance.
Screaming Frog is the first tool we reach for when auditing a website; it gives us a quick overview of the technical job ahead.
Easy to Use
- Google PageSpeed Insights - This tool analyses the speed of your webpages and provides opportunities for speed-saving improvements. Slow sites can frustrate potential donors! (Alternative: GTMetrix)
- Mobile-Friendly Test - A quick test to see if your webpage is mobile-friendly. Issues are highlighted with recommendations.
More Advanced
- Screaming Frog - A technical SEO auditing tool for crawling websites. Crawl 500 URLs for free and analyse page titles, broken links, and duplicate content.
- Google Search Console - Plug in your website into this free Google tool to measure search traffic and performance. Issues are highlighted and fixes can be validated. (PRO TIP: We encourage anyone responsible for a nonprofit website to use and learn about this tool.)
- Cloudflare - A free global CDN that can help to speed up your website.
Domain Analysis - See How Other Nonprofits Succeed
These tools help you delve a little deeper to understand how similar charities and organisations are ranked within the SERPs. Would you like to know why certain organisations rank higher than you? Who is linking to them? What campaigns are they focusing on?
Easy to Use
- Serpstat - A freemium multi-tool allowing you to analyse up to 10 domains per day. Check organic keywords and backlinks for any domain.
- MOZ Free Domain Analysis - A tool that highlights top-linking domains, best-performing pages, top-ranking keywords, and who your main competitors are in the SERPs.
Free Chrome Extensions
- MOZBar - Check domain and page authority of your site and others in your space.
- SERPTrends SEO Extension - Gives you information on each SERP listing.
Link Building Tools - Accelerate Your Credibility
Link building is the process of increasing the number of 3rd-party websites linking to your content. These links are like 'votes of confidence' for your website and help to build the domain authority and trust, which are key predictors of search engine performance.
Acquiring links from websites can be hard and extremely time-consuming, but it’s a necessary undertaking to really boost your website up the SERPs. That’s why we’ve amalgamated this list of link building tools to help you get started:
Easy to Use
- Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker - Identify broken inbound and outbound links. Fixing links pointing to 404 pages can be a quick win.
- hunter.io - A great outreach tool for finding email addresses associated with a website. Sign up for a free account and get up to 50 requests per month. Use this to reach out to potential partners or journalists. (PRO TIP: Install the Chrome extension for quick access.)
- HARO (Help A Reporter Out) - Connects journalists with sources. HARO will send out daily requests from journalists who need help with their content. A great way to feature in a high-ranking publication and gain a high-authority link.
Free Chrome Extensions
- To quickly check broken links, you can use LinkMiner or Check My Links.
- Scraper - Helps you scrape information from any website or directly from the search results. Handy for building prospects and link targets.
Keep Up The Good Work
We hope this article has armed you with the necessary tools to give SEO a try. The hardest part is sometimes knowing where to start. Although there are many tools in the list that could give your website some quick wins, SEO is usually a gradual process of improvement over a number of months. We encourage you to persevere and measure performance over 3-6 months.
If you are fairly new to SEO and are finding it difficult to know where to start, we highly recommend that you use some of the above tools.
Would you like me to find a YouTube video that explains Google Search Console in simple terms, as that is an essential, free tool for all nonprofits?
