7 Nonprofit SEO Tips to Boost Rankings + Increase Donations

Nonprofit SEO involves optimizing your website to increase organic traffic, which helps your organization reach more donors, volunteers, and supporters.

SEO is an essential part of any marketing plan for a nonprofit because every source of traffic to your website counts — especially organic traffic from search engines like Google.

Online and mobile giving is becoming the preferred method for potential donors and making fundraising more seamless. This means that if you work in a nonprofit organization, you will have to dig a little deeper into digital marketing to maximize your donors’ giving.

A solid SEO strategy can help bring awareness and organic traffic to your nonprofit websites without breaking the bank. For nonprofits and charities, where every penny counts, it can be one of the most economical digital marketing channels.

In this article, we’ll cover essential SEO tactics, tools for content ideas, and tips for optimizing your nonprofit’s online presence. Ready to step up your SEO game? Let’s go.

What is nonprofit SEO?

Nonprofit and charity search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing websites to increase visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people look for information related to that organization’s cause, such as volunteering, fundraising, events, and education.

The goal is to attract visitors with high conversion potential — in this case, people who are likely to donate, volunteer, attend events, or engage with the nonprofit’s mission.

Nonprofit SEO can differ from other sectors in a few key ways:

• Conversion goals: Unlike for-profit businesses that focus on sales, nonprofits aim to drive actions like donations, event participation, and volunteer sign-ups. The nature of the conversion impacts the type of keywords you should target and the content you need.
• Budget constraints: Nonprofits often operate with limited marketing budgets. This means you need to leverage cost-effective SEO strategies and free tools to achieve your goals.
• Content focus: Nonprofits typically produce content that raises awareness about social issues, educates the public, and advocates for causes. This content must be optimized to reach and engage a broad audience while conveying the organization’s mission and values.
• Local SEO: Many nonprofits rely heavily on local support. Local SEO tactics, such as optimizing for “near me” searches and maintaining accurate Google Business Profile listings, are crucial for attracting nearby volunteers and donors to your cause.
• Trust and authority: Nonprofits need to establish a high level of trust and authority. This is achieved through transparent and informative content, strong backlinks from reputable sites, and maintaining a positive online presence.

How does nonprofit SEO work?

While nonprofit SEO can be different from other sectors, in some ways, it’s the same across the board. Search engines don’t play favorites—they want to provide users with the most relevant and useful results, regardless of whether the site belongs to a for-profit or nonprofit organization.

Search engines perform two main tasks:

1. Crawling the web to build an index of content
2. Providing users with a ranked list of results that best match their queries.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how they do that:

• Crawling and indexing: Think of search engines as librarians for the internet. They use bots (also called spiders) to scan the web for new content, which they store in an enormous database called an index. To get your nonprofit noticed by a search engine, you need a clear site structure, proper use of robots.txt files, and an up-to-date XML sitemap.
• Relevance and ranking: When someone searches for something, search engines sift through their index to find the content that best matches that query. They then rank these pieces of content based on various factors like keyword relevance, site usability, and backlinks. For nonprofits, this means you need to create content that resonates with your audience’s needs and what they are searching for.
• User experience: A user-friendly website is key to any successful SEO strategy. Search engines prefer sites that offer a great user experience, which includes fast loading times, mobile-friendly designs, and engaging content. You should focus on making your website easy to navigate and accessible to everyone.

While SEO for nonprofits might sound complex, the basics are straightforward. By focusing on high-quality, relevant content, optimizing your site, and ensuring a stellar user experience, your nonprofit can improve its search engine rankings and attract more supporters to its cause.

Why is SEO for nonprofits important?

SEO involves implementing a set of strategies to improve your site’s ranking in organic spots on search engine result pages (SERPs).

By aligning your content with search intent, you can ensure your site ranks higher, making it easier for donors, volunteers, and supporters to find you.

HawkSEM’s team lead, Brandi Harvey says, “SEO has the highest ROI potential for nonprofits by nature of the potentially low cost invested. Many nonprofits and not-for-profit organizations have incredibly limited funding.”

Harvey explains, “SEO provides incredible long-term value to help these organizations reach their target audience, whether that be donors, sponsors, volunteers, or beneficiaries.”

SEO for nonprofits comes with a variety of benefits, such as:

• Competitive edge: SEO can be a low-budget marketing strategy that helps you compete against more prominent organizations.
• Visibility: These efforts help donors and volunteers find your organization online.
• Local attention: Local SEO tactics allow you to reach local audiences that show interest and engagement through search behavior.

Besides attracting donors, high visibility can raise awareness about an issue, thus serving one of your nonprofit’s core goals: promoting social causes or advocating a certain standpoint.

The 3 pillars of SEO

OK, so the jury’s still out on exactly how many pillars of SEO there are and what they mean. Some say there are three elements: authority, relevance, and experience. Others say the pillars are technical, content, on-site, and off-site.

We like to keep it simple, so let’s go with these three: on-page, off-page, and technical.

Knowing and incorporating all three of these pillars will give you the most well-rounded SEO strategy to help ensure your content ranks high for the keywords you are targeting.

1. On-page SEO

No surprise here: On-page SEO mainly deals with the elements of your website. It’s all about doing what you can to ensure each page of your website is primed to be easily crawled by search engine bots so they can find out what your site is about and serve your content to the right searchers.

On-page SEO means elements like:

• Optimized content focused on keywords, value for the reader, and E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) standards
• Meta descriptions
• Headers and title tags
• Images with alt text
• Keyword optimization
• Working internal links

2. Off-page SEO

While you have less control over SEO than on your website, there are plenty of things you can do to ensure third-party sites accurately represent your nonprofit. The main action item here is to ensure all of your organization’s info is accurate across all of your external profiles on other websites.

Off-page SEO can include:

• Backlinks
• Social media profiles
• Guest posts
• Review site profiles
• Local SEO (like directory listings)

3. Technical SEO

This is arguably the most important SEO type. It’s a bit more complex than on-page and off-page, meaning many businesses tend to ignore it.

But the truth is that having healthy technical SEO is essential to hitting your organic search goals. Plus, some of your on-page efforts will also fall under the technical SEO umbrella.

Technical SEO refers to factors like:

• Schema markup/structured data
• Complete metadata
• Site security (having “https” in your URLs)
• Mobile-friendly web pages
• Proper site architecture, sitemaps, and navigation
• Swift page speeds
• Thoughtful URL structures

Keeping all of these objectives in mind, let’s review key nonprofit SEO tips.

The content you create can be repurposed and made into different types of media, thus keeping your marketing costs low. (Image: Rawpixel)

7 SEO tips to improve your nonprofits search rankings

1. Make sure your website is user-friendly

The Google search engine (and alternatives like Bing and DuckDuckGo) pay special attention to the user experience (UX) on your website. Besides creating an intuitive user interface (UI) and using a thoughtful, easy-to-navigate design, don’t neglect these technical SEO issues:

• Page speed – Pages should load in under two seconds. Any longer, and users will likely hit the “back” button, which isn’t great for your bounce rate.
• Text readability – A top-notch content structure (smaller paragraphs, headings, sub-headers) can help you win the fight for competitive keywords.
• Interactivity – Your website should respond to the user’s input in less than 100 milliseconds (according to Google’s Core Web Vitals ranking factors).
• Mobile optimization – With 25% of donors using smartphones to make donations, mobile optimization is key. And since more than half of all searches are done on mobile devices these days, Google has adopted a mobile-first indexing strategy.

Pro tip: If your website is user-friendly, visitors tend to stay on it longer. This increases the “session duration,” which, according to some evidence, is a Google ranking factor.

2. Focus on your content

Content reigns supreme when it comes to SEO for nonprofits. But sharing valuable information doesn’t just bring donors to your website — it also raises awareness for your cause.

Here are a few things to consider when writing content for your nonprofit’s website:

• Keywords are crucial: The foundation of good SEO rests in keyword research. Discover what keywords, phrases, and questions are being searched relating to your area of service. Tools like Ahrefs Keyword Generator and Moz’s Keyword Explorer offer free insights into search volume (i.e. the number of searchers typing in a word or phrase in a month).
• Write quality content: Using those keywords, put your passion on paper, so to speak, and create content that will educate, inspire, and engage.
• Update the old: Check your previously written articles (if you have any) and make sure they include enough organic mentions of your keyword. (By the same token, don’t overdo the keyword inclusion — this is a black hat SEO technique called keyword stuffing.)
• Make it pop with pictures: Keep readers engaged by pairing your text with visual content, such as graphics, images, or videos. (In 2020, video was the #1 form of media used in content strategies.)
• Diversify your content: Common types include blogs, white papers, lists, and case studies. Don’t forget images and infographics for easier sharing on social media.
• Solicit help for ideas: Source content ideas from volunteers, donors, and competitors.
• Aim to educate: Provide value and educate your audience with guides, how-tos, and downloadable templates if applicable.

Pro tip: The content you create can be repurposed and made into different types of media, thus keeping your marketing costs low.

3. Take advantage of free tools

An important advantage of nonprofit SEO is its reasonable budget. It’s possible to achieve many initial SEO content-related goals by using free or low-cost tools that are readily available online.

AnswerThePublic and Google Trends can help you learn what your target audience is interested in, to create high-quality blogs. You can also use BuzzSumo to discover what type of content is currently popular to find potential outreach opportunities. Platforms like Semrush and Moz can assist with targeted keyword research as well.

Even if you have excellent content ideas for your website, SEO tools can help you determine what will resonate most with your target audience.

4. Boost your backlinks

If content is king when it comes to SEO for nonprofits, link building is the queen.

That’s because search engines pay special attention to websites that link back to your site. If credible, high-authority websites link to your site, you are more likely to rank highly.

Unfortunately, there’s no “secret trick” to getting quality backlinks — it’s often simply an investment of time and effort. But when you work in nonprofits, you understand what investment means and why it’s worth it.

The good news is that this investment is much the same as promoting your cause: Use the right words, be passionate, paint a picture, and grow your reach.

• Write guest blog posts for trustworthy, high-authority websites that allow adding a link to the writer’s bio or your website.
• Share hard data, annual reports, and statistics collected by your organization. Then, reach out to reporters and bloggers through sites like Connectively (previously Help a Reporter Out or HARO), Quotd, and SourceBottle to put that information (and a source link) to use in their articles.
• Create highly shareable content like infographics. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a picture with words is worth a million.
• Add social sharing buttons to each content piece. Moreover, make sure your posts have attractive images that will engage a social media scroller when they come across them in their feed.
• Ask your community: Corporate sponsors, donors, volunteers, and new sources are all great options for links to your site. Can’t make a contribution but want to help? An in-kind sponsorship of a backlink with details could be worth a line or two in an event program!

High-quality backlinks can be hard to acquire. However, through consistency, they often yield excellent SEO results.

Besides helping volunteers find you, staying on top of local SEO can lead to additional partnerships and opportunities. (Image: Unsplash)

5. Make the most of local SEO

Whether you’re hosting a drive, hoping to recruit volunteers, holding an event, or attracting donors, people need to be able to find you.

Your community is your greatest resource for engaged individuals to support your mission. Local SEO is the fast track to being visible to those in the community you’re trying to reach.

Ways to increase your local search visibility include:

• Create a Google Business Profile listing so your nonprofit website shows up in response to “near me” searches.
• Register your nonprofit on Google Maps to make it easier for volunteers to discover your local offices.
• List your organization in local directories to help your target audience find you.
• Take advantage of local target keywords when creating website content.
• Create location-specific pages for each office, if applicable.
• Try to get backlinks from local businesses, charities, and other nonprofits.
• Try the local news for a source of high-authority backlinks.

“Another great resource for backlinks is local businesses who sponsor fundraisers,” Harvey explains. These businesses “can often provide quality backlinks on their sites as part of their sponsorship agreement.”

Local news outlets are also typically eager to help.

“Discuss discounted bundles for articles with local newspapers, periodicals, and news channels, “ Harvey explains. “Many will work with nonprofits to provide editorial coverage plus advertising at a discounted rate.”

Besides helping volunteers find you, staying on top of local SEO can help you generate awareness in your community, which can lead to additional partnerships and opportunities.

Pro tip: Keyword research and SaaS platform Semrush has its own list of recommendations in the realm of SEO for nonprofits. These include (obviously) using keyword research to drive content strategy, growing brand awareness through link building, prioritizing site UX, keeping local SEO top of mind, and staying on top of your social media presence.

6. Optimize your on-page elements

As explained above, the three types of SEO are on-page, off-page, and technical. To make your site more appealing and optimized for search engines and users, make sure to keep these on-page elements in order:

• Create a unique and relevant page title tag for each page on your site (ideally, it should be around 60 characters).
• Create well-written meta descriptions for each page. These should be around 160 characters. (While it’s not a search engine ranking signal, this description can impact click-through rates).
• Include relevant keywords in titles and meta descriptions. Make sure you’re targeting different keywords with each web page.
• Add alt text to images to meet ADA compliance recommendations and make images more searchable.
• Make sure anchor text is accurate and descriptive, rather than vague “click here” phrases.

Pro tip: Duplicate content is another on-page SEO aspect worth keeping in mind. While not technically a penalty in the eyes of Google, having multiple pages targeting the same keyword can confuse readers and muddle your message. If you come across two similar pieces of content, consider combining them together under one URL (ideally, the one that’s built up the most link authority).

7. Stay up to date on SEO trends

Maintaining a strong online presence requires staying current with the latest SEO trends and Google algorithm updates. These changes can impact your site’s visibility and rankings, taking you from the top result one day and blasting you to oblivion on page 5 the next.

Here’s what to keep an eye on:

• Ranking factors: Google frequently updates its algorithms to enhance the quality of search results. New ranking factors and adjustments to existing ones can affect where your site ranks for relevant search queries. Keep up with these changes to prevent drops in organic traffic.
• Core Web Vitals: Google focuses a lot on metrics like website speed, responsiveness, and visual stability through Core Web Vitals. Sites that offer a better user experience through quick loading times and smooth interactions are more likely to rank higher.
• Mobile optimization: As mobile internet usage grows, optimizing your site for mobile devices becomes even more important. Google prioritizes Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in mobile search results, so consider implementing AMP to improve your mobile visibility.
• Structured data: Using structured data markup helps search engines understand your content better. This makes it easier for Google to index and display your information accurately.
• Https and security: Google rewards secure sites with https encryption by potentially boosting their rankings.

Harvey also reminds us that there are some key elements a nonprofit should pay attention to.

“There are some key SEO elements that often get overlooked by nonprofits,” Harvey says.

“Structured Data is the first — this helps search engines understand what your site and pages are and how to better deliver them to users. With the advent of Search Generative Experience, Structured Data (Schema) is ever more important.”

The takeaway

Search engine optimization is one of the most efficient (and cost-effective) ways to generate website traffic. For this reason, SEO for nonprofits is an especially attractive digital marketing method.

By adding nonprofit SEO tactics to your overall marketing plan, it’s possible to attract donors, find volunteers, share events, and increase awareness.

Focus on high-quality content, backlinking strategies, and technical page excellence to start seeing the results you want and make an even greater impact on your cause.

And if you’re ready to put your efforts in the hands of an SEO expert who can help you do all this and more, we’d love to make that happen.

This article has been updated and was originally published in January 2021.