Business identities are now recognized by websites in this digital era. Be it a profitable business website or website of a non-profitable organization; digitalization rules the globe.
Have you thought about how you will manage your website to stand out amongst millions of sites? Ever heard of Google SEO ranks?
What Is SEO?
SEO alias Search Engine Optimisation is a process that increases the network traffic of your site and ensures that your website is visible to maximum visitors.
SEO modifies and optimizes your website according to the ranking factors (few are shown in the above image), which are defined by Google, for search engines. When a user enters a search query on Google, this optimized site will be visible in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) in response to a user query.
Thus, SEO plays a pivotal role in maximizing the traffic to your site, making it visible in organic results.
Why Do You Need SEO?
Businesses have created websites to gain web traffic and to become familiar with the crowd. Valuable information, relevant content, and appropriate keywords all these factors help search engines to find your site easily. This, in turn, not only increases visitors to your site but also increases returning customers.
If your non-profit website is optimized for SEO, it is likely to give you good finances and profits for your charitable cause. You can also use the Google Analytics tool to monitor SEO performance. Research indicates that 93% of web traffic comes through search engines.
What Are Search Engines Looking For?
If your website is not visible to search engines then, you need to focus on your SEO strategies. Search engines crawl, index, and rank sites based on more than 200 factors defined by Google. Let’s check a few of them.
Ranking Factors:
- Relevant content to a user query
- Qualitative content
- Easy and smooth navigation for memorable user experience
- Site speed
- Mobile and browser compatibility
- Error-free internal links
- Title tags and Meta description
- Tagged images
- Social Media Marketing
Reasons To Optimize Your Non-Profit Website:
Attract Target Audience By Providing Useful Site:
Your aim to serve the best content of your website to your target audience may sometimes be unsuccessful if Google fails to show your site pages in SERP. Many site owners may have seen a steep fall in web traffic post algorithm updates.
Hence it is essential to keep your non-profit site updated and optimized regularly for better SEO ranks. Appropriate content with proper use of keywords for relative searches, and a goal to attract your audience, go a long way in creating a long-lasting relationship with your non-profit organization.
Increase Your Organic Traffic:
Network traffic can be organic or paid, depending on your business. Since your website is a non-profit one, attracting organic traffic (free traffic) makes sense for your organization.
You can increase organic traffic to your site by regular blogging so they can get relevant content that will increase your site value in SERP.
Optimise Your Site For Conversions:
In some websites, customer visits and leave immediately because of disinterest, while interesting sites makes a lasting impression on customer’s mind; thus, motivating them to return to the site.
Attractive themes and designs, including site optimization, are successful in converting visitors into leads and later customers, thus increasing CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).
Satisfy Customer’s Needs And Expectations:
The best way to meet customer’s demands is to conduct research on your target audience. Even feedbacks taken from the target audience define their needs. Once you are aware of their expectations and their needs, you can easily focus on fulfilling them and making them happy and satisfied.
Build brand awareness of your non-profit website through email promotions, or by offering discount coupons, etc. to fulfil your noble intentions.
How You Can Optimize Your Website For SEO?
Inspect Your Website Data:
After defining the website goals and KPI (Key Performance Indicator), it is important to analyse the site data for gaining network traffic and more CTA (Call to Action).
Use Google Search Console for monitoring customer behaviour, analysing specific user patterns, bounce rates, etc. and improve your non-profit site visibility in SERPs.
Research For Appropriate Keywords:
Though your non-profit site is not aiming at making money, it does work for good causes that require it to generate returns. Hence for better SEO ranks, proper use of keywords is essential.
Keywords should match user content and search criteria, and hence Keyword Tool (free online tool) is ideal for researching keywords on any content. Enter a keyword and get ample keyword suggestions to choose for your content.
Select the ideal one, which not only attracts more traffic by fulfilling speedy user searches but also improves conversion rates of satisfied users.
Provide Valuable Content:
The success of our non-profit website solely depends on your keyword-rich content and proper message delivery made to the target audience. Decide the length of your content by checking out other articles on Google having similar keywords as yours.
Later ensure that your content targets your desired audience, engages them and motivates them to take the desired action to fulfil your goal.
Ensure Mobile Compatibility:
A mobile responsive site reaps more benefits due to the phenomenal increase in mobile phone web traffic day by day. Studies indicate that almost 50% of the global population use smart gadgets for viewing sites. In short, make your non-profit site mobile friendly so that you don’t miss out on potential customers.
Many WP themes with responsive designs can be downloaded for free, which can serve your purpose.
Free Ssl Certificate:
Though your site is a non-profit one, you don’t want it to be wrongly accessed by fraudsters and cyber-thieves, right? The best way to avoid them is to opt for an SSL certificate. This is the best security against hackers, and you don’t worry about the pricing, because there are free SSL certificates available in the market for such organizations.
Free SSL Certificate is one such site where you can get the same. However, you can use free SSL certificate that will give you an idea about SSL certificate’s functions.
Set Up Strong Passwords:
We lock our houses to keep them safe from thieves. Passwords are locks that keep our websites and data safe from cyber-thieves. Simple and easy to guess password will enable fraudsters to access your site and cause financial damages.
Strong protection for your non-profit website is essential, and hence a strong password will serve the purpose. A password of 16 characters with alphanumeric characters + special characters + upper case + lower case makes a strong defence against brute-force attempts.
Backup Your Website Data:
Be it malware infections or server crashes; if the backup is not taken, it can cause a lot of damage. Data retrieval becomes very difficult, and you lose out on a lot of contacts and customers too. Hence backup serves as a blessing in disguise under these circumstances. Regular backups of your site data go a long way in taking care of unwanted mishaps.
Conclusion:
A proper framework of relevant content with relevant keywords, mobile compatibility and SSL security, title tags and meta descriptions, appropriate backlinks and smooth navigation with fast page load speed, all these factors help you gain better SEO ranks.
Though SEO is a complex process, if you are following the above predefined set of rules for your non-profit site optimisation, your site is bound to be successful, visible and high in Google ranks.