Non-profits have a lot on their table, often their web presence comes last as compared to their other priorities. Many non-profits don’t even realize how beneficial expanding their online visibility, specifically within the search engines, can really be when it comes to increasing donations, recruiting volunteers and simply spreading word of their mission. SEO or search engine optimization is the process of making your website rank higher in the search engine, as a result coming up higher in the search results for a variety of different searches based on many factors the search engines establish. Let’s explore 5 easy steps towards making your non-profit’s website SEO friendly.

1. Choosing the Right Keywords: Choosing the right keywords to use throughout your website is vital to having your content found in search engines for relevant searches about your nonprofit. Keyword research works as a combination of the phrases you think people are using to find your website with the keywords that have an appropriate amount of monthly search volume.

For instance, the American Heart Association could make the assumption that people might search high blood pressure to find information on their website. By using a popular keyword tool, like Google’s Keyword Tool, you can search this key phrase to see how often these terms are searched monthly on a global scale. It’s important to use keywords that aren’t heavily competitive, but rather shoot for keywords with small to mid level search volume. This way you can rank for many keywords that aren’t as competitive, instead of focusing your efforts on getting results from one highly competitive key-phrase that you may never be able to rank for. The key phrase high blood pressure are highly competitive with a global month search volume of 165,000. That’s some potential for traffic, but it’s too competitive to rank for in a reasonable amount of time. Try shooting for other variations that the keyword tool gives you like signs of high blood pressure or symptoms of high blood pressure both of which have notable amounts of search traffic and the opportunity to actually rank using these phrases in the long term.

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