A beginners guide to SEO for charities- the tips and tricks

Search engine optimisation is all about making your website visible to the people who you want to find you.

For charities, that means finding people who are interested in supporting the same cause as you, and willing to make donations to support your work.

Why

Increase donations: Online donations are increasing in popularity as it’s quick and easy to make a contribution. Your website just needs to persuade that person, so they need to be able to find it.

Raise awareness: Local SEO is a massive element of some charities’ success. More awareness of your brand in general will help spread the word both online and offline.

Promote trust: A high ranking SEO helps build up a stronger reputation. When you’re easy to find online, people have more confidence in you.

How

Carefully select keywords

An effective SEO revolves around your keywords.

What most closely describes the content.
What might your readers search to find you.
What’s memorable enough that they can find you again.

Keywords are a good place to start with your SEO; they’re easy to adjust with pretty immediate results.

Include your geographical location

Most charities tend to be UK-based but whether you are or not, make sure you specify

Where you are.
Where you operate.

Search results vary for everyone. Location is a significant factor, so don’t waste time trying to rank highly outside of your area.

Keep your content engaging

If the content is strong, this means the SEO can be too. Search engines reward sites with great content by improving their ranking based on:

Time spent on site: Ranking is affected based on whether people stay on a site for a while or go back straight away.
Exploration on site: If you produce content that urges people to read on, explore and click through, this translates to more time spent and gets you a higher SEO ranking.
External links to the site: If other people are sharing your information, search engines perceive it as useful and up your rank.

Make your site mobile friendly

People don’t always factor in the difference that mobile accessibility can make to your SEO ranking.

With the rise of the smartphones, SEO ranking for numerous search engines now factors in how compatible your site is with mobile. In order to keep up with this, make sure you follow these simple practices :

Keep your images & text correctly sized so the site stays correctly laid out and loads quickly.
Don’t use Flash or pop ups as these are likely to not work on many devices.
Make sure all your links are clear, easy to click and work correctly so people can move freely around your site.
If users are required to click onto another website (e.g to donate or sign up) then make sure this site is also compatible.

This scratches the surface of ways you can optimize for mobile, but if you want to know more take a look at this Moz article.

Remove all errors

This final point seems like a given, but we feel we should stress how important it is!

If any of the below applies to your site, this ups the chance of people exiting your page quickly and suggests to search engines that it’s an old or neglected site. So be sure to check if:

It doesn’t load correctly.
It doesn’t display clearly.
Certain parts don’t work.

Once you’ve got these down you’ve made a good first step towards improving your sites SEO ranking, so feel free to pat yourself on the back.

These are just a few of the simpler tips for getting your SEO ranking up without having to allocate tons of time and budget to it.

If you want to get even more clued up, there’s tons of useful info in the links below:

Moz: a detailed blog with information on every element of SEO
Webmaster: An official google specific starter guide
Econsultancy: they offer small-business specific advice & what to be weary of.

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