SEO FOR CHARITIES

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As a charity, you will likely be aiming to increase awareness and donations for your cause, however, budgets can often be limited – but this doesn’t mean your results should be. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an effective way to achieve outstanding results without having to invest an arm and a leg.

An SEO strategy will review and optimise key elements of your site to help improve your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which in turn, will increase organic traffic to your site and create more opportunities to drive conversions. Along with this, having a powerful SEO strategy will help you to increase awareness of your charity, gain more exposure, extend your reach and generate more local attention.

When we speak about on-page SEO, we are referring to optimising pages on your site to help boost your rankings in the SERPs. Several elements must be considered when reviewing your on-page SEO, including:

• Content: each page on your site should consist of high-quality, unique content that is relevant to your target audience. You should ensure to use a selection of relevant keywords, however, you must avoid keyword stuffing at all costs as this can have negative consequences for your site. 
• Header tags: you should define key headers in HTML using relevant tags, for example, <h1> will typically indicate the title of your page and subsequent tags (ranging from <h2> to <h6>) will demonstrate the hierarchy of information that follows. 
• Internal links: by adding internal links to your site you will be helping the search engine crawlers to effectively navigate your site.
• Alt text: primarily to help the visually impaired to better understand images on your site, but also useful for helping search engines to identify image content. 
• Meta description: HTML elements used to describe a page. They must be highly relevant, provide a summary of the page in question, and should be between 150 – 300 characters. 

Part of your on-page SEO, this area focuses on optimising the technical aspects of your website to improve your ranking in the SERPs. When reviewing your technical SEO, you should consider the following:

• Site speed
• Crawlability 
• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Security 
• XML sitemap
• Structured data

As the name suggests, off-site SEO is concerned with optimising areas related to, but not on your website to help improve your ranking in the SERPs. Perhaps the most commonly referred to off-page ranking factor is inbound links: to the search engines, high-quality, relevant links are equivalent to recommendations, so the more you can obtain, the more authority your site will have. 

Other off-page ranking factors include:

• Social media presence
• Unlinked mentions
• Influencer marketing 
• Reviews

Local SEO for charities is particularly important as it helps to attract volunteers in target locations and promote your fundraising events to relevant local audiences. When we look at local SEO for charities, we will be optimising your site to attract more visitors from key locations by using local keywords, NAP (name, address & phone number) citations, adding your charity to local directories and creating a Google My Business profile.

For more information on developing an SEO strategy for your charity, please email hello@boss-digital.co.uk or call 01628 783973.