welcome to the non-profit digital success podcast I'm your host David and in this episode we're going to be covering the importance of SEO for non-profits and Charities with my guest Brandon Leibowitz since 2007 Brandon has been running an operating SEO optimizers their digital marketing company based out of La that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses get more online traffic which in turn converts into client sales leads Etc it's a little bit different in the non-profit and char
ity world than the business world but it's really important to think of yourself as a business you need to drive traffic into your site you need volunteers you need to get people to come to your events you need donors very similar lessons uh Brandon thank you for joining the show today looking forward to hearing from you thanks for having me on today so SEO is search engine optimization it is if can you define it for everybody in case anybody hasn't heard of it before so SEO is a way to get free
traffic so you don't have to spend money on ads so like helping people save money because I mean the ads work but they're just expensive and once you stop running ads you just disappear whereas with SEO you stop doing SEO you're not just gonna Disappear Completely you're still going to be ranking for the most part until your competitors do more SEO than you've done and try to outrank you but SEO certain optimization just long-term strategy to help tap into that free traffic from Google so it is
ranking websites on Google so when you search on Google or any search engine there's ads at the top those are all paid ads red below ads is organic the free listings and SEO is getting you in the free listing so you're not paying for the ads one of the things I think a lot of people think about is like they'll go to Google and they'll search for their organization name and if they come up that that's really great but is that a good strategy so searching for your own company name is called yeah
branded search where this is your brand so if you're not showing up for your brand name that's a big red flag that something's wrong because you should show up for your branding unless it's a really common name then Google might mix you up with other people not know what your company name is but you don't really want to write I mean you want to write for your brand name but that's not going to get you new eyeballs to get new people you want non-branded keywords keywords that don't mention your b
rand name because like imagine you search for Target you know Target you've been there before you haven't been there might not have been there but you know about Target you've heard of them versus someone searching for like men's sunscreen and then Target ranks for that that's going to get them a sale versus someone or a new eyeball hopefully I mean they might have been to Target before in the past but they're searching for a keyword that doesn't include the brand name and that's really what you
want to focus on is making sure that you show up for non-branding keywords because that's going to get new people new eyeballs on your content it's good to have your brand name you definitely want to make sure you have that one right But ultimately it's the goal for seos and non-branded keywords right and I think that's a really great point is you need to think about what it is that people are going online and searching for that you want to show up for right so what are those keywords and Brand
on do you have any strategies in terms of what people can think about in terms of researching the keywords that they might want to show up for I would just go into Google search for your keywords see who's on that first page of Google and look at so when you search on Google there's ads skip over the ads but look at the organic free listings and you can see this blue clickable link which is called SEO title tag that's where everyone puts their keywords so you just quickly search for your keyword
s and see what other people are using you can see synonyms plurals variations industry jargon that you've maybe never heard of and that will give you ideas and I would just make a big list of as many keywords as possible like don't hold batches write down as many keywords as possible but searching in Google is going to let you find any better and and it's on that first page of Google they've done something right and they're more than likely due in keyword research they're not just picking random
keywords I mean some people are but to get to the first page you gotta do some stuff so I would look at what they're doing and then use different tools like the Google Keyword Planner it's a free tool for Google that will show you how many people actually search for those keywords because just because your competitors are using it doesn't mean it's the most accurate or relevant keyword it might have been good five years ago but maybe time to change where people search for different variations o
f that word and so you gotta always double check using different tools but the Keyword Planner from Google it's a free tool and it's from Google so I would use that one first but there's plenty of other page rules if you want to buy a paid tool that will show you how many people search for those keywords they just make it look prettier and nicer but they're just taking their data from the Google Keyword Planner and just making it look more presentable so if you're listening we're going to have a
link for Google Keyword Planner on our show notes page just go over to nonprofit digitalsuccesspodcast.com and search for this episode and we'll have all the links that uh Brandon and I chat about today in in the show notes for you um so yes it's important you go into Google if your organization focuses on dementia let's say June is Alzheimer's Awareness Month go in and search for that and see what other similar like organizations are doing and and the words that they're using and I think that
that's a that's a good piece to pull in yeah it's a quick easy way to do it without getting too technical just searching Google Google's then pretty much show you everything you need to know fantastic and one thing to to mention is SEO is a long game strategy right you start making some changes on your site it's not going to happen overnight it does take time so Alzheimer's awareness month if that's something that you want to focus on you need to be working on that few months in advance do you h
ave any tips with regards to how far in advance the organization should be thinking about things yeah SEO is not immediate unfortunately so if you want immediate results paid ads we'll get you that immediate traction SEO takes a couple months if your new website it could take six months or a year I mean it just depends how competitive the keywords are that you're trying to Target because it's not really a one-size-fits-all SEO it really just depends on your website versus the competitors how muc
h SEO have you done versus the competition that's all that matters we don't care about Google or their algorithm because it changes every single day and if you try to figure out how Google works tomorrow is going to change and every single day it's going to keep changing but who's on that first page of Google that's really what matters who's on that first page of Google how much SEO have they done and if you're a brand new website and it really comes down to these backlinks so the backlinks are
what ranks website so backlinks are clickable links from other websites that point to yours so if you're reading an article in like the LA times and it says Brandon Lee Blitz and you click on it and it goes to my website I'd be getting a backlink from the LA Times the more websites that talk about you the more trust Google is going to give to you and then they look at the keywords on your website to figure out how to rank you it doesn't really work the other way around without backlinks it's alm
ost impossible to rank on Google and the way to figure out how long is going to take you to rank is you gotta figure out how many backlinks do you have versus the websites on that first page of Google if you're a brand new website and you only have five backlinks and you can pairs up 500 backlinks it's gonna take months maybe even a year to rank if they have 5 000 backlinks it might take a couple years because they built it up over the years so much trust and Authority from Google that you gotta
find keywords that just aren't dominated by big players so if your new website and your competitors only have buy backlinks and you have five backlinks and you should be able to rank for your keywords within maybe a month or so but it just depends on his backlink so backlinks are really the biggest factor with SEO is trying to figure out how many backlinks you have versus the competitors usually people say on average it takes about six months to rank a website but again it's not really a one si
ze fits all every website's different every keyword search is going to be different so we just gotta figure out where the disconnect is between you and your competitors so if you get a spam-ish kind of email and it says we will rank you number one in Google in a week ignore it it's not true throw it out forget about it and move on there's something called if we can just geek out for a second Brandon there's something called domain Authority right and what is domain Authority and how does that pl
ay in to your SEO backlink strategy that you're talking about so Google made pagerank that's how they rank websites and that would be a scale of 0 to 10 and they unfortunately stopped showing you what your page rank is so in the past you could see oh I'm a page right four or I'm a page right seven which is really high up there but now Google well Google's not got away a long time ago so other third-party tools came in and made their own ranking system where they're trying to guesstimate at what
Google is but these are all third-party tools that are not Google so you can look at them take it with a grain of salt but just because you have a high domain Authority doesn't mean anything with Google because there's ways to manipulate the domain Authority because people sell backlinks and the higher the domain Authority the more someone's gonna buy it for so there's Moz has domain Authority page Authority there's Majestic trust flow citation flow there's ahrefs that has their own metrics and
what I do is I look at all them because just because it has High mods domain Authority it might have a really low trust score on citation or from Majestic which is really important and that's one that a lot of people don't look at I would look at that one over Moz is demandatory because it gets so spammed and but all over spam and they're not Google's albums so it helps but just take out the grain of salt because it's not accurate at all they're just guesstimating and there's ways unfortunate to
manipulate it right so domain Authority ultimately is like how trustworthy your site is and how popular you are right and so if you can get a link from a big name like LA Times right to link to your organization that that would have a higher uh trust factor in terms of Google and their secret sauce algorithm that nobody really knows what the what the right formula is so if you can get listed if you can get some media attention if you can get somebody somewhere on a big enough site to drive back
links back to you for a specific article or a topic or maybe a profile of your your CEO or executive director right you might be able to increase your SEO ranking Majestic and ahrefs all these other third-party tools they go from zero to 100. Google went from zero to ten so similar but they're just you know just guesstimating it but it is looking at well there's different metrics but like Majestic is looking at trust flow and then they're also looking at citation flow because they don't want to
just look at one aspect they want to make sure that you're getting good backlinks but they're also trustworthy and not spammed because you get the wrong type of backlinks except ranking higher you actually drop down in rankings but the biggest part with the backlinks is relevancy things really find websites are related to you you don't want to just be on any website gotta Beyond website side related too that's really number one Authority is definitely important but relevancy is the most importan
t because Google looks at relevancy for everything how relevant are the keywords on your website to the keywords that people are searching how relevant are the backlinks to your website because if you're like a mechanic like an auto body shop and then you're getting backlinks from a doctor that looks a little weird like why is a doctor linking to a mechanic but if the mechanic has other auto body shops or car manufacturers linking out to them that makes sense so you want sci-fi related to you an
d that Authority is great too like if you get in the big big Publications that helps out a lot because those ones are just so trusted like Google looks at the big websites and trusts them a lot more than smaller websites so big websites get a lot more SEO value that's passed onto your website for sure so if there's any um associations or governing bodies for your your organization connect with them see if they can list you on their site because then you've got the relevancy factor in there there
might be other organizations that you have Partnerships with maybe they're not doing the same type of work that you're doing in for your non-profit or charity but maybe they're doing something kind of similar and you're you have a bit of a joint venture type of thing going on have conversations with them about linking back and forth between each other and that'll that'll help you and that'll help them yeah the more sites like that BBB Chamber of Commerce any of that stuff and that's for Spiner
your competitors are going to show you all of their backlink seizing tools like ahrefs or Moz or sem Rush all these paid tools you can throw anyone's website in there and see all their backlinks and tools are not very expensive either right we're probably talking like 40 50 60 a month kind of thing right uh somewhere somewhere kind of in there or you can hire an expert that's already using the tools like Brandon and his team over there at SEO optimizers and have them help you out with a solid st
rategy that will help you I I think it's obvious what the benefits of SEO are but Brandon do you want to talk about that a little bit well it's just really getting that free traffic that's the main thing so you don't have to keep spending money on paid ads so tapping into that free traffic and people trust the organic more than the paid ads on Google but the main benefit really is that free traffic that you're going to get who wouldn't want free traffic right you don't have to take out ads right
you're just putting some content on your site that's rich in keywords and what it is that people are looking for on your site take a look if you don't have analytics installed on your site get analytics on your site look through the data on a weekly monthly basis see what people are searching for that are coming into your site produce more content around that because that's obviously a topic of interest that is going to drive more traffic to you yep yep you gotta have analytics if you don't hav
e Google analytics or Google search console both free tools be a really kind of just going at it blindly their data is there to show you what's working what's not working what pages get the most traffic Pages get the least amount of traffic which pays to get the most traffic but has the most amount of people leaving immediately which you're not going to get that if you're running Facebook ads there's a thing called the bounce rate which shows how many people came to your website left immediately
and a lot of people don't know that their bounce rate might be like 90 of the traffic that they're sending from Google ads or Facebook ads is leaving immediately and that's where you gotta really dive into the analytics and look at the data and just make more statistically informed decisions about what's working and what's not working and that'll also give you some details in terms of referring domains so you can see where you've got backlinks coming in and it's it's a built into Google analyti
cs for free so you know get on that if you don't have it already go and sign up it's it's free get it on your site right away and start looking at the data give it a couple of weeks so that you have a bit more robust information in there and you know talking about websites it's great you're gonna after listening to this episode you're gonna go okay and you're gonna start producing content that's rich in the keywords that's going to drive traffic to your site but then we need to convert right and
we need to turn those into people that are either going to be following you or donating or looking to volunteer or getting more information about a program or a service that you might be offering um if you have any tips on how people can optimize their website for conversions you just gotta really make sure that you have all the information at the top of your website because what people see on a website is called above the fold once you start scrolling down below the fold and most people will n
ever scroll down so having all the important information at the top of your website good call to action a value proposition explaining what they're going to get out of it maybe have a video up there or just really minimal less is better and then you could have a bunch of text and stuff below that but the top above a fold needs to just really be having the most important things not having too many distractions especially with mobile too you don't want to have it cluttered so less is better but it
's all about just testing seeing what's going to work what's not going to work you get a B test your web site and split test traffic half the traffic gets one version half the traffic gets another version you can see which one converts better because there is no perfect website you should always be testing and tweaking it and that's where the analytics can help you out right you can take a look at the data and see what people are clicking on what might resonate more than the other if you're goin
g to do split testing you can take a look at the colors that you're using or you can take a look at the wording that you're using on those call to actions that will make it stand out and work better one thing to note scientifically you should only change kind of one thing at a time so that you can properly know okay well this is what it is so if you want to change the color change the color but don't change the color in the words and the position of it because then you don't know what it is that
actually increased the click-through rate or the conversion from that yeah we have one at a time you don't want to go too crazy unless you're getting a ton of traffic but even then it's still going to be complicated so if you have a ton of traffic you can test a lot more but usually it's best just one thing keep it less simple is better and then you can just keep testing and testing and see what's working test out against something else and then find the winner test out against something else f
ind the winner test that again and keep on testing because there's no perfect website and that's true for your email marketing as well right when you send out an email if you're using MailChimp or Constant Contact and you're sending stuff out try changing maybe the time of day or the day of the week that you send that message out and do it three or four emails in a row and then you'll have some pure data to really identify what it is that worked yup you just gotta think about who's your audience
are they parents then maybe you want to send it before they're sending their kids to school or maybe in the afternoon when they have some free time or after they pick up their kids or we got figured out like or if you're selling like concert tickets maybe you want to send your emails out on Thursday to let people know about the concert on Friday or if it's on the weekend but you just gotta try to figure out like who's your audience when are they going to be aware and how do you get a friend at
the right time before it's too late and just try to really just take a step back put yourself in the user's point of view I think that's really solid advice right like take a look at your analytics well first have analytics take a look at the analytics make iterative changes over time so that you can better and and prove what it is that you're doing and in terms of improving what you're doing social media is kind of all over the place it's in our face it's getting more and more popular more peop
le are using it certainly during covid over the last you know three years how can you use social media to help grow your organization well um it just depends if your audience is on there or not yeah take a step back and think who is my audience and where are they going to be like if you're a dentist or something like that probably not going to get too many people coming to you on social media like on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter probably not looking for dentists or there but if you're sellin
g a product or something where it might go viral that work really well or if you're like a musician or Sports those work really well on social but like myself I'm an SEO company many people are going to go out on social media to find me but I use social media to put a face behind the company to let people know that I'm a real company that they could ask questions they can read reviews they could see status updates so social is usually a way for once people have found you online then they vouch f
or you and check you out on like Yelp or social media or TripAdvisor or whatever it may be to check your reviews and make sure you really are who you say you are so social helps in a way to just build trust but get new clients too but really get to run paid ads for the most part because because there's no reach there's no engagement anymore so social has really become a pay-to-play platform if you want visibility exposure you've got to advertise just because reach is so low like on Facebook five
out of 100 people that like your page will ever see what you post without having to boost it up and advertise so it's really tough to get that engagement you spend all this time getting 100 likes and five lists people will ever see what you post the rest of the people will never see it unless you advertise to them so it's kind of tough to do social nowadays but if that's where your audience is at you need to be there it's just really trying to figure out who's your audience and where they're at
and what platforms are they on we don't need to be everywhere you seem to be on the ones that they're on and I think that's that's a very fair point right find out where your donors your volunteers the people that care about the work that you're doing where they're hanging out and go into those spaces right it might be Tick Tock right and or it might be Twitter it might be LinkedIn who knows where it is um you can reach out to your donors you can reach out to your volunteers and ask them hey li
ke what social uh platforms are you using and do like a little bit of a survey try to dig in and get some information about that and go after one of those platforms to start maybe go after a second after that but connect with them let them know that you're on those platforms and even if you have staff let them know that you're on there and when you post something if it's big enough maybe send an email to all of your stuff and be like hey if you have a minute go on and like this or share it or so
mething like that I know it seems a little disingenuous to do that but you need to start building your audience from somewhere yeah yeah it helps out cross mode as much as you can and try to tap into as many sources of traffic as you can but just make sure that's where your audience is that that's the main thing you just try to figure out where are they and how do you want to get in front of them at the right time if they're on Google on Yelp are they on TripAdvisor where are they you got are th
ey on Amazon they're all have algorithms it's just making sure that you optimize to get yourself ranked higher exactly exactly and on those platforms you want to be posting content that you have on your site to drive traffic back into your site the social platforms have their own part to play in Google's algorithm as well and you know that kind of pulls it all together and wanted to ask you does SEO work in 2022 is SEO still something that people should care about um as long as there's search en
gines and as long as the search engines aren't full of ads and SEO still works but if Google is just full of ads and SEO is not going to work but I don't think Google is going to do that because people don't want just a page full of ads but I'd love to see what happens in the future if there's no more search engines and there's no more SEO so just trying to figure out what's gonna happen are there still going to be search engines are people gonna be searching in the future or are we just gonna b
e tapped into something and don't have to search or let me have some alternative reality in the metaverse or who knows I think I think it's important to still focus on SEO I think Google is gonna in bing uh which also powers Yahoo in terms of database right I think they're still going to be around for for some time people are using the platforms they're monetizing it by selling ads and I maybe down the road they'll probably have more ads and try to drive more Revenue that way but I think probabl
y for the next year or two we're probably safe with how things are uh but then again who knows right maybe they'll go and just shake things up and and kind of stir the pot a little bit yeah we'll see but ever since I've been doing SEO since 2007 they've been saying SEO is dying out and so I don't think that's he has gone anywhere anytime soon but who knows but ever since I've been doing it people said SEO is going to be done and that was in 2007 and they've been saying that even before I started
doing SEO so I feel like just people just say that to scare people off because they don't want them to do SEO and or they want them to run paid ads and make Google more money one thing to pay attention to in my opinion is don't just put like a whole bunch of keywords into an article you want to make sure that it's relevant to the content that's in there do you have any what you shouldn't do moments that you can mentioned we don't build backlinks that are low quality or from irrelevant websites
the backlinks are really the tricky part because with the content the main thing is just don't have duplicate content don't reuse the same content on multiple pages on your website don't throw keywords in there spammy people don't hide your content in like font size .001 and your white background you have white text like stuff like that which is pretty obvious that you're manipulating or tricking Google but the backlinks are where you could be getting backlinks and you think they're good backlin
ks but they're actually bad ones so that's where you just gotta be very very careful making sure they're relevant making sure they're not from spammy sites making sure they have some trust and Authority but you got to be careful that's the tricky part of the backlinks some amazing insights today Brandon thank you so much to everybody listening I want you to take action on something that Brandon spoke about today go maybe change the title of your home page just a little bit just tweak it just a l
ittle bit just to put that keyword maybe as the first word in the title and see you know over the next two months what happens or three months or four months what happens with your website with your traffic and I don't think that you're gonna regret it at all Brandon during our pre-show we were talking a little bit and you've got a special offer for everybody listening um the gift can you tell us what that's about yeah so everyone that's listening I create a special gift for them if they go to m
y website SEO optimizers.com it's SEO opt i-m-i-z-e-r-s.com forward slash gift they can find that there along with my contact information and I do a lot of classes all those classes are up there for free so they want to learn more about digital marketing they could find all that there that's awesome free SEO resources everybody go and get it go go go go stop listening to this podcast all right finish listening to the podcast we're almost at the end here but then go and check out Brandon's site S
EO optimizers.com gift and we will get you the links also on the show notes thanks again so much Brandon for hopping on it's been great having you on the non-profit digital success podcast uh to everybody listening as I mentioned show notes page links and resources for Brandon as well as his contact information and until next time keep on being successful foreign
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