Ep 272 | SEO for 2024

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how you set up your website to get more organic traffic. SEO may seem daunting, but we break it down into actionable steps that any organization can implement. Whether you're new to SEO or looking to refine your strategy, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you get found online.

What you'll learn:

→ The key factors Google uses to rank websites (E-E-A-T and YMYL)
→ Strategies for creating high-quality, user-friendly content
→ The importance of internal and external linking
→ How to optimize blog posts for better search visibility
→ Tips for updating and repurposing existing content

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[03:00] Pay attention to the Google Ad Grant and how it can support your organization's goals. The Google Ad Grant provides eligible nonprofits with $10,000 per month in free advertising on Google. By ensuring your website is properly optimized for SEO, you can take full advantage of this grant and reach your target audience through both organic and paid channels.
[07:29] Focus on creating a great user experience through your content. Google places a strong emphasis on the quality and relevance of your content. Ensure that your blog posts and other web content are engaging, informative, and meet the needs of your audience. This will not only improve your search rankings but also provide a better overall experience for your visitors.
[08:03] Link to other relevant content on your website to build trust and provide more value. Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure and relationships between the different pages on your site. It also allows visitors to easily navigate and discover more of your content, improving their experience. Additionally, linking to authoritative external sources can further establish your organization's expertise and trustworthiness.
[10:00] Utilize tools like Rank Math or Yoast SEO to optimize your blog posts. These plugins can help you ensure that your blog posts are properly optimized for search engines. They provide checklists and guidance on elements like meta descriptions, keyword placement, alt text, and more. Taking the time to optimize your content can make a significant difference in your search visibility.
[14:00] Regularly review and update your top-performing content for better rankings. Updating and refreshing your existing content can be a powerful SEO strategy. By keeping your content current and relevant, you can maintain and potentially improve your search rankings without the need to create entirely new content from scratch.

Resources

Rank Math SEO
Yoast SEO
Ep 88 | Google Ad Grant and How to Maximize it
Ep 271 | Turning Existing Content into Blog Posts

Full Transcript

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Hey, hey, we are here today to talk about search engine optimization, or SEO. So this is how you get found organically online. So that means when somebody goes into their favorite search engine and they type in something they're looking for, your SEO is what allows you to show up for those particular keywords, so that you can get people to click through to your website, organic, meaning free traffic from search that kind of stuff. So it's a great thing that we want to consider, and something we want to put a little effort into when it comes to our websites. But it might not be what you think this episode is going to be about. So I'm going to give you kind of a little bit of a background on SEO and how specifically Google takes a look at your website, and then we're gonna talk through some strategies to kind of help things along the way. Now, full disclaimer, this is not going to encourage or create ranking right away. I don't know when your website will rank on the first page. I don't know why other pages are ranking higher than yours. These are just some things to consider, because we don't know what other organizations are doing with their SEO in order to encourage that ranking or the content. There's a whole lot of factors, and so this is really just going to help you build that strong foundation to be able to start the process. Now, algorithms are changing all the time, so again, there's no guarantee that any of these things are going to happen immediately. And so you're probably saying, Well, why do I care about this episode? Listen, these are foundational elements that haven't really changed over time, and just things to consider also, with some of these strategies that we're going to be talking about, they just provide a better user experience overall. So whether it is organic new people or existing people that are coming in, they're going to have a better experience with the content you're creating in general. And that's what we want. So it's all for a good cause. It's not for not and we're not going to go into a lot of the technical pieces. We're not going to talk about local SEO strategies, meaning, how do we rank in our local market with local businesses? We're not going to talk a lot about code or schema markup or things of that nature. We're just going to talk about the basics so you can get started and get things moving in the right direction.

But before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by our little I almost forgot what month we're in our August freebie, which is my favorite, 11 tools to help you to create content quicker. How can you get things done faster while still providing the quality that you need for your organization? So you can grab that at thefirstclick.net/resources, I think you'll like it. Check it out. Pick your favorite tool for where you're having the biggest bottleneck, and get after it. Let's get into the episode.

Intro
You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Okay, so why do we care about SEO? Well, again, like I said earlier, it's going to help you create a better user experience for your audience. And what's unique for nonprofits is when you set things up appropriately, it's really going to help you also with the Google Ad grant, and that is something that allows nonprofits to have a $10,000 Ad grant for their organization to spend in Google ads, and we will link up in the show notes the episode that we did with nonprofit megaphone. I can't remember what episode it is off the top of my head, but we will link it up in the show notes if you want to learn a little bit more about what the Google Ad grant is, but it means that you can rank on the top paid top of the page with all of the other paid advertisers. But uniquely, it's a $10,000 Ad grant so you don't have to pay for that advertising expense. So we still want to set up our websites to function correctly or Google so that we can take advantage of the Ad grant and also get some of that better organic SEO. So we're going to talk first about the acronym, the acronyms that Google has had for quite some time as far as how it ranks people's websites. Now, again, this isn't an exact science. This is just things that you want to be thinking about as you're building out your websites and the content that's on it. Now it used to be eat, E A T, now it's E E A T, and that stands for experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness and so these are kind of the areas that Google considers when it comes to ranking websites. So experience, meaning, what kind of experience do you have? Like, what right do you have to be in this space? Sorry, expertise. Being kind of your credentials, all of that good stuff, authority, being the authority of your website. So how long has it been around? Is it? Does it have an SSL is it, you know, is it something that we think has great domain authority? So it's kind of more the technical side, not necessarily the like experience side, and then trustworthiness is, is the content that's on your website trustworthy? Can people believe that it is true and real? And does Google feel like if they send people to your website, they're going to get the information that they're looking for based off of the keywords that they're putting into the system?

So the other acronym we want to pay attention to is Y M Y L, and that is your money, your life. So that means that anything that any topic, any website that focuses on anything that has to do with money, financials or or life. So health care, mental health, supplements, whatever fitness, anything that falls into a category that is Your Money, Your life, your meaning, the people that are visiting your your page has higher scrutiny as well, and so that means you're going to be looked at a lot more closely than other websites, because they want to make sure, again, that that trustworthiness is there, and that if they're sending people to your website, it's not going to give them information that is wrong or false or that is not going to be good for them. So eat, E A T and Y M Y L, your money, your life. These are things we just want to think about big picture all the time. As we're creating content, are we creating content that's going to help us boost that trustworthiness, showcase our expertise, showcase our experience, or the organizations so that we can build more trust with Google? So now that you kind of understand that overall background, the first thing that we really want to think about when it comes to our websites is the quality of the content and the user experience. So this is becoming more and more and more of an of an impact when it comes especially to long form content, blog content, things of that nature. Is it something that is engaging, that people are connecting with, that people are liking and utilizing? Is it giving them the information that they need? Is it giving them what they're expecting when they're clicking on that link? That's a big thing right in the formatting in a way that makes sense, easy to skim, easy to consume all of that good stuff. And again, this goes back to just being great user experience. So really think about the content from the user's perspective. What do they need? What do they need to make a buying decision? What do they need to make a decision that you're the one that's the right fit for them? So that's what we want to think about when it comes to content creation. Now the other thing we want to think about for trust building, and also just to help provide additional resources for our visitors is link building.

So how can we connect our existing content on our website to other things on our website? So maybe have a blog post that's talking about one topic and you have another blog post that kind of goes deeper on, maybe a part of what you've got going on there. Link those together so people can dive deeper with your organization and learn more about what you do. Similarly, let's say that there's a resource or a fact or a piece of data that is not yours, that you got from someone else that you want to also prove trustworthiness and authority, and that this is something that you know, is is to be true. Linking to another resource or another website is also really great, because it helps kind of build the story of what the content is that you're creating, and built that trust factor, if that other website has high trust, is a trusted domain. So that's up to you to really understand and do your research on who you're linking to, but you know, think about some of the bigger media organizations or research areas, places that you know you can trust. So those two links, we want to include those in every blog post, right? Because it's going to help build the story of what the content is that we're creating, and give Google a bigger image of what it is that it is, and help your readers get the full picture and get more understanding. Now, one of my favorite apps that I like to include on all of our websites is rank math, Yoast SEO might also be the other one that you've seen, and we'll link both of those up in the show notes for you here. But what I love about rank math is when you have it on your website and you create a blog post, it's going to give you a checklist of all of the things that you need to create. It's going to help you really ensure that you're doing the best practices as far as kind of the baseline foundation of SEO. And we're going to go through a few of those things, but you'll definitely want to check it out, plus it's free and. There's nothing better than getting that green check or seeing your score be 80 or 90 out of 100 on a blog post. Again, it doesn't guarantee that it's going to rank, but it's going to ensure that you have the right foundational elements in place to make it more likely that it will start to move up in the rankings. So some of those things are it's going to help you build out your meta description. So your meta description is what shows up in Google. So if your website ranks, or when it shows up in the search, it's going to have the title, it's going to have the meta description. So rank math will help you customize that. So you can put your description in there, and you can put your title. There's a whole lot of things that you can put in your title, obviously, what the post title is also location if you need to, or your organization, name, whatever it is that you have space for. But that's a great place. And then it will also help you make sure that your keyword is in the right places for the best optimization. So you'll put your keyword in. It's going to help you make sure that's in your meta description. It's going to help you it's going to help you make sure that it's in your title. And it's going to keep things moving forward.

The other thing we want to do is make sure that every single image that is on that page has alt text. So if you're in WordPress or any other of your web builders, when you upload a photo, there's often a box that says alt text, and what that is, is the information that is read on an e reader for people that are visually impaired to tell them what the image is, so that it gives them context so they can understand what they're what would be shown to somebody who isn't visually impaired. Super important to have that on there. Great best practice required for ADA compliance, which we've done episodes on before. We can link those up in the show notes as well. But also, just for search engines, they want to see that that's there to make sure that your website is accessible to people that need that need to use an e reader. Or just in general, they want to make sure everybody has access to the same content. So we want to put that alt text, and what that is is literally just a description. So it would say something like two people at a park having a picnic, eating watermelon, or Sunday afternoon, whatever, just a description of what's happening in the image to provide context for what they're seeing. Then the next thing that we want to think about is the formatting of the content, and this is for user experience. So how is it laid out? How much white space is being used? Again? We've talked about this a lot in other episodes. Where's the call to action? Where are the links like? Really making sure that that user experience is great? Do you need a table of contents, if it's a long blog post, so that people can drop down to where they want to get the information. Do we have videos embedded? Do we have audio embedded? How is that experience going to be for the user? So really think about that. And then when it comes to length, again, it's quality over quantity, but we the longer your post is, the more that it gives search engines the understanding about what the content is about and who it should be served to. So again, take a look at rank math or your Yoast SEO plugin. See what it's recommending. If you feel like you've said everything you need to say and you're at 300 words, don't try to push it out just so that you have 1000 words or whatever. And utilize AI to help you with some ideas for how to expand it, but really, just think about quality over quantity and the formatting to make sure that it's a good user experience. And you're not just adding fluff for the sake of words, okay? And then the last thing that I kind of want to talk about here is updating your existing content. And again, we just talked about this at length in a podcast episode this month, so we'll link that up in the show notes. Again, this is just an overview of SEO, but really paying attention to the content that's already working for you and doubling down on it, updating it, keeping things moving forward relevant and updated for the new trends, the new information, the new things that are happening. So that can be a really great way to get better rankings without having to put in a lot of effort of creating new content.

But again, check out the show notes for this episode in order to get all of the resources for the things that we talked about today. And you can get all of that at the firstclick.net/272, so we haven't done an overview of SEO. I don't know if ever on this podcast, we've talked about it quite a bit, so I wanted to just give you kind of a baseline understanding of what it is. Now there's, of course, so many more things that you can do to really take advantage of SEO, if that's a big strategy that you want to take for your organization, but paying attention to a few of these things now will definitely make an impact and help you get that organic reach. As always, make sure you're paying attention to your data, your Google Analytics, to see how things are going and how things are trending, and definitely pay attention to the Google Ad grant and see how it can support your organization in reaching your goals, driving content to your or drive. Visitors to your website based off of the content that you're creating that connects with your ideal audience. So I hope you found this episode helpful. You can grab the show notes, like I said, at thefirstclick.net/272, we'll have all the episodes that we mentioned here. You can also watch these on YouTube, and we'll have them linked up there as well. While you're there, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on a single episode. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to these episodes. I'm so excited to get into our next month of year end giving. It's going to be an amazing month, but I look forward to chatting with you all things year end fundraising and thank you so much. I'll see you in the next one.