Non-profits interested in SEO usually focus on content strategy to go through web optimization. SEO, however, is not all about your content. Here are some other factors to consider if your SEO starts to drag.
1. Page download speed
Content is important to SEO, but so is user experience. Slow download speeds lead to a higher rate of abandonment, meaning visitors get tired of waiting for a page to load and move on to another website to look for information. This also leads to a higher bounce rate, less time spent on pages and lower user engagement with your non-profit’s site. These factors result in a lower SEO. Search engines like Google and Yahoo use bots to crawl a website for indexing purposes and faster downloading speeds directly correlate to faster indexing. This is more important for sites with many web pages, but is still relevant for every organization looking for better SEO.
2. Website host quality
Your non-profit’s choice of web host can have either a negative or positive impact on SEO. With a shared server, it may be overloaded with thousands of websites, slowing down server responses. Too many requests in a short period to the server has a dampening effect and may even cause an interruption in services. This leads to poor website availability and therefore poor search optimization. While our non-profit may not be able to or does not want to spend the money on a dedicated server, avoid unreliable web hosts. These are often evident through a lack of known address or working from places like Ethiopia.
3. Social media engagement
There is more to social media than just Facebook and Twitter and when you engage with other platforms, the traffic to your non-profit’s site increases, which turns into better SEO. Engagement is critical to your digital success, with social media causing a trickle down effect. Bringing in followers and friends on social media platforms will cause them to visit your site or blog, making your non-profit’s site more popular. This lets search engines know you have something interesting to say and elevates your search engine results. Google+ usage especially helps with SEO. Google will particularly promote their own social platform and Google+’s authorship capabilities will help increase your non-profit’s SEO.
