SEO For Community Organisations
SEO for community organisations (which include volunteer groups and charities) is when a not for profit or community based organization applies search engine optimization to their groups website, with the goal of improving their online position for relevant keywords to the community services that they provide.
What is SEO for community organisations?
One of the main things community organisations can do to improve their SEO is upgrading the content on their website to give their donors and beneficiaries a better understanding of what their organisation does, the services they provide and so on. Upgrading the content also helps search engines understand in more detail what the community group does in more detail, and help improve their position in the SERP accordingly.
Also important for the SEO is having good backlinks done so the community organisation increases their level of online authority. When doing backlinks, it’s imperative that only high quality, relevant and legitimate backlinks to their website are done.
As a community organisation or charity, some of the first links that you could have done would include local community directories, under the charities or volunteer work sections. These do not provide that much ‘’link juice’’, but it does help Google and other search engines show that the organisation is linked into the community well.
Other great backlink opportunities for a community group would be ones from businesses that have provided donations, or other groups that are associated with the community organisation. With a wide range of businesses and other groups that link back to the organisations website, Google and other search engines can see that the community organisation is linked into the community well.
Why is SEO important for community organisations?
It is a well known fact that The best source of new donations and contributions for charities and community not for profit organisations is by far referrals from happy donors and contributors. The existing donor that is referring their friends and family (or business associates) to your organisation is literally doing all of the work when in comes to selling your community group to other people. Now, what is the next best source of do new donors? That’s an easy one, SEO.
SEO places your community organisation in front of potential donors and contributors who are actively seeking your services. With advertising on the other hand, people are being bombarded with adverts for your organisation, when they are busy searching online for other things. This is one of the reasons that SEO for community groups is extremely important if they want to maintain a healthy customer or donor base. Community groups and receiving donations work is also quite a competitive industry in local towns and cities across Australia. With a community organisation having both individuals and businesses as donors and contributors, the industry can be quite beneficial for those receiving help from the donations made to the community organisation. For example,
If an individual donates money to your community organisation, and happens to work for a company who are looking for a worthy cause to donate to on a regular basis, then providing the organisation is using the funds in a meaningful way, then they could also receive regular contributions from the business.
It’s for these reasons that it is extremely important that community organisations have their website ranking well in the SERP by using SEO.
The Stages of SEO Done For Community Organisations
Doing SEO for a community organisation can be quite complex, however we have broken it down into 4 main steps. They are as follows:
Website Audit
Before any SEO work can be done, an audit of the community organisations website needs to be done. This audit consists of:
Technical audit: The technical audit will consist of having the website put through a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush, and having technical factors analysed such as H tags, redirects, indexability, link profile and so on to see if there are any technical issues that need to be fixed that will hinder SEO efforts.
On Page Audit: The on page audit consists of analysing the actual content of the website to see if there is enough content to satisfy readers and search engines, analysing the meta descriptions to see if they are attracting potential charity donors, title tags, images and more. Basically, the on page audit relates to the parts of the website that potential donors can see.
Determining whether as a community organisation you are targeting a local or national demographic
Before keywords can be selected for the SEO plan for the community organisations website, it first needs to be determined who it is that will be targeted by groups SEO. For example, if the community organisation is in a small town like Hobart TAS and only services donors and beneficiaries in that area, then we know for the next step of planning that the keywords need to include ‘’Hobart’’ in them. However if the community organisation services the entire country, then the following step is a lot more complex, as there could be many hundreds of keywords used to reach the target demographic.
Choosing appropriate keywords for your community organisations website’s SEO plan
Knowing the target demographic, it’s extremely important that the correct keywords are selected for the community organisations SEO plan. As mentioned before, if the organisation is servicing a local town such as Hobart, then the keyword selection can be quite simple.
However if there are multiple service areas, such as cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and so on, then multiple landing pages would need to be created, and relevant keywords would be grouped together to be on the same page. This is done so that each landing page can target a certain area, along with smaller suburbs within that area.
For a community organisation that services multiple capital cities, this is very important as they would want to capture as much organic search traffic as possible, to bring in as many new donors and beneficiaries as they can. Below is an example of keywords that would be grouped together on a landing page. For this example, the community organisation has an office in Sydney, and therefore a landing page has been made for the Sydney office:
Main Keywords: These are the short tail keywords that are the most broad and relate to the term community organisation and the main city, Sydney.
“Community Organisation Sydney”
“Sydney Community Organisation”
Secondary Keywords: These keywords relate to the main city Sydney, community organisation, and also sub services that the organisation provides.
“Charity Sydney”
“Community Sydney”
“Volunteer Work Sydney”
Auxiliary Keywords: These keywords relate to smaller suburbs within the main city Sydney that people also search for, that the community organisation services.
“Community Organisation Seven Hills”
“Community Organisation Parramatta”
“Community Organisation Blacktown”
“Community Organisation Bondi”
By incorporating all of the relevant keywords into the content of the landing page, the community organisation is essentially telling Google that when people search for a charity or volunteer work in all of the areas listed, that it is a good idea to serve the community organisations website in the search results.
Listing your community organisation on Google My Business
It is very important that all organisations, especially community organisations, list their group on Google My Business. This essentially means that when a person searched for charity work or volunteer work in any given city, the organisation will be displayed on the map section of the search results. This section of the search results is the first thing people see when searching on Google for a community organisation, so if an organisation can be listen here, they can get a very large amount of traffic. Being listed correctly in GMB, a community group can also be found on Google Maps when searching an area for a charity or volunteer work. Also, the community organisation reviews are displayed underneath the organisations name, so potential donors and beneficiaries can see instantly if they have good reviews or not.
What other industries does Extension Group help businesses in Australia with?
Extension Group provide SEO for Australian businesses in virtually all industries. If you have a website and your competitors are ranking higher than you in the SERP, then we can help. Some of the industries that we commonly work with though include (but are not limited to):
Accountants
Cleaners
Community Organisations
Financial Planners
Law Firms
Child Care Centres
Restaurants
Ready to take the next step?
Contact Extension Group to have an obligation free analysis of your website, and start the journey to more customers and more sales!
How To Get Started on SEO with Extension Group
We have a simple 4 step process which we go through with our customers to get set up to help with their SEO. First, we will have a quick 5 to 10 minute chat about your business and what you are looking to achieve with SEO. Then, we will work out a strategy to be able to achieve these results for your business. From there, depending on the product that you have chosen with us, we will assist with the following steps whether it be build you a new website or update your existing one, and then finally once you are making money from your SEO, you can decide whether or not you want to stay with us.
For more information, click here to view how our process works.
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