Non-profit SEO (being found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.) is needed by the organizations as much as a small or large business.
If you truly believe in your cause and that others should be involved in it, there is NO reason to miss out on capturing people’s attention through the internet.
Moon & Owl was recently contacted by Vantage Point, a <a href=”http://www.vantagepointfw.com” target=”_blank”>church in Haslet, TX.</a> The church was ready to up their online presence but had some serious problems.
Namely, they were invisible on the internet unless you already had their url.
As soon as we start any non-profit SEO project we have to determine the “You Are Here” point on the search engine strategy map.
They were invisible for many reasons. Here is Why and How We Fixed it.
1. Under The Hood Stuff Search Engines Seek Was Missing.
Like many small non-profits, Vantage Point Church decided to save money by doing their own website. It looked attractive, but some key horsepower features were missing under the hood. We ran a Screaming Spider crawl and saw several pages didn’t have titles, headlines or meta-descriptions.
Some pages contained images that didn’t contain all the info they could have entered to help Google best see what page was about.
Having your page titles, image alt tags, and meta descriptions all using the keyword for which you want that page to rank is crucial.
We went in page by page, and picture by picture and corrected all this.
2. They Were Getting Repeatedly Hacked
When Vantage Point called us, they had made someone’s “Hack Friendly” list.
Many non-profit internet developers or church IT departments are simply the lead pastor or non-profit director.They have a million things on their plate and site security just doesn’t crack the top ten list.
Hackers know this and, thus, love to prey (not pray!) upon small non-profits and churches because they guess they won’t have the best security protocols in place. This tends to be true.
We shored up Vantage Point’s WordPress based site with WordFence and blocked the countries from which the hack attempts were coming.
We hardened all the usernames and passwords using http://www.passwordmeter.com requiring them to all be at 100%.
We also moved them off of GoDaddy hosting. We have never been a GoDaddy fan. Our number one option for WordPress is the folks at FlyWheel. They have stout backup and security measures.
The hacks and subtly placed junk files inside the site were actually penalizing their rankings. We removed all the extraneous files.
3. Fixed the Sitemap for the Non-Profit
This particular church used a pesky WordPress plugin to present their church sermon audio that was overriding the website’s sitemap. A sitemap is an outline the search engines look for in order to figure out how to display search results.
If you have a WordPress site you should be able to type in /sitemap_index.xml after your website (example: vantagepointfw.com/sitemap_index.xml and see a Google friendly sitemap generated. If you don’t see this you have a problem.
4. Corrected Their Physical Address
Vantage Point Church meets in Haslet, TX but their offices were in Keller. They had chosen to place the Keller office on their website front page. This hurt their rankings for Haslet. We changed out this and included the meta-description for Haslet on their homepage.
We also went through all public listings (Yelp, Google, etc.) to make sure their address was cited correctly.
5. Siloed the Site for Their Optimum Non-Profit Keywords
Grouping large amounts of valuable content into “silos” or funnels that are given the titles similar to the keyword phrases people search for when looking for a non-profit site is important.
We adjusted the url of each page and article (called slugs) to include these important keywords.
We posted up blogs like:
http://www.vantagepointfw.com/churches-in-haslet-7-questions-to-ask-when-choosing-a-church/
under the correct silo “church in Haslet.”
As they build out content in this silo simply by writing more solid content and assigning it to the church in Haslet category, their rankings will strengthen because everything is presenting properly.
Don’t just name your pages and categories on your blog something cute. Make them work FOR your non-profit.
6. Applied our Guerrilla SEO Method™ to their content for improved Non-Profit SEO.
This is something Moon & Owl in which we specialize. We take Vantage Point’s content, optimize it using some proprietary plugins, and then publish it on their site while shooting it out to 20+ high trust flow Web 2.0 properties.
Every article they publish has 20 strong backlinks from day one.
We then apply our unique SwarmSearch™ to send live humans to your site, increasing your rankings.
This is the most affordable way to do SEO for a small business or non-profit.
The Results of Vantage Point’s Non-Profit SEO
When Moon & Owl started, Vantage Point was showing up on page 44 for the search term “church in Haslet, TX.”
Now for “church in Haslet” they show in position #3-#5 on the FRONT page of Google.
“Children’s Ministry in Haslet” #1.
“Student Ministry in Haslet” #1.
And we are just getting started. Vantage Point has actively been using Moon & Owl to engage in our SEO method on their behalf for under 4 months. We are about to start creating and syndicating YouTube videos and more! They have saved 1,000’s of dollars over what a typical big SEO agency would have charged them at this point with the results to prove they are good stewards and wise investors.
If your DFW organization (or anywhere in the US for that matter) needs non-profit SEO work done, give us a call. We’ll see if we are fit for you and your cause. Call us for a free conversation at 817-889-1487. Thanks.
