K-12 Education Non-Profit Advocacy SEO

Strategic Online Growth through SEO for K-12 Non-Profit Advocacy Group

For an advocacy group to successfully influence public opinion, a multi-channel approach to message and communication is critical. One of the most undervalued, but essential places to have a strong presence is in the organic results on Google and other search engines.

For this advocacy group that I partnered with to manage their digital marketing campaigns, I saw a significant opportunity to improve their online presence. Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is a perfect channel for increasing visibility and website traffic from your target market at the moment they’re searching on your topic of expertise; thus getting in front of their key stakeholders and constituents necessary to their mission and messaging.

SEO Activities:

The majority of the traffic currently coming to this advocacy group’s website was for branded terms as well as from referral traffic and social media. To begin an SEO campaign to apply foundational best practices, here is where I started:

• Keyword research to identify high-traffic keywords important for their mission and messaging
• Analyzing pages on their website that were conducive and primed to receive more traffic: pages with high quality unique content, indicators of inherent authority, and solid internal linking and prominence in the site structure
• Review of any technical impediments that would hinder SEO efforts
• Benchmarking current performance and data in order to measure impact and growth and report on results at a later time

After creating a keyword mapping strategy identifying and assigning critical keywords to their most important pages, I began foundational on-page optimization in the backend of their CMS. This looks different for every organization but typically includes the following tackling page by page:

1. Writing new or improved title tag and meta descriptions using the assigned keywords
2. Working the keyword judiciously into the page
3. Applying meaningful headings based on synonyms, variations, and thematically relevant keywords to the overall topic
4. Optimizing images (compressing if necessary, optimizing with a more friendly image file name if possible, and at a minimum applying descriptive alt text)
5. Ensuring a CTA (call to action) exists on each page to make them more conversion oriented
6. Navigating to other pages covering a similar topic and strategically working internal links in back to core and hub pages and linking pages together to give internal linking signals for both search engines and users