Software for Nonprofits Keywords

Software for Nonprofits Keywords is a free service that provides you with a list of keywords relevant to nonprofit organizations and your programs. It will also tell you how many times each keyword has been searched in Google and Yahoo during the past 30 days (based on the Google keyword terms database on the first of every month). The search results are organized by local state, USA.

Our software for nonprofits keyword research tool helps you find the best seo keywords for search engines and content areas in your organization, including seo tools for social media. We are a nonprofit too!

Tips for Creating and Optimizing Your Nonprofit’s Keyword Strategy

1) Brainstorm a Topic List

Get 5 people in a room with a whiteboard, and start brainstorming a list of topics that are important to your organization. These can be anything: problems that your nonprofit is tackling, communities that you serve, issues you stand for, or services that you offer. The more broad the better—you’ll want to create a list that’s thorough and comprehensive. Worry first about major themes, and then dig into specifics afterwards.

With some creative mind-mapping and outlining, you can structure this brainstorm into a list of keywords that you can research. By starting with the keywords first, you’ll ensure an approach that prioritizes your audience’s needs over any algorithm.

2) Organize Your Brainstorm

Take the brainstorms you generated, and start grouping your ideas by causes, communities, and personas. The, translate this ideation process into a cohesive list of topic ideas. From there, create a list of keywords that are relevant to each topic (eventually, you’ll commit to focusing on one keyword per topic).

What you’ll soon realize is that there are numerous directions that you can take with your content. Take a step back to understand why, and figure out the directions and angles that are most on-point with your cause. This approach will help ensure that your ideas are the right combination of interesting, engaging, and easy to find through search engines. 

The beauty of natural language is that it’s subjective. That’s why, after building your initial blog topic and SEO keyword lists, you’ll want to research similar angles and directions. You might also ask another team member to help—just to provide an extra eye and set of recommendations.

Your keyword research should involve SEO tools, conversations with customers, and data from your web analytics software. Cast your net wide and figure out what you don’t know. Look for hidden opportunities to reach your target audiences through search.

4) Mix Long-Tail and Head Terms

Just because long-tail is the name of the game doesn’t mean that you should avoid head terms altogether. After you’ve managed your SEO strategy for six months to a year, you’ll start to see trends among keywords that are driving traffic.

Use this long-tail success data to continue to identify other potential head terms. Think of these as keywords that are more general—and more competitive to rank for in search engines as a result. Using long-tail keyword data, you can better target the head terms that are most aligned with your brand and that make sense to target as a result.

5) See Where Your Competitors Fall

The search landscape is highly competitive: you’ll want to understand how Google ranks key players in your industry. See where your competitors fall by conducting keyword research audits on their blogs and websites.

Instead of looking to replicate what they’re doing however, look for hidden opportunities. Among nonprofits, especially, similar organizations should work together and share successes—not try to outrank each other.

The knowledge of how your partner and peer institutions are ranking can help you come up with ideas that you may not have previously seen. Don’t build your SEO strategy in a bubble: know what others are doing so that your nonprofit is visible, too.

6) Cut Down Your List to Start

When it comes to a successful SEO strategy, planning is only part of the equation. Execution is equally important.

Make sure that you’re focused in your approach: start by targeting a few keywords and monitoring the results of those efforts. Replicate what works, nix what doesn’t, and keep forging ahead with small, steady tests. Over time, you’ll see trends that you wouldn’t have been able to foresee.

Focus with SEO is key. If you spread yourself too thin, you won’t see real results.

Free Google Tools Nonprofits Can Use for Deeper Insights

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console serves a very important function for anyone who is responsible for maintaining a website. Google Search Console is how organizations can claim their website so that Google knows they are the owner of the domain. This then becomes Google’s primary channel for communication and where they will send updates, alerts, or red flags that impact your website.

To get started, you must verify ownership of your website using one of a few recommended methods, such as uploading a snippet of code from your verified Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account. Once you are the verified owner, then you can use Google Search Console to do the following:

  • Inspect URLs: Check to see if your URLs are indexed by Google. This section can be used to submit new pages or check pages with recent updates to ensure Google is aware of the changes and new content as soon as possible. This view will also alert you of any issues with the page or if your pages are being blocked by Google.
  • Mobile Errors: This report will shows any errors that prevent your pages from being mobile-responsive. Examples include: text being too small to read, clickable page elements being too close together, or if the page layout doesn’t automatically resize to fit smaller screens. 
  • Search Result Performance: This section allows website owners to understand how their site is performing in organic search. You can see keyword (query) impressions and clicks, page performance, click-through rate, types of Google listings (video, events, rich results), and more.
  • Coverage: View how many pages Google is indexing from your website, which ones they are excluding and why, and which pages have warnings associated with them which can inhibit them from ranking well. Issues that can impact your rankings include crawl issues, 404 errors, server errors, and URLs you have submitted to be marked no-index.
  • Sitemaps: Submit your XML sitemaps to Google to ensure all of the pages of your site are being properly discovered and indexed.
  • Speed: This report shows a graphical view of your page speed over time for both desktop and mobile.
  • Security & Manual Actions: This is where you will be alerted of any manual actions taken against your website by Google. Manual actions are taken when Google has found that your website violated their webmaster quality guidelines, or has malware issues that need to be addressed, such as hacks or malicious activity.

2. Page Speed Tools

Page speed is so important, Google has created numerous tools to help website owners and developers improve their website’s page speed. Page speed impacts user experience and search engine friendliness (your chances of ranking well and appearing in search results), so every website administrator should focus on improving it.

Luckily, you can easily gauge your current page speed by inputting your domain name or specific page URLs to the PageSpeed Insights tool. You’ll receive instant recommendations from Google on exactly which files and images should be updated and how much those optimizations will impact speed. Most recommendations require an engineer or developer so be sure to send them a link to your page speed results.

google page speed insights

To better understand your mobile site speed as a whole (rather than on a page by page basis), try this mobile site speed performance comparison tool. With this tool, you can see your mobile site speed rating, how the site speed is trending since the previous month, benchmark to your competitors, evaluate the speed improvement impact on your business, and generate a report on custom fixes to make your pages load faster. 

You can also use Google Analytics to view your page speed trends over time and to filter by page under the “site speed” section. Google Analytics even provides page speed recommendations to help you improve. Consider looking at your highest trafficked pages and prioritize page speed improvements there. 

3. Mobile-Friendly Test

Starting in 2018, Google began defaulting to mobile-first indexing, meaning it uses the mobile version of your site to evaluate ranking and performance. While this announcement shook the SEO world at the time, Google has provided a variety of mobile-testing tools that have made it really easy to understand if your site is mobile-friendly and if there’s anything you need to improve your mobile-friendliness. Google Search Console also allows you to monitor your website as a whole as it pertains to mobile-friendliness or issues over time. 

For a more granular view by page, try this Mobile-Friendly Test. Run certain pages or your homepage URL in the Mobile-Friendly Test and within seconds, you’ll find out how mobile-friendly your page is and areas of improvement to make it even better. 

google tools mobile friendly test

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a robust and powerful reporting tool. If implemented correctly (meaning it accurately tracks all of the pages and conversion points), Google Analytics offers insights into top-performing traffic channels, page performance, engagement key performance indicators (KPIs), conversions and goals, and much more. 

Familiarize yourself with Google Analytics by exploring each of these major sections within the platform:

  • Home view: This is what you’ll see when you log in to your Google Analytics account. The home view is a great starting-off place for various reports and snapshots of data. You can then use the report links below each to see the full report of data and insights.
google search console screenshot
  • Audience: Navigate through the Audience tabs to find out your user’s demographics, mobile usage, interests, and more. 
  • Acquisition: Take a peek at the acquisition overview for a good high-level view of the channel and conversion data. 
  • All Traffic: Navigate to All Traffic within Acquisition to discover your traffic sources and channel performance. This section of Google Analytics will help you understand how users are landing on your webpages. Are users finding you through Google organic search, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Ads, or another channel? Are they coming to your website directly or through a referral source? This section will also help you understand what your top-performing channels are once they arrive, how many new users are coming to your site, your bounce rate, how many pages users are viewing and how much time they spend on your site.
  • Behavior: Click through the Behavior tabs to find the content your website visitors are engaging with, the speed of your content, and the behavior flow of your users.
  • Conversions: Finally, the Conversion section will help you understand the various conversion rates and goals associated with your website.

Keyword generators for blog topic ideas

Keyword generators help you home in on what your potential customers want to know. They scrape search engines and question-and-answer databases to reveal new blog topics and keyword ideas.

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is a newer tool that plugs right into the Chrome web browser. When it’s on, results automatically display on the right side of your results page each time you enter a search term.

The data delivered by Keyword Surfer includes:

  • Keyword ideas with their volume
  • Cost per click (CPC) for each search term
  • Pages that rank for the term you entered
  • Traffic to pages ranked 1 through 10 for that term

It’s a highly efficient keyword research tool and delivers results as you use your web browser. As a new tool, there may be some kinks to work out. Data delivered by the plugin can sometimes differ from data supplied by other Google search tools. However, it’s a fast and easy way to get content ideas.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a great place to see raw search insights. After you enter your search term(s), it displays the questions people are asking related to that topic. The results are shown in a graphic display with all the who, what, where, when, why and other questions users ask.

It’s a powerful way to generate keyword ideas and see what your potential customers actually want to know. You can download the data as a graph or a list.

There is one con for this tool: With a limit of 3 free searches a day, you have to be thoughtful about each phrase you search.

Keyword Sheeter

Keyword Sheeter pulls autocomplete results from Google. It delivers real-time data on what people are typing into the search engine.

If you want to generate a long list of keyword ideas fast, Keyword Sheeter is an excellent choice. It pulls about 1,000 ideas per minute, and exporting your list is free.

It’s a simple and powerful resource to identify ideas for blog topics. However, the free features of Keyword Sheeter do not include search volume or data on how competitive it is to rank for a phrase.

Keyworddit

Keyworddit mines Reddit for keywords. To use it, enter a specific subreddit with at least 10,000 subscribers and specify a timeframe. The tool searches through the titles and comments to extract up to 500 keywords with search volumes.

Due to the variety of answers within each subreddit, the relevance of the results may vary. There is an option to specify high relevance, which slows down the tool somewhat.

Keyworddit is not designed to replace other keyword research tools, but it can be an interesting complement to your existing strategy. Reddit is a popular site where people with specific interests take deep dives into a topic. It may reveal keyword phrases and blog topics you wouldn’t find using other search tools.

QuestionDB

QuestionDB is an excellent blog topic idea generator. It pulls from several question-and-answer websites, including Reddit and Quora, to give you questions people are actively asking related to your keywords .

The free version of the tool allows unlimited searches without registering for an account. You can download your results with a single click.

You have the option to display the source link for each question. This allows you to review additional details about how people are framing their questions. You can also review the answers. QuestionDB also displays related topics mentioned in the questions.

The free account limits you to 50 results per query.

Conclusion

The Nonprofit Marketing Kit provides keyword research and log analysis, and comprehensive training on how to market your nonprofit using social media, search engine optimization, content marketing, sales and fundraising.

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