Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I'm your host, David, and in this episode, we will be talking all things marketing with another David. I've got David Forman here with me.

David is the COO of Clariti Creative Group, a digital marketing agency in Orlando, Florida. His agency works with clients from healthcare to non-profits, artists to lawyers, and everyone. David, so great to have you here on the show with us.

David Forman: Yeah, so glad to be here and hang with another David.

David Pisarek: We should call this David's Podcast. We've had a handful of David guests already.

David Forman: I see. You should only have David's on your podcast.

David Pisarek: We will rename the podcast Only David's, but anybody can listen to that one. You don't have to be David to listen to that one.

David Forman: That is allowed. Yes, we do allow anybody to listen. Not only David, it's correct. I like that.

David Pisarek: We will be talking about marketing, which includes all kinds of stuff. Let's start with the basics here. What is a niche?

David Forman: Yeah. It's what you're going after.

It's who you're trying to speak to and what you're trying to really get across.

When it comes to marketing, we can think about anything from Facebook ads to Google ads to SEO; who are you talking to, and what are you talking about. That would be your niche. "Who are you trying to reach type" of thing?

David Pisarek: In a recent episode, we were talking about three things that make up a niche and really identifying the persona or the avatar that you're going after, which are demographic, geographic, and psychographics—when we think about all those things with regards to a niche, how can SEO be leveraged in that way?

David Forman: You would use SEO to go after those, probably your niche, depending on what you're looking to get out of it. There are a couple of different ways to go about this. I will go a little bit longer, probably on answer than you probably want, but I will do it anyway.

There are a couple of routes to go down: who you're writing to, what you're writing to, and what you want to get across. It goes different ways.

If you're a non-profit, I would say there are probably three levels. You have probably the people that you support. Some people probably can support your organization, your donors and everything like that. Then you probably have the casual person. Maybe you have events or other things that might find you, follow you or show interest in you.

The question would be, how do you speak to them?

It will probably have three different personas, just as a thought, and it would be about a special needs charity. Maybe, well, chances are they do a hospital visit. Maybe they're researching a lot on certain blogs or other things.

But that's probably going to be different than maybe your donor pool. Maybe your donor pool comes from people who are philanthropists, or maybe they are doctors, or they like to support something local, or it touches on something important to them. So maybe your content and everything you put together might be unique.

Then you might have your casuals. I'm thinking the Walk for Wishes event is coming up, and you need to get people there; you'll have everybody. Maybe at that point, you're trying to bring in anybody and just trying to speak to multiple people.

But how you would try to market or write to it is about finding what they are searching for. What do they need? What are they trying to get out of coming to your website, maybe your Facebook page, or whatever it is that you're trying to get your information out?

David Pisarek: I think that's a great way of thinking. When thinking about who you're going after, you've probably got 50% to 60% of people that fall into a specific persona, avatar, or whatever you want to call it. Then you'll probably have a 20% and a 20% and a 10%.

In my opinion, You want to spend the most time on the major people you're going after, the people you're really trying to connect with.

To your point, you will have constituents using your programs or services. You're going to have donors and volunteers, and you're going to have maybe the general public, maybe government, those types of things. So, really being clear on who you want to connect with, write it down.

Put it down on paper somewhere, put that into your brand guide, and have it clear as day for anybody and everybody in your organization so that everybody's on the same page.

They all know who you should be trying to speak to through the messaging, through the wording, through the emails, through the website, through the media, through all of that.

David Forman: Right, exactly. Who are you writing to? Who is your end person? If you put on that persona, is that speaking to them? Does that check all their boxes that it feels like it's talking to them? Absolutely.

David Pisarek: Let's talk about SEO. Do you want to explain to the folks that are listening? What is SEO?

David Forman: Yeah, SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It's optimizing your website for search engines. Obviously, that's the obvious side of it. And if it were only that easy, things would be much simpler in this world. But it really does come down to really only a few things.

We have on-site signals. That might be your content, or internal linking that you have between posts.

It could be just general, like how your site is built. It's on-site, and you have off-site. That signals from outside of your site, stuff that you probably can't necessarily control. It's a big authority signal.

I would say that probably having a backlink from Charity Navigator or from a local organization that is supporting you, A, proves who you're about, what you're doing, and what you're active in, and it's reciprocal, but it helps Google understand, "Hey, this company is not only real, but it looks like this law firm is linking to them," or "This car dealership cares about them." So, it's a trust signal at that point.

And then after that would be technical. And that's ensuring that your site loads quickly, making it easy for Google to crawl it. And there are other things behind the scenes.

Every image you have should have what's known as alt text or alternative text.

That way, it can read images, but it loves that you've given a little description of what that image is about. It's some of that technical stuff that works behind the scenes; just helps to ensure that when Google or Bing or whoever's scrolling your site, it understands what's going on.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and there are tons of benefits. If you have any corporate sponsors or big donors with their websites, try to convince them to have a link back to your site. It's going to help for several reasons. Google will see your site as more authoritative.

There's something called DA, which is Domain Authority. If you can get a link from that site back to yours, it'll also help you with your ranking because it'll end up moving you up. After all, Google will see you as a more authoritative website.

David Forman: Exactly. At this point in the algorithm, what else is there to help it understand what to use as a ranking tool? And links are a big thing.

Even though Google says they're not, we all know they are.

You have to take what they're saying and be like, I'll still go after links or look for them. It's not spam. It's not that you're not getting an honest and fair way by having somebody that participates with your business, your non-profit, or whatever.

David Pisarek: Imagine that your website was a business. You want to get referrals. You want word of mouth, and in web speak, those referrals are those backlinks coming back to your site, which will help you. It's going to help drive you up.

When we're talking about non-profits, is there anything specific you can discuss regarding what non-profits can do for search engine optimization?

David Forman: Yeah. There's always a handful of things. People are always looking for ways to donate, ways to volunteer, and ways to participate. You should always at least probably have three different pages on your website that talk into that.

Don't overthink the keywords.

Those should be your keywords because if somebody's typing in your charity or even if they're searching for a local charity or similar description, maybe it's a special needs charity or a charity to help grant wishes, they're going to be, "How do I grant wishes in city name?", If you have optimized your page for that, you're going to do a lot better.

Again, don't overthink some of the content and go after what you do and how you do things and have that page well written.

We always say there's no minimum, but it could be 750 words, really, that goes into depth about it. It has good titles; it has good headings. It just gives an understanding. And then, at the end, make sure it has some Call to Action that you expect them to do next.

If it's a donation page, make it very honest and clear what you're doing with your donations and then ask them for the donation. A volunteer. Is there a form? Is it something that they can sign up for? Then, anybody wanting to participate is looking to use your services. How can they enroll? How can they sign up? Where do they need to go?

Again, that is an excellent description there. Then, if you want, you could also write blog posts about other ways they could participate with your organization and other things they can do that could be, again, more detailed. But I would say at your bare minimum to continue supporting your cause again.

David Pisarek: One of the things you came so close to saying was local SEO. Most non-profits deal with things in their very specific geological location, so their city, town, village, municipality, and wherever they live, leverage that in your page titles, in your content, wherever you can. People are searching for places to volunteer in West Virginia, for example.

We want them to be able to find your organization so that you can attract them and at least get some eyeballs on your website. You were talking about content. You said 750 words. Do you have any thoughts on best practices for content on a page on a website?

David Forman: So, best practice is writing it as digestible as possible. Write it in small parts. Don't write an essay with, I don't know, a 900-word paragraph, but break it up into parts. When we say "750 words", I think somebody thinks it will just be a text blanket, but you can break it up.

You can put bullet points, you can put icons, you can put other things. Make it so it's easy for somebody to read and digest, highlight the specific things you need to do, bold certain phrases that you need to have, but break it up into sections, build an outline, have something that you could quickly put onto a page and that somebody could easily be able to read certain parts of it. Also, the same way Google is going to take it in.

When Google's crawling, it's pulling parts of your site, so you might as well break it up for them because when you're giving it tons of text all at once, it doesn't know where to start, where to stop, what parts are going into.

There's some AI writing that you can do. We can go down that rabbit hole if we want to.

But unique text about you: you talked about local SEO, hands down essential to start somewhere, especially if you're serving a local community.

We all have dreams and aspirations. "We're out of Orlando, Florida. We might talk to a charity that does want to service all of Florida". That's lofty.

We're talking millions and millions of people instead of thinking, "Okay, I could really just target a good million here in Orlando. I'm probably good", right?

You don't need to go out of the area immediately as you grow because it's going to be easier to rank locally here than elsewhere. So if your content speaks locally, obviously, that will help put those keywords and cities in there.

David Pisarek: You also want to break up your content a bit.

Nobody wants to look at a wall of copy.

When's the last time you looked at it, aside from maybe looking at the Wall Street Journal online, the New York Times, CNN, or whatever news outlet? Nobody's coming to your non-profit site and expecting to read a Ph.D. dissertation or anything like that. Break it up.

Have some headings in there. H1 to H6, that's going to help Google identify different pieces of your content. Throw some images in there, and make it a little bit lively. If you've got a video of some kind, pop that in there. Let's imagine that you were coming to your site. What would you want to see?

David Forman: I love it. I love it. Yeah, make it easy. Make it digestible. I'll be honest: it's sometimes as simple as writing two, or three sentences, stopping, writing a new paragraph, continuing your thought or changing your thought because, at that point, you don't need to write any more than that because you're going to lose people at that point.

David Pisarek: Yeah, be sensible. Read it yourself and say, "Yeah, this is engaging." Give it to your child, spouse, neighbour, or colleague and say, "What do you think about this?" It's to get honest feedback instead of, "Oh, yeah, this looks great." Constructive feedback. Let's make it better.

Awesome. We've got some content. We've been working on SEO on our site. We're driving traffic to it. Google is recognizing us. Super awesome. But many times, I would say probably from my experience with our clients, maybe about 30% of traffic, 30% to 40%, is actually people going into Google and searching for your organization name because they know who you are.

When you do that, what comes up? You're going to get the results. Over in Google, we're really going to talk about Google here because they're the big players in the space.

Over on the side, you've got the Business profile that shows up for the organization.

If you don't have a Google Business profile, it's free. Go to Google and search "How do I get a Google business profile?" You'll get instructions from Google on do this, do this, do this.

Cool. Chances are, if you don't have one, Google has already identified your organization, and you'll notice a little link in there that says, "Claim this listing." Then, you can go through the process of doing that. You have to get a postcard in the mail or something to authenticate yourself. Why should non-profit owners, non-profit founders, and executive directors care about their Google Business profile?

David Forman: Beyond it, just being free is the number one reason because there's hardly anything in life that's free for marketing, and you get visibility.

It's because, as you said, A, if they search your business name, you're going to have so much more visibility by having that big outline box on the right with images, with phone number, with website, there's a lot more visuals to it.

And then on top of it, if somebody is searching for similar things, it will show up in the map pack. I would say 90% of the time, the mat pack shows up just below the ads, normally on the page or sometimes even above it when we get lucky. But it's going to show up above the regular SEO. If you want to show up faster as a startup or even a big name to show up sooner in an area, you will want to focus on local SEO.

Google Business profile needs to be set up for you even to have that visibility and to make sure it's correct, has the right website, and has the right phone numbers so nobody else can get that information.

David Pisarek: Shouldn't non-profits focus on their website? Why should they be spending time and care about the Google Business profile? What else is there? What other reason?

David Forman: Yeah, well, I mean, your website itself is also going to feed into your Google Business Profile, right? But there are other ways that you could, again, use your profile to engage.

There are Q&A's that you can fill out on your Google Business Profile. There are posts, you could have offered. Maybe you have a dollar-for-dollar match by a specific corporate donor, and you can promote that so people can leave reviews.

It's a trust signal out there that people are looking for. The more reviews, the more trust, the more chance you have to show up better.

That is a big ranking signal in the Local Profile is reviews. And people are going to give to companies that probably have... I know I pick a lot of times companies that I deal with because of trust signals, and reviews are one of them. Now, it's just one way you could use to discover who you want to do business with. You might as well own that space, control it, and you can respond to them. So, if there are any questions by owning the profile, you have all that visibility.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Are there any tools or software in your tool belt that you use? Which ones are they? What do you like about them?

David Forman: Yeah, SEO is crazy. I think there's like a thousand tools. Well, I'll mention two.

There's the free one. I like to use Google for Keyword Research, and I'm crazy that way. Why? Because if I'm searching for a certain charity type, maybe I call myself a certain charity type, and I plug that in; what shows up? What other companies are there? What other terms are they using?

A lot of times, even if you start typing, Google will auto-finish it anyway.

It already knows the direction possibly that's going. Or if you scroll further down, they'll have similar searches or related searches that chances are content, keywords, and topics that you can write on your website or include in your Google business profile.

You can use Google itself for keyword research without overthinking it. We use a third-party tool called Ahrefs for Keyword Research. It's pretty popular out there. There's one, two, or three there. It's in the top three, depending on who you talk to. It's our favourite. I'm not going to say it's cheap. I think it starts at something around $100 a month.

But if you're writing a lot of content and need research about what's going on, it could help you with competitor analysis; knowing what your competitors rank for could help you let you know what you rank for, and you can track certain keywords.

But then you can also go into keyword research mode and know how many people search that phrase, how often people click on it, or who's the competitor for it.

If there's a search term that seems to have Wikipedia as number one, chances are you won't beat it. You might as well find another search term to go after.

It just gives you a lot of data you don't necessarily see in Google. But I would say if you're really serious about writing content, using a third-party keyword tool like that for research is super helpful. There's a hundred things. I think we use 60 of the 150 things that that tool offers.

There's so much that does. I'm sure somebody can find whether there's stuff to do with social, there's stuff to do with backlinks, there's a ton of things in there.

David Pisarek: Yeah, Ahrefs is really great. We'll have a link for that on the show notes page for this episode. As David said, there's a handful of them, and they're interchangeable.

You want to make sure also that you're leveraging Google Analytics. Make sure you have a Google Search Console account as well. It used to be Google Webmasters because then you could start looking at some of the organic search terms people use to find your site, which is super telling.

You might think that your non-profit is ranking for certain things because you want it to, but that doesn't mean that that's how you're actually showing up.

Having that insight is so amazing and eye-opening because then you can start going, "Why are we ranking for this?" It's like one of your board members' names and your site's ranking high, and you're getting many clicks through for them. Why is that happening? You can dive into that and get more insight and details.

David Forman: I have a quick funny story on that. One of our clients is a personal injury attorney. He finishes everything with PA.

At some point, Google thought we were promoting that we were in Pennsylvania and out of Florida. That was not even close. Very quickly, we suddenly start showing up for a bunch of Pennsylvania terms, and we're like, "We need to sweep the website and never mention PA for that." But the Search console allowed us to see some of those keywords that were showing up.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think that's a great example there. You might not know that that was ever happening.

Plan in your schedule, and put it in your calendar once a quarter. Spend an hour once every four months. Quarter, sorry. Once every three months. Just look in your search console and see what's going on. It's free, so sign up and get it. That's cool.

When we think about non-profit sites, quite often, and we've done an audit at my agency of over 400 non-profit charity websites, they don't look great. They don't look great. They look like they're from 15, or 20 years ago. It's a big problem. Some of them look really awesome. Some of them look like they're maybe six or seven years old. What are your thoughts on how often somebody should redesign their non-profit website?

David Forman: There's no hard and fast rule, but I would say probably between four to six years max, maybe, should you really go in and start refacing your site.

And your redesign is a great opportunity to really zone in on what's trendy now because it's obvious, but most people use mobile devices some of the time, and if you're getting most of your traffic on mobile devices, it's easier to research when I'm sitting on the couch. How do you look on mobile?

In the mobile-first web that we now live in, I think at this point, you have to make sure, is it easy for them to donate? Can they donate? Sometimes, your button gets hidden because it was built on a desktop and everything.

No matter what, you should really be looking at your site. And dare I say, look at your competitors. If all your competitors have updated their websites, I'm not saying you have to do it, but I think we're all in a comparison age, where people will pull up two or three websites and look at them side by side.

You want to make sure you're on their level, that you're looking the same way they do, and that it's easy for people to engage with your not-for-profit.

Again, sometimes, it's really easy to make a few changes, and you're good to go. You often have to build from the ground up, rebuild everything, and make it look good. But the user experience of your website, how people see it, is such a huge trust signal.

After a few years, technology changes in how your website performs. Even people on Wix and Squarespace, dare I say, have upgraded versions that, if you don't know that you're using, you're using an old one that might be slower and not performing.

It's definitely obvious in WordPress that you might use an older theme or another third-party tool that maybe has an upgraded version that is faster or has more features than you're using that you can leverage to help in growing your non-profit.

David Pisarek: I love that you spoke about mobile responsiveness. If you open up your website for your organization on your phone and it scrolls sideways, you need to redo your site or at least have a new style sheet made by a professional to remedy those issues.

Google has outright said mobile responsiveness is an indicator in their algorithm. Meaning, that if your site works extremely well and has a great user experience on mobile, you're going to rank higher.

You want to make sure that your site is working optimally on mobile.

David. These have been some amazing insights around marketing, SEO, and web for non-profits. I hope the people listening have gotten you some great advice and pointers today.

I'd love for you to give everybody a challenge here. What could a challenge be that they, after listening to this episode, do?

David Forman: I would challenge people to make sure that they have a Google Business profile and give it 20 minutes to get that thing filled out.

Get a few photos uploaded, make sure services and products are filled out, maybe add a poster, too, and get that going. Make it look good.

If you have reviews, respond to them. Take 20 minutes. It's not a lot of time. Make it as robust as you can within that time, and really just run with it. Have an easy win on your plate.

David Pisarek: That's awesome. I love that. David, if anybody wants to contact you, what do they need to do?

David Forman: Yeah, our website is easy. IWantClarity.com. You can find us on Twitter. Most of the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Clarity Creative Group are usually under the handle IWantClarity. You can find us there and reach out. Let us know if you have any questions. We like to nerd out on all things SEO and marketing.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Before the episode, we talked a little bit; you've got a gift that you can offer listeners if they get in touch with you.

David Forman: Yeah. My business partner really loves doing five-minute videos where we'll actually, a lot of times, use Ahrefs to show people what's going on their website.

If you go to our website, scroll down a little bit, and there's a quick little bar where you can fill out your email and your website; fill that out, and it sends straight to him. And usually, same day, he'll make a little video up and tell you what's good, what's wrong, what you can work on.

We don't even have to work on your website. You can send that to anybody. But we like to share opportunities and what's working and what's not because sometimes you don't have that visibility.

David Pisarek: David, thanks so much for joining in today. It's been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources David mentioned, head to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep being successful.