085 – The top SEO Tactics for Non-Profits with Phillip Stemann

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Ever wondered how SEO can amplify your non-profit’s impact? We’re going to dive into quick SEO wins, cost-effective strategies, how to build trust with Google. Stay tuned to discover how to optimize your SEO efforts, even on a tight budget.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about all things SEO with Phillip Stemann.

Phillip is a programmer who changed his career path to SEO. Later, he transitioned into content art and daily work with SEO. He started his SEO journey by helping a law firm rank number one for important keywords and has yet to look back. Phillip, thank you so much for joining in the episode today.

Phillip Stemann: Thank you so much for having me, David. I’m super excited for this.

David Pisarek: Yeah, very excited. We don’t often talk about SEO. For anybody that’s wondering, let’s just start off. What is SEO?

Phillip Stemann: Of course, SEO is all about ranking on Google. So when you go into Google, and you ask the question, it could be, “How do I make an Espresso?” And then you have these results from Google.

First, you have a ton of ads, and then you have organic results. These organic results, they have done a lot of SEO to optimize their articles to rank high for this specific question. And that is what SEO is all about. It’s about ranking in Google with your website to get traffic.

David Pisarek: And SEO is an acronym. It’s Search Engine Optimization. Make sure that your content works well for the bots and the spiders that these search engines have. We’re probably, I imagine, mostly going to be talking about Google today. Google is like the big powerhouse, but there are other ones.

There’s Yahoo, there’s Bing. Do you want to go back? Years ago, there was AltaVista, and all kinds of different small, more niche types of search engines out there. When we think about SEO, can it be a reliable source of traffic for a non-profit and for charities?

Phillip Stemann: I definitely think so. Absolutely.

I think the thing about SEO is that it’s often overlooked because it requires so much work. Constantly, you need to work on your content, you need to optimize your website and so on.

But if you have just the fundamentals and a technical setup that allows you to grow your website, then it doesn’t require that much. Requires that you create some content. Requires that you maybe update this content once a year.

Depends on, of course, what industry you’re in. But you also need to see that SEO is an investment that you do now in time, and that investment will pay off in the long run, and it will continue to pay off.

And it takes little to no effort to maintain. Often, you don’t even have to touch your content. And that’s why it makes so much sense because you do an initial investment, and then you just see how the results come in time and time again. I definitely think there is a lot to unfold within this, how to do it and how it’s important to build a fundament that you can build on top of with your content.

David Pisarek: Yeah. I think we want to try to touch on those topics that people are interested in. One of the easy things that you can do is take a look at your analytics.

Hopefully, you have analytics on your site. Look at the popular pages that you’ve got. What are those topics? Hopefully, they’re important topics to your organization. Create more content that’s like those popular topics.

In terms of immediate actions, that’s one there. But what other things could a non-profit or a charity do to take in and leverage SEO in their favour?

Phillip Stemann: Yeah, great question. I think this fundament is so important.

I’ve seen so many websites and businesses just start create content, and that’s just what they start doing, and they continue to do so. And the problem is that if you have a wobbly fundament and you just build content on top of all of this, then you’ll get the full out of the content that you spend so much time on creating, and it will hurt yourself in the end.

So it’s so important to take a step back and build that fundament. It doesn’t require a lot. One thing is setting up Google Analytics, so you have some insights into your website.

Another thing is setting up Google Search Console, which is a direct link into Google so you can see how your content is actually performing in the organic search.

What keywords are your specific pages ranking for? There’s so much insight in Google Search Console, and it takes less than a minute to set up.

It’s even easier than setting up Google Analytics. If you’ve done Google Analytics, Google Search Console is super easy. Often, it takes a sitemap. A sitemap is basically an XML file of all your pages and posts from your website, which is if you’re using a CMS system like WordPress, then it’s generated completely automatic.

This is what Google Search Console takes, and then it knows what pages and posts does your website has, and then it knows what to index for your website. That’s such a small step to take, but it benefits you on so many levels.

You also get feedback from Google. If anything is wrong with your website, if you have some pages that doesn’t exist, and so much more. But that’s a small thing you can do that really benefits you in the long term.

David Pisarek: And it’s free, right? Google Search Console and Google Analytics are both free. Take advantage of that.

Get it up on your site, and connect your site map. You can control it, and you can request to come and reindex a page through Google Search Console as well. If you don’t know how to get there, just go to Google and just search for Search Console. It’ll come up.

You can go, you can connect it all and just make it really easy for yourself on an ongoing basis to support yourself and get some deeper insights.

Phillip Stemann: Exactly. It also helps to index your website. That is when your pages and posts show up on Google because sometimes if you haven’t done these initial steps of building your fundament, it is a little bit difficult for Google if you don’t have a proper link structure on your website to figure out what pages and posts needs to be intakes.

So do yourself a favor and set up Google Search Console. It takes no time, and as David said, it’s free. Then you can just go on from there.

David Pisarek: So we’re talking about free, which is great. It leads right into what I wanted to ask you about next, which is what are some cost-effective strategies that a non-profit should maybe prioritize to rank better, to get better SEO?

Phillip Stemann: Great question. The tips that I often give is based on if you’re using WordPress. I hope that you are. At least more than 50% of the web is powered by WordPress, so there is a good chance.

And with WordPress, you can install a lot of great free plugins. My favorite SEO plugin, which I will recommend almost everyone to install is Rank Math SEO. It’s such a cool plugin.

David Pisarek: I love Rank Math. It’s awesome. It’s so good. Yeah, I love it.

Phillip Stemann: Rank Math, it’s so simple to set up. It’s completely free, and you get far with the free version of the plugin. They do have a premium version, but you don’t need it at all.

With Rank Math, there are some steps that you need to take, and it’s fairly easy. They have an entire setup wizard that you just need to go through, and then you are good to go.

From there, then you have a fundament, and you have your SEO set up for your website. You can start to write meter descriptions and title for your post. A meter description is this small little text you see in Google when it is that you Google for specific questions and queries.

Sometimes Google uses text parts from your content, but overall, this is the meter description, and that’s what Google uses. But the thing you can also do with Rank Math is you can make it set up for your EEAT already using Rank Math.

A thing that is often overseen with Rank Math is that they have local SEO which they support. People think, “I don’t want to rank for any local SEO. I’m not a pizza place, and I don’t have any local SEO that I’m focused on.”

But the thing is that with local SEO, you can write information about yourself, about your business. You can set the About page, the Contact page, and all these elements are part of what you use to build your EEAT.

EEAT is experience, it’s your authoritiveness, it’s trustworthiness, and also your expertise. It’s how you show Google that you know what it is that you’re talking about.

And this is something you really want to focus on. So not only can you add your About us page and Contact page, of course, you also need to ensure that these pages contain information that shows that you’re a real business, like an address, an email address, social media, if you’re using that phone number.

So these small steps you can use with Rank Math to ensure that your EEAT at least are off from a good start. Because, of course, there are a lot of other things that you can do to build your EEAT, but at least this small step puts you ahead of a lot of other websites.

David Pisarek: Rank Math is a really great plugin. Like you mentioned, it’s free. There is a premium one. What it did for me was we were using a number of other plugins, Yoast, and we were using a redirection monitoring tool, and we were using another one.

But this Rank Math, when I found out about it three years ago or so, it really combined all those. The fewer plugins you can have in your site, quicker it’ll tend to run with WordPress.

And if you can have things being monitored and tracked in one plugin instead of three, there’s also less potential security risks and stuff like that. I highly recommend it. We’ll have a link for that in our show notes page as well.

We’ll talk about that later on. Okay, so you’re talking about EEAT, so experience, expertise, attractiveness and trustworthiness. What are some ways that a non-profit could build stronger trust with Google?

Phillip Stemann: Yeah, I think content is often where it starts for me because when you have content, you can build links to your content. And links is also a big part of EEAT. Then it’s just important that your content is, of course, appealing to whoever wants to link to it.

And as an NPO, you have access to, correct me here, David, if I’m wrong, but you have access to a lot of data, you have access to people that you can get information from where you can send out surveys and elements like this, especially data and statistical articles that get a lot of links.

If you can send out an interesting survey where you can get some insights into a specific industry, or you can compare two elements against each other and make some compelling arguments based on this data, that is something people find interesting and they want to link to.

And by building links doing this way, you automatically build up your authority for your website, which is also a huge part of your EEAT. But that’s also a long way to go, but it’s definitely worth it.

Another thing you can do is when you write your content, it’s so important to show that you know what you’re talking about using phrases like, “I’ve experienced this, and then that happened,” or “I have done this, and this was the result of doing this experiment.”

It’s so important that you show first-hand experience with whatever it is that you’re writing about. So you show Google that you actually tried to do this and you’re not just talking from a hypothetical standpoint.

David Pisarek: Yeah, there’s something called domain authority, and that’s going to help you rank higher as well. So the better your domain authority, more trustworthiness, Google sees that you have.

Getting other websites to link back to you, some backlinks, that helps build your domain authority as well. And how long somebody spends on your site.

You have Google Analytics, they have to be using some of that data to determine how good your site is or how relevant your site is based on the search that somebody typed in and landed on your page. If they’re there for maybe two minutes, right? “Oh, maybe that’s a good page. Maybe that’s relevant content.

We’ll start ranking you higher because it’s more relevant.” But there’s also something called a bounce rate.

And Google, I don’t know how much they’re tracking bounce rate as much anymore because in Google Analytics 4, there’s actually, I don’t think, a metric in there for bounce rate anymore. I think they got rid of that from UA3.

And if you can have other relevant content there that somebody then clicks through to because it’s really closely related and they’re engaged with your content. That’s only going to make it better in the eyes of Google.

Phillip Stemann: Absolutely. Internal linking structure is so important. And if you just start writing content, maybe you’ve done some keyword research where you found some keywords you think are interesting to pursue and you start writing content in East, West, North, South.

Then it also becomes super difficult for you to link these posts together because they’re not closely related, as you said. Another favourite you can do yourself is to create what’s called a topical map.

A topical map is basically where you list all of your subtopics and the topics below them. You then get what’s called clusters. Each cluster then consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of keywords.

What you want to do is instead of just writing content all over the place, start with one cluster, write your content in that cluster before you move on to another cluster.

It’s so important to completely exhaust that cluster. You also do yourself that favor, and it’s so much easier to actually interlink your post, but also easier to show Google that you have authority in this cluster because you have content on all subjects in this area.

There’s so many positives of building a topical app. You can even use ChatGPT, the free version, to get started with your topical map.

It’s not going to give you an exhaustive list of topics, but it gives you an idea of what direction to go.

Then you can do your own research from there to elaborate your topical map and make it even better and ensure that you’re covering the topics. But yeah, start with one cluster, then move on from there.

David Pisarek: If you’re not sure what cluster to start with, think about it this way. What is the one thing, the primary thing, the main reason that your organization exists? Start with that and just go with it.

The best thing you can do is to actually start doing it.

Sitting and meeting with people, sitting in a boardroom, talking with executives and your peers, having Zoom meetings, Zoom calls, and Slack messages about all this is great, but limit that. “Okay, we are going to meet for half an hour, an hour, maybe twice, maybe two hours, and we are going to decide what this topic is.” If you don’t have free reign to decide that, you need to put a limit.

You can just meet yourself to death and not actually take action with that. We’re talking about content, talking about writing articles and being close with your content and knowing what it is that you should write about. Are there any tools that you think might help outside of Rank Math that a non-profit could use to help increase their SEO?

Phillip Stemann: Yeah, there are definitely tools. I personally use a tool that’s called Frase. It’s what I use to write my content. The reason that do that is because when I want to write, let’s take an example again, “How to make a cup of Espresso coffee.” If I want to write an article for that specific query, then I simply open up Frase, which is the content optimization tool.

I enter my query, and then Frase does a ton of research for me. So it automatically goes into Google and it does the search as I would do it. And then it takes the top 10 ranking websites on this query, and then it gives me insights into what are these content about, what words are they using, how many times are using these specific words, and so on.

This helps me ensure that I cover this specific query from all angles and that I cover all the subjects within this query because there are so many specific angles you can take and go in so many directions. One thing it doesn’t help me with is search intent. And search intent is super important as well when you write your content.

If you, for instance, google “How do you make an espresso coffee?” then people expect a guide, a “how to” guide. They don’t expect a list of the best Espresso coffee you can make. They just want that guide. And that’s search intent.

You want to figure out what do people expect based on the query.

When I have that search intent and I have that in order, then I go into phrase and I start to write my article. So the phrase is a brilliant tool. There’s another one called MarketMuse.

There’s also served by SEO, but these are a little bit pricey. I’m not aware of any free ones because they’re quite heavy to run. That’s also why I believe that they do cost a little bit more than the average SEO tool.

David Pisarek: Those are two good tools. We’ll have links for those on our show notes page for you.

There’s somebody really big in the SEO space. You’ve probably heard of him, Phillip. Neil Patel. He’s an amazing marketer. He’s got these short little clips, but he recently bought a tool this past year called Answer the Public.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this or not, but basically, you can go to Answer the Public. They have a free option and you can search for whatever the topic is. So it could be “Espresso.” This is what we’re talking about. You go in there and it will come up with a whole bunch of different questions that people are actually asking in search about “Espresso.”

If you can create content that has that question as the topic or the title, you’re going to end up ranking higher. And you’ve probably done this as well. You go into Google and you search for something as a question.

Going and using questions will help you rank higher because it’s going to be more of an exact match to what somebody is actually looking for. If you’re going to answer the question well, if you can give them what Phillip was just talking about, the hint, you’re going to end up ranking higher for those results.

Phillip Stemann: Absolutely. It’s completely great.

David Pisarek: Amazing. We’re talking about WordPress. It’s, as far as I’m concerned, the number one web tool out there in of content management systems. Fantastic platform.

There’s themes you can buy, themes you can get for free, plugins for free, ones you can buy. There are agencies out there like mine where we work with WordPress and help non-profits and charities.

In terms of, I guess, initial setup, imagine I’ve got a brand new non-profit and I’m like, “Phil, I need a website. What do I need to do? What are the initial steps that I need to do when I’m setting it up?”

Phillip Stemann: Good question.

I’m assuming that you already have a domain. So you have bought a domain, which is probably your business name. Then you need hosting. And with hosting, you can go quite in two directions.

Either you can go for something called Managed WordPress Hosting, which is hosting a little bit for WordPress websites. So it’s made to make WordPress websites load as fast as possible and work as good as possible.

And then the more generic web hosting, which is just made for websites, and both works fine. It also depends on your budget.

If you have a low budget, go with the general web hosting. It works completely fine. If you have a bit more in your budget, the Managed WordPress Hosting is also a bit better. When you have those things set up, then you need to find yourself a theme.

There are, as David said, a lot of great free things that you can go for. If you want a more premium theme, then you can go to a website called Theme Forest, which has a ton of great options. Then you install your theme and it’s super easy. You just need to use your mouse and click around.

It requires no coding at all. From there, then you need to install some plugins. At least that’s what I like to do.

Of course, as we talked about, Rank Math SEO, it’s a great plugin to start out with. You also need to install a cache plugin and an image optimization plugin unless your hosting provides this for you.

As a free caching plugin, I like to use a plugin called WP Fastest Cache. It’s so simple to use, and you simply just check off some check marks, and then you must go. Then your WordPress flows much, much faster.

More premium version is WP Rocket, which is incredible, but it’s also a bit more pricey. For image optimization, there are also free plugins like Smush. It’s a free one.

Short Pixel also has a couple of free images per month, and they both work great. I really like to use Short Pixel personally, but you can use whatever you want with image optimization.

And from there, you’re pretty much set to go. You have your theme, you set up with plugins, and then, of course, you can go in. If we have to take a step further, you can set up your Google Analytics, and you can set up your Google Search Console, as we have already talked about.

And then overall, you have a website that’s ready.

One thing that I have learned about working with websites is that you don’t want to set up your Google Search Console too early. If you set it up while you have a theme from Theme Forest with some dummy content that’s not relevant to your business and a lot of demo pages, then Google just gets confused when you start changing this.

So maybe wait a little bit with that part until your website is 90% there, and then you can start to set up these things. Then you’re off to a very good start.

David Pisarek: There is a setting in WordPress that you can have checked off that says to discourage search engines from indexing your site. That’s going to affect something called a robots text file that good search engines are going to pay attention to.

You could, in theory, set up a search console, but you won’t be able to actually link it unless you allow search engines to access the site. I think that was really great. If you want to go a little further in terms of setup, we highly recommend Cloudflare for DNS and caching. They have a free tier, which is, really, really phenomenal.

It also does some other stuff, like there’s some firewall-type stuff. I also recommend setting up WordFence on your site and setting up two-factor authentication in WordFence. You have a little bit more enhanced security on your site as you set it up.

Again, there’s a free tier; there’s a paid tier. You don’t need the paid tier. The free one will do everything that you need on that side.

David Pisarek: That’s really great. All right, so we’ve got Rank Math set up. There are some settings in Rank Math that I’d love if we just explored for a quick second here.

There’s Open Graph data, so OG, can you talk to us a little bit about Open Graph?

Phillip Stemann: Yeah, definitely.

If you’re targeting social media or if people like to share your website and social media, then Open Graph is something you definitely need to have in order.

An Open Graph can be an image, a title, and, if I remember correctly, a description. It’s super important that you have these elements in order. You can use Rank Math for this.

Often, let’s say that you set up a page and post it in WordPress, and it has something called a featured image. Automatically, this featured image will be the image that is shown when it is to share this specific URL. And the same goes for the description.

I think it automatically actually takes the first 160 characters or something like that. But you can also overwrite this by writing something manually yourself, which I will strongly recommend that you do.

If you want to and write your entire page or article or blog post, for that matter, in 160 characters or less. There’s also the width of the entire text to take into order. But Rank Math guides you on that. It tells you if it’s too wide, you have too many characters and elements like this. So follow the guidelines from Rank Math.

It’s super simple. Ensure when you write your meta description, which also becomes your OG description, that you stay within the guidelines.

So you also, as a website, look better, both when you are shared on social media, but also in Google as well. And then write an enticing title that you want to click on.

Those elements are super important, both for social media, but also for Google. So they go a bit hand-to-hand. And it’s also important that if you have categories that are important to share when you create a post, you can add it to a category.

These categories also have OG tags, and these are often overlooked because you manually have to go into categories and set these in the bottom. But it’s also super valuable to when it is that we share the categories.

And if you want to rank your categories on Google, because you can do this as well by adding a description in the bottom of the category, in the top if that’s what you want.

These OG tags, the meta description and the title, and then you basically have everything set up.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. Thank you for that, Phil.

So SEO, website, setting up, plugins, some settings in the plugins. There’s something we didn’t talk about yet, called Local SEO.

If you are a coffee shop or an espresso bar in a specific city, you’re not looking for people across the country. You’re looking for people local to you. Can you talk a little bit about what Local SEO is?

Phillip Stemann: Definitely, yeah. With Local SEO, there’s a lot of It’s almost a subject by itself. But with Local SEO, as David said, you want to target people who are close to the area that you have to shop in, or if you drive out to customers, you want to target those within that area. But there are a couple of elements to be aware of.

Of course, to begin with, I will strongly recommend you to set up a Google business profile. The Google business profile is, let’s say that we search for a specific company. Then we have, out on the right side on Google, you have this little square where you have some information about the company.

That’s a Google business profile, and you definitely I really want to set that up because a ranking factor within local SEO is that you have a great Google business profile, but you also have positive reviews.

That is super important because it also shows that you’re a real business. But another thing that’s also super important when you’re targeting local SEO is that when you do your keyword research, looking for keywords, it needs to be keywords which are relevant for your area.

Often, depending on what keyword research tool you’re using, you can checkmark that you only want to do local SEO and you only want to search keywords within local SEO. That means that when it is that you do your keyword research, instead of choosing United States, for example, as your location, then you choose your specific city so you get the keywords which is search within your city.

You can use tools like Ubersuggest, which is from Neil Patel. You can also use tools like LowFruits, which is also a free tool you can use.

There are a lot of tools that you can use to perform keyword research for local SEO because it’s different than doing just global SEO. You need to be more aware of what it is that you’re targeting.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really solid advice.

If you’re a non-profit, you’re serving people in your local community, a lot of non-profits do that, but maybe you also are serving people globally. Is there anything in terms of best practices for how people might be able to target or focus their SEO efforts in a bigger, broader sense?

Phillip Stemann: That’s a great question.

At least for me, I always start narrow and then I broaden out. I think I would still focus on the local SEO to begin with and take my learnings from that.

Then, when it is that I want to broaden out, then I would use those learnings to broaden out. But I think first I would focus on local SEO because it’s really a subject for itself, takes a lot, requires a lot, and requires different practices when it is that you focus on local SEO compared to global SEO.

For global SEO, you have a bit more free hands. If you can say that, I’m not sure, but you can do a bit more of what it is that you want. Whereas for local SEO, you have a bit more restrictions you need to put on yourself to ensure that you are only focused on what it is that people search local SEO because the searches are completely different.

Local SEO search could be “coffee place near me.” But if it’s global SEO, then you need to think of if it’s an e-commerce store, then you need to think of shipping of all these elements.

Then it’s more like “best Espresso beans” or whatever. It could be anything. It’s just completely different mindsets.

Of course, you can combine it. But then you just need to be sure that when you write your content, you need to ask yourself, “is this for local SEO or is it for global SEO?”, because the content piece alone can be difficult to mix for both local SEO and globally.

David Pisarek: This has been some amazing SEO insight and resources that we’ve been talking about today.

I hope people listening to this episode are ready to actually go and take some action, whether it’s reviewing the plugins that they’re using in their website or the way that they used analytics or not.

A lot of organizations, they have analytics, but they never really look at them. Set up a search console site or search console account. Do you have a challenge that you would like people to do within maybe two days of listening to this episode?

Phillip Stemann: Two things. I would love for people to, if they haven’t already, set up a Google Search Console. Super simple. You benefit so much from it.

That’s one thing. The second thing that I would really love people to do is to find the top three pages that perform best in search. And you do this in Google Search Console as well. In pages, where you just see what get most clicks.

Because by doing this small exercise, you will also find pages and posts which you want to optimize because they get a lot of impressions, but no one clicks. And then you have to ask yourself, “Why is that?”.

So, I would love for people to take these two small steps, and that will be my challenge.

David Pisarek: That’s awesome. I think that’s super achievable for anybody listening to this. Really easy, really quick to go and do.

Phillip, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, I know that you’ve got an offer as well. You’ve got a really great article that you want to share as well. Tell us what we need to do and where they need to go.

Phillip Stemann: Definitely. I’m super active on Twitter, which is where I share my SEO knowledge and the SEO that I test and try out and all my learnings.

Then I have my website, which is my name, phillipstemann.com. I think we’ll put a link as well in the show notes.

Here I have an e-book of the seven best AI copywriting tools that I’ve tried. If you dive into my website a bit, you will find out that I have a YouTube channel and I have tried on the plus side of 50 different AI copywriting tools.

I have narrowed it down to the seven best, and a lot of them are super cost-effective, and you can download that entirely free.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. Great article.

Thanks again, Phillip, for joining me in. This has been a great episode of the non-profit Digital Success podcast.

Everybody listening, as I’ve mentioned before, if you want any of the links or the resources that Phillip and I were talking about today, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!