132 – The SEO Mistake Most Non-Profits Still Make with Garrett Hammonds

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Feeling overwhelmed by SEO, PPC, and all of the digital jargon? Garrett Hammonds breaks it down and shares real strategies that your non-profit can use to boost visibility, attract owners, and tell your story online. We’re going to cut through the noise and help you unlock your digital marketing potential.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about using data to drive digital growth, SEO, and storytelling. I’ve got Garrett Hammonds here with me. Garrett is a digital marketing strategist and founder of HMM, which is helping businesses grow through smart SEO, PPC, and storytelling strategies.

He was also recently recognized with an AMA Award for digital marketing excellence.

Garrett, thank you so much for joining the show.

Garrett Hammonds: Absolutely. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

David Pisarek: Yeah. For everybody listening, Garrett and I had a good, I don’t know, 20-minute conversation while I was driving here in the car. I was late coming back from a client. We’ve already had some engagement that wasn’t recorded, but we’re warmed up. We’re ready to go and looking forward to the episode.

Garrett Hammonds: I didn’t envy your drive. It was a whole process for you. Yeah.

David Pisarek: Well, all right, let’s jump in. Let’s talk about this for a moment. You’ve worked both inside non-profits and as a strategist.

What are some of the common marketing mistakes or website mistakes that you’re seeing non-profits make?

Garrett Hammonds: That’s a really good question. I, honestly, think when we try and break down between non-profit versus for-profit corporations, a lot of the same stuff ends up happening, but perhaps in different sequences. And I’ll explain here: non-profits, I think, are master procrastinators, and it ends up being, whether it’s a budget issue or an approval issue or just trying to find the right person in the right seat at an organization to do a thing.

Websites end up going long periods of time without having updates to get them up to best practices. Now, non-profits are very good about updating content. You usually have, whether it’s events that are going up on a website or posting about new program things, what have you. But then, you look at a site, and you’re like, ‘This looks like it was made 50 years ago. They’re just posting new content.’

So we end up seeing a lot of structural issues, and this is important when it comes to SEO.

SEO for organizations nowadays is not just about the quality of the writing.

That’s certainly important. We have the acronym EEAT that Google gives us, so we can all eat out there. But then we are also getting more and more technical. The reason for this is to follow the money. Google has to spend less money when they have to exert less with their crawlers, when their crawlers don’t have to do as much on your website.

So we’re seeing technical areas like schema markup being more and more necessary. We’re seeing site speed and performance become more and more necessary.

I don’t want to throw out so many terms that it becomes intimidating, but it’s something that will affect how you reach people online. And so that’s where I see non-profits in particular having the most trouble with website things, without getting into specific page details, that sort of thing.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think that’s very true. We’ve done an audit of over 400 non-profit websites, and what we’ve seen on a lot of them, I’m not going to share the screen and go through the whole rigmarole of it, but there are a lot of websites that feel honestly like they were built in the 2000s.

A lot of technology has changed. The way people browse has changed. The way people read has definitely changed. People are not reading, they’re just skimming. So you want to make sure that your content, to Garrett’s point, is consumable, not just by the technology stack, not by Google or OpenAI or Perplexity.

Their bots are going out there, they’re spiders, they’re getting your content, they’re organizing it in their databases and all that.

But when somebody actually lands on your site, are they able to understand what it is that you do, who you serve, and the impact you have? The value of them engaging or donating or being a part of your, we’ll call it a greater community, it’s even more important.

If you can fix some things on your website, some things are easier to fix than others. Making it more consumable for both the digital bots that are going and crawling, as well as the humans that are going and looking, is a win-win at that point.

Garrett Hammonds: Absolutely. The place where we also run into trouble is how long it takes people to get into action. So Vimeo, the video platform, just published some research that folks really have this affinity for four clicks. I’ll preface this by saying their research was more specific to e-commerce, shopping-type scenarios.

But in general, we want shorter sequences to be able to take action on a site. If it takes us a long time, it’s something ridiculous, the number of users on average who bounce from websites. It’s well over 60%, and it’s painful to hear 60% of the potential audience that you are getting out in front of is just leaving before they even really see anything at all that you’re trying to put out there.

All that hard work that you made in whatever content that you have on your site, if you didn’t think through the details of ‘Why is somebody truly here and going through each of these sections?’ It’s all waste. We have to be really thoughtful.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Part of that thoughtfulness, especially in non-profits, I mean, in businesses as well, nobody wants to spend money needlessly or thoughtlessly. But specifically in non-profits, every dollar really does count because that’s money that you’re not putting towards your programs or services, or whatever your goal, your mission, your vision is for your organization.

What are your thoughts on how non-profits could get the most out of advertising budgets? For anybody not listening, there’s the Google Ad Grant. It’s $10,000 US a month in free ad spend as long as you’re a 501(C)(3), or a registered non-profit or charity. What are your thoughts on around how they can get the most out of that?

Garrett Hammonds: The Ad Grant, the one thing I’ll say, it’s not what it used to be. Oh, man, the money used to represent real money. And nowadays, your dollar is not a real dollar in that ad grant. You will be undercut by fully paid accounts.

So, I used to get any non-profit that I worked with onto that Ads Grant, and now if the non-profit has… It’s still a good program, don’t get me wrong, and I don’t want to turn anybody away from that. Google Workspace program is really fantastic if you’re looking for internal resources and that sort of thing. But, if you have the ability to go ahead and just get a full-blown regular Google Ads account and just run based on your regular ad dollars, you’re probably going to be positioned to get more visibility faster. You won’t necessarily get this bill off the Ads grant, but you’ll get it faster through other means.

So it just depends on what your timeline and needs are for those sorts of things. Now, what I will say is that there are certain pieces that non-profits, if you are on a shoestring budget, need to be thoughtful about when constructing the ads.

Number one is you need to know who your audience is and what your goal is. Now, non-profits usually have a good understanding of who their core audience is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they always know exactly how to be able to reach them online or what buttons or switches to toggle in order to be able to get out in front of them.

So that piece is something that, even if you have an understanding of who your audience is in theory, you have to translate that into what their online affinities are? What websites do they go to to learn about stuff? So you have the contextual marketing piece of thing, and then your goal, you need to be really thoughtful about that as well. Are you fundraising? Are you trying to be able to educate about something? Is it a membership, sign-up, or something like that that you’re trying to get? All of those may look different in the kinds of ads that are available to you to run.

But the big tip I’ll give is to try to utilize local geographies. Don’t try to win everything all at once. Try to win the core areas that you need to.

So if you are a state-based non-profit or a region-based non-profit, perhaps even a national one, you’re going to have core cities or core places that your non-profit shows up more. Maybe you put on events in a certain area. Whatever the case may be, you’ll know where you’re most active. Start with those areas and then expand from there. But if you try and win everything all at once, you’re going to end up being disappointed by the end outcome.

Those are a couple of things off the top of my head.

The other one, the last piece, is to make sure and be diligent about watching your metrics, because you’ll learn so much in a short amount of time.

For instance, you’re trying to gain awareness of something. You might be watching a metric that we call CPM, or cost per million, or what we would think of more accurately as cost per thousand. Per thousand people you get out in front of, how much did you have to pay to do that? Well, you need to make sure that you’re not just having to spend all the money in the world to get out in front of a thousand people. That’s number one.

Number two, if you see that shoot up really quickly, well, that could be an indication of all kinds of different things. It could be that your ads are starting to need to be refreshed. It could mean that you had a new competitor enter the market and is driving up the costs. So all of these things are going to make a difference to your budget. So watch the metric and be aware of that.

David Pisarek: You said, ‘Oh, here’s a few things.’ So much good insight, Garrett, there for sure.

So I have a couple of quick thoughts that I want to mention there: organizations need to be thinking about avatars and/or personas and building those out, giving it a name, getting a photo of that persona. But the persona is made up of three pieces. You’ve got your demographic: age, sex, weight, education, income, family, lifestyle, that stuff. You’ve got geographic: where are they located, very much to your point. Pick a core city, the region, whatever it happens to be, focus on that, and then go after other ones. Prove that what you’re doing works in one spot before you expand, right? And the third one, and a lot of people don’t think about this in this way, you touched on it a little bit, it’s called psychographics.

And it feels like every three or four episodes, I mention psychographics. So I’m going to mention it again. Go check out episode 16 of the podcast. I talk about psychographics, why it’s important, and how to develop them for your organization. The psychographics are like, what motivates people to do something? Where do they spend their free time? What keeps them up at night? What are they worried about? What do they want to help with? That stuff.

That’s the emotional piece that’s going to get you to connect with them, to make them click on the ad, to make them share some content, to like something, even to just skim what it is, or to follow you on social. So pay attention to all three of those. They do have to work together.

Garrett Hammonds: You sparked a thought inside of me here with that: a lot of the time, when we’re thinking of advertising for non-profits, video is going to come into play in many cases. It’s a very useful tool that, if used correctly, can make huge difference. But the University of Pennsylvania, in the last couple of years, has done some research on fundraising, advertising, specifically.

They put out some research that showed people are twice as likely to donate if they see an advertisement with an individual person’s story as opposed to a bunch of statistics about an aggregate group. And the reason for that is that video can help us relate to what we’re doing, that emotional side. We can connect with the person, and then, we don’t neglect the statistics and the research, but when we’re trying to tell that story, we need to give somebody the ability to latch on to a story they can connect with.

David Pisarek:  Absolutely. I love that idea of being able to connect with people. There’s a lot of science behind, and I talk about this in my webinar, is how do you get somebody when they’re looking at your website to engage with you? Well, what you do is you have pictures or videos, right? But if a lot of people, Hero section, top of their homepage, have pictures of people looking directly at the camera, not off to the side, because we are wired, going back however many thousands, whether you’re a creationist or you believe in big bang, whatever.

We are wired way back to the beginning to look at people in the eyes, and you can gauge people. You can understand who they are. There’s that instinct that comes to be, and you can draw people in if you’ve got somebody looking directly at the camera. There’s a little bit of pseudo-psychology mixed in with that.

Garrett Hammonds: Absolutely. I think that those are the little details. They just go such a long way. I love that thought, whether it’s the still images or the videos, how can you connect? How can you connect with your audience, and your audience vice versa, connect with you?

David Pisarek: Okay, so we have some ideas on how we can connect with people, use storytelling. I talk about that all the time. We’ve had a number of episodes where guests are talking about leveraging storytelling to help engage and all that. It’s true. If you’re not doing it, why are you in a non-profit? There’s a story about something. There’s a reason that your organization exists. Make a story about that. Tell that through video, through pictures, through articles, through social posts, through whatever.

But we need to be thinking about how we actually drive more traffic and awareness. Ultimately, that comes down to SEO. And a lot of people think about that as search engine optimization. I’ve been talking about it probably for the last year or so, about search everywhere optimization. With the advent of AI, we’ve definitely been using it for over four years in my agency. But if you’re listening to this and you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, you need to go back and listen to a bunch of episodes because we’ve got all kinds of stuff around AI. But there’s ChatGPT, there’s Perplexity, there’s Gemini.

You go to Google, you search for something. Chances are, your search is going to show a Gemini result at the top there.

What we are seeing industry-wide is less traffic going to websites over the last 4-5 months.

By the time this airs, it will probably be like six months, seven months, because people are getting the information they need right there in Google search without having to leave. So there are all kinds of implications. I don’t want to talk about Google losing money for ads and whatever. We’re not going to go there, right?

There are new… I’m not going to call it a protocol. It’s not really a regulation, but there are robot text files with websites. There are site map XML files with websites. There’s a new proposed one, LLMs.txt files, to help get your content into these large language models, the LLMs, so the AIs, those. How do you think, from what you’re seeing, organizations could be staying competitive given this changing landscape of search?

Garrett Hammonds: Yeah. It’s a scary thing for organizations that when we talk about non-profits, a lot of the time, and you and I, before the podcast, we’re talking about the mini-hats that we wear.

Sometimes I call it the mini-hats mentality. We feel like we have to do all the things. But we end up running into this wall where it’s hard to compete with companies and corporations that have such large budgets. Even if you’re not a direct competitor, you’re a non-profit, you’re competing for attention in a lot of topic areas. So it’s a search competition.

And it’s interesting to me that the LLMs.txt file: some platforms are even starting to incorporate this into their… Like Web flow is one that we’ve worked with clients in the past. They were already trying to integrate the LLMs.txt files into their systems. So it’s all going to change.

The big thing that non-profits need to latch onto is their members. Because in search, search is going to benefit you if you are doing these things. You need to get as much user-generated content as possible. So if you host events, if you have directors on your board who are people of influence within the industry, if you have members who win an award from you, whatever the case is, find ways to be able to give your organization opportunities for your members, for your donators, for whoever you work with to talk about you online.

Google has been in the works of launching a lot of personalizations inside of search experiences. You will even see in Google News, we’re going to see perspectives now where you have a news entity that reports on a story, NBC or CNN or Fox or whatever out there. But then, right next to it, you will start to see other perspectives on that exact same story. Maybe a social media influencer, maybe it’s some local blogger, but we’ll see multiple perspectives on the same story.

And so, if you can get your organization talked about by your people, then you will be found more online and focus on the local side. I know I’m talking about local a lot, but really focus on the locals. I came from working at non-profits that were membership organizations. So I always fall into this trap where I always think of all non-profits as a membership organization.

My fault on doing that, but I’ll use a membership organization as an example here. A lot of the time with membership organizations, you’ll have local chapters. And so what if you gave each of your local chapters guidance on how they could get found in local SEO?

Google has NAP as an acronym: NAP, name, address, and phone number. So if you can get all your locations synced up inside of local directories with that, then you raise your authority. If you have your local chapters linking back and giving you backlinks to your national brand, then that’s a win for you. It’s all kinds of different ways you can do this, but leverage what you have.

Don’t try and out-compete the big corporations on the things that you can out-compete them on. You don’t have the same budget, with exceptions too; there are some non-profits that are very well-funded, but in general, focus on what you know you can do, which is work with the people that’s a part of your organization.

David Pisarek: It’s really timely that you’re mentioning this in UCG, user-generated content. UGC, not UCG. User Content Generated. No, that doesn’t work. On, I think, the most recent episode of the show, I had Kimberly Haley-Coleman. She was talking about how their organization organically generates a ton of social engagement, and people going, and posting photos, and tagging them in it. So, totally great point. I would encourage everybody to finish listening to this episode, okay? And then go find that episode with Haley.

Awesome. Google is, obviously, they have all kinds of updates every month. They roll out an August update, a September, an October update. What do you see as the next one or two updates? I know you mentioned NAP. Is there anything else that you’re seeing or keeping your finger on the pulse of?

Garrett Hammonds: Right now, we’re at a strange time period where we’re shifting away from the way we’ve traditionally thought about search to a whole new system. You’ve talked about it, AI overviews, the Gemini responses at the top of search, and now we have AI mode. That’s going to be more of a standard of how we search, and it gives us different results than what we have had in the past.

So if you think of it this way, traditional search and the algorithms in place right now say that you had a genie and you could ask them to grant you a wish. That’s what Google is trying to do with traditional search: you put in a query, and then they serve you the best, most relevant content that they can to answer your question for you. The future, it uses what’s known inside the industry as RAG, R-A-G, RAG, but it’s more geared towards trying to be able to understand the intent behind your question. So maybe it’s more like a fortune teller, right? You bring a question to them, and they’re trying to predict your future. And so the results that it outputs is a little bit different than the results that you’re going to see in traditional search.

We need to stop thinking of ranking in terms of keywords as we have traditionally.

John Mueller, head of search at Google, has gone around at their different search events and talked about how 15% of searches every single day are new, and they have a lot of searches every day. We’re talking billions here. This is wild to me because we are not searching for things like a local Bistro or where’s somewhere I can buy the best hot dogs. The way we’re searching nowadays is, ‘Hey, I’m vegan, and I live in Norman, Oklahoma, here in the United States, and I have a bunch of friends who are coming to. Where’s a good place that I could take them that I can impress my…?’ It goes on and on. So we have these long queries now, and we call them no volume keywords because they’re just so unique that they just don’t have a tractable metric to them. So here is making the long story long here.

The takeaway is: we need to be less focused on individual keywords and more on keyword clusters and topic areas, and we need to speak to a bunch of different parts of our topic areas, but we also need to speak in our lanes. And so if you focus on one specific audience, create your content for that audience. So that way you can actually rank inside of the generative responses.

I’ve heard it called all kinds of different things. We have AEO and GEO and all kinds of generative engine optimization things. So this is what the future looks like for us: we have to adapt for the way people are going to search and the way that it’s going to be output.

David Pisarek: Love it. All spot on. Absolutely.

One quick, funny thing. There’s a friend of mine who is in the SEO space, and he posted a picture on Facebook, and he said, ‘This wins the SEO business of the year.’ It was a photo of a pizza restaurant near him that he drove past. The name of the pizza restaurant? ‘Pizza Near Me.’ Talk about trying to game the algorithm on that one in Google Maps, right? Yeah, that’s amazing.

Garrett, some amazing insights around digital marketing strategy, AI, web, SEO, all that stuff. I hope that the folks listening or watching this, hey, everybody, we’re on YouTube. Go and subscribe, follow us on there, follow us on all the channels. We’re on TikTok and Instagram, etcetera, etcetera. So find us. I hope that everybody listening or watching has been able to get some really great insights from you, from our conversation. And I want a quick little challenge from you. Everybody listening to this show, if you were to give them a challenge, something you want them to do in the next 24 hours after listening to this episode, what would that be?

Garrett Hammonds: I would say, try and use a AI program in a way that you’ve never used it before. There’s a million different ways that we can operationalize things like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, you name whichever one. But the more creative that we can get and, thinking outside of the box, the more that we’ll be opening up our minds to the possibilities that are before us.

We’re just really starting to dip our toes into this. AI is not new. It’s been around for a super long time, or I say super long, longer than what most people think. The computer mouse has been around a shorter amount of time than what the first structural things of AI has been around. But when we can open up our minds to what are the possibilities with this, I think it’s going to benefit us. Try and do something with AI that you’ve never done before. That’s my challenge.

David Pisarek: Even if you haven’t used AI, go and try it.

Garrett Hammonds: Go and try it. Oh, yeah. If you haven’t tried it-

David Pisarek: If you really want to blow your mind, the first AI platform, in my opinion, you should try is called Perplexity. Go there and search for your organization, and you’ll see what comes up. It is ridiculous what that platform can do. Garrett, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Garrett Hammonds: You can find our agency at hmm.agency. I love to make new friends, specifically. So reach out to me. I’m on LinkedIn. You can search for Garrett Hammonds. I think my tag is Garretthammons-digital, or reach out to me over email: [email protected].

David Pisare: Garrett, thanks again so much for joining on the show. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the resources, the links to anything to Garrett, to his LinkedIn, whatever, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this show, this episode for the show notes.

Until next time, keep on being successful!