Search Engine Optimization and Nonprofit Success

It’s often communicated, openly, that search engine optimization services offer the highest return on investment of any marketing channel, period.

Just what that return is varies and depends on how involved the campaign is, how competitive the market is, and some other factors. But rest assured, digital marketing experts have drawn quite the conclusion. 

Depending on the estimates you trust, search engine optimization will produce anywhere from anywhere from a 500% to 1200% return (depending on industry) and that within a year. 

Here, we tend to serve clients in eCommerce, as success is easiest to measure (and ROI easiest to quantify) when sales are involved. 

But that doesn’t mean we don’t (or can’t) serve clients with search engine optimization services in different industries. 

This is the true story of one of our clients, a nonprofit and a food bank, and how we generated massive year-over-year increases in revenue, which in their case, takes the form of charitable contributions. 

Atypical eCommerce Search Engine Optimization Services

Our normal process for eCommerce clients is this: we audit the website, audit the industry and take a closer look at the competitive landscape, then discover a cohort of keywords (dependent on the scope of the campaign) that promise to generate the highest return. 

Typically what we are looking for are keywords with strong commercial or transactional intent, that are closely aligned with the actual products our clients sell. We publish content, build links, boost the technical performance of our client websites, and in time, our clients rank better for those keywords. 

Clients see the listing, click, convert, and that’s how it goes. Measuring ROI in this case is easy. You just compare the growth in organic revenue to the investment in the SEO campaign itself.

In this particular case, in which the client operates a large regional food bank and collects donations, measuring that ROI would naturally prove a little trickier. 

In terms of operationalizing the campaign, however, that part was standard enough. We just needed to find keywords that users were searching for when they wanted to make a charitable contribution (or some other sort of donation) to a foodbank in their area. 

We found the keywords, qualified them according to location to keep users outside of the target market away from the campaign, and then made our other optimizations as required per the campaign. 

From that point, we could publish optimized content to their blog and CMS pages, optimize their key category and pillar pages on a piecemeal basis, create local citations, eliminate technical hurdles, and build links.

That part was standard, and has been vetted time and time again to produce results for our clients. The main customization was just finding the right keywords that potentially interested “customers” would be looking for when they wanted to make a donation. 

Even so, there were a few hurdles associated with the campaign that we had to overcome on the road to success. 

The Hurdles

Granted, this SEO campaign, like any of the other eCommerce SEO campaigns we’ve planned and executed, was not without its relative challenges. 

For one thing, finding the right keywords was a challenge, not the least of which for the reason that we needed to find keywords people were searching for when their intent was to donate, not to buy something. 

The local element was also something that we had to consider, because only people in a certain area of the country (by and large, not absolutely) would fit the bill as members of a target audience. This client is in the Northeast. Attracting charitable donors from the Southwest would be nice in theory but would not pan out well in practice. 

So those things were challenges. We also were tasked with the somewhat delicate charge of getting numerous decision makers and editors to align not just with our content, which is the most important factor in any campaign, but with each other. 

This slowed progress slightly, but in the end we were able to see eye to eye and kept content publication moving along at a fair pace, which generated higher organic visibility in their target market. 

It’s also worth noting that a distinctly challenging element of this campaign is that this client came to us experiencing a slump in donations in the wake of the coronavirus, and wanted us to get them back to where they were. As you will see shortly, we not only met but exceeded that goal.

Lastly, we had to deal with a relatively competitive market and one that is fundamentally different from that in which we typically operate, since this client is not, strictly speaking, eCommerce. 

The Results 

In spite of these challenges, we were able to generate significant results for this client, not just in terms of keyword movement, overall visibility and traffic to the website, but in donations acquired. This much, at least brought the campaign closer in line with what a traditional eCommerce SEO campaign typically offers. 

First, let’s just take a look at the raw figures typically associated with SEO, impressions, clicks and average position. 

As you can see in the screenshot below, which compares the last 3 months to the corresponding period the previous year (dates indicated) impressions and clicks were up and average position was down (which is a good thing).

Just among organic impressions, we nearly doubled overall organic impressions. Clicks were up too, by nearly 10%. 

Average position was more than halved; to put this in layman’s terms, we effectively brought every organic listing for this client one whole page forward. In other words, listings for the client that used to be on page 3 for one keyword were on page 2 for the same keyword over the past three months. 

This is significant because it is an average position; for important keywords and search terms, realistically we had more listings for this client on page one. 

Views and active users were also up more than 20% over the same period, as indicated in the screenshot below. 

But as you can imagine, money talks, and during roughly the same period, we saw more than a 12% increase in revenue, which this organization captures in the form of charitable donations. 

The market conditions were tough and there were challenges surrounding this campaign, but at the end of the day, we improved, and continue to improve, not just organic visibility, but the bottom line: revenue. 

SEO Success, Even for Nonprofits

If by chance you are reading this and responsible for charitable contributions or marketing for a nonprofit and thought eCommerce SEO was not an appropriate marketing channel for your endeavor, think again. 

Get in touch with our SEO experts and let us know what your goals are. We’ll give you a realistic view of the landscape and let you know what your most viable options for growth are (and, if you want more evidence, see our collection of eCommerce SEO case studies).