SEO for Nonprofits: Where to Start and What Actually Matters

Most nonprofit communicators know SEO matters.

You have probably been told this more than once, sometimes by someone who made it sound very complicated and you’re left not knowing where to get started. 

But what you do know is this: your website is not ranking the way it should. You are not entirely sure why. And the gap between “I should do something about this” and “I know what to do” feels wider than it should.

I wrote this guide to bridge that gap. 

It’s not going to make you an SEO specialist overnight but it will give you a clear picture of how search works and a practical process for improving your nonprofit website.

Because at its core, SEO is actually quite simple:

People have questions.

Search engines are trying to surface the best answers.

Your job is to help your organization become one of those answers.

Most communications teams are stretched thin.

You are managing a website, running campaigns, writing content, fielding requests and somewhere in the background trying to think strategically. You need your efforts to build on each other, not disappear the moment you stop pushing.

That is what makes SEO different.

A page that earns a strong position in search can keep bringing people to your website without ongoing ad spend (or whatever the hell’s happening today with social media algorithms). Someone searches, finds your page, reads it and takes the next step. That can continue happening long after the page is published.

I don’t want to overstate anything here. SEO still takes ongoing work (especially in recent years). Algorithms change. Competitors publish new content. Pages need to be updated to stay relevant. New technology emerges that radically changes how people discover information (hello, AI).

But the underlying value still holds: SEO is one of the few channels where your work can compound over time.

A good page can keep working for you.

A thoughtful content strategy can keep growing.

A strong website can help the right people find you before they ever hear your name.

For nonprofits, that matters. Your organization may be trying to reach donors, funders, partners, policymakers, service users, volunteers, advocates or community members. And search is often that first place people go when they’re trying to understand an issue, solve a problem or decide who to trust.

If your organization has useful knowledge, lived experience, sector expertise or a strong point of view, SEO helps make that work easier to find.

And every organization I’ve worked with has all of those in heaps. 

Further reading: The Complete Guide to Your Nonprofit Website Redesign

When you type something into Google, you’re not searching the live internet.

You are searching Google’s index, a huge catalogue of pages it has already discovered, crawled and assessed. Google reads pages, tries to understand what they are about and then decides which ones are most likely to answer a search well by ranking them sequentially top to bottom. 

This is the SERP (search engine results page). 

Yes, over time the tactics have shifted. The goal does not.

What search engines want to do is connect people with the most useful, relevant answer to what they are looking for.

Once you understand that, SEO starts to feel less like technical black magic. You’re not trying to trick Google. And you’re certainly not trying to make your content more readable by bots at the expense of real people. 

SEO is all about writing the best content that answers the questions people have and making that content easier to find, easier to understand and more useful to the people searching for it.

Look, there are 1000% different perspectives on SEO. There’s a whole part of the sector that believes you need to game the system and find the loopholes in the system in order to rank quick and en masse. This is called black-hat SEO, a set of practices that is largely frowned upon and that usually eventually gets penalized by a new algorithm update. 

Good SEO practices overlap with good UX practices and with good accessibility practices. And that makes sense: you are trying to make information easy to find, easy to access and easy to understand. 

Mark Williams-Cook says it best:

“There is absolutely no ‘SEO change’ you should do on your site that will make the user experience worse. None. No exceptions.”

That is a useful test for almost every SEO decision.

If a tactic makes the page worse for a real person, it is probably not a good long-term SEO strategy.

A clear heading structure helps people scan a page. It also helps screen reader users navigate the content. And it helps search engines understand how the page is organized.

Alt text helps someone using a screen reader understand an image. It also provides people information about an image if it doesn’t load. And it gives search engines more context about why you put that image there.

Pages that load fast are better for people in general. They’re especially better for people who don’t have access to fast internet. And search engines reward them.

SEO is not separate from the quality of the website. It is one way that quality shows up.

Further Reading: Best Practices for Designing Accessible Websites

SEO can get complicated quickly, but the basic process is not complicated.

Everything starts with keywords (sometimes called queries).

Keywords are the searches people make when they are looking for something. Whether or not they are phrased as questions, they represent questions real people want answered.

That’s all a keyword is: a search. It’s not a magic phrase to stuff into a page. It’s a clue about what someone needs.

The way your organization describes its work is often not the way your audience searches for it. You may talk about systems change, integrated services or community-centred programming. Your audience may search for something much more direct.

Thinking in terms of questions pulls you out of your own language and into theirs.

When you’re looking at keywords, three things matter.

Search volume tells you how many people search for a term each month. Higher volume can mean more potential traffic, but it usually means more competition too.

Keyword difficulty gives you a sense of how hard it may be to rank for that term. Smaller sites often need to start with more specific, less competitive searches and build from there.

Search intent is the reason behind the search. This matters most. Someone searching “what causes food insecurity” wants to understand the issue. Someone searching “food insecurity charities” may be looking for organizations working on the issue or comparing where to give. Someone searching “food insecurity donations” is looking to take action. 

Same general topic. Different needs. So that means you need different pages. 

Finding the right keywords is its own process and has its own guide. For now, the principle is enough: understand the questions your audience is asking, choose the ones that are relevant to your organization and focus where you can give a genuinely useful answer.

Every page needs to be about something specific.

Not a vague meandering idea.

A clear topic.

A page about “food insecurity” is broad. A page answering “what causes food insecurity?” is much clearer.

That question becomes the reason the page exists.

Once you have the main question, the rest of the page starts to take shape. What would someone need to understand next? What follow-up questions would they naturally have? What would make the answer more complete?

For a page about what causes food insecurity, the questions it needs to answer might look something like this:

Those questions help structure the content. They are what the page is written to answer in order to cover the topic “what causes food insecurity” comprehensively. That might lead to an outline that looks something like this:

Notice we’re not answering what causes food insecurity in a paragraph. This is a complex issue and we’re covering it comprehensively. 

But the reverse may be true: this isn’t a post about poverty. Or climate change. Or water scarcity. It’s not even a deep dive on how those cause food insecurity. Somebody asking “what causes food insecurity?” is looking for an umbrella level understanding. They want to understand the causes as a whole, they’re looking for a map, not to examine each individual tree. Each of those subheadings needs to answer why they cause food insecurity and then ideally link to a page that goes in depth on how climate change affects food insecurity. 

This is why I always say that the best SEO is great writing. You pick a topic and carefully select every element on that page to support that topic. It’s laser sharp focus, staying on topic, never straying.

But it also has to be comprehensive enough to be meaningful. If you can’t get on a soap box and talk about the topic in depth, then you probably don’t have the expertise, experience or authority to write anything worth reading about, so you won’t rank. 

Search engines usually want to surface the best answer to a question, not three thin pages from the same website that each answer part of it.

Once you know what a page is about and you have created a strong answer, you need to make sure the page itself is written and designed in a way that will reinforce that topic clearly.

This is called on-page SEO: the elements, the specific levers you can pull on to optimize your page so it can better help people and search engines understand what the content’s about.

The goal of on-page SEO is not to check every box on Yoast or whatever plugin you use but to make sure the page is clearer, stronger and easier to find.

Further reading: How to optimize your page for SEO (on-page optimization guide)

Here are the main elements of on-page SEO:

Optimization is an ongoing effort so you don’t need to master every element at once. But you also shouldn’t save this as a final checklist just before you publish. It should inform what you’re even writing to begin with. 

But ultimately, the goal of optimizing these elements is simple. 

Is this page clear, specific and easy to understand?

Is this the best page you can create for this topic?

Does this page properly answer a searcher’s questions? 

A single page can rank.

But long-term search visibility usually comes from depth.

If your website only has your program pages, an about page and a handful of updates, there aren’t many ways for people to find you through search. SEO is a powerful channel to reach people at all stages of their journey certainly, but especially at a time when they’re just looking for credible information that you could give them the answers to. 

That’s the power. It’s by becoming a helpful resource over and over again that you build trust and affinity with them and guide them closer and closer to what they’re trying to do, which is to take meaningful action to make a difference in this world. 

If they’re learning about the causes of food insecurity, a part of them wants to know what they can do to help. 

You need content that answers the questions your audience is asking before they’re ready to act. But “before they’re ready to act” isn’t even the full story because your content marketing strategy with proper SEO should guide them to act. 

This is where topic clusters are useful.

A topic cluster is a group of related pages built around one larger topic. A pillar page covers the broad topic in a comprehensive way. Cluster pages go deeper into specific subtopics and link back to the pillar.

For example, a pillar page on food insecurity might be supported by cluster pages on:

Each page answers a specific question. Together, they show depth around the larger topic.

That matters for search engines, but it also matters for people.

If someone lands on one article and finds three more useful pieces that help them understand the issue, your website starts to feel useful. Not because you trapped them in a funnel, but because you actually helped.

Topic clusters also make content planning easier. Instead of asking “What should we publish this month?” you can ask “What questions have we not answered yet?”

That’s a much better question.

The way your website is structured and built does affect your SEO as well. This is what we call technical SEO. It may sound intimidating, and to be honest most technical SEO practices do require a dev or a specialist that’s able to affect large issues like indexation or canonicalization.

But there are some things that anyone publishing content on the website can affect so you do need to understand the basics, because even great content can struggle if search engines cannot find it, access it or load it properly.

Most technical SEO issues fall into a few buckets.

A few foundations are worth confirming once and then keeping an eye on:

The goal is not technical perfection. The goal is to remove the obvious barriers that keep good content from being found.

There’s a lot that affects Google’s ranking of pages. Most of it we’ve covered: content quality, the structure of your content, the technical hygiene of your website.

But when all is equal, how do search engines decide which content should rank first? From the start, a massive indicator that a page is more credible than another is how many other pages are linking to it, especially from external websites. 

When reputable websites link to your content, that’s called a backlink. Those backlinks act as signals of trust. They’re basically votes and they suggest your content is useful enough for someone else to reference.

There is no good shortcut here.

We’ve talked about black hat SEO and early on, a large industry emerged to buy links, swap links or chase low-quality directories. Today, these tactics usually create more risk than value.

The better path is to create content worth linking to.

For nonprofits, that might include:

A lot of backlink opportunities also come from relationships you already have: partners, funders, coalition members, sector networks, media contacts and collaborators.

If those organizations mention your work online, ask whether they can link to the relevant page.

Good content earns trust.

Good relationships help that trust travel.

SEO can feel abstract because the results take time.

The good news is that you don’t need to track everything to understand whether your work is moving in the right direction.

Start with Google Search Console and GA4. Both are free. 

A few useful metrics:

Do not obsess over rankings alone.

Ranking first for a keyword that brings the wrong people to your site is not the goal.

The goal is to help more of the right people find your organization and take a meaningful next step.

Search is changing and we’re just at the start of this evolution.

More and more, we’re seeing people turn to an AI tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews in order to get information and these tools provide answers to their questions directly, without sending anybody to a website.

This will change how people behave and how websites need to create content in order to show up and it will even change what organizations track in terms of success. But today AI does not make the fundamentals of SEO irrelevant.

See, these AI platforms aren’t making up the answers they give (well, mostly). They still need sources. They still need clear information. They still need to decide what is relevant, credible and useful.

You may hear people talk about AEO or GEO as if they are totally separate from SEO. But what we’re currently seeing today is that the practical work to show up in AI answers still overlaps heavily with good SEO: publish clear, useful, well-structured content that answers real questions and demonstrates genuine expertise.

That doesn’t change (even Google agrees, although even that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.) 

Which means that today your content needs to be understandable not only to people and search engines, but also to AI tools that may summarize, cite or draw from it.

Further reading: How SEO is Continuing to Evolve

This is a lot to take in at once, so don’t take it all in at once.

Start with what you already have.

Open Google Search Console and look at which pages are getting impressions. These are pages Google is already serving in search results. They may not be ranking well yet, but they have a foothold.

Look at the keywords (called queries in Google Search Console) that are bringing people to those pages.

Are they relevant?

Does the page answer those questions clearly?

Could the title be stronger?

Could the content go deeper?

Could the page link to something more useful?

Could related pages link back to it?

A few targeted improvements to pages that already have search visibility can turn middling performance into real traffic.

Then pick two or three topics your organization genuinely knows well. Look for places where your audience has real questions and your organization has something useful to say.

Build from there.

You do not need to publish constantly, you just need to publish intentionally.

But ultimately, the foundations of great SEO are very simple. 

Understand the question.

Create the best answer you can.

Make it easy to find, read and trust.

That’s the work. And it’s probably work you’re doing off your website anyway. Now get those perspectives published and attract the traffic that’s there, waiting to read your incredible content.