A Practical Guide to AIO and SEO for Your Nonprofit Website
Nonprofit AIO and SEO are tools to get folks to connect with content. When it comes to strategic communications, we all want the right audience to find our content, but this can be challenging for folks who work at nonprofits. Writing in an accessible way that gets views and engagement does not always come naturally. Instead, we often stay in our comfort zones and talk in a way that is niche-based. This has prevented many nonprofit websites, as well as nonprofit communication, from reaching broader audiences and getting the engagement from advocates and donors that they really need.
Below are our top tips for AIO and SEO:
- Be consistent: At a minimum, you need to make sure you are writing about topics consistently in a way folks can understand and find them. This is a good content strategy that some call SEO, and it is still important. AI tools can help build out a content strategy and track metrics, but you still need to be active in writing and creating good content. AI-generated content (also known as AI slop) can do more harm than good.
- Make your content searchable: With AI summaries and support-led search becoming so important, it is easy to think that the basics of good web strategy go out the window, but it is the opposite. Updating your website and being thoughtful about your content will make your site jump out even more.
- Get your content linked by others: Having your site linked by authorities like local or national news sites can make a big difference in how you show up in searches.
- Own your own content: For years, social media has been the content easy button, but this is rented land, not owned content. By spending time and owning your keywords and content, you have a firewall against AI slop and short-term social engagement. Having a thoughtful content strategy, including written, visual, video, and audio mediums, will get you focused engagement.
With AI, there is a new wrinkle to the niche problem that makes it more challenging. In the past, we have written about the lack of care folks take to the content on advocacy and political websites, and AI will make clear and compelling content even more important. AI is not all bad, but it takes some getting used to. AI forces folks to be more focused in their approach. Understanding what AI is looking for can also help you engage with real people who are mostly looking for the same thing.
- Experience: What is the experience you as an organization have? How long have you been around? Define it and be clear about it.
- Expertise: How are you showing you are the experts on this issue or cause? Using case study examples through video and written content can help.
- Authority: What gives you authority? How long have you been around? Add testimonials to your site. Show who your team is and link their bios to written content.
- Trust: Is your site trustworthy? This can include anything from logos of member orgs, backlinks to news articles, or making sure your org’s address is up to date.
How you rank in AI searches matters and will matter more in the future. AI will do the initial research for folks. Donors, advocates, and potential members will compare competing organizations and issues via AI and then look further based on that.
TOFU Vs BOFU: This is not suddenly an essay about veganism. TOFU stands for top of the funnel, and BOFU is bottom of the funnel. Top of the funnel content is broad and more general. AI itself will be the top of the funnel one day. Bottom of the funnel is much more specific and detailed. Organizations need to focus hard on their bottom of the funnel content (in the old days, we called this long tail keywords), which will help with conversions and engagement by getting folks to see you as the expert on a detailed subject.
Quick tips for AI search and ranking:
- Be clear: Make it obvious why folks should come and engage with your website. Less jargon and a clear message matter now more than ever.
- Have up-to-date content: the more up-to-date your content, the better it will rank. Removing old content that does not rank is also a great way of getting better engagement.
- Have an FAQ section on your website: This will allow AI to easily understand who you are and what you do.
- Use schema markup on core sections of your site, like your FAQ: Your web developer should know what this is, but it will also take some tinkering to get it right.
- Update your bios and author pages: You want people to know you are the experts and have authority about what you are writing. It is important to have these pages up to date, so folks get to know your team and why they care about the subject they are writing on.
- Make sure your address and terms of service are up to-date: Little things like addresses and terms of service are not things that folks pay attention to, but updating this info creates trust from AI and search engines that are looking for this data.
TL; DR: Having a proactive plan and vision for your content can help you in both the short and long term. Fixing and updating issues on your site will make it show up in search by both humans and AI.
Have questions or want to learn more about AIO and SEO? Click below to get in touch or check out the rest of our blog for related content.