How Can You Use Google Alerts For Your Nonprofit’s SEO?

Google Alerts is a powerful tool that can help your nonprofit track mentions, events, and more. Use this tool to boost your SEO as well as keep track of sentiment surrounding your cause.

Knowing when you’re mentioned online as a nonprofit is critical, whether or not the sentiment is positive or negative. If it’s positive but goes unnoticed, you’ll lose a chance to engage with supporters and make them feel like they’re valued and their contributions appreciated, which can boost recurring donations. If it’s negative, you get the opportunity to address that issue as soon as possible.

A tool like Google Alerts will allow you to quickly find any mentions of your nonprofit online. You can use these to understand the sentiment around your cause as well as boost your SEO. If you’re mentioned, but not linked to, then you can ask the site owner for a backlink to your website.

What Is “Google Alerts?”

Google Alerts is a free notifications tool that sends you emails summarizing the search activity around terms that you specify.

For example, if you set alerts for your nonprofit’s name, you could receive an email each day, week, or month with a list of websites where your nonprofit was mentioned. You might also set alerts for specific keywords surrounding your cause, so you can find additional opportunities for mentions.

Benefits of Google Alerts for Nonprofits

While Google Alerts may seem like a basic tool, it can be used in many powerful ways to help your nonprofit grow. Here are five of them:

1. See what questions are being asked related to your cause

Some people who are passionate about a cause and are willing to donate might not know exactly where to do it or which organizations to trust. Setting up Google Alerts to receive notifications whenever someone asks a question related to your cause is a great way to market your nonprofit and remove any doubts they might have.

For example, let’s you have a hunger relief organization that focuses on helping feed people struggling with food insecurity. In this case, you set alerts for phrases like:

  • Where to donate food
  • How to help the hungry

You can then answer those questions and share how your nonprofit is helping tackle those issues.

Addressing these questions also helps to further optimize your website for search engines. You may end up with a featured snippet if you answer commonly searched questions in a clear and concise way on your website.

2. Find guest blogging opportunities

A guest post is an article written and posted on someone else’s blog with the goal of getting a backlink, driving web traffic, and increasing brand awareness.

Guest posting is one of the most effective link-building strategies used by marketers. Link-building is a common SEO tactic for gaining additional relevant backlinks to your website – something Google loves to see.

However, looking for these opportunities can sometimes be time-consuming—that’s when Google Alerts comes in. Instead of spending countless hours searching for potential guest posting opportunities, you can add some of the following operators and have Google notify you when an opportunity comes up:

  • [topic] + “guest post by”
  • [topic] + “write for us”
  • [topic] + “contributing writer”

The advantage of using the “guest post by” operator is that you’ll also get notifications from websites that might not have a dedicated “write for us” page but are accepting contributions. Make sure that you only write for relevant websites as well. Random backlinks won’t get you any “SEO points.”

3. Keep an eye on other nonprofits

Monitoring other nonprofits will help you see which marketing techniques they’re using. This way, you can consider if it’s worth implementing their tactics in your own nonprofit.

For example, if you discover that other organizations are doing a lot of guest blogging, you could also reach out to the websites they’ve been published at and pitch a guest post as well. If a website is mentioning other nonprofits, there’s a good chance that they’ll mention yours as well.

In this case, you can set alerts for the name of other nonprofits or the author of the articles. For example, if you wanted to track GiveWP and Taylor Waldon was in charge of writing guest posts for other websites, you could set up an alert for “Taylor Waldon.”

4. Track your nonprofit mentions

Mentions on the internet are important to monitor so that you can both address negative feedback and take advantage of positive comments.

Here are some alerts you can set up to track your nonprofit’s reputation:

  • [Your nonprofit] fraud
  • [Your nonprofit] review
  • [Your nonprofit] legit
  • [Your nonprofit] scam
  • [Your nonprofit] good
  • [Your nonprofit] worst
  • [Your nonprofit] favorite

Tracking your nonprofit mentions is also a good way to find backlink opportunities. For example, if someone mentions your nonprofit but doesn’t link to it, you could reach out to them and ask if they’d be willing to include a link as well.

5. Track local news and events

Attending local events is an excellent way for nonprofits to get involved with the community, find sponsors, partnership opportunities, and raise awareness of their cause.

For example, if your nonprofit is looking to get involved in a local school’s annual Christmas concert, you could set up an alert for “Christmas concerts in [location].” Here are some alerts you can set for local events:

  • Events [location]
  • Charity [location]
  • Concerts [location]
  • Game night [location]

Communities are what keep nonprofits alive, so it’s important to network at local events.

How to Set Up Your Nonprofit’s Google Alerts

Setting up Google Alerts for your nonprofit is a straightforward process. All you need to do is:

  1. Visit google.com/alerts
  2. Add your keywords. Enter your nonprofit’s name or any other keywords you’d like to track.
  3. Select the frequency. If you’d like to receive alerts in real-time, choose “as-it-happens.”
  4. Select your sources. Unfortunately, Google Alerts doesn’t cover social media, but you can track web content, such as news, blogs, videos, and books.
  5. Choose a region. If your nonprofit is only present in one country, you can select it here.
  6. Enter your email. Add the email address where you’d like to have these alerts delivered.
  7. Click Create Alert. That’s it!

Now It’s Your Turn!

Of course, there’s much more that you can do with this simple yet powerful free tool by Google. So don’t be afraid to experiment with different search terms, notifications, and strategies.

For instance, Google Alerts can be extremely useful for fundraising. Keeping track of your top donors to see where and who they interact with the most can help you plan a marketing strategy to target them as well—you could even consider starting a partnership with your top donors.

Setting up alerts for your supporters will also allow you to interact with them where they are online, which will keep your nonprofit in their heads and make asking for donations later a much easier task.

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