SEO for Nonprofits Fundraising on Giving Tuesday

SEO for Nonprofits fundraising on Giving Tuesday is easier with Yoast.
Yoast and SEO for Nonprofits on Giving Tuesday

Your Giving Tuesday success depends on your interaction with the community and how easily your website is found on Giving Tuesday. Plugins like Yoast make SEO for nonprofits easy to execute and your site more social media-friendly.

Preparing for Giving Tuesday includes checking that your organization’s website is in amazing shape. Your nonprofit site should always accomplish the following:

  • Tell someone what you do within 15 seconds of landing on the home page.
  • Show donation options in multiple places.
  • Optimize the overall structure and content for search engines.
  • Display links properly on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The Yoast SEO plugin addresses these last two pieces most directly. Plus, Yoast is easy to use for WordPress users of all levels. Let’s dig into building SEO for nonprofits fundraising on Giving Tuesday with Yoast.

Free

Giving Tuesday
Workbook

Get everything you need to launch your Giving Tuesday campaign for FREE.

Technical SEO for Nonprofits

First, you need to set up your site properly so that search engines can crawl and understand it. Without this basic step, your next efforts are not nearly as effective.

Start with your website’s sitemap and metadata. A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like. It maps out your website structure. Metadata is a background piece of information on the website. It tells search engines and social media platforms what they’re looking at and how to interact with it. Metadata tells search engines what your

This is how search engines get the headline and description of the page links they display.

The GiveWP Google Search results display show the entire website structure and the main description for the website as well as each website section.

Metadata also tells social media platforms what image and link information to display on their link previews. You can check your social sharing settings with tools like the Twitter Card Validator and the Facebook Debugger.

The Twitter Card Validator shows you the information found in your websites metadata as well as what that looks like when it’s shared on Twitter.

There are a lot of different aspects to technical SEO, but you don’t need to know them all inside and out. Yoast allows you to create an XML sitemap and set up your metadata without any code.

Optimize Your Donation Forms and Landing Pages with Keywords

Another key to SEO for nonprofits, especially for Giving Tuesday, is storytelling. Stories are crucial to connecting with both your audience and search engines. Before you ever begin writing, start with keyword research.

Use these questions to get you started:

“What will your ideal donor search for when they’re looking for a cause like yours on Giving Tuesday? What will they search for when they’re ready to give?”

Type your answers in a spreadsheet. Then, use your answers to start keyword research. If you need help researching keywords, check out these five SEO tips for donation pages. Once you have a group of keywords, you can use them to optimize your website and donation forms.

Yoast has a Keyword Optimization tool built into all of your WordPress posts, pages, and GiveWP donations forms. It gives you feedback on how to use your keywords more strategically. The tool assesses the strength of your keyword usage as well as the readability of your page.

Yoast will show you a green smiley face when your page is properly optimized for SEO and Readability. Clicking into the analysis tab gives you additional tips on how to better optimize your page.

If you have Yoast Premium, you can add multiple keywords to optimize for a keyword cluster instead. Keyword clusters are important because they expand the potential reach of your page. Not everyone searches for the same thing using the same terms. They also provide search engines with more context to place your site in the right person’s search results.

Yoast SEO lets you know when you use keywords more than once. So, if you’ve forgotten to take down a past Giving Tuesday campaign, it will let you know when you try to use the same keyword again.

You can use your GiveWP form content section to create robust page copy for SEO. Or, build your own landing page with the page builder of your choice and embed your form with a shortcode or Gutenberg block.

Social Sharing is the Key to Giving Tuesday

Giving Tuesday is uniquely built around the concept of a viral social media campaign. It was one of the first of its kind. Since it started, it’s grown immensely, all due to the power of social media. So, if your website is not social media-friendly, you may be missing out on some powerful Giving Tuesday potential. You can fix that with Yoast!

We mentioned Yoast automatically includes your metadata for social media platforms, but you can also change this data. By default (with the right Yoast settings enabled), your social media links for GiveWP donation forms will show the form title, assigned featured image, and the excerpt (or as much of it fits). If you choose to embed your forms on a unique landing page, the title of the page, featured image, and excerpt should also automatically show here. If you altered the general search metadata, then that is used on social media in place of the default settings.

Many times, the featured images for your site might not work best on social media. Or, your title is better changed for social sharing. Yoast allows you to change the photo, link headline, and link description for both Facebook and Twitter separately. These settings are generally carried over onto other platforms that read the same metadata, like LinkedIn.

The Yoast Social Meta box has options to change the image, title, and description used on Facebook.

You may find that assigning a GIF as your social media image works well. Whereas, your website’s theme might not support GIFs as featured images. Experiment with these settings and test them out before the weeks leading up to Giving Tuesday.

Edit your social media meta descriptions to be shorter than search engine meta.

Reach Out to Your Local Media and Public Officials for a Boost and a Backlink

Another important piece of search engine optimization is backlinks. Public mentions of your organization (ideally with links back to your website) send search engines signals that you’re the real deal. If you do this in conjunction with your Giving Tuesday Campaign, the more likely someone searching for an organization like yours to give to on Giving Tuesday will find you.

There are a few ways to attract this kind of backlink.

  1. A Mayoral Proclamation
  2. Media Mentions (News Publications)

Our Giving Tuesday Workbook has everything you need to know about how to request each of these items.

Free

Giving Tuesday
Workbook

Get everything you need to launch your Giving Tuesday campaign for FREE.

Learn Everything You Need to Know About SEO for Nonprofits

We partnered with Yoast on a full guide to the fundamentals of WordPress SEO for Nonprofits. Get your copy for free now and keep your nonprofit website’s SEO strong year-round.

Get the SEO eBook for Nonprofits

About the Author

Share this post

Join Our Newsletter

Get fundraising insights directly in your inbox. Plus a 15% discount off all plans.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Copyright © 2024 Liquid Web, L.L.C.

GiveWP™ is a trademark of Liquid Web, L.L.C.

A Liquid Web Brand

© 2024 All Rights Reserved.