Non-profit organizations, all useful tools in Search Console
New appointment with the lessons of Daniel Waisberg to the use of the Google Search Console for specific professional activities: after dedicating the last in-depth analysis to institutional and government bodies, now the Googler talks about what tools can help improve the performance and online operations of non-profit organizations. These are very basic indications to find out how a site is behaving in Google Search and to understand what you can do to improve visibility and increase traffic, which (as always) offer a practical inspiration to all of us.
Basic tips for each site
The Search Advocate of the American company first synthesizes the “three commandments” to have an effective site, valid both for the projects of non-profit organizations and for any other purpose:
- Make sure Google can find and read pages.
- Monitor website performance to find new opportunities on Google Search.
- Learn how to optimize the site for search.
Waisberg quickly summarizes how the search engine works, saying that “Google constantly scans the web to discover new and updated pages and to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page”. When a user enters a query, “Google machines search the corresponding pages in the index and return the results that we believe are the most relevant to the user”.
GSC supporting non-profit organizations
We then move on to the guidelines and suggestions of approach to the Google Search Console for those who work on sites of non-profit organizations: the first operation to do, if we have never used the free tool Google, is to verify the ownership of our site, choosing one of the many ways to achieve the goal.
We can then go directly to the index coverage status report, which gives an overview of all the pages of our site that Google has indexed tried to index and that visually summarizes the errors detected.
We should now know the possible status, or Errors (prevent indexing of pages and can cause loss of organic traffic); Valid with Warnings (pages that may or may not be shown on Google, depending on the problem, which must still be checked); Valid (properly indexed pages that can be shown on Google Search); Excluded Pages (which have not been indexed and will not appear in Google, but for our intention).
A specific example of pages not to be indexed could be a form of details for a donation, which should not appear in the search results.
The report also allows you to share details of errors and warnings with a developer, who can help us repair our site. After the surgery, we will have to use the GSC to validate it and wait for Google’s answer to the changes.
How to assess the performance on the search engine
Now that we know that our pages can be indexed, it’s time to find out what their actual performance is on the search engine, using the Search Performance Report, which shows how much traffic comes from Search, including breakdown on queries, pages and countries.
For each of these subdivisions, we can in fact see transfer impressions, clicks and other metrics, and Waisberg suggests to evaluate 3 elements in particular:
- When the number of impressions is significantly higher than the number of clicks for a query or page, you may need to create better page titles and descriptions to make the site more attractive to users in search results.
- If the search queries that we expect to see do not appear, the site may not have enough useful and relevant content for such queries.
- Lastly, we must check the branded queries, that is how many queries show the site among the results when the user includes or not the name of our organization not-profit, because this situation may show interesting areas in which people directly search for the content related to our site.
SEO for non-profit organizations
In the last part of today’s episode of Google Search Console Training (from home), Waisberg provides some quick optimization advice for those who run websites of non-profit organizations, remembering that “SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines to attract more relevant traffic”, which can “involve changes to both content and page structure“.
There are four examples of SEO best practices – the implementation of which may require the support of a developer – cited by Waisberg, which invites us to focus our attention mainly on:
Create high quality content that is actually accurate, clearly written and comprehensive.
Write unique titles and meta descriptions for each of our pages, because these are HTML elements that tell users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.
Use headings to emphasize important text on pages.
Make the site mobile friendly because most people search on Google using a mobile device.
ell’ultima parte dell’episodio odierno di Google Search Console Training (from home), Waisberg fornisce qualche rapido consiglio di ottimizzazione per chi gestisce siti di organizzazioni senza scopo di lucro, ricordando che “la SEO è il processo di aumento della visibilità delle pagine del sito web sui motori di ricerca per attirare un traffico più rilevante”, che può “comportare modifiche sia ai contenuti che alla struttura delle pagine”.
Quattro sono gli esempi di best practices SEO – la cui implementazione potrebbe richiedere il supporto di uno sviluppatore – citati da Waisberg, che invita a focalizzare la nostra attenzione principalmente su:
- Create high quality content that is actually accurate, clearly written and comprehensive.
- Write unique titles and meta descriptions for each of our pages, because these are HTML elements that tell users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is.
- Use headings to emphasize important text on pages.
- Make the site mobile friendly because most people search on Google using a mobile device.
