SEO For NonProfits: Analysis of the Salvation Army, Feed the Children, & ASPCA

As a small business agency we are always looking out for the local market or those with less than enough resources to reach their potential traffic or sales level from the search engines. This week we are going to do a high level SEO analysis of 5 Nonprofits to hopefully give them insight into some actionable items they can use to make their sites healthier in the search engines, increase traffic, donations, and exposure, to drive website interactions.

SEO can be organized in a pyramid structure containing 4 levels (Technical, Content, Links, Social), or as we call it the “TLC’s of SEO“. In this SEO case study we will take a high level view of the first and third levels of the TLCs of SEO, applied across 5 Nonprofits.

The first level is technical: This includes most of the onsite metrics that correlate with rankings. These can be algorithmic SEO variables such as header response codes, missing or duplicate title tags, duplicate content, H1 tags, 302 and 301 redirects.
The third level is links: This includes link metrics of the Nonprofit’s website, and shines light on some of the link metrics that correlate with rankings.

Each of these levels of the pyramid build on one another and amplify the level underneath it. When the 4 levels of the pyramid firing on all cylinders a website is well optimized and has a high potential to rank well and drive quality, converting traffic.

20 Tips for Optimizing Nonprofit Websites

Encourage links from supporters
Don’t forget about pages hosted elsewhere
Evaluate the calls-to-action throughout your site
Manage your online identity
Do your keyword homework
Clean up your code
Optimize site speed
Do you have lots of great content that passes the panda questionnaire
Make sure you are optimizing your page titles and header tags
Optimize your Description Tags for CTR
Optimize your images for image search engines
Make clean, non-dynamic urls
Optimizing your site architecture
Make sure you are using 301 redirects on all pages that have moved or been deleted, accept those in which pose a security risk due to donations
Structure the internal linking strategy
Initiate a Link Building Strategy
Set up free analytical tools, such as Google Analytics and webmaster tools to track visits and conversions
Optimize your content for keyword diversity
Create a diverse set of content including lists, videos (add transcripts), and images
Create infographics to help with link building

Nonprofit: Salvation Army SEO Analysis

Background: The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.

Technical SEO Audit of The Salvation Army’s Website

Images: It looks as though The Salvation Army has upwards of 305 images (gif, jpg and png image files) across its website. The key is to utilize these images to influence the on-page SEO and help drive traffic from image engines such as Google Images.

Make sure all the images have alt text attributes. Google uses the alt text of an image much like they use the anchor text of a link.
Ensure the image name is optimized to represent the image (instead of image.jpg for a picture of the salvation army’s logo, use salvation-army.jpg)

HTML Pages: The following is a breakdown of the 435 crawlable pages on The Salvation Army’s website and the HTML header code they return.

Approximately 360 pages return a 200 header. This is the standard response for successful HTTP requests.
We could not find any 301 redirects on their site.
Approximately 7 pages return a 302 header. 302 redirects do not allow ranking metrics to pass through the page and onto the page that it redirects to. The list of urls below are those in which returned a 302 redirect. These links originate from bad links being in the code of internal pages on salvationarmyusa.org.
- http://www.salvationarmyusa.org
- http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-local/Ways-to-give
- http://www.salvationarmyusa.org./usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-local/Ways-to-give
- http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/
- http://www.salvationarmyusa.org./
- http://salvationarmyusa.org/
- http://salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-local/Ways-to-give
The big 302 issue comes from their primary home page (which most people will use to link to the Salvation Army’s website) 302 redirecting to a less friendly URL (http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf). This 302 redirect stops the ranking metrics from flowing to the new home page URL.
It also looks as though their non-www website’s homepage 302 redirects to the www version of the website. This is having the same affect as the above, by hurting the flow of ranking metrics if someone links to the non-www version of the site instead of the www version.
It also seems as though they have some poor code in which the links not formatted correctly for them to resolve at a real page.
Approximately 35 pages return a 404 error. This is a missed opportunity to capture the ranking metrics that those pages have gained from external links and social metrics. These links should be fixed in the internal link structure, and there should be a 301 redirect mapping put in place to capture any off-site metrics.
The URL structure: The site has long URLs that lack any valuable keywords (example: http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-dynamic-index/54FA4B304817F825852574F800668C67?Opendocument). The one thing I do notice that is a positive about their URLs, is that they do keep them all lowercase.

Title Tags: Title Tags are a primary factor within the onsite variables group that Google uses to gain insight into the content of a page.

Their Title Tags are not optimized structurally or for a focused keyword set. This is causing them to miss out on focused traffic for both mid and long-tail keywords.
They have 26 Title Tags that push the limits of how long a Title Tag should be (75 characters or less)
They also have pages that have duplicate Title Tags, mostly due to both the www and non-www versions of the site being indexed.

Tip: I would suggest optimizing the Title Tag structure of most pages such as (primary keyword: secondary keyword | Brand )

Description Tags: Description Tags help click through rates (CTR) from the search results, and can also be a signal to Google to help them distinguish between pages that could possibly have duplicate content.

The site seems to be missing its Meta Description Tags across all crawlable pages.

Tip: A good person to optimize the Description Tags is the individual who handles PPC, as they are familiar with optimizing CTR.

Meta Keywords Tag: Where as Google does not use the Meta Keywords Tag, Bing recently announced (August 2011) that they have gone back to utilizing it as a minor signal to help them understand a page’s content set.

The site is missing its Meta Keywords Tag across all pages.

Tip: I would suggest taking the keywords in the Title Tag and adding those that are in the Description Tag, (minus stop words like “a, the, and”) which should total approximately 10-20 words at most.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3): Header tags are like the chapter titles in a book, and need to be unique on each page.

The site currently duplicates its H1 tag on every page, which could confuse Google as to what the page is about (Current H1 tag: The Salvation Army: Doing the most good.)
The H2 tag is slightly better but still has duplication and keyword focus issues across the website.

Canonical Tag: This is a great way to minimize duplicate content caused by vanity URLs, poor site structure, or internal tracking perimeters added to the URL string for click tracking.

They currently do not utilize the Canonical tag to help minimize duplicate content and focus metrics

Link Analysis of The Salvation Army

Basic Domain Link Metrics: Currently The Salvation Army has over 158,300 links coming from about 6,366 linking root domains.

mRank: 6.3/10
mTrust: 6.87/10
External Followed Links: 53,124
Total External Links: 57,810
Total Links: 158,382
Followed Linking Root Domains: 6,069
Total Linking Root domains: 6,366
Linking C Blocks: 3,839

Nonprofit: Feed the Children SEO Analysis

Background: Feed The Children is a Christian, international, nonprofit relief organization with headquarters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, that delivers food, medicine, clothing and other necessities to individuals, children and families who lack these essentials due to famine, war, poverty or natural disasters.

Technical SEO Audit of Feed The Children’s Website

PDF: Feed The Children’s website has 22 PDF files that can be discovered by a web crawler that could be optimized to drive incremental traffic. We have written a post about how to optimize PDF’s for SEO for reference.

Images: It looks as though www.feedthechildren.org has upwards of 619 images (gif, bmp and jpg image files) across its website. The key is to utilize these images to influence the on-page SEO and drive traffic from 3rd party image engines.

Make sure all images have descriptive alt text attributes
Ensure the image name is optimized to represent the image

HTML Pages: the following is a breakdown of the 418 crawlable pages on www.feedthechildren.org and the HTML header code they return.

Approximately 202 pages return a 200 header. This is the standard response for successful HTTP requests.
1 page returns a 301 header. This is the correct redirect response to return when a page has been moved.
Approximately 213 pages return a 302 header. 302 redirects do not allow ranking metrics to pass through the page and onto the page that it redirect to.

Many of the pages on www.feedthechildren.org are the exception to the 301 vs 302 rule; the pages that return a 302 header code are done for security reasons, thus they don’t affect SEO.
There are a couple pages that should use a 301 redirect, the most notable being http://www.feedthechildren.org which redirects to a less friendly URL. This should be change to a 301 redirect since most people will use this URL (http://www.feedthechildren.org) when linking to the website.

We found 2 pages returning a 404 error. This is a missed opportunity to capture the ranking metrics that those pages have gained from external links or social metrics. These links should be fixed in the internal link structure, and there should be a 301 redirect mapping put in place to capture any off-site metrics.
The URL structure:. Most URLs are heavily dynamic and use an underscore to separate keywords. Matt Cutts at Google has said that Google has a hard time parsing out words that are combined or use an “_” underscore in place of spaces. The URLs should be all lower case and not camel case or contain upper case letters. Stop words should also be removed from the urls (examples: the, and, to). For example: http://www.feedthechildren.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=13821 should be rewritten like http://www.feedthechildren.org/site/news/neways-donates-critical-innovative-products-feed-the-children.

Title Tags: Title Tags are a primary factor within the onsite variables group that Google uses to gain insight into the content of a page.

From an SEO standpoint the Title Tags are not to bad. There are duplicates on a few pages and I would suggest rewriting them to mirror the suggested structure below.
We did find 60 pages in which the Title Tags are to long, but that can be easily fixed.

Tip: I would suggest optimizing the Title Tag structure of most pages to follow this pattern (primary keyword: secondary keyword | Brand )

Description Tags: Description Tags help click through rates (CTR) from the search results and can also be a signal to Google to help them distinguish between pages that could possibly have duplicate content.

They seem to have added the meta Description Tag, yet they just duplicated “Providing hope and resources for those without life’s essentials.” across the entire site. This should be fixed to give each pages a unique DT to help with click through rates.

Tip: Because the Description Tag has an opportunity to help click through rates, I would suggest working with the person who handles PPC, as they are familiar with optimizing CTR.

Meta Keywords Tag: Where as Google does not use the Meta Keywords Tag directly (although some SEOs say that they could use it to execute search queries on a website to find new content), Bing recently announced (August 2011) that they have gone back to utilizing it as a minor signal to help them understand a page’s content set.

The Meta Keywords Tag is a touchy tag that can come across as spammy if not done properly. www.feedthechildren.org uses the same tag across the site (feed the children, feeding, relief, food, medicine, clothing, essentials, famine, poverty, natural disaster, Christian, hunger, poverty, disaster, hurricane, hungry children, earthquake, tornado, hungry, help children, baby, abandoned babies, Kenya, Katrina, tsunami CDs, DVDs, music, framed art, books, Nonprofit, charity, feed the children), which can definitely make it look spammy. Not only that but they use unrelated keywords such as CD, DVD, Music across all web pages.

Tip: I would suggest taking the keywords in the Title Tag and adding those that are in the Description Tag, (minus stop words like “a, the, and”) which should total approximately 10-20 words.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3): Header tags are like the chapter titles in a book, and need to be unique on each page.

They are missing the header tags across all but a few pages on the website. This could have negative affects on the rankings and should be fixed to represent the primary topic of each page.

Canonical Tag: This is a great way to minimize duplicate content caused by vanity URLs, poor site structure, or internal tracking perimeters. Not all search engines honor this tag, but it is still a best practice.

www.feedthechildren.org does not currently utilize the canonical tag for minimizing duplicate content or focusing ranking metrics.

Tip: When utilizing internal tracking on links use the “#”(hash tag) to separate the clean url from the tracking code, which will eliminate the duplicate content issue.

Link Analysis of Feed The Children

Basic Domain Link Metrics: Currently Feed The Children has over 18,554 links coming from about 1,934 linking root domains.

mRank: 5.71/10
mTrust: 5.93/10
External Followed Links: 14,883
Total External Links: 15,042
Total Links: 18,554
Followed Linking Root Domains: 1,865
Total Linking Root domains: 1,934
Linking C Blocks: 1,099

Nonprofit: American SPCA Society SEO Analysis

Background: Founded in 1866, the ASPCA was the first humane organization in the Western Hemisphere. Their mission is “to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States.” The ASPCA works to rescue animals from abuse, pass humane laws and share resources with shelters nationwide.

Technical SEO Audit of The American SPCA Society’s Website

Due to the size of the ASPCA’s website we took a sample of just over 10,000 urls and files to analyze from their website.

PDF: Of the URLs that we crawled, www.aspca.org seems to have close to 48 crawlable pdf files which could be optimized to drive incremental traffic. We have written a post about How to optimize PDF’s for SEO for reference.

Images: Of the URLs that we crawled www.aspca.org has upwards of 2400 images (gif, bmp and jpg image files) across its website. The key is to utilize these images to influence the on-page SEO and drive traffic from image search engines such as Google Images.

Make sure all images have alt text attributes
Ensure the image name is optimized to represent the image

HTML Pages: The following is a breakdown of the 8,000 pages we crawled on www.aspca.org and the HTML header code they returned.

Approximately 7800 pages returned a 200 header. This is the standard response for successful HTTP requests.
328 pages have a 301 header. This is the correct redirect response to return when a page has been moved.
Approximately 176 pages returned a 302 header. 302 redirects do not allow ranking metrics to pass through the redirect.

We noticed that there were many pages outside of the above mentioned that also returned a 302 redirect. These pages were about specific animals that could be adopted. Our suggestion would be that when an animal page is removed, that the page be 301 redirected up a level in the site architecture to a category level page to capture any ranking metrics the animal’s page acquired.

Approximately 7 pages returned a 404 error. This is a missed opportunity to capture the ranking metrics that those pages have gained from external links or social metrics. These links should be fixed in the internal link structure, and there should also be a 301 redirect mapping put in place to capture any off-site metrics.
The URL structure: URLs are very long, used underscores for spaces, and included very few targeted keywords. The URLs should also be all lower case and not camel case or contain upper case letters.

Title Tags: Title Tags are a primary factor within the onsite variables group that Google focuses on to gain insight into the content of a page.

For the most part the only recommendation I would make is to structure the Title Tags differently and focus on better keywords within them.
The main issue with the Title Tags comes from the press area. These Title Tags are all the same no matter what press release you are reading. I would suggest making the Title Tag represent the title of the press release to capture additional long tail keywords.

Tip: To optimize the Title Tag structure of most pages I would suggest following a structure that mimics the following (primary keyword: secondary keyword | Brand )

In many cases the meta Description Tag is missing which causes a lost opportunity to influence click through rate.

Tip: A good person in the organization to optimize the Description Tags is the individual who handles PPC, as they are familiar with optimizing CTR.

This tag is duplicated across pages causing a red flag in the spam category.
This tag is also formatted incorrectly and should contain commas between keywords.

Tip: I would suggest taking the keywords in the Title Tag and adding those that are in the Description Tag, (minus stop words like “a, the, and”) which should total approximately 10-20 words at most.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3): Header tags are like the chapter titles in a book, and need to be unique on each page.

The H1 tags are missing on some pages, and on others they simply are not optimized for the page they represent.
The H2 tag follows the same issues as the H1 tag and should be examined for relevance and value.

www.aspca.org does not currently use the canonical tag on any pages we were able to spider

Tip: When utilizing internal tracking on links use the “#”(hash tag) to separate the clean url from the tracking code, which will eliminate the duplicate content issue.

Additional Meta Tags: It seems as though www.aspca.org is using a index,follow meta tag on every page. This is not necessary since that directive is the default for every page on a website.

Link Analysis of The American SPCA Society

Basic Domain Link Metrics: Currently The American SPCA Society has over 508,000 links coming from about 15,304 linking root domains and has the highest link metrics across all Nonprofits that we analyzed.

mRank: 6.6/10
mTrust: 6.88/10
External Followed Links: 508,119
Total External Links: 513,634
Total Links: 713,099
Followed Linking Root Domains: 14,585
Total Linking Root domains: 15,304
Linking C Blocks: 6,837

Final SEO Link Comparison Across 5 Nonprofits

We looked at he above Nonprofits along side of a couple others to get an idea of how they stacked up from a link metrics standpoint.

Additional SEO Resources for Nonprofits

Bill is the Lead Linchpin at the company and focuses on SEO and content strategy. Bill’s ten-year background in digital marketing, SEO, and building online companies has helped him rise to strategic lead for some of the largest online brands and content websites in the world. Bill believes that at the core of a website's success sits the value that website provides it users.

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