We’ve worked with many nonprofit organizations over the years. Without fail, we find that nonprofits tend to make the same common mistakes when it comes to search engines:

Mistake #1: Autopilot Pay Per Click Campaigns
You take the Google tutorial, set up a campaign and log in to the Google interface a few weeks (or maybe a month) later to take a look at how much traffic was generated for each keyword you purchased (who knows which keywords actually converted, you don’t have time to figure that out). Would you approach your email campaigns this way? High ROI Pay Per Click campaigns that raise money, build email lists, etc. require tight management and an understanding of multiple nuances in Pay Per Click, such as keyword selection, bid management, the Google grants system and most importantly, tracking and analysis.

What’s the upside of doing it right? RedBoots recently helped SOS Children’s Villages -USA clean up their Pay Per Click campaigns. In the first month, we were able to reduce their total spend by 65%, increase donations by 187% and increase donation value by 65%. Like many of our other nonprofit clients, Pay Per Click Search Marketing is now consistently the highest ROI tactic used by SOS-USA for online fundraising.

(Note: Doing it in-house? The RedBoots Digital team can help you set up, and/or clean up, your Pay Per Click campaigns and learn how to manage everything in-house with higher ROI results.)

Mistake #2: Lack of a Multi-Channel Search Strategy
There is more (much more) to the search engine results page (SERP) than sponsored listings (Pay per Click). In Google for example, you have at a bare minimum two opportunities to appear on every SERP (and more if you do it right).

Why is it important to appear more than once on the same SERP? First, the cost of Pay Per Click is rising dramatically (for .coms and .orgs). A multi channel search strategy that leverages positioning in the organic search space (the “free” or natural listings that appear in the middle of the Google SERP) will help improve the overall ROI of your search engine initiatives. Second, the more frequently your site appears on the SERP, the more opportunity you have for a click-through (much like the “frequency” concept in conventional media buying). Moreover, research shows that multiple exposures in search engines boosts brand related search queries and overall conversions.

Mistake #3: No Social Media Strategy
Your visibility in social media impacts your visibility in search engines, now more than ever in Google, which still claims over half the total searches that take place each day on the Web. Google’s new practice of “Universal Search” means that results from vertical channels such as Google video and Google images, (heavy social search content) now displays in the regular organic results. In fact, do a search on almost any topic and you’ll find a combination of organic listings that may include a You Tube video, images from Flickr – a whole range of content from social media destinations.

Leveraging social media also enables you to dominate the SERP for a keyword search on the name of your organization, and/or or key leadership, which helps with Reputation Management (and in case you think Reputation Management applies only to corporations, go and search the name of your organization on any search engine – you may be surprised, or horrified.)

(Note: Beth Kanter provides some resources on the basics of social media for nonprofits; also see my Social Media Workshop presentation from the Search Engine Strategies conference.)

Mistake #4: Testing
How well would your email program do without testing? You probably test a wide range of elements for email. You must do the same with search. A visitor who comes in from a paid listing on a general charity or donation related keyword will be looking for something different than a visitor who comes in from an organic result on a long tail keyword that describes your issues, campaigns, etc. Each of those visitors will require different content and a unique conversion funnel on your Web site. If you test what works for site visitors based on how they found you in the search engines, you will improve the ROI of your search initiatives dramatically.

Mistake #5: Tracking
Tracking at the keyword level is imperative. You can’t run cost-effective search programs without it. Unfortunately, effective tracking is complicated and fraught with problems. At RedBoots, we find that over 90% of our new, nonprofit clients have either insufficient analytics systems or have not set those systems up properly.

So, what do you do? Invest. Spend the money on revamping your Analytics. In fact, take it out of the marketing budget if you have to. If you aren’t tracking properly, you are flying blind and you will lose more money by continuing to spend marketing dollars without the ability to assess your investment than you will if you simply bite the bullet and get the software (and the consulting hours you will need to make it work properly for your organization).

Nate Linnell is our Analytics Guru at Redboots; he is crafting some interesting and informative posts on this subject, including this post on which Web Analytics metrics should be tracked for content sites. For more detailed information on this topic, see my Nonprofits and Search presentation from the last Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Filed under: Non-Profits, PPC, Reputation Management, SEO, Social Marketing on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 by Nan Dawkins |
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