Nonprofit SEO Strategy 101 [Nonprofit Marketing with Jake Bohall, Part 6]
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your nonprofit website show up higher in search engine results like Google and Bing. But for your nonprofit organization, it’s more than just about getting clicks—it’s a game-changer for spreading the word about your mission and boosting website traffic, which leads to increased donor engagement, more volunteers, and helping make a bigger impact in the world.
A well-crafted nonprofit SEO strategy isn’t just about quick SEO tips or shortcuts; it’s about implementing effective SEO strategies that create lasting connections, complement your nonprofit marketing efforts, and drive real results.
To watch or listen to a detailed conversation about SEO tactics for nonprofits with our founder John Bertino and guest expert Jake Bohall, see the audio player and video players below. Then keep reading!
Listen to Learn About SEO Strategy for Nonprofits
More Nonprofit Marketing Expert Interviews and Tools
Want more niche marketing insights on how to market a nonprofit organization?
This episode is Part 6 in a multi-part series on nonprofit industry marketing. To continue learning on this niche, visit:
- Part 1 – Nonprofit Communications Strategy [Nonprofit Marketing with Rick Cohen]
- Part 2 – Nonprofit Omni-Channel Marketing [Nonprofit Marketing with Michael Goodrum]
- Part 3 – Nonprofit Branding and Websites [Nonprofit Marketing with Alex Morse]
- Part 4 – Google Ad Grants for Nonprofits [Nonprofit Marketing with Grant Hensel]
- Part 5 – Influencer Marketing for Nonprofits [Nonprofit Marketing with Ashwath Narayanan]
- Part 7 – coming soon
- Part 8 – coming soon
Want more help with marketing your nonprofit?
- How to Market a Nonprofit Resource Guide – coming soon
Watch SEO Strategy for Nonprofits (Part 6 in the Series)
Nonprofit SEO Strategy 101
As seen above in the podcast with John Bertino and Jake Bohall – one SEO expert interviewing another SEO expert – we encourage your NPO to build an SEO strategy that focuses on sharing relevant, compelling stories about the populations you serve, offering ways for others to get involved, and using consistent SEO content that aligns with your mission. For example, a nonprofit focused on environmental sustainability might publish blog posts about “zero waste living tips” or “how to volunteer for clean-up events” to capture traffic from searchers passionate about their cause.
By producing quality content regularly, you can build trust, showcase expertise, and attract an audience that cares about your cause. Effective SEO strategy can put a spotlight on your organization, helping you reach more people, increase online visibility, and make a real difference in search engine results.
In addition to listening to and/or watching the podcast interview above, keep reading for strategies for SEO.
1. Local SEO & Citations
Local SEO is essential for establishing credibility and visibility in your nonprofit’s community. With a strong local SEO strategy, you can maximize your impact by reaching local supporters and volunteers.
Citations and Legitimacy
Listing your nonprofit in reputable online directories with a physical address (not a PO Box) builds legitimacy and helps your organization appear in search engine results, especially for users searching locally. For instance, a food bank could benefit from being listed in local directories to ensure it appears when people search for “food donation centers near me.”
Knowledge Panel
Earning a Google Knowledge Panel—an informational box that appears on the right side of Google’s search results—can provide immediate visibility and credibility for your nonprofit. To increase the likelihood of a Knowledge Panel, ensure your Google Business Profile is complete and consistent across all online directories, build citations with reputable websites, and earn backlinks from authoritative sources.
A Knowledge Panel can quickly communicate essential information, such as your mission, contact details, and key achievements, to potential supporters searching for your organization.
To learn more, visit Knowledge Panel Help from Google.
Search Engine Prioritization
Google search prioritizes local businesses and nonprofit organizations in search results, so optimizing for local SEO is crucial. Incorporating SEO strategies specific to your location can increase your nonprofit’s online visibility and attract nearby supporters and volunteers.
Leveraging SEO Tools for Local Impact
Tools like Know’em and Google My Business streamline the process of creating citations across multiple directories, helping ensure your information is consistent, accurate, and widely visible. Consistency in citations boosts search engine ranking and website traffic.
Building Credibility with Google Business Profile and Social Media
An optimized Google Business Profile provides essential information, enhances visibility, and adds credibility. For example, a youth mentorship nonprofit could highlight local events and testimonials, building trust and expanding reach. Plus, the connection between social media and SEO is invaluable. By regularly sharing content and connecting with local community groups on social media, your nonprofit can enhance engagement, which in turn helps your SEO rankings.
(Note: Although Google has tried to incorporate social metrics into its ranking algorithms in the past, it’s not clear how much, if any, of social media data directly affects search rankings today. However, Google doesn’t necessarily need direct access to social data to gauge the impact of social media on a website’s authority and relevance.)
2. E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
As a team with more than one SEO expert, we know that Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines are crucial in SEO, especially for NPOs that depend on credibility and transparency to secure support.
Demonstrating Expertise
To establish expertise, share success stories, volunteer opportunities, and comprehensive information about your nonprofit organization’s cause. Creating SEO content that offers valuable insights, like a blog post detailing the impact of a recent fundraising event, shows your nonprofit’s depth and impact.
Leveraging ChatGPT for Content Strategy
Using ChatGPT (or other similar tools) can streamline content creation and help structure articles, blogs, and social media content that resonate with your audience. ChatGPT can help you map out user journeys, create audience personas, and answer specific questions that potential supporters may have.
Try prompting ChatGPT with questions like:
- “What questions would a new supporter ask about our mission?”
- “How can we highlight our organization’s unique strengths?”
By incorporating ChatGPT’s suggestions, you can ensure your content remains relevant and aligned with audience needs, enhancing your nonprofit’s trustworthiness and expertise.
Building Authoritativeness through Modern-Day Link-Building
Today, link-building for NPOs is about forging authentic relationships with reputable websites, blogs, and organizations. For example, if a well-known health website links to your health-focused nonprofit’s content, it signals authority to search engines and boosts your rankings. You can also encourage local partners to link to your website to strengthen connections within your community.
Establishing Trustworthiness
Transparency is key in nonprofit SEO. Provide clear contact information, display testimonials, and secure your nonprofit website with HTTPS. These steps not only reassure search engines but also build trust with visitors. Including donor testimonials or case studies, for example, can showcase your nonprofit’s credibility and the real impact it’s making.
By integrating these E-E-A-T elements into your nonprofit SEO strategy, you can boost your search engine optimization, attract donors and volunteers, and increase overall online visibility.
3. The Power of Storytelling for SEO
Storytelling is one of the most effective tools nonprofits can use to boost their SEO, and it has come up time and again throughout our 8-part series on nonprofit marketing for good reason. Crafting compelling stories that resonate emotionally with readers can drive social sharing, generate buzz, and encourage people to take action, such as donating or volunteering. When your content triggers an emotional response, it’s more likely to be shared across social media, amplifying your reach and boosting website traffic.
For nonprofits, emotional storytelling—combined with impactful visuals—can even lead to impulsive giving behaviors, inspiring donations in the moment. Stories that show the direct impact of donations or volunteering help visitors connect with your mission, which not only improves engagement but also signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant.
Storytelling also helps clarify your page’s intent for both search engines and audiences. Nonprofits are often looking to connect with a variety of people, from potential donors and volunteers to those they aim to serve. This can sometimes create confusion for search engines around page intent. By weaving clear, compelling stories that speak directly to each audience, you can better signal the purpose of each page, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank your content.
With tight budgets and high volunteer turnover, investing in storytelling is an affordable way for nonprofits to create impactful, shareable content that creates emotional connections, increases social sharing, and drives long-term SEO value.
4. Enhancing User Experience and Readability
Core Web Vitals
Improving user experience is critical for nonprofit SEO success. Volunteers and donors will not stick around if a website loads slowly, is overwhelming or confusing, or doesn’t feel like it speaks to them.
Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics that Google uses to assess a site’s user experience. These metrics focus on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, all of which play a major role in SEO ranking.
For nonprofit organizations, having a fast, user-friendly website can improve search engine result rankings and increase visitor engagement.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console to check your Core Web Vitals and make adjustments as needed. Addressing these elements can lead to better SEO performance and a smoother user experience.
Optimize Content Structure and Readability
Content that is well-structured and easy to read not only improves user experience but also boosts SEO rankings. Google favors content that is accessible and structured with clarity, especially for nonprofits whose supporters seek quick, digestible information.
Use headers (H2, H3), bullet points, and short paragraphs to make content skimmable. This readability and structure enhance SEO by encouraging longer engagement and repeat visits.
5. Nonprofit SEO Strategy and Link-Building Tactics
A successful nonprofit SEO strategy involves more than just keywords. Link building is essential for increasing SEO performance, and it’s important to focus on genuine, quality connections rather than just quantity.
Backlinks: A Crucial Element in Nonprofit SEO
Quality backlinks signal to search engines that your nonprofit website is reputable. Avoid shortcuts and quick-fix link-building methods that can lead to penalties. Instead, build authentic relationships with reputable websites, online publications, and local organizations.
Leveraging Volunteer Engagement for Link Building
Volunteers are invaluable resources for link building. Encourage them to share their experiences and contributions on personal blogs, social media, or community websites. You can also create “egobait” content—like volunteer spotlights or acknowledgment pages—that recognizes their contributions and invites them to link back to your nonprofit’s site. For example, creating a blog post that highlights top volunteers, and their stories could encourage them to share, increasing valuable backlinks.
Utilizing Entities and User Journeys for Targeted SEO
In the context of SEO, “entities” refer to the specific people, places, and things associated with your cause, which search engines use to categorize and understand your content. For example, if your NPO focuses on marine wildlife conservation, mentioning specific entities like “Pacific Ocean,” “whales,” or “coral reefs” helps clarify your content.
Mapping out user journeys—like a potential volunteer’s path from learning about your mission to signing up for an event—can guide content creation and keyword choices, improving both SEO and engagement.
Utilizing Impact Statements and Data Visuals
Visuals like graphs, charts, and infographics highlight the impact of your nonprofit organization. They not only capture attention but also increase retention of your message, making them excellent tools for building backlinks.
By showcasing specific outcomes and success stories through data visualizations, you can drive greater engagement and attract more supporters.
6. Incorporating Google Ad Grant and Google Keyword Planner for Keyword Insights
Incorporating keyword research through the Google Ad Grant and Google Keyword Planner can significantly benefit your SEO efforts, even on a budget.
Google Ad Grant
This grant offers eligible nonprofit organizations up to $10,000 in free Google Ad spend each month, allowing you to test which keywords are most effective in capturing your target audience’s attention and engagement. To learn about eligibility and more tactics you can apply, check out Part 4 in our 8-Part nonprofit marketing series on Google Ad Grants for Nonprofits.
By experimenting with different search terms, you can better understand the phrases and topics that resonate with supporters, ultimately informing your SEO content strategy and organic search efforts.
For example, if an ad campaign for “support wildlife conservation” performs well, you can adapt this phrase into a blog post and on landing pages for improved organic reach.
Google Keyword Planner
This SEO tool helps you identify high-impact keywords related to your nonprofit’s mission. Entering relevant terms in Keyword Planner generates a list of related keywords and shows search volume, competition, and cost-per-click estimates. Use these insights to create content around popular search terms, optimize specific pages, and enhance your local SEO effort.
For instance, if “community youth programs” shows high search volume, crafting a blog post or landing page on this topic can draw more local traffic.
Put Them Together
A great SEO tip is to use insights from both the Google Ad Grant and Google Keyword Planner to refine your approach. If certain keywords drive high engagement in your Google Ad campaigns, you can integrate those terms more effectively into your website content, your blog post schedule, content marketing plan, and social media channels.
This dual approach—combining paid and organic keyword research—enhances your search engine optimization and ensures that your nonprofit is reaching the right people with the right message.
7. Using Schema Markup for Enhanced SEO
Schema markup, or structured data, is a type of code that helps each search engine better understand the content on your pages. Adding schema to your nonprofit’s website can improve your search engine results by including rich snippets, like event dates, donation links, or volunteer opportunities.
Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add schema for events, donations, or location-based details to enhance visibility and click-through rates in search results.
8. Incorporating Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for SEO Success
Using tools like Google Trends, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console can provide insight into what’s working in your SEO strategy and where you need to adjust. Tracking performance data, such as website traffic and user engagement, helps refine your content marketing and SEO techniques over time. Additionally, incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) can streamline analysis, helping you better understand supporter behaviors and preferences, and adjusting your strategy to be more effective.
Google Trends
Use Google Trends to track seasonal topics and search trends. You can identify trending topics related to your cause and create blog posts around them to capture additional organic traffic, supporting a full content marketing and SEO effort.
Google Analytics
Allows you to monitor which pages drive the most engagement and conversions, providing data to inform future content and SEO marketing efforts.
Google Search Console
Offers valuable insights into search engine rankings, keyword performance, and any technical SEO issues that might be impacting your nonprofit’s online visibility.
By leveraging AI-driven tools, you can more easily analyze supporter interactions on your website and adjust the user journey accordingly, helping guide potential donors or volunteers from interest to action more effectively.
9. Content Refresh Strategy for Ongoing SEO Success
As time passes, content can become outdated or lose its relevance. Periodically refreshing high-performing content by adding updated data, keywords, and insights can significantly improve SEO.
SEO Tip: Conduct regular content audits to find popular blog posts or pages that need updates. Adding current information to these pages keeps them relevant, strengthens their ranking, and ensures they continue driving traffic.
Nonprofit SEO Final Notes
A comprehensive nonprofit SEO strategy can amplify your mission, connecting your nonprofit organization with a wider audience and increasing its impact. Yet, you and your non-profit may be working on a budget.
Although your non-profit likely has limited resources, you can still make a strong impact with SEO by prioritizing high-return strategies that don’t require heavy investment.
- Start by optimizing your existing content—update blog posts with current keywords, add fresh examples, and ensure readability while hitting the elements of the E-E-A-T guidelines.
- Utilize free tools like Google Search Console for insights on search engine performance, Google Analytics for tracking engagement, and Google Keyword Planner for basic keyword research.
- Local SEO is another cost-effective focus: claim your Google Business Profile, encourage positive reviews, and build citations on reputable local directories.
Leveraging free or low-cost strategies can yield excellent results over time, making SEO accessible even on a budget while also effectively engaging supporters, attracting donors, and expanding your reach.
Integrating these SEO services and techniques into your digital marketing plan will help your organization grow its online presence, communicate its mission, and inspire action, ultimately creating a more significant impact in the communities you serve.
Check Out Our Other Seasons on YouTube
- Season 1: Mortgage Industry Marketing Series
- Season 2: Marketing Mavericks Series
- Season 3: Industrial Product Marketing Series
- Season 4: Food & Beverage Marketing Series
About Host John Bertino and TAG
A decade spent working for marketing agencies was more than enough to know that there are too many bad agencies and not enough objective marketers within them. John launched TAG in 2014 with the mission to provide brands unbiased guidance from seasoned marketing professionals at little or no cost.
TAG advises brands on marketing channel selection, resource allocation, and agency selection to ensure brands invest in the right marketing strategies, with the right expectations, and (ultimately) with the right partners.
TAG represents 200+ well-vetted agencies and consultants across the United States and Europe.
John’s professional background and areas of expertise include: Marketing Planning, Earned Media, SEO, Content Marketing, Link Acquisition, Digital PR, Thought Leadership, and B2B Lead Generation.
About Our Guest Expert: Jake Bohall
Jake Bohall, Co-Founder and Vice President of Hive Digital, Inc., is an entrepreneur at heart. He discovered Hive Digital, then known as Virante, as a client seeking marketing advice, and quickly fell in love with the search marketing industry and it’s ever-changing environment. His experience in founding several startups, ranging from insurance services and consulting to a social network for wine enthusiasts, gives him practical knowledge in assisting clients grow their business.
Jake is recognized as an online columnist, entrepreneur, and served as a board member of an educational non-profit. His 15+ years of experience in these diverse areas make him often sought-after to speak on topics of entrepreneurship, education, and web-based marketing strategies.
Jake’s experience in business and strategy development has made him adept at identifying practical online marketing strategies to fit a company’s growth objectives and available resources. Jake is frequently requested to speak at major industry conferences, such as PubCon, to lecture on industry trends and adaptive marketing strategies. He is also an educator/instructor for Fortis University, leading their ASPE-ROI Search Engine Optimization Boot Camp course.
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John Bertino
The Agency Guide
Email: info@TheAgencyGuide.com
Jake Bohall
Transcripts: SEO for Nonprofits with Jake Bohall (Part 6 in the Series)
Note:
This transcript (of the video version of this episode) has been provided to assist you in finding extra information specific to your needs and goals. We have not edited it line by line for grammar, spelling, punctuation, or spacing. Please forgive errors. Feedback welcomed at social@theagencyguide.com.
In this insightful sixth episode of our nonprofit marketing series, we speak with Jake Bohall, co- founder of Hive Digital Marketing, who shares over 20 years of expertise in SEO tailored for nonprofits. Jake highlights essential strategies for effective keyword research, budget-friendly SEO initiatives, and the importance of compelling storytelling to connect with audiences. He discusses the significance of building credibility through consistent online listings and shares tactics for acquiring high-quality backlinks via meaningful content and social media engagement.
With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Jake explores innovative ways for nonprofits to enhance their narratives while remaining authentic. This episode is a treasure trove of actionable insights for improving visibility and engagement in the nonprofit sector. Don’t miss Jake’s valuable advice—check out Hive Digital Marketing and subscribe for more nonprofit marketing insights!
Chapters
- 0:00 Introduction to Non-Profit Marketing
- 1:29 Meet Jake Bohall
- 9:10 Hive Digital’s Mission
- 13:10 SEO for Nonprofits
- 23:02 The Importance of Keyword Research
- 29:04 Citations and Local SEO
- 36:43 Understanding Links in SEO
- 47:02 Building Brand Mentions and Links
- 52:50 Content Creation Strategies
- 59:03 Conclusion and Contact Information
▶ Click Here to See/Hide the Full Transcript of the Interview
Transcript
Introduction to Non-Profit Marketing
Intro (John B):
[0:00] You’ve landed on episode six of our multi-episode series all about how to market a non-profit. In this episode, I sit down with a longtime professional friend and colleague, Jake Bohall, one of the finest SEOs I’ve ever had a chance to work with. Considering I’ve worked with a lot, that’s saying something. Jake Bohall is the co-founder and vice president of Hive Digital Marketing, a 20-plus- year-old Raleigh, North Carolina, digital marketing powerhouse, and one of my favorite all-time digital marketing teams.
So, get ready to drink from the fire hose of SEO knowledge. We’ll cover keyword research for MPOs, SEO on a budget, modern day link building, the connection between social media and SEO, EEAT, knowledge panel, storytelling, citations, local SEO, artificial intelligence, entities, user journeys. I’ll put it this way. We cover basic SEO, advanced SEO, controversial theories, nonprofit specific tactics. It’s all in there.
If you’re serious about ranking your nonprofit, you should download this episode to your device so you can take notes and listen everywhere you go. Speaking of which, don’t forget to subscribe. Do it right now so you can catch all of our non-profit marketing releases both now and when we revisit this niche in the future. I promise you we’re going to. And pretty please hit that like button. Think of it as a donation of kindness to the Niche Marketing Podcast. Buckle up, niche marketers. Here comes a killer episode with Jake Bohall from Hive Digital Marketing.
Meet Jake Bohall
John Bertino:
[1:29] Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast. As always, I’m your host, John Bertino, founder, CEO of The Agency Guide. If you’re unhappy with your marketing agency, and many people are, give us a shout at The Agency Guide. We represent over 300 vetted marketing teams, agencies, and services providers to whom we can match make to the right projects based on industry, scope of work, budget, all these types of things.
Check us out at agencyguide.com. Speaking of agencies, we represent today, I am so delighted to have Mr. Jake Bohall, co-founder of Hive Digital in Raleigh, North Carolina. Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Bohall:
[2:06] Thank you, John.
John Bertino:
[2:06] I almost want to do one of the welcomes to the show, because I’m so happy to have you here. I always like to say, actually, that for a niche marketing podcast, we do not bias towards just agencies we work with. In fact, a lot of our guests are people that we’ve just met or, you know, based on some light research, we found have somewhat of a strangles, not the word, but have specifically carved out market share in a specific niche.
And we invite them on the show to talk about it. It’s not the case here. I’ve known you for over a decade. You’ve been extremely helpful to me, my company, and for a multitude of tag clients that we’ve matchmaked with matchmaked, is that a word that we’ve brought to Hive Digital because you guys were truly the best resource. And you are an absolute wealth of information with all things SEO, content marketing, search marketing, among other things. And again, stoked to have you here.
Jake Bohall:
[3:00] I really appreciate it, John. In fact, I have to also say it’s been fantastic having a relationship with you as well. You’ve brought us amazing clients and your ability to find the people that are going to be aligned with us, both just in how we approach our business and how our personalities are as an agency. I think you’ve done a great job of that. And that’s why those relationships have lasted and worked out for both of us.
John Bertino:
[3:22] Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. We do pay attention to those nuances. All right. So, before we get into SEO, search marketing for nonprofits, which we’re here to focus on today, I do like to get a little background on the guest and the agency you work for. So, folks have that as proper context. Let’s start with you, Jake, where are you from? How long you’ve been in search marketing and how’d you get into it? And how’d you get to Hive? All those things.
Jake Bohall:
[3:46] Awesome. It’s a really long story. So, I’ll try to just keep it as short as I can. Yes.
John Bertino:
[3:48] Give us the truncated version.
Jake Bohall:
[3:50] Yeah. So, I, I dropped out of college to start a wine marketing, well, an insurance services company. And that was fun and an old, antiquated industry. And then I started a, basically a Netflix for wine. Wine industry, also a very old, antiquated industry. Yeah, we were trying to just mail you wine and you taste it. And we did taste attribute profiling for your taste buds. It was a company called Tastevine. We lost a lot of money trying to figure out how to legally mail wine, which, yes, now it would be great. Then, not so much.
But along the way, we hired this cool agency, Veronte, which inevitably now has become Hive Digital. We hired this agency to do our marketing, build our website. and when it didn’t work for us on the taste vine side we sort of pivoted to grape thinking which was a marketing consulting company for wineries we were millennials trying to help agents or help these wineries build e-com sites and do their own direct consumer sales where it was legal that took off and at some point I ended up reselling a lot of Veronte services because it worked and then at some point they said, hey, you should come work for Ferrante.
And I said, I’m an entrepreneur, damn it. And I’ll do it for a year just because I like you guys, and you’ve helped me out. And that was in 2007, I think, or 2008. And so I came on board to lead strategy and sales and project management side of things and then fell under the mentorship of Russ Jones.
John Bertino:
[5:17] A prominent SEO.
Jake Bohall:
[5:19] Yes, I should say the late Russ Jones. He was my mentor up until 2015 when he left to go to Moz, which was his dream job, was to work for Moz. And at that point, I took over the SEO department. About a year or so later, we reincorporated as Hive Digital so that we could focus, even in our incorporating documents, focus specifically on mission-driven organizations. And now I’m co-founder of Hive and have a team of about 19 people, I think, at the moment that’s… Rock solid. I love, I love all of them. And we’re trying to make a difference in the world.
John Bertino:
[5:54] Yeah. Great, great boutique agency size. A few threads I just want to pull on quickly there. It’s funny, the way I came to know you guys was similar to the way you came to work for your own organization, which is I had a marketing need. It was actually a link cleanup, if memory serves me correct.
Jake Bohall:
[6:12] Penguin.
John Bertino:
[6:13] Yes. Some company I was working with had bought a bunch of terrible links needed them cleaned up i don’t remember how i found you guys in the first place but you guys did such an absolutely stellar job on it.
Jake Bohall:
[6:24] Was it remove them we had yes yeah so we built one of the first outside of a couple other platforms out there we had the first link cleanup link auditing platform which was sort of oddly contradictory because we were an agency who built links and then simultaneously we built it another platform that would get rid of them for what it was worth it was to get rid of our competitors links right and it was a it was actually a playoff and emergency button we’d had for clients right but in the past if you know if you over link build you would get penalties and there was a couple of instances that we accidentally prospected a competitor’s blog for example and got outed and so we had just this delete all links button that like mass emailed people and stuff and so when penguin hit it was like okay we can take that functionality and carve it out for everybody who’s trying to undo all of the shitty stuff.
Sorry, can I curse on you?
John Bertino:
[7:15] You can say whatever you want.
Jake Bohall:
[7:17] Stuff that they had been doing in the past. So, it worked out. And obviously that tool got a lot of exposure for us.
John Bertino:
[7:23] It really did work wonders for me. By the way, the agency over two decades old at this point?
Jake Bohall:
[7:27] 2002, actually. So, we’re 23, 22 years old.
John Bertino:
[7:31] As I always say, an eternity in digital marketing years we’re an agent for a digitally focused agency. And then also you just mentioned the late Russ Jones. I mean, for those that have been in the game long enough, Russ was a preeminent thought leader in the early stages of SEO. And he was one of the, I guess, originators of Verontae or?
Jake Bohall:
[7:50] Yeah, he was the brains behind early Verontae. And I would add that he also brought, I think, some of that early energy for doing things that were more altruistic for the marketplace. Like we had Pound Privacy, which was a privacy initiative that if you just added a pound sign into your search queries. Like search engines wouldn’t store that data or wouldn’t get passed through.
We built Open Captcha, which is actually one of our early ends for meeting people at like inside of search engines, because we at the time hosted the largest free capture service in the world. Then access met, you know, came as long came along as well. But it wasn’t a tool that was any profit whatsoever.
It was just it was built because we wanted to catch Linkspan and understand, what, you know, what was triggering Flags for Link spam so that we could just explore some of the gray areas ourselves. But it was, you know, we just built these kinds of tools and released them. And like, a lot of that was all, you know, Russ’s, you know, enthusiasm and drive and, you know, and then a lot, it was quite influential for me.
John Bertino:
[8:53] So an agency built on the back and mind of one of the great SEOs of our time, I think is saying a lot 20 years, 23 years later. You guys have done work across all different verticals, by no means just non-profit,
Hive Digital’s Mission
John Bertino:
[9:08] but these days it’s a bit of a focal point for the organization. So, tell us about Hive now, if you could.
Jake Bohall:
[9:13] Yeah. So now our focus is mission-driven organizations, which generally is non-profit. So, we do obviously work outside of the non-profit sector, but we as a company want our portfolio to eventually be nothing but non-profit organizations or those that are very clearly mission-driven orgs. And we’re also sort of thinking ahead and trying to carve out space to help those companies that are trying to make that transition. Because a lot of companies, they have their own focus and mission. And when we can get involved on the marketing side and say, hey, what if you tried this?
What if you tried this for a link building strategy? And we can coax them to do positive, impactful things in their communities as part of their marketing strategies and not, you know, not like buy off somebody’s, you know, debts for, for press, but just literally like, how can you contribute to your community? Because that’s where you’re going to get some of the value and brand impression that you want. So, like those things are a, a focus of ours rooted in the idea that, and when we rebranded and in 2015, 2016, the driving force behind it is we were actually at a, at a crossroad with the agency. and there was a.
Jake Bohall:
[10:25] Sort of natural feast or famine that happens with agencies. You get like this giant client on board, you hire a bunch of people, that client inevitably, you know, hires internally. And now you have to shrink resources. And that means layoffs. And emotionally, that was a lot for us. Come to the point where we were literally debating, should, and for me personally, like, should I just quit and go work for like an NGO?
Like that sounds like why I’m, I love education. I want to start my own school one day and so forth. And so, I was like, I don’t know why I’m working for this agency that, you know, we have all these clients that I kind of don’t like them. I’m not proud of all of them. And I was also just becoming a father to my first daughter, you know, my daughter.
Jake Bohall:
[11:08] And I have an older child, but, you know, my first baby that I was holding. And you know there is like this moment where it’s like I want to brag to my child about who I work for and what I do and I want them to be proud and I can’t do that with all of my clients and that is not like that’s not good like I don’t want to I don’t want to do that I want to come in and say like hey we’re helping the company does facial recognition and airports to stop child trafficking like that like that’s meaningful and gives purpose to what we do and so when we reincorporated you.
We decided instead of quitting and working for an NGO or something, we could just be an agency focused on businesses that we felt were making the impacts, the change we want to see in the world. And then most importantly, that we could provide a culture within our own company where the employees are working on things that have meaning to them. So, some employees are passionate about music.
Some are about equitable rights between genders or races or whatever. And each of these people have a purpose or a mission that they feel calls them. And so, it became more of the focus, like, how can I find clients that give each of my very talented marketers.
Jake Bohall:
[12:25] A portfolio that is breathing life into them and simultaneously making an impact in the world. And so that’s the new hive that we’ve been trying to create. And you don’t just pivot from being a very capitalist business to one that’s, yeah, it is a change that we’ve been making, but I feel that we’re making the progress that I want.
Jake Bohall:
[12:48] And I hope that we’re going to get that just portfolio mix nailed down. And I mean, our goal is 2030. You know, we would like to just be fully there 2030. So we’ll see.
John Bertino:
[13:00] Excellent. There’s some really cool subtopics and threads in there just about building an agency where everyone’s mission aligned. We’ll have to bring you back and have a discussion just about that.
SEO for Nonprofits
John Bertino:
[13:11] In the meantime, we’ll segue into nonprofit-specific challenges, considerations, again, through that lens of SEO and search marketing. Let’s start from the top. First, if you could just maybe quickly define what SEO is to you or how you think about it. And then any unique challenges that nonprofits face or opportunities that they have that might be different from other industries.
Jake Bohall:
[13:35] SEO in general, there’s a lot of ways that it gets interpreted. Obviously, search engine optimization, the goal is how do I rank this site to the top of the search engines? From our agency’s perspective, when we are talking about SEO, it’s how do I ensure that I’m creating an experience on our site that reflects the intent of the users coming from search.
Because if I can marry that, then I’m creating a positive experience for people, whether it’s Google, Bing, Facebook, app stores, wherever the search is occurring, you know, ChatGPT and other generative AI, you know, is, the new frontier for that. But how do we make sure that the content that is the best fit shows up first and that we’re able to meet the needs of those users? And doing that effectively, that is search engine optimization.
Because if you’re capable of doing that, all the other metrics for engagement, stickiness, conversion, et cetera, align. And instead of ranking number one and disappointing horn people, you rank number one and enhance the lives of others. And that’s the goal of the search engine as well.
John Bertino:
[14:39] Yeah, you won’t last for long if your experience isn’t aligning with search and time.
Jake Bohall:
[14:43] No, and generally you tank your brain. It’s like all of the people who invested in wanting to do the deal of the day stuff. There’s a restaurant and be like, oh, I’m going to do this deal that people can buy. And then their restaurants implode because they get too much traffic.
John Bertino:
[14:56] Whatever.
Jake Bohall:
[14:56] Same thing happens for sites. They’re ranked number one for the wrong thing. Their sales teams get inundated with bad questions, all those kinds of things.
John Bertino:
[15:03] Unqualified leads.
Jake Bohall:
[15:04] For nonprofits, though, I think there is a unique challenge in SEO and that generally their energy is focused on the audiences that they’re trying to change, like the impact that they’re trying to make. And a lot of SEOs is internally, internal marketing, like how do we focus on content that showcases our leadership? How do we establish relationships that will build citations and references for authority?
And how do we make sure our technical infrastructure is great? And a lot of these nonprofits are like, how do I make sure that I’m getting more donations so that I can go empower somebody in the field who’s helping a needy family get dinner?
Jake Bohall:
[15:45] That’s where they want their money to go. And feeling like they have to pay for an agency to $1,000 and you’re going to build me a landing page so maybe I get donations. I could take that $1,000 and feed 20 families like that. There’s a huge challenge at the resource of budget because, you know, they’re intentionally driven on making the impact they want. And, you know, you’re carving out a future, you know, a future benefit by like, okay, let’s invest long-term in SEO where they’re wanting immediate change everywhere.
And then I think the second biggest challenge is, so like that budget allocation in general, and then getting the budget because generally a lot of them are grant-based or donation-based. And like they’ll get windfalls, you know, somebody passes away and, you know, leaves an estate and that kind of thing. You know, they’ll tell Canada what if somebody makes a handsome donation, but that doesn’t create stability and budget that we need as a marketing agency, for maintaining, you know, these types of campaigns that they have.
John Bertino:
[16:52] Because SEO takes time, just to be clear.
Jake Bohall:
[16:54] Yes.
John Bertino:
[16:54] It can take a lot of time. And so, you know, there needs to be a concerted effort over, you know, several months, sometimes if not a full year or what have you to get significant traction.
Jake Bohall:
[17:04] Yeah. Because it’s not just the time of implementing the changes, but it’s also, you know, collecting the content from experts, right? Like we, we want to have a better landing page. Like we need you, you know, getting images of your volunteers making these changes. Let’s get stories of the people whose lives have been touched and make sure those are shared well on this. And like, everybody has a hard time doing that. I mean, a plumber has a hard time doing that, let alone, you know, somebody who’s out there just volunteering and giving their last, their last bit of energy to make a difference.
John Bertino:
[17:35] It’s interesting. You went there talking about the pictures and the stories. It’s interesting only because we sat down to focus on SEO, search engine optimization. And whereas the storytelling and the imagery has come up time and time again in my other nonprofit expert marketing discussions, I’m surprised we got there already. So how or why is it that you find storytelling or sourcing of different types of content, such as images, playing into ranking higher? Can you connect those dots?
Jake Bohall:
[18:03] Anytime you have an emotional story or emotional connection that you’re making with others, they’re going to want to share it, right? Like it’s impactful and meaningful for them. On the nonprofit side, like that’s how you get donations. I mean, there’s a reason why there’s, you know, sad children in the video or, you know, injured puppies. Now they’re not putting the happy, playful ones asking for your money. It creates the engagement and buzz that drives new link, new brand mentions, and those kinds of things. The social share side happens behind it. I mean, it’s impactful.
Our goal in marketing is to influence the behavior of other people’s. We have to know what that behavior is, measure it to change it. But once we are effectively measuring it, now we can try these new things to see what makes the biggest difference. And every single time, if you have an emotional trigger, any impulse, right? Like think about, I’m going to make an impulse move, like a donation, right? Like if I’m not thinking about estate planning and I’m just sort of browsing for a cause or a thought and I see something, like you want that person to immediately have their heartstrings pulled and feel a calling and.
Jake Bohall:
[19:06] And a connection in order to draw them in. And I think one of the, just to back up for a second, one of the other big challenges with nonprofits, you know, most businesses, we’re looking at just the customer. So, like in this case, like a donor for nonprofit, but nonprofits marketing presence, they’re looking for donors.
They’re looking for volunteers. They’re looking for candidates, right? Like whom needs our help, right? So, like if you’re, you know, Meals on Wheels, like you’re wanting people to know that you exist so that they can reach out to you and say, I need help.
John Bertino:
[19:37] Yeah, very distinct, differentiated audience persona.
Jake Bohall:
[19:41] Yeah, so the website presence, normally with a giant enterprise, it’s a lot easier because you’ve got partner teams and marketing sales teams, you’ve got an HR department. All of those are independently functioning with their own budgets and that kind of thing. With a nonprofit, they’re all sharing a budget and there’s a typical shortfall on volunteerism. Right. Like they need more people to volunteer. Volunteers generally don’t stay around forever.
John Bertino:
[20:08] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[20:09] Right. And, you know, which is its own problem in project management side with nonprofits. They’re trying to cater to a lot of different audiences with their web presence, which can be a bit confusing for a search algorithm to understand. Like, what are we looking? Are we looking for hungry people? Are we looking for, you know, people who want to donate to hungry people? Are we looking for restaurants? Why does this site exist?
John Bertino:
[20:30] So it’s the job of the search marketing team to create kind of clearly differentiated landing pages and messaging, depending on which customer archetype, if we could call them customers, audience archetype we’re looking to appeal to, right? You want to be very cognizant of muddling the message on what that page, again, the intent of that page, what it’s trying to solve across those different archetypes.
Jake Bohall:
[20:51] Yeah. I think one of the biggest differences in a lot of nonprofit organizations. Sites and homepages versus others are the need to clearly bifurcate some very different audiences out of the gate. Whereas normally you’re trying to like, is this enterprise or standard?
John Bertino:
[21:06] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[21:06] Right. But like on a non-profit, it’s like, are you a volunteer? Are you a donor? Are you in need of help?
John Bertino:
[21:11] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[21:12] And like, we are immediately sending you off into three different experiences, based off of what are completely different archetypes or demographics. Right.
John Bertino:
[21:22] And so again, to kind of connect those dots to SEO, what the search engines are looking for is when someone landed on the site, did they get the experience they needed? So it’s not just about appeasing visitors, although you’re absolutely looking to do that too. You’re simultaneously appeasing search engines by making those journeys throughout the site very clear and distinct, right?
Speaking of appeasing search engines, we were talking a few moments ago about imagery and messaging that you incorporate in the site for impact to resonate, create an emotional connection. The algorithmic benefit of that, right, is more time on site, more positive user experiences signals, more sharing, more repeat visits, all of which are supposed to have an impact on your ability to rank, correct?
Jake Bohall:
[22:08] And now that we’ve just had these testimonies in front of the judicial department, we know they impact your ability to rank.
John Bertino:
[22:16] Right?
Jake Bohall:
[22:16] Because they’re using those engagement metrics directly to influence the ranking position of sites in search.
John Bertino:
[22:24] Whereas before that was a little bit of a hazy.
Jake Bohall:
[22:26] Before they argued that it was, you couldn’t do traffic shaping. I mean, like we knew because we could run experiments and see it. Some small aspect, we could never do it at scale. And now we understand that, yes, we were seeing those anecdotal results because they were influencing and that we just didn’t know how to scale it.
John Bertino:
[22:47] Let’s take a step back to where to begin. So, whether I’m an in-house SEO or we’re an agency looking to improve the rankings of a nonprofit, it all starts with keyword research, or at least that’s one of the fundamental
The Importance of Keyword Research
John Bertino:
[23:01] pillars of where you begin. Could you talk a little bit about keyword research, your process, what you should be looking for, regardless of whether it’s for a nonprofit?
Jake Bohall:
[23:10] I mean, obviously step one is identifying your audience and what is it that they would be searching for? That’s the goal of keyword research. What are the people looking for what I have to offer? Typing into their search bars or verbalizing into Alexa or whatever device they may be using.
John Bertino:
[23:26] Somewhat easier said than done, right? We’re not quite as obvious and intuitive, right? If it was as easy as just, you know, taking stakeholders in an organization saying, what do people want? That would get you, what, 70% of the way there, 80% of the way there. But there’s a lot of gems that come out in those research tools.
Jake Bohall:
[23:40] There are. So actually, it’s interesting because generally, I’m opposed to the idea of keyword research. Not because I think- Hot take.
John Bertino:
[23:49] Yeah, not because- Jake Bohall says keyword research doesn’t matter.
Jake Bohall:
[23:53] SEO is dead. No, the idea of keyword research historically was we could go and use like ads, like the API for Google ads and identify what’s being leveraged or bid on in paid search. We would run paid campaigns and see what were the actual exact batch queries that people were using that triggered are ads related to any particular term. And the goal at the time for SEO was that any one of these long tail keywords, we could then build a page, incorporate the phrasing and have no problem ranking for that as long as we were long tail enough and we were the authority.
With the advances in language modeling with Google and mom and Bert and keep going, you know, like the idea of an individual keyword phrase has lost its meaning. You know, Google is very capable now of taking any search long tail search phrase that is entered into its query and breaking that down into a vector model of the keyword topics.
John Bertino:
[24:57] Yes, they understand things, not strings, as I’ve heard it said. Understanding the topic, what bubbles up to that topic. In other words, the breakdown of the subtopics of parent topic is not simply looking for a sequence of words together.
Jake Bohall:
[25:11] Correct. So now it is very easy to rank a page without exact match keywords. In fact, if you’re more topically relevant, you know, like Q tools like Market Muse and that sort of thing. If you’re more topically relevant around a keyword phrase, you’re more likely to rank than another site that might even have the exact match on it.
John Bertino:
[25:29] Did you hear that, everybody? You do not need to have the exact match keyword in the page or even potentially, well, it doesn’t need to be said over and over again throughout the site. It’s about understanding the topic, what breaks, what, what makes up that topic and getting that content fully explored in the proper breadth and depth throughout the site.
Jake Bohall:
[25:46] And remember, Google’s goal or any search engine’s goal when it gets a query back is to try to figure out what does this person actually want? Like if I’m searching for, you know, I don’t know, Frigidaire versus, you know, Kenmore. The search engine knows I’m actually trying to figure out a refrigerator to buy, right?
Keyword phrasing says, I need an exact batch page of comparing these two refrigerators. And like, they’re going to look for a page that meets the intent of I’m trying to compare, but they understand the underlying desire of the user is to discover more, you know, refrigerator options, compare features and find one to purchase. And Google has been announcing that they’ve been tracking journeys forever. Right?
Like I remember that was probably 10 years ago. They came out with like; do you know what it takes for someone to buy a car? And it doesn’t start with Honda versus Toyota or whatever. It starts with best car for families. And two months later, it’s like, best car for bicycles or camping. And then eventually that creates a profile that Google is literally watching what you’re searching and they’re generating results around those
journeys because they know what you’re likely looking for next. So, on the keyword research side, currently, there’s a lot of great tools, whether it’s Ahrefs or SEMrush or the Ubersuggest.
Jake Bohall:
[27:09] I have to say, I mean, a lot of people go there, right? Or your common in-your-pocket tool, like Search Console, using AdWords, leveraging ChatGPT. We can talk about that later. But, you know, like there’s the bulk of my keyword research now starts with asking Chad GPT, like we have a persona model that we want.
You know, like you are this consumer. Can you provide like your key pain points that you’re looking to have solved, the key features that you’re looking for? And then we are mining those conversations to identify what concepts we need to convey. Like this solution is better because of X. And that might cover a thousand keywords that never get mentioned on the page, but conceptually we are relevant, and we will rank for them.
John Bertino:
[27:58] More on chat GPT in a bit.
Citations and Local SEO
John Bertino:
[29:05] Let’s continue to cover our bases just on the fundamentals of SEO for nonprofits. In doing my own topic modeling and research around this topic of SEO for nonprofits, a few things bubbled up as potential talking points. I want to get your take. Citations, are they relevant for a nonprofit? So citations being directory listings, name, address, and phone number in certain directories across the web that usually isn’t a local SEO 101, something you want to accomplish. Are you typically doing those for?
Jake Bohall:
[29:39] We do. There’s an aspect with link development or citations where part of what you’re trying to paint is a picture of a business that is reputable and trustworthy and legitimate. And I say these things because there’s so many businesses on the web that are not. And there are some things that really distinguish the difference between the two. And one of them is, can a person physically walk into your business establishment?
So, like having an office or even a virtual office with a location or the slate where you get mail, where a human being is going to get mail. Exactly, right? I mean, they sort of hate on the virtual P.O. Box kind of scenario, but being a legitimate storefront, right? Where customers have a human to interface with having a phone number that is a real number. And they can tell the difference between a virtual number and an actual number that’s been purchased.
John Bertino:
[30:32] To be clear, you mean Google when you say they.
Jake Bohall:
[30:34] Yes.
John Bertino:
[30:34] And they use this as a hallmark of legitimacy. And it’s such a simple point, but it’s really, really important because they’re trying to solve all of these things algorithmically. What’s the best result? Well, one of the best results, the best results are ultimately going to come from those trustworthy sources. Well, how do we know that someone’s trustworthy? Believe it or not, a consistent name, address, and phone number, i.e. citation across the web in multiple places is one of the big indicators for identifying this.
Jake Bohall:
[31:01] There’s a reason why every single search that you place into Google or others tries to serve as a map result. And that is because it is without question that if there is a local business to serve, that is probably a better fit for anybody that’s doing a search. So, it doesn’t mean that you have to be physically located everywhere, but it is a testament to the legitimacy that that brings and the value that Google has for that.
John Bertino:
[31:28] Okay, so one of the first things I imagine you’re going to do while you’re cleaning up the site or shortly thereafter is doing the citations. With that would be the Google My Business stuff. Are they still calling it Google My Business?
Jake Bohall:
[31:40] I don’t know what it’s called.
John Bertino:
[31:40] Yeah, they constantly change the name. Exactly. I know this is a small, very one-on-one stuff for you, but like, that’s something else that needs to be done, right?
Jake Bohall:
[31:47] That’s critical. Yeah. I mean, there is, I don’t, I don’t know if this particular tool still exists, but there used to be a tool where you could enter your, your brand name and it would automatically secure.
I think it was like Noam, maybe. And it would automatically secure like a social profile for you with that username across all the major profiles. Like, like the key, it isn’t just name and address, a phone number, right? It’s like, it is like generally when you think about citations as an SEO, like that’s where everybody goes, but it is more like more brand mentions and brand presence.
So, like, I want to make sure that my clients have a presence anywhere that their customers might be first, right? Like I don’t care about creating a Myspace profile, but it doesn’t hurt to have one pointing back to your site and it’s free.
Why not? But there, there is an aspect of making sure that there are enough citations of your brand. And ideally you can get engagement in any networks that you’re creating in, that it shows that legitimacy. So oftentimes that entails like either the brand or the website or the phone number or link back to, you know, contact us page.
Generally, it’s associated with a human, you know, like you have like on LinkedIn, right? You’ve got like, here are the employees and those things are lending more and more credibility for your business being legitimate. And the more legitimate it is when you’re competing, there’s some doubt about your competitors, you’re going to outrank them.
John Bertino:
[33:06] I don’t know if I want to get into EAT just yet, but there’s EAT signals there, right? Expertise, authority, and trust, or what’s the second EAT?
Jake Bohall:
[33:12] E-E-A-T, so expertise.
John Bertino:
[33:14] What’s the other E?
Jake Bohall:
[33:15] Experience was the new one that got added in. Right, that’s right. Authority and trust. It’s fun. I mean, a lot of people love the EAT acronym.
John Bertino:
[33:22] Give the quick overview since we’re all- Yeah.
Jake Bohall:
[33:24] So it is essentially Panda was an algorithm update that rolled out like 2014 or something, I believe. Um and it was a a essential change in the way google valued sites based off of whether or not they were credible and out of this came a bunch of acronyms but at the time um they we know that they were looking for things like does this site have a phone number on the page does it have a human um noted as the writer does the is the contact information readily available for this business.
So, like a lot of the early questions that were, were used to drive that first round of, of Panda were like very basic things about just, does this look legit versus not? And that has taken a whole life of its own, partly the SEO community, just having some simple concept to just build on.
Um, and the other part is like, I mean, there’s fundamental value and a site has expertise. So, it’s written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about. We don’t have, you know, a non-educated person writing articles about how to, you know, deal with marital strife or, or deal with a medical condition. You have experience, which they just recently added. So, like similar take, it’s like, does it suck? Right?
Like I can navigate it. Um, authoritative, uh, you know, like is, is, does my brand have credibility? Um, like, do we have citations, links, references on the, on the page itself for authority? It’s.
Jake Bohall:
[34:52] Playing a bit into, I think, the expertise and the kind of role in. And then trustworthy. So, a lot of what they’re looking at is external factors. So, like, does this site have poor ratings on other sites? Like how are people reviewing it on third-party sites and are those reviews legitimate? So, I think that’s- It’s very much one of those.
John Bertino:
[35:10] What’s old is new again.
Jake Bohall:
[35:12] Right?
John Bertino:
[35:12] I think to your point, a big part of what you were getting at with your answer is these are things that Google has been trying to solve more or less all along, or certainly for well over a decade. But as they’ve gotten more pointed and specific in their approach, new acronyms or ways of conceptualizing this have emerged, one of which has been EEAT, which has been on the tips of SEO tongues for the last couple of years.
Jake Bohall:
[35:36] Yeah, it’s funny because so many people are sort of baffled by how the search engines would work. I think there’s obviously technical nuance for like, can they find a canonical tag of that sort of stuff? But like, ultimately, they’re trying to process an algorithm that is the same that you would have as a general human processing a bunch of information. I would like to eat at a restaurant downtown. I would like to know from my friends. So, citations like, hey, you guys have anybody that you recommend? I’m going to look at the menu.
Does the content look like something that I actually would like to consume? That type of thing. You know, like what is the vibe? Where is it located? You know, like these are all things that we don’t even think about, but they are, you know, these algorithmic measurements that we place for every decision on where we go or what we buy. And the search engine is applying those same concepts to every website or product to try to produce the equivalent response of, hey, we just human curated the entire internet to give you the thing you were looking for.
John Bertino:
[36:35] Yep. Yep. I wanted to hold off on getting into links, but I think you just gave me the perfect segue. way.
Understanding Links in SEO
Jake Bohall:
[36:42] That will take it.
John Bertino:
[36:43] So just quickly explain the value of links in SEO. Still to this day, you probably too, Jake, I am on calls regularly with brands looking for new agencies where they don’t fully understand this idea of a link, a backlink, link building, link acquisition. Please explain what it is. And then we can get into the broader subject of unique opportunities for nonprofits.
Jake Bohall:
[37:04] Google was originally called Backrub. And the entire thing that made Google different was the fact that they looked at incoming links and from other sites as a way of doing authority.
Whereas at the time, all other just well-known search engines were just looking at content on the page. And so, what made Google special was they looked at citation or links as an authority metric. And so today we have that same rule still applies and that as more people linked to an asset or a page, then that means that it has more popularity sentiment and um you know the quality of your neighbor her or the quality of the person voting or whatever you however you want to refer to it like those things have taken their own algorithm and nuance uh but ultimately not all.
John Bertino:
[37:53] Links are created equal.
Jake Bohall:
[37:54] Exactly yeah not everything uh there’s a guy link moses um who had this phrase shout out link moses Yes, shout out, buddy. He’s passed away, actually. But that’s okay. You know, but his big statement was that great link building is indistinguishable from great marketing.
And that is that, you know, when you’re doing link development, you know, the goal isn’t to go out and just buy links because, you know, it’s easy to tell that, like, these people were paid in line to make that restaurant look busy, as opposed to its legitimately a place that people love. And for search engines, they’re able to distinguish those differences as well. So, between a great link or a poor one.
So, clients do come to us and say, hey, we want link building. And it’s challenging because Google is actively seeking to eliminate their dependence on link building. And we’ve been watching this happen forever. And the most interesting part about it is after Penguin, and what a lot of people didn’t realize is that penguin was essentially google outsourcing the link spam team to all of the webmasters so we would disavow the links that we hate and in exchange they got an influx of human, audited links yeah to train their ai model on how to detect what a paid link looks like and you know so the takeaway is that right now i could go out and build 100 links.
Jake Bohall:
[39:20] Maybe 90 of them Google is just like I kind of don’t like how that looks and it brings absolutely no value and only 10 of them bring value and so one of the changes that we’ve made as an agency in our link building is that we no longer sell link building as like this is the thing that we’re doing right it’s more like you know how can we, all good strategies cycle back right but like I mean Jim Boykin had the we build pages model forever ago, like, let’s build a great asset and the links will come.
John Bertino:
[39:52] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[39:53] And, you know, now it’s not so much, let’s build a great page, but it’s, let’s find what we have that is unique, that we could, um, present to a community that will foster more discussion that involves our brand or references us. So, like maybe, especially as a nonprofit, right? Like they have all of these stats about. The income levels or, or, or, you know, what research impoverished community that they’re trying to help, like, yeah, their research that they’re leveraging to try to get donations, right?
Like, you know, they, you know, the, the human rights foundation shows up and says like X number of million people were, were oppressed, you know, in, in this country and here’s why and how. And so, like those sorts of impactful, um, numbers are, you know, metrics from their research make fantastic infographic campaigns.
So, Anne Smarty, you know, is literally reinventing, you know, herself with her agency doing, you know, sites, a form of infographic marketing, but it’s, I mean, it’s not infographic marketing as much as it is data marketing, right? Like figuring out like, what do we have that’s interesting? Can we compare how much house you can buy for your income by state?
Jake Bohall:
[41:04] You know, which we all think is a really cool and interesting thing. Um and then all of a sudden you know different communities and reddit are like my state sucks and like my state’s great and like there’s you know there’s then you can reference natural that content exactly which results in the backlink and quite frankly it results in and in that particular case which is actually one of our case studies um you know like she was on all of the local news like all of the you know the local news organizations in cities or states where they’re advocated for like we’re the winner like you know we’re the top town for x you know like they’re going to brag about it and your business that just happened to know that data point is going to get referenced as a citation and you’re getting you’re getting a voice and you know and even those that you know aren’t reflected well still take to the streets to argue how it was they were you know misrepresented or you know like it’s not as bad as you think right but there’s still conversation that happens.
So, it’s, I think link building now is more about how I create an engaging conversation about my brand that could be somebody writes a blog post and links back to my site. It could be somebody makes a TikTok video and talks about me.
John Bertino:
[42:19] But to be clear, any links in social platforms technically don’t pass link value, right? But the traffic, there’s a weird gray area.
Jake Bohall:
[42:28] I mean, just to say, we don’t know. I mean, technically, right? Like, I mean, we know that Google and Reddit are making a deal, right? And that Google can see all of the citations, brand mentions, and so forth. I would posit this question. I don’t think Google needs it to be a hyperlink anymore. At all. Like an unlinked brand mention. Like we, we used to do campaigns where we would go get unlinked brand mentions linked. And, and like, that was exciting because we were like, oh, there’s all this missed opportunity. People talked about you, but didn’t link to you from a, from a conversion standpoint or traffic flow.
Yes, please still do that. And it’s a good thing. But if you have a bunch of people talking about your brand and a product in social media, even without linking to you, you will start to see the impacts because you will end up getting brand plus query searches, right? Which create that keyword association for you without even having the link, but it was because of this content distribution or engagement with your brand that was happening in other channels.
John Bertino:
[43:29] Is the name for that co-location? Is that the, I think, I’ve heard of that. I remember this specific point you’re talking about, Ran Fishkin from Moz, formerly from Moz, doing a video on this exact point. And it fascinated me.
It’s interesting to hear that, and it was very speculative, I think, at the time and hadn’t totally been proven out. And maybe that’s why it didn’t get a lot of, generate a lot of discussion other than, again, just speculative discussion.
But it sounds like now, from what you’ve seen, 20 years plus in the business, if your brand gets mentioned in proximity to a certain subject, we’ll get back to wine, for example. You know, Jake’s Wine Company, you don’t have one, I’m saying you used to have one.
Jake Bohall:
[44:08] Sure.
John Bertino:
[44:08] Jake’s wine company gets mentioned in association with Merlot or Cabernet that without the link, that should help improve rankings for those types of search terms.
Jake Bohall:
[44:19] It would. I mean, because on the knowledge graph side, Google is now creating an association and a vector model of your brand and those terms. Now, whether or not it’s linked back to your domain name in that instance is not necessarily relevant. I mean, it can be helpful.
But if you’re in the knowledge graph and Google knows that Jake Bohol is this entity with high confidence, and then it sees these related topics and it knows that my entity, when you search my name, I’ve got a knowledge panel with my website, like it can draw, it can infer, you know, that there could be a link there, right?
And grant me some authority around that topic and boost my site. I will say that we don’t actually know anything when it comes to links. We know that they work. We know that sometimes they don’t. And it seems that it is in every case that you try to scale it and artificially manipulate it that you start running into scenarios where there is a threshold, where you see like, hey, that didn’t seem to make a difference.
John Bertino:
[45:19] Diminishing returns.
Jake Bohall:
[45:20] And like I said, you build 100 and maybe 90 of them. Google just silently said, nope, I don’t trust those. And as a consumer buying links, you have no idea. And so I think that link building campaigns should always be centered around how do I take a solid promotional project, whether it’s a.
Jake Bohall:
[45:43] Deal or sale that we’re having or you know this this landing like this actual campaign that I’m trying to promote like how do we get the most reach for that and that the link building the link building concept like naturally starts to occur behind it so instead of focusing on a count of links I mean like ultimately some people need like they I mean they’re they don’t see a metric yeah they like I need a number quantitative right for like why did I spend ten thousand dollars how many links did I get you know just saying like I don’t know like here’s a thousand links but maybe half of them aren’t real that’s not or not effective or whatever is not going to work um you know so like I try to shy away from that these days with clients I mean link building is valuable every correlation study will show you that sites that have more links rank better than those that don’t but generally speaking sites that have more links also just have more products, more fans, you know, like a whole lot of other things that are more actual correlation than causation.
And while I know without any question that I can manipulate rankings with links, I am not in a position today that I could say that at scale,
Building Brand Mentions and Links
Jake Bohall:
[47:01] I can manipulate rankings with links.
John Bertino:
[47:03] Before we move on from the subject of link building per se, or link acquisition, what are some of the things that nonprofits can do to help put themselves in position to accumulate links or even just accumulate the brand mentions that we surmise could be potentially equally as valuable?
Jake Bohall:
[47:20] Thinking about ways that your customers would want to share. So, all of your volunteers are making an impact, right? So, like any time that you can give your volunteers something to share, like showcasing them, highlighting them, things like that.
So, like ego, you know, ego bait kind of stuff. Like that’s an easy way to get shares, you know, like the, the impact. So, any impact statement case study, like I was talking about like the data, like, you know, how many meals did we deliver last week.
John Bertino:
[47:48] Right?
Jake Bohall:
[47:48] Like we made a difference. Okay. If we compared, you know, this pile of money to, you know, this pile of food, you know, like those sorts of like visual representations that you can catch attention in social media, because that will perpetuate the sharing and the mention.
So, specifically drive new link development opportunities for a nonprofit. You need to identify what is the value that you are providing to your audiences. And then within like real marketing, right? Like, and within that, what motivates them? Because if we can outtake some of those key emotional triggers, we can leverage that with new content or new imagery that will get shared.
John Bertino:
[48:34] Interesting. Having known you a long time like I have, I wasn’t expecting to talk nearly as much about social media today as we are. Although, of course, it makes sense to me, everything you’re saying.
So are you finding more and more that when the discussion of, again, I need links, I heard that drives rankings. When that comes up more and more, you’re pointing towards, obviously, what’s some great content we can create, but also then how are we going to distribute that for maximum reach? Because it’s that reach, it sounds like, that is really central to the process.
Jake Bohall:
[49:04] I mean, you know, Google tried to incorporate a social weighting in the algorithm a long time ago, right? And then, I mean, even pre-Google Plus, there was like, you know, some voting options that we had for a little while.
John Bertino:
[49:15] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[49:16] You know, if you can think about it this way, if you’re, let’s just say you have a Twitter slash X profile and you’ve got 10,000 engaged users, like that is a better metric for Google to weight your authority than it is for them to say, oh, you’ve got 10,000 backlinks. Because 10,000 engaged users, that means they have profile. They can see for each of the people who like you, what does that audience look like?
And remember, Google’s got an entire ad platform that is strictly based on matching audiences to keywords. And so, if they can identify your social following and what those audiences look like, then they can better match what are the types of people in searches that are looking for the products that you’re offering and quite frankly, what distinguishes you from a competitor brand and their audience.
John Bertino:
[50:04] What about this notion that social is a walled garden? Is that a dated mantra? This idea that Google can’t access, you know, meta and crawl it, or there used to be a lot of limitations around Twitter. Maybe that’s changed. Are you operating under the assumption that they can get access to whatever the hell they want in terms of assessing?
Jake Bohall:
[50:24] I know that I’m not Google and I can get access to most anything that I want. So I can’t imagine that Google, like, I mean, even though they’re just maybe violating some terms of service somewhere, like, I can’t imagine that they either don’t access that information or don’t have an equivalent metric.
Think about it this way. You know, when, you know, Google’s being sort of an ambassador about monopolization and blah, blah, blah. Like, I get it. Understand.
John Bertino:
[50:48] Yeah.
Jake Bohall:
[50:49] From a search engine perspective, like, like Ahrefs is trying to launch. Yep. Right. We’ve got perplexity and like all these different search engines. Like there is an aspect of user behavior and data like just pure query data over the last 20 years that google has that nobody else has and so it’s like you’re literally saying like i think because this guy is an expert, he’s got 20 years let’s pretend Google’s a human has 20 years of experience directly counseling people on how to do.
Jake Bohall:
[51:19] And that there is something that isn’t special about that knowledge, like inherent knowledge that they gain versus some new person who’s trying to understand. Like maybe there’s efficiencies for perplexity starting out or, yep, starting out as a search engine, but they have lost all of the context of other information.
And when you have all of this other stuff and potentially blurred lines between what comes out of Gmail or Chrome or ads or YouTube, you know, like their fingers and Google Analytics, I mean, they have all of this data.
And so, I don’t know that they really need to see who my friends are on Facebook to know who in a macro level modeling, like who I am and what I’m looking for. Like I am not so special in my search history that there’s not somebody times a thousand out there that’s behaving the same way that I am, that they can predictably provide a great result.
John Bertino:
[52:23] Because I’ve been told that I should solicit my viewers more for comments. So, I think on this point about whether or not Google can or needs to access social media data to influence rankings or understand authority, please enter your comments below the video and tell Jake you agree with them or disagree with them.
Jake Bohall:
[52:44] I think they want it, right? Like, I mean, like openly, like they needed,
Content Creation Strategies
Jake Bohall:
[52:47] they wanted, but I don’t think they have to have it. I think it’s nice to have.
John Bertino:
[52:50] So we only have a couple minutes left, unfortunately. I feel like we could go at length, but let’s just talk about, for lack of better phrasing, the brass tacks of content creation and kind of what to create. You’ve already touched on it to a degree. And then let’s layer that discussion with ChatGPT.
Again, we won’t have nearly enough time for it, but let’s talk about ChatGPT as a vehicle to ideate what to create, how you guys are using it, and then just in general, how you’re thinking about what to create, how to create it for maximum benefit for SEO.
Jake Bohall:
[53:23] A couple of concepts to unpack. Number one, I think, yeah, for a nonprofit, one of the biggest challenges on a content side is that they’re either over creating because they’re just trying to just create it and they’ve got volunteers and everybody thinks like, I’m a volunteer, like I’ll contribute an article and like I’ve helped. Right. Which a lot of times for nonprofits score, right?
Like, like the amount of effort that there was in like, Hey guys, like. 75% of your content is not great.
John Bertino:
[53:49] So Scores is a nonprofit that focuses on educating entrepreneurs.
Jake Bohall:
[53:54] Service Corps of Retired Executives.
John Bertino:
[53:55] Yeah, we collaborated on it at one point.
Jake Bohall:
[53:57] Those businesses tend to have often an influx of content and we have to clear out the garbage. And then you have those that are trying to create content. And the challenge that they often see is that either they want to create content about everything and it’s something that’s already commonplace.
Right like they’re you know the classic I’m a pizza shop so I should write articles about how to make dough and what kinds of tomatoes exist in the world and what kind of growing regions are appropriate it’s like just I want a pizza yeah like and so like there’s a lot I think especially for non-profits who have limited budget when you’re trying to create content you want content that’s going to motivate or engage your audience around whatever emotional triggers you’re trying to use in your marketing campaign Chat GPT is fantastic for that The first case of my using ChatGPT was engaging with it in a persona model where I had it create a panel of an expert, an entrepreneur.
Jake Bohall:
[54:52] And it was an expert officer and a buyer and basically pitted it in its own. I watched a cage match between the different personas it built with one person trying to sell the product, the buyer asking questions and getting answers and the expert weighing in when he’s like, that’s wrong, you’re lying.
It ended up being this fantastic discovery for us because we realized that we could leverage this persona, like buyer persona idea in ChatGPT to have it present the headlines that are going to both motivate a user around the pain points that they have using the ADA model.
John Bertino:
[55:32] Right?
Jake Bohall:
[55:32] So, we can now have some GPTs that we’ve set up that we can give it a landing page, a product, what we think are awesome about our product, and what our customers, maybe some testimonials or something. And in exchange, it’ll come back, and it’ll say, for awareness, did you know? Right?
Like there’s the just… Trying to get you to understand that you have a problem that you didn’t know you have. So, problem unaware, moving to problem aware of like, you know, how do I do this? I know there’s a problem to, you know, like comparing brands, so brand awareness.
John Bertino:
[56:08] Right, back to that journey that Google’s trying to understand for every purchase.
Jake Bohall:
[56:12] Chad GPT is fantastic at creating that journey and tying those, those headlines and those threads together in something where like your awareness level headlines are great for simultaneously generating images and things for ad campaigns because you’re trying to build awareness. It’s like, you know, are you ready to melt this summer? Right. And it’s an HVAC company.
John Bertino:
[56:33] Right.
Jake Bohall:
[56:34] And it’s like, don’t forget to get your tune up before it’s too hot and too expensive. And so like, like those things then lead into articles about how, you know, how to, how to make sure that your architecture is working properly. I should have stayed with a nonprofit reference. Sorry. The journey with ChatGPT, you can, you can create what those headlines are. You can create outlines by just interrogating it as to like, you know, what questions would somebody want? You know, what would they expect behind that headline?
And with the cautionary warning that if you’re creating commonplace content, like there’s a world where eventually all content’s GPT related. It’s all from historical models of content that already existed. And now the only value that your content brings is whatever you did to make it unique and special.
So, the GPT model does not have your special sauce unless you create an assistant and load in, you know, like your company’s mission statement, your values, and like you can start seeding it with the things that make you special. That is unique data, and have it start contributing that into the article suggestions it’s making because having another article about you know what hunger means right or like you know how little it costs to feed a childlike.
Jake Bohall:
[57:53] You’re not different and you’re not going to get more links or more rankings from that type of content but if you can tie in something that creates new value then you’re going to be considered.
John Bertino:
[58:06] Or specific experience specific to you in this case non-profit which i think brings us right back to eat as part of what they’re looking for in that framework is does this organization have true expertise or experience with this specific thing and can does that demonstrated throughout their content.
Jake Bohall:
[58:23] I think more importantly, does it contribute new knowledge, right? So, like generative AI is in search. Like they can generate whatever responses they want on the fly. What they can’t do is, are those things that they haven’t seen before.
So, if they see that you have an article and it’s a new approach for something or has new stats, new data in it, like now you’re contributing value that’s outside of like the global, the global corpus of knowledge, right? Like you’re more than Wikipedia and now you have value. And like that is what will distinguish your business in the future because everybody’s
Conclusion and Contact Information
Jake Bohall:
[58:59] going to be using ChatGPT and similar models to fill in all of the blanks.
John Bertino:
[59:04] Yeah, perfect cliffhanger, I think, to leave off on. We’re out of time, but I’ll have to have your back, whether it’s virtual or back here in the studio, to talk more about ChatGPT. Of course, there’s a lot of pressure to release that content quickly once we record it, so it doesn’t get dated and stale. I better get this episode out quickly.
Jake Bohall:
[59:22] Oh, four.
John Bertino:
[59:22] Excellent. Jake, for those that want to get in touch with you or learn more about your agency, what’s the best way to do that?
Jake Bohall:
[59:29] Hivedigital.com or on X, I’m Jake Bohol, but Hivedigital.com would be the fastest, easiest way to get ahold of somebody.
John Bertino:
[59:36] Excellent. Thanks for being on the show, man. Great to have you here.
Jake Bohall:
[59:38] Thanks, John. I appreciate it