Looking for feedback on our nonprofit site
-
I work for a nonprofit org which of course means a low budget and paying out of pocket for things (such as training).
Our current website is done by a 3rd party vendor and although it looks nice, we can't make any changes to it without paying for it. (We can only upload documents).
I'm wondering if anyone in this group will give their feedback on the site in terms of SEO and recommend a platform that would be relatively easy for a small shop to manage.
Our site is www.coastalcommunityfoundation.org
Thanks in advance
-
I'm trying to make a case at work to bring it in-house so we can have fresh content on the site. We're also paying the company $100 to host & don't have high traffic so I know we can pay much less -- and get a nonprofit rate in some cases.
I'm hoping to collect comments like these and take them back to work.
-
I definitely understand a web developer wanting to set limits with clients. I have heard horror stories.
My frustration is that we can't add new content or new pages. Our quote to integrate the blog with the existing site was $5,000 so we're keeping it on blogger for now.
That's impressive with AdWords. I've been managing our Google grants account with little success. Part of me thinks it's because we don't have a whole lot of action steps on our site. It's not clear what a visitor is supposed to do when they get there.
Thanks for the input.
-
Thanks. I'll check out woorank
-
I worked as a non-profit executive long before I ever got involved in SEO.
So I appreciate the difficulties with budget, staffing, and training.
That said, I really think the long-term answer is to take more of the work in-house. Given the Rip Van Winkle timelines that can prevail in non-profits, this could be a one or two year process. All the more reason to get started right away!
If you are on another platform, migrating everything to WordPress, for example, is not a small task. But it could probably be done for $1,000 to $2,500 by a developer whose mandate also includes training a staff member or intern for all future updates short of a major redesign. The developer could then lurk in the background, ready to be called on rare occasions. I have been though his process for both for-profit and non-profit clients.
I really think the days of delay, dependency and paying $50-$150 for every minor text or graphic change need to die.
-
Hey, Tina.
I second what XNUMERIK said, and given that I have worked with a number of nonprofit clients not all that far from you, I'll add this...
I previously worked with 1,600 nonprofit clients and fully managed sites for maybe 100 or so. For those clients, we budgeted a certain amount of changes into their monthly contracts so that, while yes they were paying for them, they didn't feel nickeled and dimed every time they wanted something updated, a new page created, etc. In some of those cases, we gave clients minimal site access, but not enough that they could potentially mess things up – delete the home page, take down the whole site, and so on. Hopefully, you at least have the ability to create new pages and content yourself. If not, you might consider moving to a provider that will give you full content access... if that is an option of course.
If you choose to move, you have a lot of different options – Wordpress, Squarespace, Drupal, and more. All have their advantages, and all of them have a plethora of design and site management shops dying to find new clients. Unfortunately, in my experience (and maybe yours as well), recoding for a new platform can be very cost-prohibitive, and then depending on how you have your contract set up with your vendor, getting technical help can also be expensive sometimes... not to mention that choosing the wrong provider is not only a huge headache, but also costly.
All in all, your site looks good, but that being said, there are things that I would change – move context setting to the top, increase font size in most places, merge the blog into the site, change the nav items, put much more emphasis on getting email sign ups, and so on. If you haven't gotten one already, apply for a Google Grant. I used to run one for a client that did somewhat similar work to yours, and for only the cost of my management time, we were getting +$18,000 in monthly GIK AdWords spend from Google, which sent over 26,000 monthly visitors to their site and added to the positive increases they were seeing in donations, email sign ups, social media activity, and more. If you're not doing that already, you probably could be.
I hope that helps. Best of luck.
-
I have taken a quick look at your website.
In terms of SEO, I would say that your vendor didn't do a bad job.
In fact, it would be hard to ask for more than a well structured website, clean URLs, good titles... if you didn't specifically request a Search Engine Optimized website.
Of course, there are many major improvements that could be made like adding a sitemap, a robots.txt file, description to pages...
Here is a tool that will give you a nice broad picture of your website's SEO:
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do Wordpress sites outrank SquareSpace?
I was a big fan of Wordpress. I used it for 10 years. However, because I run a very small business, the constant upkeep needed on WP in the end started to frustrate me in the end, so I moved to SquareSpace. However, I am beginning to question my decision, as one of my sites is struggling really badly, and I mean badly. The other sites are okay. So I started asking around, and most people are saying there shouldn't be a difference. A few people have said their Wordpress sites always outranks their SquareSpace sites. Then I read what Rand Fishkin said in the below Twitter thread, now I am even more confused. I am very reluctant to move to Wordpress, its just so much hassle. But at the same time, if a site doesn't get much traffic then it's useless. https://twitter.com/drew_pickard/status/991659074134556673 https://twitter.com/randfish/status/991974456477278209 Please let me know your thoughts and experience.
Web Design | | RyanUK0 -
Have you changed 100's of links on your site? Tell me the why's, the how's and what's!
Hello there. If you've changed 100's of links, then I'd like for you to contribute to this thread. I've created a new URL structure for a website with 500+ posts in an effort to make it more user friendly, and more accessible to crawlers. I was just about to pull the trigger, when I started reading up on the subject and found that I might have a few surprises waiting for me around the corner. The status of my site. 500 posts 10 different categories 50+ tags No Backlinks No recent hits (according to Google Analytics) No rankings. I'm going to keep roughly 75% of the posts, and put them in different (new) categories to strengthen SEO for the topic which I'd like to rank multiple categories for, and also sorted a list with content which I'd like to 410. Created new structure created new categories Compiled list of old URLs, and new URLs New H1, Meta Title & Descriptions New tags It looks simple on paper, but I've got problems executing it. **Question 1. **What do I need to keep in mind when deleting posts, categories, and tags - besides 410, Google URL removal? Question 2. What do I do with all the old posts that I am going to re-direct? Each post has between 10-15 internal links. I've started manually removing each link in old posts before 301'ing them. The reason I'm doing this is control the UX, as well as internal link juice to strengthen main categories. Am I on the right path? On a side note, I've prepared for the 301'ing by changing the H1's, meta data and adding alt text to images. But I can't help but to think that just deleting the old posts, and copying over the content to the new url (with the original dates set) would be a better alternative. Any contribution to this thread would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | Dan-Louis1 -
Competitor's new site ranking with out much keywords - How?
Hi all, One of our competitors have recently redesigned their website with new content. Now I can see much less keywords in the content. And page title also changed away from keywords. Still this is ranking at good position. How? Previously they used to have much landing pages with related keywords which some of them are missing now. Still I wonder why this website is ranking high? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
How to correct error in customized posttype WP site
Hi folks Can anybody help me. I foolishly, dogedly followed a Lynda.com tutorial for developing an 'online portfolio in WP'. Little did I know that my initial assumption - to use the 'twenty twelve' rather than the 'twenty eleven' theme would land me in such deep water. I was attempting to learn php on my own. All went well, until, --- the index page for the customized post type. Now I have two beautiful customized posttypes, 'companies' 'coverage' and no idea how to create an index page for either. I can't do the next step! I have tried every permutation - changing the permalink settings, changing them back, desperately searching for any handle to the nebulous links within the menu section. The only thing I can do (and have done for now) is to link the menu item 'company' and the menu item 'coverage' to a single post. Then the poor visitor has to scroll through the posts individually. I tried contacting the tutor and Lynda.com, to no avail! I have searched forums and found this is a common problem, but because I am so confused and novice to php they might as well be speaking Chinese. To compound my problems, looking through 'Wordpress SEO' for Yoast, I am painfully aware I can't go to the first basic step and fix the peramilinks to 'Postname' as that just makes my flakey menu collapse like a pack of cards. Help!
Web Design | | catherine-2793880 -
Site structure and blog tags for local with five locations
I have a client who has five locations. Their current web site was structured very well for the pre-penguin and Panda world. However it does not seem to do as well after these changes. I believe it would serve them both with their customers as well as on Google if they localized the site for each location. Currently all the content on the site if focused on one location that is in the largest metro. On the content side we have a plan to produce local content and blogs for each location. My questions are how to go about structuring the site map and blogs to provide the most local juice. I was also wondering how to properly mark up a site with a main trunk and five local branches. I am also trying to figure out how to structure the tags on the blog. On the site map itself I was planning on maintaining all the content as well as the older blogs in the main trunk of the web site. Under this trunk there is a locations page that currently goes to five pages that simply have an address as well as a bulletin board of upcoming events. The blog is directly off the main page with no tie to any location. Here are my thoughts on what I think we should do: I believe we should create a mini web site starting at the location page that has specific content and navigation related to each location. That the content should focus on the specifics of that area and what would serve that clientele the best. We should add to each branch location based on the key words and competition in that area. The blog off the main web site should continue to house the general categories that are already there as well as any other general posts. I think we should add a link to each store page with a location specific blog in each mini location site. Each mini location site should have it's own blog with specific blogs targeted towards the local market. This local blog would also feed in the general blogs from the "trunk" as they are posted. Relating back to my original questions: is what I outlined the right approach or is there a more effective way to do this? Is there any special mark up I should do to tell the directories what to do? How do I structure the tags for the blog? I was thinking of a structure like this: General blog/category/subject under the main structure : local blog/category/subject Any ideas of input on this? Ron
Web Design | | Ron_McCabe1 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
Joomla! Site Returning 12000+ Duplicate Content Errors! W Image
(I do award "Good Answer" and "thumbs up" to responses as earned) I have tried to ask this question previously (maybe not correctly). I have a client that I am doing the on and offsite optimization and the MOZ report is kicking back major errors. I have examples below. They all seem to relate directly to rokecwid and ECWID. Is there ANY solution to fix this? Is this hurting the rankings Since I didn't build the site, I am having to tell the website company what to do when I need changes made to code, etc... I am also not very proficient with Joomla! and my web engineer is one of those closet coders (the best kind to have) and doesn't communicate in a way that a "layman" could understand. He pointed out several issues with the HTML but I don't think that is related to this below. Can anyone tell me what to tell the web company that built this site to get rid of these errors? A very small sample of the urls w errors:
Web Design | | Atlanta-SMO
http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560097
1 14 1 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560098
1 1 0 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560099
1 14 1 http://www.metroboltmi.com/shop-spareparts?
Itemid=218&option=com_rokecwid&view=ecwid&ecwid_category_id=3560100
1 14 1 SEOMOZErrors_zps3a1ce2a2.png0 -
Optimzing a new ecommerce site, Need help with URL
Hi We are putting up a new ecommerce website and for product description, our tech team indicates that they must have the skun numbers in the URL. Which one of the following URL structure do you find the most SEO freindly? 1. http://www.Site.com/SKUNumber/ProductDescription/ or 2. http://www.Site.com/ProductDescription/SKUNumber/ My personal opinion is that most relevant content should be on load page so I like option 1. Thanks
Web Design | | CookingCom0