With every new intern at Relevance Advisors comes a new project to work on for a non-profit organization. As Relevance Advisors’ spring 2023 intern, I had the opportunity to work with PAWS Atlanta to help them understand their position and potential growth in digital media. In this blog post you will find a breakdown of who PAWS Atlanta is, the difference between their organic and paid traffic, and the tools we used to find strengths and weaknesses of their online content.
PAWS Atlanta is a non-profit rescue animal shelter located in Decatur, Georgia. The organization is dedicated to its no-kill philosophy and providing their rescue animals with the care, time, medical attention, and behavioral training they need to thrive. PAWS Atlanta offers cat and dog adoption, foster care programs, vaccine clinics, volunteer opportunities, puppy therapy, and more. While they have a valuable mission of bringing pets and people together, PAWS Atlanta receives no funding from federal, state, or local government, and relies on their supporters to fund their organization.
Because of this, it is important that PAWS Atlanta optimizes their online presence and traffic. It is our mission to help them grow as an organization and make the most out of their digital content. To do this, we conducted both a Search Engine Optimization audit and a Google Grant audit.
The ultimate goal of performing an SEO audit is to help PAWS Atlanta understand their positioning in the search engine results, as well as offer suggestions to optimize the website to make it more favorable for search engines and users. To achieve this, we analyzed their organic keywords, position among competitors, website architecture, and site speed and performance.
We used tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs to generate relevant data. Ahrefs, a third-party software that uses an algorithm to generate data, provided us with important information regarding PAWS Atlanta’s top ranked organic keywords, organic pages, and backlinks. We also used data from software called Sitebulb to analyze top performing title tags and URLs. From this data, we are able to recognize where the organization is getting most of its non-brand traffic, how they rank among competitors, and what they can do to improve user experience on their site.
As a non-profit organization, PAWS Atlanta is eligible and currently operating their Google Ads account with a Google Grant. This grant provides eligible non-profits with a monthly ad spend budget of up to $10,000 given that the account meets certain criteria and performance levels. With a $10,000 monthly budget, there is a lot of opportunity to optimize ad performance.
We first analyzed Google Ad metrics on a month-to-month basis. This ensures that PAWS Atlanta is taking full advantage of their grant budget. If they are under budget, we look at opportunities in high performing search terms that could be included in their account, opportunity for negative keywords, and potential for new campaigns or ad groups. Since PAWS Atlanta has their account set to maximize conversions (key actions taken on the website), we specifically made note of monthly conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate.
PAWS Atlanta is in a great position to provide an excellent user experience as well as rank highly on search engines. The Google Grant also gives them room to experiment with keywords and creating campaigns, and most importantly, their ads account allows them to keep track of their conversion goals. The SEO and Google Grant audits are not only meant to enlighten PAWS Atlanta on their current online presence but also to help expand and optimize their organization to its fullest potential.
