At Relevance Advisors, interns are given the opportunity to perform an audit for a nonprofit. Our spring 2021 intern, Clara, discusses her experience with Pink Ribbon Girls below.
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As a digital marketing intern with Relevance Advisors this Spring, I had the opportunity to work with the nonprofit, Pink Ribbon Girls, an organization who provides free transportation, meal delivery, house cleaning and support groups for breast and gynecological cancer patients. My project expanded into two different sections, exploring both the paid and organic side of search results so I got to help Pink Ribbon Girls set up their Google Grant account and also perform an SEO Audit to identify areas of opportunity to win more traffic.
THE START
When I first met with Pink Ribbon Girls, we initially only planned to perform and walk through the SEO Audit. However, we noticed they had previously used a Google Grant but it had gone dormant. We re-activated their account and set up multiple campaigns and ads to make use of Google’s offering. A Google Grant is a monthly Ad spend (up to $10,000/month) gift from Google for qualifying nonprofits to use for search text ads. Essentially, Pink Ribbon Girls had “free” advertising spend available for use and we wanted to take advantage. Once we had them set up and ready to go with that, I turned to the SEO Audit.
THE CHALLENGE
Pink Ribbon Girls is a robust nonprofit with multiple offerings in multiple markets across the country. We had to identify how to best optimize their website to meet the needs of possible patients who could be searching for any one of those services in any of those markets. To do this, I looked at both the content of their website and the technical aspects.
At the time, Pink Ribbon Girl’s website had one page for all of their offerings. In terms of SEO, this meant the page was not very specific, and thus not relevant to keyword searches (because most searches would be for only one service). Secondly, their website was created with Squarespace, which meant they had less direct control on technical aspects, but we did identify lots of areas of improvement. Their website was very functional, however, most suggestions we had were to rewrite tags and descriptions to be in a more optimal format.
THE SOLUTION
Our first, and most important, recommendation was to separate out their website to include a page for each service, or each market. This would increase page relevancy for specific service or market searches, improving their overall ranking on the Search Engine Results Page. In order to capture traffic of people who don’t even know these types of services exist, we suggested creating a patient testimonial or blog to help the website rank for terms outside of their direct services.
In terms of the technical aspects, we provided recommendations that they would hand off to their developer when they had capacity to tackle those issues. I analyzed their page speed, backlink profile, title tags, meta descriptions and more, all with the understanding of relative competition. That is to say, if their competitors also had slow page load times for example, fixing the page speed was not as high a priority as their title tags and meta descriptions.
THE RESULTS
We delivered the SEO audit knowing the limitations in capacity and resources for a nonprofit organization; however, the recommendations were laid out and ready when Pink Ribbon Girls had time to devote to it. The presentation sparked a lot of questions around paid search and its role in attracting traffic (in addition to optimizing for the google rank algorithm). Specifically, questions arose around the Google Grant and we realized that though we had set it up, we wanted to clarify the requirements and process, so that we could effectively hand it off to their new marketing employee. The Google Grant requires that accounts maintain certain benchmarks in order to keep receiving ad spend, so we wanted to set Pink Ribbon Girls on track to keep their account active.
