In today’s post, we’ll walk you through an SEO case study that showcases a website that achieved exceptional organic traffic growth, increasing from 636 to 1,040 organic clicks from Google in just two months – an impressive growth rate of 63.52%!
Essentially, this website acts as a job board for non-profit/non-governmental organizations that are looking for employees. You can think of it as an intermediary between employers and employees; something like Glassdoor but listing NGO jobs only.
By leveraging a strategic SEO approach, including structured data implementation, optimized meta tags, and high-quality link building, this website was able to skyrocket its search engine visibility.
Follow along as we break down the step-by-step process that led to this remarkable growth and gain valuable insights and actionable tips to help your website experience similar success.
Non-Profit SEO Case Study Key Takeaways
- Implementing structured data was a key factor in this website’s organic traffic growth. If you’re using WordPress, it’s quite straightforward to put structured data into action.
- Get the basics right. Never skip the basics of an SEO-friendly page like optimized meta titles, keyword insertion in key areas of a page (without making it look unnatural), an enticing introduction that hooks your reader, etc.
- Don’t underestimate the impact of content generation rate and quality. More high-quality, useful content = More traffic coming your way from Google.
Disclaimer: The full SEO procedure takes more steps than what we can mention in this article. If you need our SEO team to take an in-depth look at your website, kindly fill in this form and we’ll reach out to you shortly.
First Steps – Technical SEO Audit
The first step that we’ve taken with this website is -as we do with all our clients- performing a site audit. This audit is key to finding technical SEO issues that are holding the website back from showing on search engines.
Issues might be related to crawlability and indexation, different types of error pages, site structure and internal linking, sitemap, robots.txt, etc. Luckily, there were no critical technical SEO concerns for NGOs’ Hub.
However, we detected multiple easy wins that -if implemented correctly- would boost the website’s search visibility.
Easy Wins
Here’s a breakdown of the opportunities and how we approached them.
Utilization of Structured Data
Structured data (AKA schema or schema markup) is essentially a script that is added to the code of your page to help Google understand what exactly the page is offering.
Structured data gives search engines a clearer view of the context of your page, allowing search engines like Google to serve the data to users inside the SERP itself (Search Engine Results Page).
For example, you may search Google for “best laptops under $500” and while exploring the options you see this result that has two attached questions to it. This is an example of an implementation of structured data called FAQs schema markup.
In our case, the structured data’s impact was much more significant than the FAQs schema markup we just mentioned. Given that our client’s website is a job board, we used the job posting structured data.
The easiest way to implement structured data to your website is by using an SEO plugin like Rank Math. The process is simpler than you would imagine. Here’s how you can implement the job posting structured data using Rank Math:
- After installing and setting up Rank Math, head over to the plugin’s dashboard and make sure that you have the schema markup feature enabled.
- Then, head over to the page that you need to add the schema markup to and scroll down till you reach the Rank Math section and click on Schema.
- Use the “Schema Generator” to pick the relevant schema type that you need. In our case, we’ll pick job posting.
- Finally, fill in the details according to the page’s content.
The sections that you shouldn’t leave blank are Headline, Description, Hiring Organization, and Address. Other details could be left blank but I encourage you to fill in as much of the details as possible as this increases your chances of getting picked up by Google’s job posting featured snippet.
On-Page Optimization for Job Listings
Although this is a basic and essential SEO task, we often find many businesses having poorly optimized pages that don’t even include the basic Google ranking factors. So, in this step, we just implemented the basics.
We just made sure that our main keyword for each page is there in the meta title and meta description. As an example, you’ll have no chance to rank for a keyword like “Best Fishing Rods” without having it in your meta title (the title that appears on Google).
It’s a straightforward task that could be easily handled using Rank Math.
Long-Term Wins
As a general rule of thumb, you should be aware that SEO is a long-term game. Here’s a breakdown of what we believe is essential for long-term SEO success.
Homepage Optimization
We had one goal for the homepage: to rank on Google’s first page for the keyword “NGO Jobs in Egypt”. Initially, the page wasn’t ranking at all for this keyword. Here’s what we did about it in terms of on-page SEO:
- Changed one of the H2 subheadings on the homepage to include the main keyword. The subheading was “Featured Jobs” and was changed to “Featured NGO Jobs in Egypt”. You may think that this is a minor change that won’t have a significant impact, but it actually played a crucial role in ranking this page on the first page of Google.
- Changed the meta title and meta description of the homepage to include the main keyword as well. However, it was also important to optimize for CTR (Click Through Rate) within the meta title to encourage the searchers to click on our result. The current meta title is “NGOs’ Hub: NGO Jobs in Egypt [Daily New Opportunities]”
The last part of the title “[Daily New Opportunities]” is where we targeted a higher CTR. This helped users know that we have new job opportunities on a daily basis and it encourages them not only to click on the website but to also register after clicking.
PR Link Building
As you may know, links from other websites are like votes to your page. Although Google is pretty ambiguous about their statements when it comes to their search engine’s ranking factors, they state boldly that backlinks are a solid ranking factor.
We used links to bolster our on-page efforts that were done on the homepage. So, we ran a PR link building campaign that targeted news websites. We managed to land links from websites like Digital Journal and AZcentral.
There are multiple ways to run link building campaigns. You can use a website called HARO (Help a Reporter Out) which lands very high-quality links but it’s very time-consuming. Another link building technique is simply reaching out to journalists or websites that you want to be featured on. You can use a chrome extension called Email Hunter that helps you find emails associated with any website. Alternatively, if you want to avoid the hassle of this process, you can hire us to handle your PR link building campaign.
Deal-Maker Factors
We should also mention that it wasn’t possible for us to achieve this organic traffic growth without the help of the client. Here’s how the client has helped us.
Content Generation
As mentioned earlier in this post, the client was keen on posting new job opportunities almost on a daily basis which allowed us to 1- implement more structured data to more job postings, 2- target more keywords, and 3- help us create what is known as “topical authority” in the NGO jobs industry.
Setting Logical Expectations
If you think you’ll implement the aforementioned tips and rank on Google in two days, you should reconsider going for SEO. SEO takes time and resources; the fact that it’s organic not paid traffic doesn’t mean it’s free. You should work towards having a strong technical base, then a strong content plan, and finally a link building campaign depending on the competition and your website needs.
Wrap Up
Schema markup, on-page optimization, and link building are the three key elements that helped us achieve good results in a timely manner with this client. It’s important to mention that different industries require different analysis and steps. You can reach out to us if you need our help in optimizing your website for search engine visibility.