A few years back my parents became heavily involved in a Kenyan Orphanage. Through some contacts they helped raise the funds for the build and have since carried on raising funds for the day to day costs and further developments. With talk of a website re-build on the cards I started to think about ways in which I could step in and get involved with some SEO work. None of this has been put into action yet, but the more I thought about it the more excited I became as the SEO opportunities here are huge. As I haven’t seen this subject talked about a great deal, I thought it could make for quite an interesting blog post.

For the purpose of this blog I’m going to leave the subject of how much to charge charities for SEO alone...that moral dilemma’s yours! However, for someone who’s looking to build up a portfolio, charity work could be a great opportunity to get your teeth stuck in, and help out at the same time.

Requesting Links From Associates

Networking is a central part of any charity, and in general most charities that prove successful in this area will end up with a good amount of associates.  It’s also fairly likely that out of these associates, quite a few will have quite good authority on the web. Many charities team up with schools and government schemes so that means there’s a great chance of getting some really strong links from .edu and .gov domains. Most organisations that partner with a charity are usually quite proud of the fact, so gaining a link from them shouldn’t be a struggle. All good news for SEO!

 Ticketmaster.co.uk charity page supporting Nordoff Robbins and Sparks

Support With A Link

Giving a small contribution towards a charity has become a familiar tick box in ecommerce checkout systems. But what if ecommerce stores starting providing badges linking to their favourite charity? I think it would be much easier to team up with a successful online business if all you were asking was for them to send or provide customers with an embeddable badge instead of a % of profits or contribution at the checkout stage. For example:

“example.com is proud to support the cause of www.example2.com . Please help make a difference by simply embedding this link where possible”

If a website really got behind the idea, various types of embeddable content could be made available at the minimum intrusion to business. After all, if someone doesn’t want to link they don’t have to!

PR

Getting some great online PR when working with charities should be relatively easy to achieve. You’re never short of news-worthy stories (fund raising efforts, achievements etc) and the local press especially love to champion local causes. In my experience it is far easier to get a story run when it involves charity work, compared to a commercially linked story. Any online partners you have may also be willing to publish your latest news via their blogs and social media accounts, all creating links back to your website and raising your profile.

Social Media

Facebook groups/pages, twitter profiles and social bookmarking all provide an amazing platform on which to promote your fundraising efforts. If you happen to be organising a sponsored walk, run or sky-dive then social media can help you spread the word amongst your network and way beyond. As with PR, people seem a lot more willing and forward to share a link or post relating to a charity event or fundraising effort. I would start by setting up a Facebook page with all the relevant details and then encouraging everyone to spread it as best they can. Probably best to avoid the “unless this is sent to 10 friends, you will die by next Thursday” tactic.

Great Ormand Street Children’s Hospital Charity Facebook page...25,029 people like it!

Specialist Knowledge

Chances are that if your charity is based in specific area, you will probably start to develop quite a good understanding of different issues surrounding the work. This should give the option to contribute information and ideas to different stories, and quite often you’ll see charity leaders asked for quotes. This opens up quite a few possibilities to gain links within content from all manner of sources; great for improving on your high authority inbound links.

Some of these ideas may be basic link building techniques, but when put into the strategy for a charity the way in which you can easily spread yourself across seems really exciting.

Right, now I better actually go and start implementing these ideas...look forward to your comments.

About JonQ - I set up Go Search Marketing in 2009 having previously worked on various online marketing efforts. My clients mostly consist of small to medium sized local businesses.