Only 16% of Google Searchers Go Beyond First Two Pages Of Results.

What does this mean to your organization and it's online presence?  Try finding your NGO based on search terms you think a user might plug in (without using your organization's name or URL).  If you are on page one, well done!  If not....keep reading!

I just came across a new website/tool at http://woorank.com.  It's a website analysis service that is really simple to use, and the free version gives you alot of data about how your nonprofit website is viewed by search engines such as Google. 

Amnesty International SEO Case Study

To try it out, simply go to Woorank and type in your website URL.  When I went to the site, the default test URL was for Amnesty International, so I will use that data to share a little bit about what Woorank gives you and how you can use it to tweak and refine your site.

The first thing you will see after you submit your website address and hit "enter" is that Woorank starts calculating your ranking number (see image at right).  For Amnesty it was a 72.7.   As a comparison, Wikipedia gets an 89.6.  I wont go into how those numbers are calculated, in large part because I couldn't find an answer on the Woorank website.

What you can do in order to gain insight into "how to improve" your woorank is start scrolling down the results breakdown.  Looking at Amnesty's ranking results, the first major breakdown is regarding "Visitors".  Here they give data such as how many visitors your site is getting per month, and how you rank on sites such as Alexa and Compete.  The Alexa site is particularly interesting to look at, but that is for another discussion.

After looking at "Visitors", which you can't really influence or change directly, you get a snapshot of "Content" including the number of pages that have been indexed or "crawled" by Google as well as your site's most popular pages.  If you find that not many of your site pages have been indexed by Google, you need to figure out why that is.  Finding that out is important, but also can be quite technical so you might need some help.

Next comes the segment "In Site SEO" (search engine optimization) and here is where you can do some simple fixes yourself if necessary.  Looking at the Amnesty results we see that Woorank color codes the areas by green, yellow, and red.  You will note, for example, that the "meta description" is missing...hence it is red.  If you click on the "+" sign next to Meta description the Woorank site will tell you why this is important:

The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results.

Your Meta Description should contain between 70 and 160 characters (spaces included).

So, Amnesty can easily improve their Woorank by adding the Meta description code into their website (minorly technical, but a 5 minute fix for those using website CMS tools....Amnesty is using the Drupal CMS).

You will see that the Images segment of In Site SEO is ranked "yellow", as some images are missing "alt" attributes.  These attributes are important for the visually impaired, as their computers will read the image descriptions to them, but also help improve your SEO results as Google can't read an image but can read an "alt" tag.  Once again this is a quick easy fix.  Typically when using a CMS you simply find your image, right click on it and edit the properties to add the "alt" description.

I will skip the "Inside Analysis" and go to the "Website Compliance" results for Amnesty (image above).  Here you see a number of warnings going off.  The first one is a yellow light warning that the two "versions" of the URL (http://www.amnesty.org and http://amnesty.org) do not redirect to each other....which means that they are treated as separate sites which is not ideal for SEO ranking.  Have your tech person work on the "htaccess" file and redirect the "www" version to the "non-www" version, or vice versa...whichever you prefer.

The other red lights are somewhat technical in nature...but provide good insight for the webmaster at Amnesty to take a look at what's going on "behind the scenes".

A cool bit of info can be found from the "Social Media" section, pictured above.  It gives you a snapshot of how your site is being referenced on Delicious, Digg, Twitter, and Wikipedia.  Hmm.  Only 33 recent Twitter backlinks for Amnesty?  I wonder if they would have expected that result!

Now It's Your Turn

There are a few other bits and pieces you can look at on Woorank.  The point here is that it is a free service (there is a pay version in the works) and it gives you actions you can take, both big and small, to get your site into the top of the search results.

Remember....only 16% of the people looking for your organization are going beyond page two of the search engine results.  Targeting those 84% of the audience is indeed worth the effort!

Here is the URL again...just click here and in 60 seconds you will have a wealth of information at your fingertips!