The SEO Checklist for NGOs With No Marketing Team

Most NGOs don't have anyone whose actual job is marketing. Only 22% of nonprofits have a dedicated marketing staff member, which means the website usually falls to whoever's willing to touch it: a program officer, a founder, someone's part-time hire. Unsurprisingly, only 37% of nonprofits have anything resembling a dedicated SEO strategy. Not because SEO doesn't matter to them. Because nobody has the bandwidth to learn it on top of everything else.

This is a checklist for that person. Nothing here requires a marketing background, a budget, or more than an afternoon.

1. Check what your title tag actually says

Open your homepage. Right-click, "View Page Source." Find the line that starts with <title>. Does it say your organisation's actual name and what you do, or does it say something generic your website builder left there by default? This is the single most common thing I find broken, and the easiest to fix.

2. Write a real meta description

Two lines below the title tag, look for <meta name="description">. If it's empty or missing, this is what search engines (and increasingly, AI tools) fall back on to guess what your page is about, and the guess is rarely flattering. One or two honest sentences about who you serve and what you do is enough.

3. Make sure your impact is actual text, not just images

If your case studies, outcomes, or "who we've helped" content only exists as photos or infographics, none of it is readable by search engines or AI systems. A grantmaker's assistant searching your organisation's name won't find it either. Real text, even a short caption, is what gets indexed.

4. Check that your site isn't accidentally hidden

Search site:yourdomain.org in Google. If nothing comes up, or far fewer pages than you'd expect, something is blocking search engines from indexing you, often a leftover setting from when the site was still in development. This is worth checking even if you've never touched the technical side of your site.

5. Link your own pages to each other

If your programmes, impact reports, and about page don't link to one another, both visitors and search engines have a harder time understanding how your work connects. A few honest, relevant links between related pages does more than most people expect.

6. Say what you do the way people would actually search for it

NGOs often describe their work in the language of the mission ("empowering resilient futures") rather than the language a search engine, or a person, would type in ("clean water access rural Java"). Both can exist on the same page. Just make sure the plain version is somewhere too.