Project Objective
My team was asked to pick a nonprofit whose website could be improved by executing SEO best practices. We were instructed to plan, build, optimize, and analyze a new version of the nonprofit’s website using WordPress. The new website needed to meet the goals and business objectives for the nonprofit and also follow best practices for UX/UI, copy (blog posts), SEO, and conversion tracking. My team chose a nonprofit called GirlStart. Girlstart’s goal is to be the national leader in designing and implementing innovative, high-quality informal STEM education programs for k-12 girls. We found this nonprofit to be inspiring, and in need of website improvements to better reach their objectives.
Background
For our new version of GirlStart’s website, we wanted to really streamline the site. Our objectives for the website, that aligned with Girlstart’s overall goal, was to increase donations (including equipment) to better support girl’s STEM education, increase brand awareness to inform more people about this non-profit, their events, and volunteer work. We also wanted to use this site and blog to become an authoritative resource for STEM education while also using the site to encourage more girls to participate in Girlstart programs. We used wireframes to design our web pages, developed updated site content, and clear CTAs to allow for better user experience and an increase in conversions.
GirlStart was currently paying for keywords that did little to help with their overall goals. We discovered opportunities for new keywords that got more traffic and we wanted to use these to create content and blog posts that featured them in the site’s H1. This HTML tag would indicate the heading on our website and help with our search rankings. These keyword opportunities and clear headings were paired with other on-page SEO strategies like interlinking, canonical data, robot txt, alt-text all done to keep users on our site for longer sessions and improve our accessibility. For better off-page SEO and to raise our domain authority score we fixed broken links and we drafted outreach emails to get more authoritative sites to backlink to our site and give us more link juice.
To track the website’s performance, we set up a Google Tag and installed a Google Tag Manager plugin on our WordPress site. This would allow my team to run Google Analytics and Google Optimizer to gather data from our site. These analytics allow us to monitor our page sessions, bounce rate, and which pages led to conversions and other user behaviors. This data helped us find more ways to keep improving our site. To take it one step further, we also develop and an A/B testing strategy to perfect the user experience. Our remarketing strategy was to use our Google Tag to track and create an audience for us to retarget. Delivering ads to those who have interacted with our site before allows us to remind the user of our brand and gather more conversions.
To successfully complete this project my group used Trello, a project management tool. We used MockFlow, a wireframe development tool, and WordPress to create the website. For our keyword research and content, we used Yoast SEO, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, and AnswerThePublic. For our site tracking, we used Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Optimizer, Google Tag Manager for WordPress Plugin.