What would happen if Google just turned off the water and stopped sending visitors to your site? Or maybe if the pipes became thinner and your traffic from organic Google searches dropped from 60 per cent down to 40 per cent?

It can happen, and it does happen. As website owners, many of us assume that Google will always keep the visitor taps flowing. I’ve found that many charities have a ‘set it and forget it’ or SEP (somebody else’s problem) mentality. Even worse, some assume Google will just continue to drive lots of traffic as long as you continue to write quality content but don’t actually monitor the website traffic.

The bad news is that solving a dramatic drop in organic search is not something that can be fixed with a blog article. The good news is that you can rectify it, but you need to learn to measure your traffic and put tools and practices in place to keep your Google taps flowing.

Education is half the battle: Learn about how Google works

In my last article, I talked about how Google has now started ranking different types of content separately. This change has brought new opportunities in the way your organization can engage with donors and potential donors.

I also talked about the importance of Google in driving traffic to your charitable website or blog. Envision Online did a study in which we consistently saw 60 per cent or more of our charitable clients’ visitors originating from organic Google searches.

It’s important to remember that Google doesn’t stand still—the search engine is always updating how it calculates what results to show (its algorithm). That’s why you need to keep an eye on your traffic numbers.

Track it

If you saw me speak at AFP about the 20 best practices for your charity website, you’ll know how much of an analytics junky I am. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” That goes for your website too. Free tools like Google Analytics allow you to measure almost everything happening on your site.

If you are not doing this already, you’ll want to start measuring your website traffic on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. What’s important is your organic Google traffic (the total visitor count and how it compares as a percentage of all traffic). If you notice a sharp drop in traffic, this is a red flag that you may have been penalized.

Penalty types explained

Google’s algorithm looks to your website for two types of signals to decide where to put your website in the Google search results (if at all).

The two types of signals are:

• Off-page signals: what it finds about your website from other people’s websites (e.g. who links to you)
• On-page signals: what it finds out about your website on your website

Both are important to your success.

Over the last two years, Google has been making some major changes to their algorithm. They even have names for these changes: Panda and Penguin. Panda focuses on on-page signals whereas Penguin looks at off-page signals.

So what do I do?

The best way to protect yourself or recover from a possible penalty is to understand what Google likes and doesn’t like. Here are the Coles Notes version for 2014:

On-page signals (panda)

• Google likes quality, useful content
• Google doesn’t like thin content: pages with little content or content that is spammy or provides little value
• Google likes original content that is not seen anywhere else
• Google doesn’t like duplicate content, like blog posts duplicated on your site
• Google likes useful, original meta titles for your pages, (e.g. About Us, The Story of Charity XYZ)
• Google doesn’t like to see the same meta titles across many pages (e.g. Charity XYZ)

Off-page signals (penguin)

• Google likes natural links, or links to your website containing your organization’s name
• Google doesn’t like unnatural links, or links with marketing-oriented words like ‘Toronto charities’
• Google likes links from sites it can trust, like yours and those of other reputable organizations
• Google doesn’t like links from link farms or sites engaging in obvious attempts to circumvent natural web rankings
• Google likes links to be added to your website in a reasonable, normal time period.
• Google doesn’t like to see a large number of links added in a short time period, with the exception of news outlets 

The never-ending Google story

The Google story is not one that I see ending anytime soon. It’s continually experimenting with new ways to index content. As website owners, it is our duty to understand these changes as much as possible and be aware of traffic fluctuations. If you want to keep the flow of traffic going, make a habit of reviewing your website stats, and implement systems to adapt to the changes that you see!

A tireless explorer of new developments on the web, Todd Jamieson has been keeping pace with its constant changes since 1996. Through EnvisionUP.com, Todd and his firm have worked with over 100 non-profits and charities. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and two young boys. Follow him via twitter.