Every single visitor to your website is an opportunity. As an Australian not-for-profit, you want donors, volunteers, advocates, clients, and community members to engage with all your information as much as possible. That engagement is how you best meet your short-term goals and long-term mission.
The trouble is that it’s much harder for a potential donor to gift money or a volunteer to sign up for hours if no one can find you in search results. That is where SEO, particularly backlinks, becomes a massive digital asset.
As an NFP, you have a natural advantage in building quality backlinks. The trick is to leverage as much of your content, good reputation, and centralised online presence as possible to ensure that when someone looks for your specific organisation, you pop up first in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
Why Backlinks Matter for NFP Websites
Over 93% of SEO (search engine optimisation) experts say backlinks will help with Google rankings more than anything else in the coming years. Even with the mass adoption of AI (artificial intelligence), having a bunch of quality backlinks is the ticket to higher rankings.
A backlink is a hyperlink from another website pointing to your NFP’s site. It’s a road sign that says, “Find help this way,” hopefully posted by another website with much higher page authority.
Search engines use backlinks to improve search rankings, expand awareness of your brand, and verify which web pages are more authoritative than others. Quality is always the guide for backlinks, not quantity. You want pages that are experts in your niche, not directories or unrelated backlinks.
Start with a Website Worth Linking To
Before you cultivate any backlinks, you need to spend time on your own landing pages. If your website feels outdated, has broken links, or loads slowly, no one is going to want to link to your address.
The first step in cultivating quality backlinks for any NFP is to conduct an SEO audit of your website, assess its layout and user experience, and fix any errors. Once that is done, you can move on to getting people to notice you.
Tip #1: Build Helpful Resources Instead of Promotional Pages
Claiming you’re the “best” at anything in Australia is too promotional. Your NFP’s website is more than a place for promoting a fundraising campaign or a simple update. It needs to be a repository of information that clearly shows any visitor that you are an expert in your field. You can do this by publishing pages on:
- Community guides
- Research reports
- Annual statistics
- Volunteer toolkits
- Educational downloads
These are known as “evergreen” content, meaning they continue to attract visitors. You want that longevity in your online presence. Other sites will naturally link to you as a source to support their own goals.
Tip #2: Publish Original Data
When a nonprofit can support a claim of impact, resource allocation, or support, it helps secure funding and drive community involvement. Being able to say “We help 90% of local students achieve higher reading levels” needs to be backed by evidence.
Publishing data on your impact is a goldmine of information. Do you have a community well-being report, or can you publish volunteer statistics? Something as minor as an “after-action” report on your campaign to raise money for a town gets listed, referenced, and linked by journalists and other mainstream organisations. Those are the backlinks you want the most.
Tip #3: Guest Post on Relevant Websites
Guest posting is a tried-and-true method for quality link building. It involves reaching out to another website and asking to write a post for their blog or content for their social media that directly links back to your NFP’s website.
Don’t overthink this strategy. You’d be surprised at how many council websites, industry blogs, microinfluencers, corporate partners, and ed/health websites want guest blogs written by people doing the nonprofit work.
The key to securing guest posts is relevance. You want to seek out other websites that are most relevant to what you do, how you help, and your NFP’s overall community impact.
Tip #4: Develop Link-Worthy Visual Content
Infographics and high-quality visual media consistently earn backlinks. Visit Pinterest, which over 3.9 million Australians use every month, and you’ll find images about everything from a decent mince pie to where to volunteer after school.
Infographics are an untapped market that everyone online needs. When other organisations use those visuals, they’ll often credit your website with a backlink. You can also watermark the image, so your site name and address are in the corner.
Tip #5: Build Relationships with Journalists
When a journalist lists a story about how many unhoused people are in Sydney or if the coastline is eroding too quickly, they need expert quotes. Those come from NFPs just like you.
You can use a tool like JustReachOut to build relationships with local journalists. Whenever a relevant story crops up, they’ll “reach out” to you for comment, linking the digital copy of the story to your website.
It’s also worth creating digital press releases (PRs) for any event, achievement, or NFP news. Those PRs get shared everywhere online. They are not high-quality backlinks, but they do move the needle a little bit.
Tip #6: Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions
It’s common for a nonprofit to be mentioned without actually being linked. You can monitor those mentions with tools like Google Alerts. Whenever there is a new online article or video about or around your content, you can then politely request that a link be added.
Tip #7: Hit the Basics
Okay, now you need to do some legwork and reach out to all the “basics” for quality link building. There are some essential steps you need to tick off your backlink checklist. They include making sure you have listings that all match your current information on sites like:
- Google Business Profile (if your NFP has a physical office or serves a local area)
- Google Maps listing
- Bing Places for Business
- Apple Business Connect
- Yellow Pages Australia
- Yelp Australia (if applicable)
- Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) profile
- Local council community directories
- SEEK Volunteer
- GoVolunteer
- Volunteer Australia member listings
- Local Chamber of Commerce
- State government grant recipient pages
- Government community program directories
- Health or social services directories
- Quora & Reddit for Q&A sessions
These essentials will help strengthen your backlink strategy, so be sure your website is ready to go and uses internal linking. That way, when you do see a spike in visitor numbers, they stay on your website for as long as possible.
Avoid Shortcuts That Can Hurt Rankings
It’s crucial that you know not all backlinks are of high quality. You don’t want to get a bunch of backlinks that Google considers manipulative link-building strategies. Those include:
- Buying backlinks
- Link farms
- Spam directories
- Automated link exchanges
- Private blog networks
- Cloaking content
- Irrelevant reciprocal linking
Think Long-Term & Start with Your NFP’s Website
Successful backlink building is a marathon effort. It requires strategy and patience. However, when done right, it can be the most effective way to boost your page rank and increase visibility with donors, volunteers, and clients.
Start with a new or improved website presence. Having a professionally designed, mobile-friendly, easy-to-navigate website with a clean UI/UX encourages more people to link back to you.
Reach out to our team at Web 105 for that website design and development. We have years of experience working with Australian NFPs, healthcare organisations, government agencies, and local businesses you can trust.
FAQs
Are backlinks still relevant in 2026?
Yes. Backlinks are 100% still one of the key factors in determining page rank and website authority. It is a cornerstone element in Google’s and other search engines’ algorithms.
Which backlink is most powerful?
The best form of backlink comes from a high-authority website using a “do-follow, in-content” link. Google considers that “pillar” content worth connecting and ranking higher.
What should be avoided when building backlinks?
Duplicate content, broken links that should be pointing to you, and buying links from low-authority websites can harm your SEO efforts.