Jake Bohal is the co-founder and vice president of Hive Digital Marketing, a 23-year-old Raleigh, North Carolina-based digital marketing agency founded in 2002. Hive Digital rebranded in 2015–2016 to focus specifically on mission-driven organizations, especially nonprofits, and currently has a team of about 19 people. The agency was originally Verante, where Bohal joined in 2007 or 2008 after working with them as a client.

The two biggest SEO challenges nonprofits face are (1) budget allocation—nonprofits often prioritize immediate impact (e.g., feeding families) over long-term SEO investment, and (2) unstable funding—since many rely on grants or windfall donations, they lack the consistent budget needed for sustained SEO campaigns that take months or even a year to yield traction.

Bohal defines modern SEO as ensuring the website experience reflects the intent of users coming from search—whether Google, Bing, AI tools like ChatGPT, or app stores—by creating content that best fits user needs and delivers positive experiences. This approach aligns engagement, stickiness, and conversion metrics, and prioritizes enhancing lives over merely ranking number one.

Citations—consistent name, address, and phone number listings across directories—are critical for establishing legitimacy and trustworthiness in Google’s eyes. They signal that a nonprofit is a real, reputable organization with physical presence (e.g., office or mail-receiving location), a real phone number, and human contact points—key EEAT signals that help differentiate legitimate nonprofits from less trustworthy sites.

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—a framework Google uses to assess site credibility. For nonprofits, EEAT means demonstrating real-world experience (e.g., volunteer impact stories), subject-matter expertise (e.g., authored by staff with domain knowledge), authority (e.g., citations, references, media mentions), and trust (e.g., transparent contact info, authentic reviews). These signals help Google rank mission-aligned, high-integrity nonprofits more highly.

Emotional storytelling—like impactful volunteer stories or images of people helped—drives social sharing, brand mentions, and backlinks, which boost SEO. It creates engagement and buzz that leads to new links and citations; it also improves user experience signals (time on site, repeat visits), which Google now directly uses to influence rankings, as confirmed by recent judicial testimony on search engine practices.

Bohal argues traditional keyword research is outdated because Google now understands topics—not just keyword strings—via language models like BERT and MUM. Instead of exact-match phrases, nonprofits should focus on topical relevance: deeply exploring breadth and depth of subject matter (e.g., hunger relief) using tools like ChatGPT to model audience pain points and motivations, ensuring content fully addresses user intent behind searches.

Nonprofits can earn links and mentions by creating shareable, emotionally resonant assets—like data-driven infographics (e.g., income vs. housing affordability by state), impact stats (meals delivered last week), or volunteer spotlights—that tap into ego, pride, or advocacy. These assets spark discussion (e.g., local news coverage, Reddit debates), leading to organic citations, unlinked brand mentions, and contextual associations that boost authority—even without hyperlinks.

Bohal recommends using ChatGPT to ideate audience-specific content by feeding it buyer personas, pain points, and campaign goals—generating awareness-to-conversion headlines and outlines. Crucially, he warns against generic content (e.g., 'what is hunger?'); instead, nonprofits must seed custom GPT assistants with their unique mission, values, and original data (e.g., proprietary impact stats) to produce differentiated, EEAT-strong content that contributes new knowledge beyond the global corpus.