Nonprofit WordPress SEO for D&R Canal Watch

Nonprofit WordPress SEO for the Delaware & Raritan Canal

D&R Canal Watch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that protects, maintains, and promotes the Delaware & Raritan Canal State Park in New Jersey. They came to me with an urgent problem: a donor was ready to give a large gift by credit card and the site could not take it. Fixing that was step one.

The nonprofit WordPress SEO audit that followed showed the site was working against itself in search: no meta descriptions anywhere, missing H1s on the pages that matter most, and thin event plugin pages competing with the real content. I cleaned it up page by page.

Technologies Used

• WordPress on a YITH Wonder child theme
• Gravity Forms with the PayPal Checkout add-on for card donations
• Yoast SEO for titles, meta descriptions, and Organization schema
• EventPrime for the events calendar

Key Features

• Donation form fixed: credit card fields restored, an open “Other Amount” option added, and confusing iDEAL payment buttons removed
• Full SEO audit of every core page
• New title tags and meta descriptions for Home, About, Donate, Join, Events, Contact, and Newsletters
• A proper H1 on every core page
• Thin event plugin pages set to noindex so they stop diluting the site
• Default “Hello world!” post and a duplicate Projects page removed

Donors can give by card again, and every core page now has a clear title, meta description, and H1 that tells Google exactly what D&R Canal Watch does and where.