As you likely saw if you accessed this particular FAQ page from our navigation drop-down menu, we’ve divided our FAQ into two distinct pages/sections: 1) Answers To Questions About Working With Us, and 2) Answers To Questions About Marketing, in general.
This page answers questions about marketing, advertising, SEO, and PR. Access our FAQ that provides answers to questions about working with our South of Boston digital marketing agency and SEO company.
Q & A ABOUT MARKETING, ADVERTISING, AND PR, IN GENERAL
What Is A Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency is a firm your organization can hire to: 1) provide advice/consulting on your strategy related to any form of electronic/web-based/internet marketing activity, 2) to complete hands-on, day-to-day work related to implementing new and managing, optimizing, and reporting results on various existing electronic/online marketing activities, or 3) to provide both the aforementioned services.
What Is An SEO Company? What Does An SEO Company Do?
An SEO company is a firm your organization can hire to help your various online presences/properties rank well/be found on search engines, particularly Google. The search-engine-optimization (SEO) tactics implemented by an SEO company tend to focus on causing your website and your Google My Business profile to rank well, but they may also support your various social media profiles, such as Facebook and Instagram, easily being found on Google.
Many digital marketing agencies offer SEO services as part of their digital marketing service offerings, but the focus of SEO companies tends to be on search engine optimization only — both paid SEO and organic SEO — vs. all digital marketing vehicles and activities. SEO companies may have a deeper understanding of SEO because of their SEO specialization.
Get more answers about search optimization, in general, by reading our blog post that answers a variety of questions about SEO, and the types of SEO services offered by an SEO company or digital marketing agency by reviewing our SEO services list. As you’ll see, in addition to developing an SEO strategy for your organization that outlines tactics your firm should implement to rank better in Google for relevant search-engine searches, and offering hands-on implementation and optimization of such tactics, many SEO companies offer SEO audits as a starting point to inform an SEO strategy.
What Is SEO? What Is Search Engine Optimization?
We answer the above questions in-detail in our “Is SEO Worth It?” blog post and you can learn more about the tactics we reference on our SEO services page, but in general, SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Optimization is about putting various tactics in place to cause your various digital assets, such as your website and your Google My Business Profile, to appear at the top of search engine results for search terms (including questions) used regularly by your organization’s target audiences (we refer to these as relevant, desirable search terms.)
Will SEO Matter Or Make A Difference With Generative AI Search? How Will AI Impact SEO And Search Rankings?
We address the above question in our “What Content Served Up In Google Generative AI Has In Common: 8 Practices To Implement Now” and “How To Plan & Prepare Now For Google SGE Impact: Be Ready & Willing To Rock The Boat!” blog posts. Organizations and marketers can, and still will be able to post launch of Google SGE, to take a number of actions to ensure that their digital properties, particularly their websites, are found on/rank well in Google Generative AI/Generative AI search by following the recommendations in our blog post links above. AI hasn’t and won’t make SEO defunct or unnecessary.
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? What Is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization refers to putting tactics and best practices in place related to your online presences, such as your website and social media profiles, so that information you shared will be spit back by chat bot/chat search engines/answer engines/AI search engines whose emphasis is on answering questions that searchers have. You can learn more in our AI Search Engine Terminology & Glossary blog post.
We clumped the two above terms/acronyms — AEO and GEO — together, because honestly, as of the day we are posting this (6/20/25), it’s unclear if SEO and digital marketing experts can really differentiate between the two terms. We believe they are pretty much one and the same. GEO is about implementing tactics to increase the probability that your organization’s content or name appears in a generative search engine, like ChatGPT or Perplexity, but these are also considered answer engines and part of AEO.
Do The Terms Chatbot Search Engines, Chat Search Engines, Generative AI Search Engines, and Answer Engines All Refer To The Same Thing?
In general, yes, unless a search engine is an internal search engine vs. an external one — meaning the search engine is focused on searching data and information owned or created by an organization (company’s internal data) vs. scouring and synthesizing data from across the internet. Learn more by reading our new AI Search Engine glossary.
Can A Nonprofit Benefit From SEO? Can SEO Benefit A Nonprofit?
Yes. While a key difference between nonprofits and for-profit organizations is that, in addition to creating awareness and generating engagements for their services among the audiences they serve, they have to employ marketing and promotional activities to generate funds (participate in fundraising) to support the work of their organization, non-profits can still benefit from and should employ SEO tactics just like for-profits.
Nonprofits can benefit from the following SEO tactics:
- Organic SEO Tactics (Unpaid SEO Tactics) that support their website and Google My Business Profile ranking well in search results.
- Paid SEO Tactics (Paid Search/Google Ads) that cause ads that link to a nonprofit’s choice of website page to appear at the top of search engine results listings for relevant, desirable searches. Ideally, a nonprofit one obtain and effectively employ a Google Nonprofit Ad Grant.
So, What Is Google Ad Grant?
Individuals often refer to the above in many ways — a Google Ad Grant, A Google Nonprofit Ad Grant, A Google Grant, A Google Nonprofit Grant. What our digital marketing agency assists with is all of the aforementioned if organizations are trying to understand the Google Grant for Nonprofits which provides:
- $120,000 in annual free “Search” vs. “Display” advertising from Google Ads — this is text vs. image advertising, although advertisers can often employ a small non-branded, word-less image along with their text ads that provokes thoughts related to what the ad is advertising.
- A means for an ad (which often appears at the top of Google search results for terms with which you provide Google) to be shown to relevant searchers to create awareness or cause desired actions on your website such as signing up for an e-newsletter, making an inquiry by completing a contact form, clicking on a hyperlinked e-mail address or phone #, etc.
- A free way to drive traffic to your website to cause individuals who might be a good fit for your organization’s products and services to learn about your nonprofit organization, and possibly donate. Or, as mentioned above a free means to cause target audiences to take other desirable actions on your website (known as conversions), such as signing up to use your services or products.
How To Get Google Ad Grant?
The process for obtaining a Google Nonprofit Ad Grant has shifted a bit over the years, so we hesitate to document the exact steps for obtaining a Google Ad Grant since they are always changing. But, at a minimum, getting a Google Ad Grant so you can run Google Ads requires:
- You have a TechSoup account
- You have a Google Nonprofit Account
- You can demonstrate, by sharing appropriate documents or information, that your organization is a viable 501(c)(3)
- Your organization is not a college or university or a large healthcare provider, such as a hospital, health insurer, or health plan; nor, is your organization a government agency
- You demonstrate a general understanding of how Google search advertising works — and that’s where we come in, either training staff at your organization on the aforementioned and/or helping you to apply for a Grant, and then optimizing and monitoring the Google Search advertising you run using it.
How Does Nonprofit Marketing Differ From For-Profit Marketing?
As mentioned in our answer to the question above, nonprofits need to accomplish the following with their marketing and promotional activities:
- Cause awareness of their nonprofit organization, the way that for-profits do
- Cause engagements for their services (service use) by the target audiences the nonprofit serves, the way that a for-profit would
- Generate funds thru fundraising efforts to support the services and mission of their nonprofit organization — this latter objective is not one about which for-profits organizations need to be concerned
Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising Positions And Consulting Firms
To accomplish the above objectives, nonprofits usually employ two distinct professionals in-house/at their organization:
- Director of Marketing – individual responsible for creating awareness of the organization’s mission and various services
- Director of Fundraising – individual responsible for overseeing annual and non-annual fundraising campaigns and events that provide funds that allow the nonprofit to be able to continue to operate and offer critical services to their constituencies
The Director of Marketing, Director of Fundraising, and/or the nonprofit Executive Director are often responsible for applying for a variety of appropriate, available grants to support their important work and operations. If a nonprofit organization is large enough, it may employ a Grant Writer in-house to apply for grants.
Of course, any of the above work can be outsourced to fundraising or marketing consulting firms or agencies, like our marketing agency.
Our list of frequency asked questions (FAQ) is a work-in-progress. We will continue to update it with answers to questions from which we think our visitors would benefit. So, please continue to return to this page, and don’t hesitate to e-mail us a question at gail.moraski@allintheresults.com.