SEO for charities

Somebody looking for support tonight. Somebody deciding where to give. Somebody wondering whether they have a spare Saturday a month. Somebody signing up for a sponsored run. A business choosing a partner for its staff fundraising year. They all type something into Google, none of them type the same thing, and good seo for charities starts by treating those as separate searches rather than one.

In the US the same work usually goes by seo for nonprofits. The words change and the giving framing changes with them, but the principles below apply either way.

Five audiences, five sets of searches

Most charity sites are organised around the organisation: about us, our work, news, donate. Visitors arrive organised around what they want, and that gap is where most of them are lost. The fix is structural. One page per audience, so the people you support, donors, volunteers, fundraisers and corporate partners each land somewhere written for them.

The same applies to causes. A charity that runs a helpline, funds research and campaigns on policy is doing three things, and each is searched for in its own words. Give each its own page. A page trying to reassure a frightened parent and persuade a corporate partner at the same time will do neither.

The audiences also search on different timescales. A volunteer is usually browsing and will come back if the page answers the practical questions: how much time, where, what training, whether there is an age limit. A corporate partner is weighing you against other charities and wants evidence of what their money and their staff's time would do. Neither of them should have to find that on the donate page.

The people who need help come first

They are the most important searchers a charity has, and usually the least served. They search in the language of their situation, not in the name of your programme, and they are often doing it on an old phone, late, and under strain. A page titled with an internal service name will not be found by somebody who does not know that name exists.

The person searching for help late at night is the most important visitor your site will ever have, and usually the one it was least designed for.

So write those pages in plain words. Say who the service is for, whether it is free, what area it covers, and exactly what happens when somebody gets in touch. Make the phone number and the next step visible without scrolling. This is also the part of charity seo with the least competition, because so few sites do it properly.

Build campaign and event pages before the peak

Much charity search is seasonal: awareness months, a winter appeal, a spring challenge event, year-end giving. Nobody ranks a new page in the week the interest arrives, so the page has to be built and indexed months earlier.

Keep the same address every year. A page at a fixed address that you update with new dates and a new story carries forward everything it earned last time, while a fresh page for each year starts from nothing and competes with its own predecessor.

Event participants are their own audience here. Somebody who has entered a marathon or a trek and needs a charity place searches for the event by name, and a page for each event you take part in, with how to get a place and what you ask them to raise, is how they find you rather than somebody else.

Donation and sign-up pages that load fast and ask little

Search brings the visitor. The page decides whether they give. It needs to load quickly on a phone and ask for as little as possible: suggested amounts with what each one does, a clear choice between a single gift and a monthly one, Gift Aid asked simply for UK donors, a wallet payment offered, and no account to create. Volunteer and event sign-ups work the same way: ask for what you need to reply, and save the rest for the conversation.

Most lost donations are lost after the decision, on the form, rather than before it. The build side of that is covered on our charity web design and marketing page.

Local search, if you have shops or services

A charity with shops, a hospice, day centres or local branches is also a local business in Google's eyes. Each location wants its own Google Business Profile with accurate opening hours, what it accepts and how to reach it, and a page on the site that matches. People look for somewhere nearby to donate furniture or drop off clothes far more often than they search for a charity by name, and the map results decide where they go.

Google Ad Grants and paid search

Eligible charities can get up to 10,000 US dollars a month of Google search ads through Google for Nonprofits, known as Google Ad Grants. It is subject to Google's eligibility rules and account policies, which Google sets and changes, so check the current terms before planning around it. Accounts that break the rules can be suspended, which is why the grant needs managing rather than switching on.

Run properly, it is the most useful form of google ads for charities there is: specific keywords, a landing page per audience, and conversion tracking so you can see which ads produce gifts and sign-ups. It sits alongside search work rather than replacing it. Grant ads can appear where your pages do not rank yet, and pages that rank keep producing when the grant's limits bite.

Measure donations, sign-ups and referrals, not traffic

Traffic is easy to grow and tells you very little. An article answering a broad awareness question can bring in thousands of visits and not one gift. The numbers worth watching are donations and their value, monthly gift sign-ups, volunteer applications, event registrations and referrals from people who need the service, each tied back to the search and the page that produced it.

Put plainly, what a charity wants from all of this is more of the right people finding the service, more donors and volunteers, a site that works on a phone, and knowing which search produced each donation or sign-up. Everything above is in service of those four things. The rest of our sector guides are in the guides index.