A guide to SEO for charities

Organic Search is one of the top marketing channels for charitable organisations.

However, according to the 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report, a third of charities say they have poor search engine optimisation skills. SEO can often seem intimidating, and with so many things to consider, organisations with limited resource are often left wondering where to begin, or whether it’s even worth investing the time.

While it’s true there are several aspects to SEO, we think it’s about breaking it down into achievable steps, starting with the elements that are going to bring you the most return. In this article, we’re going to explore the different elements of SEO, to help you uncover where it’s worth putting your time and money to get the results you’re looking for.

What is SEO?

Let’s start by taking it back to basics.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, a way of improving your website for search engines, most commonly Google.

A search engine will crawl every website to identify pages, their purpose and content and will use an algorithm to decide whether this page should appear in search results, which is called indexing a page. So when we optimise a site for search engines, part of what we’re doing is trying to make it easier for our site to be crawled and indexed. We’ll get into the details of how to do this later.

Google’s algorithm has evolved over the years, so much so that SEO is no longer just about crawling and indexing, but about content relevance, user experience and more. The crux of it is there are lots of different moving parts to SEO, but what we’re aiming to do is make it as easy as possible for search engines to read, understand and positively evaluate our web pages.

Why is SEO important for charities?

Now we know what the purpose of SEO is, but why is it important?

Billions of searches take place on Google everyday, and it’s a well known fact that users will only ever view the first page of search results. So if your site isn’t appearing in the top 10 results, it significantly reduces its chances of being found without you promoting it elsewhere.

The obvious benefit of appearing in search is getting relevant users to your site, where you’ll hopefully be able to engage visitors and create lasting members, donors or general supporters of your organisation. But good SEO is not just about site traffic, but also building your online presence and brand recognition, building trust through exposure in the search results that your users are looking at.

For example, users searching ‘prostate cancer’ in the UK will find Prostate Cancer UK as the first search result. Whilst other ranking sites are medical bodies detailing symptoms, on the Prostate Cancer UK site users will find more information around living with prostate cancer and ways to access support, positioning the charity as a go-to source of information and support that is easily found online. SEO therefore helps charities to appear where their users are searching.

Categories of SEO

Now we’ve covered what SEO is and why you should care about it, we’re going to break it down into its core components:

• On-page SEO – covers everything that occurs on your site
• Off-page SEO – covers everything that occurs off your site
• Technical SEO – covers everything technical that impacts your site

There are additional categories that might be relevant to your organisation, such as international SEO and the new kid on the block, generative engine optimisation (GEO), but we can chat about AI-powered search engines another day. For now, we’re going to keep it simple and focus on traditional SEO and the three broad categories that will affect every organisation.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO involves optimising what’s on your site, often focusing on individual pages. It includes:

• Content
• Keyword targeting
• HTML
• Internal linking

Content

As a charity, you’ll want to produce content that is interesting to your audience. This could be through educational content or informative news and reports. Whatever it may be, creating high-quality and relevant content is particularly important under Google’s EEAT ranking system which credits content that is designed to help people and not purely for gaining better rankings. When thinking about content, put your users first and ask yourself what they would like to read.

Keyword targeting

To create SEO friendly content that is helpful to users, you’ll want to carry out keyword research to understand what people are searching for. You’ll craft your content around these keywords to increase your chance of appearing in relevant searches. You’ll also want to consider the search intent behind a keyword. For example, is a user searching for information, or are they looking for immediate support? Create content that aligns with and provides an answer or a solution to the search.

And if you don’t have the tools to carry out keyword research, there are other ways you can ensure your content aligns to users! Speak to colleagues who are in contact with end-users and ask them what topics they find crop often, or head to community hubs like Reddit to gain more insight into the questions your audience is asking.

HTML

While content needs to be interesting to users, it also needs to be readable by search engines and humans alike. This means optimising your HTML, focusing on writing meta titles, descriptions and headings.

To optimise your HTML, you need to correctly tag headings and include your target keywords to explain to Google what your content is about and its structure, increasing the likelihood of your ranking for the relevant keywords.

Similarly meta titles should be optimised to include target keywords, but you should also consider that these will appear in Google search results alongside meta descriptions, which should be written in tandem with each other to encourage clicks.

Internal linking

Internal linking not only helps guide the user to related content, but helps search engines crawl your site by providing links to relevant pages, enabling crawlers to discover more of your content. By providing topical links between pages, you’ll help both users and spiders understand the content of your site as a whole.

This is where anchor link text becomes important. You’ll want to ensure the anchor text is descriptive, and where possible includes relevant keywords. Google crawlers take this text into account when deciphering content and relevance, so avoid using ‘read more’ or ‘here’.

How important is on page SEO?

For organisations just starting out in the world of SEO, keyword research is particularly important and a good place to start. It will help you understand what sorts of keywords you should be targeting, and guide you to update or create content based on this. And without content, you won’t have pages to optimise in the first place! On-page SEO is often the area where you’ll have most control to carry out optimisation tasks – another added benefit.

What is off page SEO?

Off-page SEO revolves around elements that occur off of your site that can impact your SEO. These include:

• Backlinks
• PR and marketing
• Brand awareness
• Local SEO

Backlinks

Backlinks refer to links from another site to yours. While the impact of backlinks is debated, their potential benefits are twofold. Firstly, links enable both Google crawlers and users to discover your site from other sites on the web. This can be particularly beneficial for new websites, where a link from a large site like a news outlet could help discoverability of a site which might not have a large web presence.

Secondly, backlinks have an impact on the reputation of your site. A link from a credible source will signal that your site is also credible. On the other hand, a link from a spam site can make yours appear less than trustworthy.

PR and marketing

PR, social media and other marketing activities can impact your SEO by driving traffic to your website, improving backlinks and brand mentions on other sites. This will signal to search engines that your content is of value to users and that you are a trustworthy organisation. So, by creating more awareness of your site through PR or marketing, you’ll indirectly benefit your SEO efforts.

Brand awareness

This leads us onto the importance of your brand. Have you noticed that big brands often dominate your search results? While not always the case, brand awareness can be an important factor for SEO, as search engines take into account the legitimacy of your organisation.

Ultimately, Google wants to know that you are who you say you are, and that you are a trustworthy source. So things like brand mentions from high authority sites will create positive signals for your brand, while social profiles and Google Business Profiles establish your credibility.

Local SEO

Talking of Google Business Profiles, we can’t forget local SEO. Technically its own category of SEO, it involves optimising your site to attract users based on location based searches. This is particularly important for charities who work with local communities, or where traffic to a physical location might be important, like a food bank.

For these types of searches you’re aiming to appear in the local pack, a type of rich search result that shows users business listings on a map. To optimise for this, you’ll need a Google Business Profile, and will want to include location signals on your site such as business address and look to build local credibility with relevant keywords, local links or positive reviews and testimonials.

How important is off page SEO?

While it’s important to build your site reputation which can impact off-page SEO, it is not as easy to control as elements of on-page SEO. If you’re just starting out in SEO, you’re likely to focus your efforts on content. If however, you’re finding that you’re at a good place with content but aren’t seeing results, you may want to investigate your off-page SEO and see if there are improvements to be made in this area.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves optimising the technical elements of your site to ensure it can be accessed by Google and users. These include:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Page speed
• Mobile experience
• Schema markup

Crawling

Search engine bots need to be able to crawl your site to navigate and discover your pages. Every site has a crawl budget, which refers to the amount of pages a search engine will crawl on your site.

Ways to improve your site crawlability include submitting a sitemap, which helps Google to identify the pages on your site, and reviewing your site structure to make it easier for your pages to be found through crawling. You’ll also want to consider the hygiene of your site. To enable the discovery of your pages and avoid wasting your crawl budget, review broken and redirecting links to ensure you are pointing to valid pages.

Indexing

Once a search engine has crawled your website, it needs to be able to index it so that the page can appear in search results. Google Search Console is a helpful tool for understanding which of your pages are indexed. Reasons for not indexing might include duplicate content, canonical tags or no index tags which might be in place.

Bear in mind there are times where such tags should be in place. No index tags should be applied to pages that you don’t want to appear in search, such as marketing landing pages. Similarly, duplicate content can pose an issue for indexability and in such cases, Google will choose only one to index, or you should put a canonical tag in place. Take the time to review your indexed pages and ensure that the proper tags are in place where relevant.

Schema markup

Adding schema markup to your site can help provide extra detail in search results, known as rich results. Schema markup essentially adds context to the content on your site to help search engines find the information they need, from organisational information like contact details and address, to event details such as date and location. This information is then used to craft rich results, such as these charity run event results.

Rich search results are beneficial for providing users with the information they’re looking for quickly, and can result in better CTR than traditional search results.

Page speed

Something to remember when discussing SEO is we’re not only optimising the site for search engines, but first and foremost for users.

User experience is closely tied to SEO, and page speed can heavily impact the user experience. A slow loading site is likely to cause a user to bounce, which will send negative signals to search engines about your page experience. Page speed is therefore an important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and should not be a forgotten factor in search engine optimisation.

Mobile experience

62% of web traffic comes from mobile users, and this number increases year on year. So it’s no surprise Google has also made mobile an important factor in its ranking algorithm. If your site isn’t designed with mobile users in mind, this may be impacting your SEO efforts. When reviewing page speed, it’s important to consider the user interface on mobile to ensure your site can be interacted with as effectively as on a desktop device.

How important is technical SEO?

Crawling, indexing and a generally positive user experience are vital to getting your page ranking in search results. However, if you don’t have development teams in-house, bear in mind you will likely need input from a developer when it comes to improving page speed.

Tools to review SEO performance

Now we’ve covered everything you need to know to get started with SEO. Except, how do you know what to action next? You’ll need to establish how your site is currently performing, and where you need to improve. This is where SEO tools might come in handy. There are several free and paid tools out there to help.

1. Google Analytics and Search Console

Google’s own tools are free to use and should be set up for any website. Google Analytics is a great starting point for getting an overview of how much traffic is coming to your site from Organic Search. Google Search Console can provide more data around which pages and queries lead users to your site.

You’ll also want to use Google Search Console to submit a sitemap, review your indexed pages, and view core web vitals to identify any problems with your technical SEO.

2. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is another Google tool that can provide more detailed information on website performance and page speed. A word of caution, these tools were created for developers and are full of technical jargon, so don’t worry if you’re unsure what to tackle here. This can be helpful to identify potential problems, but will likely need a web developer to review and carry out any actions.

3. SEO-specific tools

A question that might be on a lot of people’s minds, should you invest in an SEO tool? Platforms like SEMRush and Ahrefs are purpose-built to help marketers carry out audits and optimisation tasks across all areas of SEO. They can be beneficial, but they do come at a cost. As an alternative, free tools such as Screaming Frog allow you to crawl a site and identify potential issues, but these tend to be more orientated around technical SEO and less around on and off-page.

Ultimately, the tools needed will depend on what you’re trying to achieve.

Where should I prioritise my SEO efforts?

Once you’ve got an idea of where you need to improve, you might find that there’s still quite a lot of work to do. This is where prioritisation comes in. Start by reviewing your on-page, off-page and technical SEO and go from there. If you have a particular problem area, you know you’ll want to prioritise that.

It’s also important to think about how you will measure success. If you’re carrying out optimisation tasks, you’ll want to know if they’re making a difference, so consider which metrics you want to measure and what impact the changes you make will have.

Finally, whether or not you can carry out certain tasks in-house is likely an important consideration for any organisation. If you find you have limited capacity or know-how to action the things you want, engaging an agency or consultant might be the way forward. Consider how SEO will support your goals as an organisation, and ask yourself if its worth the investment.