SEO Charity Website Case Study

How we more than doubled volunteer traffic organically.

Discover one of the many ways we help non-profits like yours in our SEO charity website case study below.

Problem:

We have been supporting our client with their digital marketing for several years. Today, approximately 80 – 90% of their volunteer enquiries are gained through their website’s lead generation. They are a true voluntary organisation and the amount of volunteers they have impacts the core and outreach support they are able to offer their service users.

Our team was asked to find alternative ways of gaining relevant website traffic that would complement their paid social media marketing and search engine marketing. We also wanted to diversify their traffic sources and start building more long term ways of gaining them a return on investment. Search engine optimization (SEO) was an obvious starting point for this task.

The charity has been established for more than 30 years but is still considered a ‘best kept secret’ internally even by their staff. As an overarching task, we had been assigned to boost the profile of the charity, increasing their brand awareness especially their volunteering opportunities.

The Client’s SEO Charity Challenges:

  • There’s a huge and growing competition for volunteers in the nonprofit sector, especially online
  • Despite the client’s website domain being nearly 10 years old, the domain authority for the website was low
  • Most of the keywords we were wanted to rank for were dominated by other good causes
  • The website loading speed was slow meaning that even if we captured the traffic, the visitors may bounce before consuming the content
  • Many charitable organisations are utilising the Google Ad grant for search advertising. This is making it more difficult to find good targets surrounding volunteerism for results based SEO.

Our Solution:

  • A review of the client’s website content and current SEO
  • We made the website speed considerably faster than competitor sites with a new web design and rebuild carried out as a separate project
  • Identify opportunities to rank highly on Google for related search terms
  • Identifying opportunities that were not dominated by Google Ads
  • Content marketing – content creation, designing and creating search engine optimised content. A focus on making great content that would rank nationally as well as benefit local SEO
  • Increase search engine result share surrounding ‘volunteer skills’ in order to gain more awareness
  • Communicate the value in volunteering for the charity
  • Position the charity as an authority in the volunteering sphere
  • Monitoring the results of our SEO efforts and making adjustments as necessary.

Services provided:

  1. Consultancy.
  2. SEO.
  3. Keyword research.
  4. Copywriting.
  5. Web page design.

Results:

As of the time of writing, our charity SEO efforts have delivered the following:

  • Google ranking of 2nd place for ‘volunteer skills’ nationally in Great Britain
  • Google ranking of 2nd place for ‘skills gained from volunteering’ nationally in Great Britain
  • Google ranking of 2nd place for ‘skills for volunteering’ nationally in Great Britain
  • Google ranking of 2nd place for ‘volunteer skills list’ nationally in Great Britain.

Screenshot Moz.com SEO ranking software.

Web analytics show this contributed directly to a 105.13% increase on organic traffic to the client’s website compared to the previous period. This resulted in an increase of organic traffic being 21.84% of total traffic sources the previous year to 46.07% for the following period.

As SEO professionals, we never attempt to ‘spam’ or trick search engines in order to increase rankings for the nonprofit organizations we support. Unlike some other SEOs, we focus on identifying opportunities.

As with all online marketing, there is always more that can be done and charity SEO is no exception. In order to continue increasing the client’s rankings (and even maintaining them), link building will be key.

“Having worked with Paul, we have learned that SEO plays an important role in any website and can make all the difference to charities like ours.” – Charity CEO.

We are expert marketers with a passion for helping charitable causes make positive social change. Please contact us for a no-obligation, completely free conversation.