Transforming Google Ad Grants performance with SEO for Sight Scotland

Sight Scotland is one of Scotland’s oldest charities, dedicated to meeting the challenges of visual impairment for over 200 years. Their services span specialist education, residential care, community support, and accessible enterprise, from the Royal Blind School and Scottish Braille. Their long-term goal is to reach and empower everyone in Scotland affected by sight loss.

With growing competition for visibility and major changes to Google’s search algorithms, they wanted to make sure the people who need their services could find them easily online.

Sight Scotland became a Torchbox client in late 2024, at a time when their Google Ad Grants account was underperforming. Despite access to $10,000 of monthly ad spend, it was only spending around $600 a month.

It was during this time that the entire sector was feeling the impact of AI Overviews and AI Mode, which pushed ads further down search results and reduced overall traffic for informational searches.

It was becoming harder than ever for charities to get seen, but with the right technical setup and strategy, there was clear potential to buck the trend.

We began with a full Google Ad Grants account restructure, simplifying campaign groups and improving budget flexibility.

Rather than spreading spend across too many campaigns, we focused on clear, high-intent themes such as:

• Sight loss support in Scotland
• Information and advice around key sight loss conditions
• Sight Scotland Veterans

At the same time, our SEO team provided a detailed technical audit and content recommendations.

These included:

• Improving crawlability and internal linking across key pages
• Updating metadata and headings to better align with user intent
• Optimising key information pages such as Living with Glaucoma and Macular Degeneration Support with information to match the intent of a user: clear symptoms, details, treatment options and user stories to support and guide website visitors to get the care or support they need.

Once these updates went live in April 2025, we saw an immediate uplift in performance. Pages were indexed more effectively, ad relevance improved, and organic visibility grew, creating a stronger foundation for Grants to perform.

By August, a second wave of SEO updates helped sustain growth. Paid and organic channels began working together, creating a virtuous cycle: better content drove higher quality scores and cheaper clicks, while PPC data informed future SEO priorities.

Sight Scotland’s Grants account went from underutilised to almost maxing out their $10k monthly allowance, spending $9,200 in September 2025. More importantly, since April, the account has driven 13x more new users to the Sight Scotland website compared to the previous six-month period.

This growth came at a time when many Google Ad Grants accounts were experiencing a sector-wide decline in spend and traffic following AI-driven changes to search.

By focusing on helpful, trusted, human content, rather than donation asks, Sight Scotland became more visible to people seeking information, support, and advice on sight loss.

Continuing our partnership with their growing in-house team, Sight Scotland is further expanding its SEO work and refining its Google Ads strategy.

They’ve become a great example of how charities can adapt to the changing search landscape.