Six Critical SEO metrics. 73 nonprofits. Play Online Now.

The data included in this report has been taken from tools that are freely available to the general public. These include Ahrefs, Moz and Advanced Web Rankings. None of the data we've used comes from first-party data or owned platforms (e.g Google Analytics or Google Search Console).

The six metrics we've used to assess the organic health of these charities are recognised industry-wide as being strong indicators of how a site is performing in search engine results pages (SERPs). These are:

Domain Authority

A score from 0-100 which predicts how well a website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). This score is influenced, in part, by a website’s backlink profile (the number of high quality links a website has from other sites). The higher the better!

CWV Mobile (Homepage)

Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience. These metrics are combined to create a page experience score ranging from 0-100, with a higher score being better. We've audited each charity's homepage. You can read more from Google about Core Web Vitals here.

Organic Traffic (Monthly)

The estimated volume of traffic that arrives on a website each month from a search engine. More traffic equates to more users!

#1 Rankings (Non-brand)

The no. of non-brand keywords that a website ranks in position 1 on Google for. Click-through rates (CTRs) for results in the top position are much higher than all other positions. A non-branded keyword is any search carried out on Google that doesn't contain an organisation's brand in the search.

Referring Domains

The number of unique domains (other websites) which are linking to a charity's website. Typically, the higher this number is, the higher your Domain Authority score, although low quality links can harm a site. High quality links are understood by Google to infer authority on the content being linked to.

Error Codes

A high number of 30x (redirects) and 404 (broken pages) can impact SEO performance if these have not been implemented correctly. The lower the better!

We know that charities categorise themselves differently, and we know that some of the categories aren't widely used to group charities together in other benchmark reports. But for the benefit of this site's functionality, we grouped by the way we assumed users would want to see the data, to give you the best insights within your own sub-sector.

We also know that a microsite like this can never tell the full story. We know lots of charities have commercial competitors, valuable subdomains, and important e-commerce arms that are up against the likes of eBay and Preloved, but focusing on those is what the work of a full-scale SEO audit is for, and fell outside what we could realistically do in this survey. We also know there will be some disagreement over our groupings—one might ask if it is fair to benchmark, say, a charity focused on bird protection against one that cares for dogs, but Animal Welfare covers both for the purposes of this audit. A charity focused on fostering (Action for Children) does not have the same audience as a hospital charity (GOSH), yet in this case we've grouped these charities together) because the cause they work towards (in this case bettering the lives of children) is the same. In some cases we felt charities could exist within two different categories—in the case of Save the Children and Sightsavers, we could have grouped these in International Aid. In these cases, we've made a decision to go with the grouping that felt better aligned with how that charity would be viewed by the general public.

The simple answer: time! We intend to roll this project out to become a definitive reference point for nonprofits interested in improving their SEO, so if you'd like to be included in a future iteration of this project, please get in touch.

Yes, we do. In some cases, we've built websites for them. In others, we provide dedicated SEO and/or digital marketing support.

Totally fair! Small charities can achieve remarkable things from an SEO perspective. It takes limited budget and some creative thinking but it's completely possible. The tips that we've included in each of the sub-sector audits focus on what you can do now at your charity. None of them are aimed solely at mega charities, and all of the tips apply to big and small charities alike. SEO is not about big budgets—you can achieve much more with some (data-led) creative thinking!

At the moment, this data isn't "live" data, and was correct as of 8th December 2021, when this microsite went live.