Animal Welfare SEO Sector Deep Dive

The animal welfare sector is driven by the rescue, protection, adoption and conservation of animals in the UK and around the world. As part of our audit, we looked at the SEO health of the following charities:

• RSPCA
• RSPB
• Battersea Dogs & Cats Home
• Cats Protection
• Blue Cross for Pets
• PDSA
• Guide Dogs
• Dogs Trust

This sub-sector comes out on top of the nonprofit pile for two of the six metrics we reviewed: the no. of position 1 non-brand rankings held (e.g. searches not containing a charity’s name) and the average volume of organic traffic arriving at each site, double that of the Cancer Support & Research sector. The demand for the services and causes these charities support is unparalleled when viewed through the lens of how much organic traffic arrives on the site each month.

Average Domain Authority (DA) stands at 68, which is the joint second highest DA of all the sectors in this survey. This average is bolstered by the RSPB’s individual Domain Authority, which at 75 is the joint third highest, one point behind British Heart Foundation, who are only bettered by Cancer Research UK. This is a fantastic DA for the RSPB, and is likely correlated to the ~34K referring domains the site has, one of the highest scores for the metrics of any of the charities we reviewed.

This sub-sector contains some extremely big, well known charities: the average income across all was above £83m a year—very much in the “super charity”, household name territory. But within this figure, there’s a real success story for small charities. Dogs Trust, a charity of just £11m income, punch well above their station: average monthly traffic of 1.2m compared to 1.9m for RSPCA and 1.3m for the RSPB, and a higher Domain Authority (69) than RSPCA, Cats Protection and Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. This is a phenomenal result for the charity.

Educational Content Hubs

A huge element of the work that charities in the Animal Welfare sector do centres around the education of the general public about animal protection topics; pet owners, future pet owners, the general public, vets, governments and corporations. This focus is reflected in each charity’s use of content and—for some—their SEO strategies. Organic search plays a critical role in educating the public; it’s a perfect channel for answering common informational queries from target audiences, without charities having to utilise marketing budgets on PPC ads.

Informational hubs (grouped content such as Blue Cross’ Pet Advice, RSPCA’s Farm Animal Care or RSPB’s Bird Breeds A-Z) are hugely valuable assets for SEO because they build overall relevance for your site in search engines, drive traffic from organic search and increase awareness of your organisation. These content hubs are also the main delivery method for educational content - the website content on these sites is an integral part of the overall service offering for many animal welfare organisations.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (how to structure this content) is executed differently across the animal charities we audited, with different charities grouping their content in a variety of ways:

• By pet/animal type (dog, cat, rodent)
• By breed (Dalmatian, Bengal)
• By animal size (Small dogs, large dogs)
• By topic areas (pet adoption, training, behaviour)
• By season (spring, summer)
• By campaign or cause (environment, fighting animal testing)

Grouping information by theme to create content hubs is one of the primary ways to build a long term organic search strategy and is one of the most powerful tactics for growing organic traffic.

The RSPB does this really well with their A-Z of Bird Breeds, which ranks highly in Google search for thousands of bird breed keywords. The hub is structured around the species of birds with sub pages for additional information such as ‘Population’ and ‘Breeding and nesting habits’. Google then pulls these sub pages in as sitelinks within the results:

The Bird Breed A-Z hub has position one rankings for high volume keywords, and as shown in the example above, RSPB ranks above Wikipedia for the keyword ‘sparrowhawk’ which has 47,000 searches per month. Other number one rankings include:

• ‘Red kite’ (63,000 searches)
• ‘Goldfinch’ (58,000 searches)
• ‘Jackdaw’ (32,000 searches)
• ‘Wood pigeon’ (21,000 searches)

Each of the bird breed pages contain internal links to relevant subpages for each breed, which encourages the user to read on:

These subpage URLs are structured carefully to form a hub of content:

• /wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/sparrowhawk/
• /wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/sparrowhawk/a-top-predator/
• /wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/sparrowhawk/hunting/
• /wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/sparrowhawk/population-trends-and-threats/

By utilising a clear URL pattern and internal links on each of the pages, RSPB ensures search engines can discover all of the content on the site about that breed, which builds overall relevance for the website for that topic. This strategy can be scaled across multiple breeds, pet types, pet sizes, pet care topics etc.

Blog Content

Another content type used across the sector is blog posts, which allows charities to cover more light hearted topics, such as ‘how to make cat toys’, ‘dog ice lollies’ or ‘cat jokes’. This type of content not only increases organic traffic, but it’s easily shareable on social media channels, which is a positive for SEO in that it can directly result in an uplift on branded searches on search engines.

Blogs can also provide answers to commonly asked questions (usually one question to one blog post) across a range of topic areas. Examples in this sub-sector that we found were often highly topical, for example the RSPCA’s ‘What does Brexit mean for animal welfare?’ and Battersea’s ‘Can I walk my dog if self isolating?’ or responded to evergreen queries. Cats Protection ranks in position 1 for evergreen question queries such as ‘Why does my cat stare at me?’ and ‘Can cats see in the dark?’. These topics might not be best placed in a more formal informational hub, but work really well on a blog and drive traffic and awareness through search. Targeting question queries is also a great tactic for gaining featured snippets:

Cats Protection holds over 200 of these featured snippets for relevant keywords, including ‘can cats see in the dark?’ (3,400 searches per month), ‘can cats eat chocolate?’ (2,900 monthly searches), ‘why does my cat stare at me?’ (1,500 monthly searches) and ‘why are cats tongues rough?’ (250 monthly searches).

Where we saw blogs not performing so well in rankings are news or case study blog pages. Although these are fantastic for other marketing channels, we found that they generally don’t target any specific questions and therefore don’t tend to rank highly. A good mix of news and case study style content, combined with targeted audience-driven SEO blog posts is a blog strategy that would work the hardest for these animal welfare charities.

Brand Strength and SERP Features

When looking at branded search results in this sub-sector, there is strong brand recognition from Google and high search volumes for branded search terms. All the charities have extensive knowledge panels appearing in their branded searches, and the results pages often include paid adverts, local / map packs, ‘top stories’ and Twitter cards.

Given the brand strength in this sub-sector, the branded results are fairly low on pay-per-click ads. However, we found evidence that three of the charities in this subsector are bidding on their own brand names (see Dogs Trust above). The choice to bid on branded terms is one that’s been endlessly debated, with some of the very biggest commercial organisations taking quite different approaches to this.

Our approach is that charities should bid on their own brand terms as part of a holistic paid keyword strategy, by either utilising “free” budget from Google Ad Grants, or (where 100% impression share is critical) paying for these terms. It’s your digital real estate: own it.

The ‘Top Stories’ panel (the feature at the top of results pages that highlights latest and trending news) also appears regularly for animal rescue, breeding and rehoming searches. This means that there’s an opportunity for charities to try and rank within top stories with topical content, or leverage PR to gain brand mentions within top stories from other publications.

Animal welfare lends itself to PR as there's a huge appetite for animal stories, both cause-related and light hearted. Some examples of this include:

• Second chance for Pickle thanks to Battersea Brands Hatch
• Adorable one-eyed beagle Nacho is looking for his forever family
• Cold Snap Fuels RSPCA Fears For Underweight Hedgehogs' Survival This Winter
• 11 of the RSPCA animals you can adopt now in Norfolk

The good thing about press coverage of this type is that there are plenty of opportunities to link to pages deeper within your site rather than just the homepage. If the news article is about rehoming a Beagle, it is useful for the user to include a link to a rehoming page. Links deeper into your site will contribute to improving rankings and are usually harder to acquire than homepage links.

There’s an opportunity within this sub-sector for SEO teams to work closely with PR to earn backlinks from press coverage.

Image and Video SEO

Images are critical within this sub-sector for educating, convincing and converting - images are used for listing animals for adoption, discussing animal behaviour, identifying animal breeds etc. Image packs (embedded image results within a search engine results page) appear regularly within the sector so there is a potential opportunity to optimise for image search.

If this is an area you’ve not yet focused on (and it’s a commonly overlooked area of SEO) then there’s a real opportunity here to get ahead of other organisations. Large images are used by all charities, which makes sense: everyone loves pictures of cute animals! However, considerations should be made for optimising page speed and ensuring best practices for accessibility.

Another overlooked area of SEO centres around video. A charity’s YouTube channel should be optimised for search as video packs (embedded video results) appear regularly in organic SERPs. Your charity’s YouTube channel is in itself a huge asset for digital marketing and charities within this space should consider YouTube SEO best practices.

Cats Protection do a great job of utilising descriptive titles, creating themed content playlists and uploading subtitles for their videos:

This has resulted in some of their videos gaining huge amounts of views, for example, ‘How to introduce cats to dogs’ which has over 487,000 video views.

When searching for the keyword ‘How to introduce cats to dogs’ in Google, the video pack feature appears above all but one “blue link” and the Cats Protection is embedded directly into the results. Google also include key moments so users can skip to where they want to in the video—this is a recent, significant development in how Google embeds and understands video content:

When considering videos to create, using keyword research can inform priorities. The keywords that are relevant for the above video include:

• ‘how to introduce cats to dogs’ (500 searches)
• ‘how to introduce dogs to cats’ (500 searches)
• ‘how to introduce cats and dogs’ (70 searches)
• ‘how to introduce dogs to cats at home’ (10 searches)
• ‘how to introduce dogs and cats’ (10 searches)

These different lower-volume variants can add up significantly and drive organic traffic to your video. You can also look at top performing blog content and see whether the keywords for these blogs have a video pack on the results page. If there’s a video element on the page, and you already rank well for the topic, it could be beneficial to create a supporting video to further dominate the results page.

Local Search

Local search is extremely important within the animal welfare sector, with searches for adoption, rehoming, rescue and protection terms all including local listings and map packs.

Google prioritises local results by showing them above the traditional blue links, often using the larger style map packs and also ‘find results on’ which provides links to Yell, Yelp and other local listing sites.

If you’re at a charity who have local chapter, shops or centres, keeping on top of Google My Business (GMB) listings, reviews and stars will be a critical part of your SEO strategy. Local results in this sub-sector include adoption centres, pet hospitals and also physical shop locations, which are a key strategic fundraising channel.

Online Shops

Both physical and online shops are crucial for fundraising within animal welfare. Organic search can be a key driver in the success of online shops, but products need to be accessible and able to compete within the e-commerce space. This is where the tension between the amount of time and budget e-commerce sites spend on SEO and the equivalent budgets nonprofits have comes to light: charities move firmly into commercial space, yet so often, we see no budget at all being put behind the SEO of an online Shop.

All of the animal welfare charities hosted their online shops either on a subdomain, an entirely separate domain, or on eBay. While this audit didn’t look specifically at the health of these sub/separate domains, we’ve seen high profile examples across the charity sector where choosing to host (or move) shop content onto subdomains rather than host them as part of a site’s central domain (www.maindomain.org/shop) can have a significantly negative impact on a site’s organic health.

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