Children's Charities SEO Sector Deep Dive

Please note this article contains references to child abuse, child neglect and sexual exploitation that some readers might find upsetting.

The UK has a wide range of life-changing, inspiring children’s charities making a real difference to the lives of vulnerable and ill children around the world. Some of these charities are household names, identified by their logos alone. Many of them have different aims—a hospital charity has very different aims from an organisation funding research into children development, which in turn has different needs from a fostering and adoption charity. This audit is designed to understand the unique features of the search engine results pages (SERPs) that these charities operate in, and help identify organic opportunities that will ultimately help more users find these charities, which are:

• Barnardo’s
• Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity (GOSH)
• NSPCC
• Save the Children
• Action for Children
• The Children’s Society
• Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF)

Reflections on our data

A key issue in this sub-sector that our data uncovered centres around the keywords that each charity ranks for. The average number of non-branded terms (e.g user searches that don’t include a charity’s name) that these charities rank in position 1 for stood at 231 at the time of writing—the second lowest average across all sectors. There is a major opportunity here to build out content that meet the needs of users searching on topics relating to the causes this sub-sector works to support. We’ll come back to this later in this audit.

The Domain Authority (DA, an indicator of the overall “strength” of a domain) of charities in this sub-sector averaged 64/100. This is one of the lower averages of all the sub-sectors we looked at, however the range was small and this is still a strong average. Similarly, the average number of referring domains that point to these websites was lower than some of the other sub-sectors. Typically, the number of referring domains correlates with DA, as we see here. Across the six charities we looked at, there were an average of 10,633 referring domains.

Overall Core Web Vital Skills (metrics that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience) are low in this sub-sector. In line with the other sub-sectors we audited, the range of scores for these metrics is very wide: GOSH score 71/100 while The Children’s Society scored just 33.

Common Content

Whilst the services each charity offers differs, all of the charities are united in their aim to improve the lives of children. Two common content types featured across many of these charities are:

• What We Do/Our Work content, centred around an organisation's cause. For example, Save the Children have pages such as ‘Education’ and ‘Hunger’, The Children’s Society have landing pages for ‘Ending Child Poverty’ and ‘Preventing Child Sexual Exploitation’, while Action for Children have content on ‘Parenting Support’ and ‘Children’s Care Homes’.
• How You Can Help content, centred around the actions a supporter can take. This includes content on volunteering and fundraising opportunities as well as links to donation pages.

In this latter category of content type, we identified (entirely coincidentally) that nearly all the charities we’ve audited in this report are ranking on page one for the keyword ‘volunteering with children's charities’ (a term with around 80 monthly searches). The search engine results page (SERP) is shown below.

For GOSH Charity (a Torchbox client) it’s disappointing to not see them on page 1 for this term, given the strength of their brand.

Three of the charities we looked at in this audit provide information about reporting concerns about a child’s welfare. Action for Children and NSPCC both have pages meeting this user need, and they rank highly for keywords such as ‘worried about a child’ and ‘report child neglect online’. Action for Children provides advice on where to report concerns and NSPCC provides services to report concerns. There’s an interesting, complex debate to be had here about who owns this content. In the case of Action for Children’s content, they have a landing page that provides basic support, with links to local government websites that support children who are at risk. Barnardos do something similar by linking out to the NSPCC, but the content design of their landing page compared to Action for Children’s is poorer from an SEO perspective. As such, Barnardos don’t rank for these terms. Both pages link out to other organisations as authorities on the matter, but Action for Children do it in a way that benefits their SEO at the same time.

The majority of the charities we looked at are ranking well for certain keywords which we would categorise as “head terms”. These are terms that relate specifically to the core of an organisation’s shape and makeup, and in some cases indicate a willingness to donate. Examples of keywords where these charities are ranking well include:

• ‘children’s charities’ (4,400 monthly searches)
• ‘children's charities uk’ (600 m/s
• ‘education charity’ (150m/s)
• ‘homeless children’s charity’ (100 m/s)
• ‘donate to children's hospital’ (60 m/s)
• ‘child abuse charity’ (50 m/s)

For the term “donate to children’s hospital”, GOSH’s first position ranking is for a page headlined “Donating toys and games”, not their central Donate page. This may well discourage users from clicking if they don’t want to specifically donate toys.

In each of the sub-sectors we reviewed, we found glaring examples of charities who weren’t ranking for core terms. In this sector, that’s no different.

• Action for Children do not rank on the first three pages of Google for the term “foster a child”. They’re paying for this term with a PPC ad, so it’s a clear priority, yet their content isn’t recognised by Google as serving this user’s query. A quick look at their Fostering hub shows that it’s in effect “a gateway page” of links to other pages on their site, with an H1 tag ( a key component in telling Google what content is about) that reads “Foster with us”. In contrast, Barnardos holds position 1 for this term. They also rank at the bottom of p1 for the term “adopt a child”. Similar on-page and structural issues exist with the page that does rank—the H1 reads “Who Can Adopt?”
• GOSH Charity—perhaps one of the best known children’s charities in the world—does not rank on the first three pages of Google for the term “children’s charities”.

Blog content and content hubs

The majority of the sites we looked at have Blogs, containing content that we refer to as “mission-driven”. This is content that doesn’t directly drive income or connect service users with support. Instead, it builds on the authority of each charity, in turn generating organic traffic. The types of content performing well for these charities includes:

• ‘How systemic racism affects young people in the UK’ (Barnardos)
• ‘How gender roles and stereotypes affect young people’ (Children’s Society)
• ‘No child should go hungry in the holidays’ (Save the Children)
• ‘Where is child poverty increasing in the UK?’ (Action for Children)

Again, both CIFF and GOSH don’t appear to be ranking well for blog content, which is a missed opportunity given this content’s role in driving valuable traffic, boosting brand awareness and encouraging donations.

When researching and planning blog content, consider the subtopics which are relevant to the key areas where you are offering support. By adding relevant internal links to important pages, such as those on What We Do or Our Work subfolders, this signals to Google that this content is important and it can help boost your rankings. Anchor text (the clickable text of a link) is thought to help Google understand what a piece of content is about, so avoid using meaningless text like “find out more” or “click here”.

Here’s an example of how Barnardos have used internal linking from their ‘How do I become a foster parent?’ blog post to their ‘Foster a child’ page.

By building content ‘hubs’ about topics which are relevant to your charity, you can create a cluster of links to the topic pages which will boost the authority of the main topic page. For example, if Child Poverty is an area of focus for your charity and you have a relevant landing page, create content on subtopics which links back to the main giving page.

One immediate area of opportunity centres around the keyword ‘causes of child poverty’: none of the charities we looked at are currently ranking on the first page of Google for this term.

The Children’s Society rank on page 2 for this term, so there’s a big opportunity to review their existing content in a bid to move it up to the rankings. If you’re any of the other charities in this sub-sector, there’s only one charity on page 1 for this term (UNICEF) so there’s a big opportunity to own this keyword.

NSPCC are successfully using content hubs to drive significant traffic to their site. Their ‘What is Abuse’ content hub is ranking on page 1 of Google for over 1,100 keywords. This hub covers a breadth of content on topics such as types of abuse, spotting the signs of child abuse and the effects of child abuse. This level of detail doesn’t exist on the websites of other charities we looked at within this sub-sector.

Navigation and IA

How a site is structured is often understood to be a matter of UX, and it is more common than not that site’s are built in such a way as to be useful (i.e. navigable) to users who are already on the site. But user journeys more often than not begin with a Google search (in the case of a website like NHS.UK, 90% of their traffic comes from organic search, for context). A site’s IA must consider the different entry points that user’s use when arriving on the site, but it must also consider what users are searching for to surface these entry points. It’s a critical facet of good SEO, simultaneously sending signals to Google about the relevance and importance of content within a site’s hierarchy. There may be opportunities to improve the Information Architecture of these charities’ sites, to enhance the user experience and improve internal linking for SEO benefit.

A distinction between NSPCC and other charities is in their main navigation, which is structured differently to other websites. The ‘What is Abuse’ content hub, previously mentioned, features on the main navigation, which provides users with touch points for advice and support. Other charities have a greater focus on ‘What we do’/ ‘Our Work’, which could be why these pages are driving the majority of traffic; Google potentially recognises the value of this content from its location within the hierarchy of the NSPCC website.

Challenge Events

Lastly, it is worth mentioning the importance of Challenge, Community and Mass participation events, which play a critical role in contributing to income for all of these charities (except CIFF).

For terms like “run a marathon for charity” and “run a 5K for charity”, none of the charities we looked at rank on page 1 of Google. The NSPCC have a ranking on page 2 for this first term, and interestingly they’re also paying for both searches by bidding on PPC terms, which indicates that they understand the value of this traffic. For each of the charities in this sub-sector, there are a number of different approaches to take here:

• Review the earlier advice in this audit, and create supporting content around events for future supporters. Someone prepared to run a marathon for your charity will almost certainly Google something similar to “what’s it like running the London marathon”, so consider the value of this kind of added-value content.
• Consider the IA of your site, and how it can be mapped to different user searches. Someone searching for “run a marathon for charity” is at a very different stage to someone Googling “run a 10K for charity”, so make sure your sub-category pages for Challenge Events have strong landing pages for these very different broad searches (e.g. /run-10K/ and /run-marathon). GOSH Charity’s IA is an example of one we’d like to see done differently: these landing pages don’t exist on the site, and events are instead filterable, meaning it will be very difficult to rank for this kind of query. Save the Children have organised their Runs and Walks content under one (very deeply structured) landing page, but again, someone who wants to walk for charity will not be searching in the same way as a future marathon runner, so this page will always struggle to rank well for both types of queries. In contrast, Cancer Research UK and Mind (both of whom are not operating within this sub-sector) rank on page 1 for all three of these terms, showing what’s possible for your Challenge content.
• Consider using event schema markup for specific events. This provides relevance and timeliness to individual events, which Google may well reward you with. You can either do this via a developer, or via your Google Search Console account. Although we couldn’t see any clear examples in this sector of charities doing this, here’s how Time Out’s SERP result looks for a related 10K search.

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