Violence Against Women and Girls SEO Sector Deep Dive

Please note this article refers to violence against women and girls, including physical and sexual abuse.

‘Violence against women and girls’ is defined by the UN as ‘any act of gender-based violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately’.

We examined the SEO health of the following eight charities, which include organisations working in the UK and internationally:

• Refuge
• Solace Women’s Aid
• Women's Aid
• Rape Crisis
• SafeLives
• Womankind Worldwide
• Women and Girls Network
• Girls Not Brides

Nonprofits working within the violence against women and girls (VAWG) sub-sector do incredibly valuable work that varies across a number of areas, including the types of service provision, or the geographical operating location. Some charities specialise in a specific type of violence, or a particular service user group such as black and minorities women, women with disabilities, or lesbian, bisexual and trans women.

Despite having different areas of expertise, charities within this space have many shared goals and align around similar principles. A number of nonprofits, including Women’s Aid, SafeLives and Rape Crisis, adhere to a set of shared VAWG standards. These standards include taking an intersectional approach, creating safety, undoing the harms of violence, and prevention.

For this reason, it’s worth noting that ‘competition’ in this sub-sector is a term that does not fit when nonprofits are working toward shared goals. However, investigating trends in SEO tactics that other organisations and websites use – and highlighting opportunities to improve – can help nonprofits better meet their audiences’ needs through search. It is this principle that underpins our use of the term “competitor” in this audit.

Reflections on our data

The Domain Authority (broadly defined as an indicator of the overall “strength” of a domain) of charities in this sub-sector averaged 59/100. Women’s Aid had the highest Domain Authority of the group at 70/100, closely followed by Girls Not Brides at 69/100.

Women’s Aid was one of the standout charities within the group, with the highest number of referring domains (9,436) and the highest estimated monthly traffic. In terms of rankings and overall visibility in search, Rape Crisis also stands out, with 149 position 1 rankings, compared to Women’s Aid with 72 and SafeLives, with 33.

In general, however, organic visibility is a major issue within this sub-sector. When reviewing the sector averages, VAWG had the lowest number of position 1 rankings of all 12 sub-sectors we’ve reviewed so far for SEO Super Trumps. Five out of the eight charities we reviewed had fewer than 20 non-brand position 1 rankings.

Providing support through informational content

One of the key ways that charities in this sector provide support is through informational content. Grouping information in a well-structured ‘content hub’, where the topics link together effectively is a core tactic in building relevance and evergreen visibility in search. It helps your expert content reach users who need support, directly where they are searching for it.

Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis both have informational content hubs that perform well in organic search; Women’s Aid have an ‘Information and Support’ section and Rape Crisis has a ‘Get Informed’ hub. These two content hubs were by far the best-performing folders of content of the eight websites we reviewed.

At the time of our audit, the Women’s Aid ‘Information and Support’ hub ranked in positions 1-10 for 686 keywords with a combined monthly volume of more than 307,000 searches. 178 of those keywords rank in positions 1-3. These included:

The top-performing pages on the Women’s Aid information hub include Coercive control, Getting an injunction and What is domestic abuse?

These pages rank for the highest number of keywords in traffic-driving positions (1-3), and have captured high-volume keyword groups that are relevant to Women’s Aid.

The ‘Coercive control’ informational page ranks in position 1 for ‘coercive control’ (22,000 monthly searches), and variations such as ‘what is coercive control’ (1,600 searches) and ‘coercive control definition’ (1,600 searches). This piece of content ranks well for a hero keyword and a huge variety of lower-volume keyword variations.

Excellent SEO content design practices – including descriptive H2 headings, listed examples, statistics, references and links to related content on the site – are some of the reasons this page is highly visible.

Women’s Aid have established themselves as experts on the topic of coercive control, through their campaign work to make it a criminal offence. This, as well as linking out to where they’ve written for other publications such as The Telegraph, contributes to their expertise and authoritativeness on this subject. There are, however, opportunities to improve the content, such as fixing broken or redirecting links within the content.

Rape Crisis has a similarly well-structured content hub called ‘Get Informed’. At the time of our audit, it ranked in positions 1-10 for 588 keywords with a combined monthly volume of over 258,000 searches. An impressive 300 of those keywords were in positions 1-3. It’s a fantastic example of user-focused content that successfully ranks for non-branded terms – increasing the reach of the information to people who may not be familiar with Rape Crisis as a charity.

The ‘Get Informed’ hub ranks highly for information on different types of sexual violence, including:

• About sexual violence
• Types of sexual violence
• Statistics about sexual violence

These pages then link to child pages with more detail on subtopics such as spiking, harassment and FGM.

Rape Crisis use descriptive H2 headings, often using questions as the header, with a concise answer directly below the heading. This is clear and helpful for readers who may be trying to navigate the information during a time of increased stress.

Their ‘What is Spiking’ page ranks well for high volume terms such as ‘spiking’ (12,000 monthly searches) and ‘what is spiking’ (700 searches), appearing alongside Drink Aware and the Police:

In the VAWG sector, police, legal websites, the NHS and the Crown Prosecution Service often appear as “competitors” within the search results. For Girls not Brides and WomanKind, competing domains are international development organisations such as ActionAid and Plan International, and United Nations Women.

Earning backlinks through facts & statistics content

One of the supplementary benefits to providing useful, evergreen content to your target audience is that it’s likely to gain shares and backlinks naturally over time. It’s common for web editors to signpost to support services or reference a trustworthy source. Therefore, if you are creating helpful content, you’re much more likely to naturally gain editorial links.

Providing content based around statistics is incredibly valuable for writers and editors. Rape Crisis do this very effectively with their ‘Statistics’ page which has over 2,000 backlinks, many from very high quality sources including Mental Health Foundation, Wikipedia, Vice, Huffington Post and the Independent.

The page provides a wide range of useful statistics across a number of key topics, including how many people are affected, police reports, conviction rates and perpetrators. Many statistics then link out to further information on the site for more detail:

The page also includes information about media enquiries, which makes it easier for journalists to contact them for further comment. This is a simple addition to the page, but demonstrates that media queries are welcome.

Refuge also has a really useful facts page and other ‘facts’ content, such as this press release from 2020, that are valuable linkable assets. The press release is particularly interesting, because Refuge has used their internal data to report a shocking 700% increase in calls to the helpline in a single day during the pandemic.

This 700% increase statistic is irreplicable – it’s information that only Refuge can provide – and ultimately has led to other websites citing Refuge’s website as a source. The press release has around 200 backlinks, many from quality domains including the Health Foundation, the Open University, The Times and this example from Centrepoint’s website:

SafeLives highlight on their page that their statistics come from their own internal insights data. Their ‘About Domestic Violence’ page has 98 backlinks from sources including the Guardian and the Metro.

Our analysis identified that Refuge’s ‘Facts about Domestic Violence’ page didn’t have as many backlinks as we expected. On a closer look, the content used to sit on a different, now broken URL that has over 700 backlinks, from sites including the Guardian and the Independent. It may have been an intentional choice not to redirect the old page; however, this is a missed opportunity to retain the value from backlinks gained over time. This type of issue is extremely common when updating or redesigning content; the fix is to implement a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

Featured Snippets & People Also Ask

The coveted ‘featured snippet’ position is the very highest organic result that is available. Google wants to give people the best answer as quickly as possible, and many searches feature a showcased snippet at the top of the search results.

The ‘Coercive Control’ page from Women’s Aid ranks in the ‘featured snippet’ position for ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’ (1,500 searches), which is particularly striking on mobile:

Women’s Aid’s ‘Getting an Injunction’ page also ranks with a featured snippet position for 13 keyword variations including ‘non-molestation order’ (16,000 searches) and ‘how long does a non-molestation order last’ (200 searches). All of these featured snippets are ranking above the UK government’s advice page.

Most charities in the VAWG sector hold very few or no featured snippets – this is a huge area of opportunity. Rape Crisis holds the highest number of featured snippets; all 53 were for pages in their ‘Get Informed’ informational hub:

Google’s ‘People also ask’ results are also an often underutilised opportunity to consider optimising for. It’s a good idea to start with content that is already ranking well, as you may be subtly optimise the content to allow Google to consider it for a “People also ask” snippet.

SafeLives has a piece of hero content about ‘What is an IDVA’ which ranks above the Refuge Helpline for the keyword ‘IDVA’, a term that has an average of 3,600 searches per month:

This is an amazing ranking position for a higher volume search term. When digging into the ‘People also ask’ questions, SafeLives also ranks for the first question ‘What does an IDVA do?’

However, the page that ranks for this additional question is actually a PDF on the SafeLives site, which means users have nowhere to navigate to after reading the PDF. Ideally, the ‘What is an IDVA’ webpage would rank here, so that people can easily navigate to additional pages or services on the SafeLives site. Adding a section to the webpage that answers this question would be a potential quick-win opportunity here.

Support Through Search: Helplines

In this sub-sector, the types of service provision offered varies depending on the organisation, but examples include refuge centres, forums, helplines, email support, counselling, live chat and advocacy. Organic search plays a crucial role in this sub-sector in helping users access these vital services.

For helplines, we found that people search for these numbers in a variety of different ways. Examples (with monthly search volumes) include:

• ‘domestic abuse helpline’ (4,000)
• ‘domestic violence helpline’ (1,900)
• ‘sexual abuse helpline’ (400)
• ‘sexual assault helpline’ (350)
• ‘helpline for sexual assault’ (350)
• ‘womens helpline number’ (150)
• ‘womens helpline’ (100)

Based on the keyword sample, we found that people search in general terms such as ‘womens helpline’, but also include specific needs or types of violence, eg ‘sexual assault helpline’.

The search engine results page changes depending on the term being searched for – with Google showing specialist charities when they have a relevant page.

Looking at the more general (and higher search volume) keyword ‘domestic abuse helpline’, the top performing result is National Domestic Abuse Helpline which is a service run by Refuge:

The National Domestic Abuse Helpline website is an entirely separate domain to the Refuge website. It performs well for helpline-related searches, ranking for 650 keywords in positions 1-10.

Interestingly, Google ranks this website for keywords that may require intervention but don’t necessarily mention ‘helpline’; for example ‘my husband yells at me’ and ‘is it okay for my girlfriend to hit me’. This is because the site contains informational content designed for people seeking help and support via Google, such as their page on ‘I am planning to leave my abuser’.

Google also includes sitelinks – secondary links that point to different pages on the site – so that people can jump to this advice content that is most relevant to them:

For ‘women helpline’, the London-based Women and Girls Network website ranks well in position 4 below Refuge and Women’s Aid, and has an optimised title tag that contains the word ‘helplines’:

Women’s Aid also consistently ranks highly with a signposting page called ‘I need help’, that includes helpline information, forum and live chat.

There are a number of ways to approach optimising for helpline terms. If your charity offers a specific type of support, there may be an opportunity to create dedicated landing pages that are designed to rank highly for specific helpline or service terms.

The importance of E-E-A-T

A major factor to consider within this sector is the website content would be considered ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) by Google. This means the information needs to be of the highest quality because inaccurate or low-quality information could impact the health, welfare or safety of the searcher. This couldn’t be more relevant within this sector which works alongside people in high-risk situations, often under extreme stress.

Ranking in these types of search results requires a very high demonstrable level of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust (E-E-A-T).

Until recently, the acronym was E-A-T, but in December 2022, Google added in ‘experience’ which is a highly-relevant addition for many nonprofits. ‘Experience’, ‘Expertise’ and ‘Authoritativeness’ work together to demonstrate an overall level of ‘Trust’.

Quoting Google’s guidelines directly:

“Sometimes pages on YMYL topics are created to share personal experiences, often regarding difficult life challenges. People turn to each other in times of need to share their own experience, seek comfort or inspiration, and learn from others... Pages that share first-hand life experience on clear YMYL topics may be considered to have high E-E-A-T as long as the content is trustworthy, safe, and consistent with well-established expert consensus”

One way to do this is through specific sections of ‘real life stories’, like those used by Womankind and SafeLives. This content foregrounds the voices of people with lived experiences and appears on Google when people search for stories content.

Although individual search volumes are lower, people do search specifically for content about survivor stories:

• ‘abuse stories’ (150 monthly searches)
• ‘domestic abuse stories’ (200 searches)
• ‘domestic survivor story’ (400 searches)
• ‘survivor story’ (400 searches)
• ‘sexual abuse stories’ (200 searches)

SafeLives are visible in Google search for many of the keywords listed, and US-based organisation RAINN also ranks well for ‘survivor stories’. There is clear search intent in these keywords for content that demonstrates ‘Experience’.

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