SEO for charities: Three audiences,
three different searches.
A donor, a volunteer and somebody who needs your help are all looking for you, and none of them searches the same way. Most charity websites are written for the first and found by none.
Donors·Volunteers·Beneficiaries·Training
The job
Charity search is close to uncontested, because most charities never get to it. For an organisation counting every pound, that matters more than it does for anybody else.
The work splits three ways because the audiences do, and the third one is usually the one nobody has planned for: the person in difficulty, searching at midnight, in words that are nothing like your service names.
Charity SEO services: The whole list, nothing extra.
Every one of these is in the price. If a job needs something that is not here, it is in the written scope before you say yes, not on the invoice after.
The words people in need use
Not your service names. Somebody looking for help searches for the problem in ordinary language, often urgently, and that vocabulary is rarely on a charity site.
What donors search before giving
The cause, the local branch, and whether you are the charity they half-remember. Being findable at that moment is most of it.
Volunteering, findable
"Volunteer near me" and the specific roles. Usually one buried page where it should be several.
The technical half
What is stopping any of it being found. Charity sites are often old, often donated, and often carrying a decade of good intentions.
Local, where you are local
Branches, shops and services each findable in their own town, which for a national charity with local presence is frequently missing.
Training, so it does not stop
Whoever writes for you shown how to do this themselves. For a charity budget that outlasts anything I could be paid to do monthly.
What gets crawled
Your site crawled the way a search engine sees it, not the way it looks in a browser: what Google can reach, what it is ignoring, and why.
What gets measured
Core Web Vitals measured on your own pages, with your real content, rather than on a sample page built to score well.
What you get, in order
The findings written down in the order worth doing, so the first thing on the list is the thing that changes most.
The call
A walk through the findings, so you know what each one means before deciding whether any of it is worth paying for.
What gets fixed first
Whatever is stopping pages being found at all comes before anything that improves a page already working. A closed sign beats a slow page.
What happens next
The list is yours either way. Plenty of people take it away and do the work themselves, and it is not a lock-in.
The quick check
Quick check, £400. One day, the whole site crawled, and a written answer to what is reachable, what is ignored and why.
The full audit
Full technical audit, £1,200. For thousands of pages, a shop, or a migration behind you, where a day is not enough to be sure.
Keyword research
The keyword list from £150: the phrases, what they are searched, how hard they are and what the searcher actually wants.
Monthly, and the hours
From £150 a month, with the hours written on the plan, so what you are buying is a number of hours rather than a promise.
What is quoted separately
A migration, a rebuild, or writing the pages themselves. Those are their own jobs with their own prices, not absorbed into a retainer.
No ranking promises
Nobody can promise a position, and anybody who does is selling you the one thing they cannot deliver.
The first month
Setting up and finding out: access to Search Console and analytics, the site crawled and measured, and an ordered list of what is holding it back. The quickest fixes get made that month.
Months two and three
The list, worked through in order, with the hours on the plan. What changed is in the note at the end of each month. Search Console rarely shows much before week six.
What Search Console shows
Impressions before clicks, and clicks before anything that looks like a position. It is the only free record of what Google actually did with your pages.
What takes longest
A new site has no history, so it starts from nothing however good it is. That is the part nobody can shorten by paying more.
What I report
What was looked at, what was changed and how many hours went on it, next to the invoice. The same note the care plans get.
When to stop paying
When the fixes are done and nothing on the list needs an expert, a monthly plan stops being worth it, and I will say so rather than keep invoicing.
How an SEO audit for charities runs: From hello to handover.
Step 1
12 hours max
I reply
Working hours, unless I am on holiday and have said so.
Step 2
Day 0
Scope call
30 minutes. The cause, the audiences, and who writes for you.
Step 3
+2 days
Written scope
What each audience needs, in the order worth doing. Something you can take to a board.
Step 4
First
Audit
What is stopping the site being found at all, before anything is written.
Step 5
Then
Pages and training
The pages that matter, and your team shown how to keep going.
This is for you
SEO training for charities: SEO for charities is for you
if any of these sound familiar.
- People who need you cannot find you
- Volunteering buried on one page
- A site donated years ago
- A team who would keep it going
It is not, if
- You want donations bought rather than earned
- Nobody can write or approve copy
- You want a monthly retainer above all
Not sure which side you are on? Say so on the call. If I am not the right person, you get the name of someone who is.
What SEO for charities costs
Every price on the page,
before you call.
You should not have to sit through a call to find out whether you can afford me.
Reaching the people you help: Questions I get every time.
The honest answers. If yours is not here, it is the first thing we cover.
Ask me yours01 Is SEO worth it for a charity?
Unusually so. Charity search is barely fought over, so a modest amount of effort goes further than it would for almost any business.
02 Do you do an SEO audit for charities?
Yes, the same fixed-price SEO audit as anybody else. For a charity it is often the right place to stop: the audit plus your own team doing the work is the cheapest version that actually works.
03 Can you train our team instead?
Yes, and for a lot of charities that is the better answer. Somebody who already writes for you, shown what to do, will outlast anything bought monthly.
04 How do we reach the people we help?
By writing in their words rather than yours. Service names are internal language; somebody in difficulty searches for the problem, often at night, often on a phone. That gap is usually the biggest single opportunity on a charity site.
05 We need the website too.
That is charity website design, where donations, Gift Aid and accessibility live.
Usually goes with: SEO for charities
and charity websites.
The site itself: donations that complete, Gift Aid asked properly, and accessibility treated as the point.
See charity websitesOr one of the other three
Found by donors,
missed by everyone else?
Tell me the cause and who you need to reach. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and you leave knowing whether SEO for charities is worth the money you would spend on it.
- Within 12 hoursA reply
- Within 2 working daysA written scope and a price
- OrThe name of someone who fits better