SEO for Charities: How to Get Found by Donors, Volunteers, and the People You Help

It’s fair to say that charities sit on some of the most trusted information on the internet. Often decades of expertise in a niche condition, cause or community, written about by people who know more about it than just about anyone else in the country. 

And yet, search for that condition, or even for the charity by name in many cases, and it’s not unusual to find it hovering unloved below the NHS, Wikipedia and a fundraising platform carrying the charity’s own logo.

The Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2026 found that the British public gave £14bn in 2025, down from £15.4bn the year before, and that there are six million fewer donors than a decade ago. 

The point is that when fewer people are giving, the ones who go looking for you need to be able to find you.

SEO Is An Opportunity For Charities

So, why are you reading this? Perhaps your charity website isn’t performing well in search. Maybe your donate page doesn’t appear when people search for your name. Maybe your services are hard to find for the people who need them the most. 

In all these cases, it’s likely that SEO has sat at the bottom of the list for years. No one really owns it. And you’re in good company. In the 2023 Charity Digital Skills Report, 55 per cent of charities rated themselves as poor at SEO.

In this guide, we’ll take you through how charities get found for their cause, their services and their fundraising. If you want to roll back a step, our guides to charity branding and website accessibility for charities are a good place to start, and our Full Technical SEO Checklist covers the fundamentals in detail.

What Is Charity SEO?

Charity SEO isn’t its own discipline per se. As you’d expect, it’s the work of making a charity’s website easy to discover in search engines (like Google) and AI tools (like ChatGPT) for the people it serves: those looking for help, those looking to give it, and those researching the specific cause. 

The reason it’s not a standalone practice is simple: the fundamentals of Charity SEO are the same as for any website. 

Search engines need to be able to crawl your pages, understand them, and trust them enough to rank them. But a few things make charities a slightly different proposition, and they’re worth understanding up front.

You’re serving several audiences from one website. A business website is mostly trying to reach customers. Those customers are usually fairly similar. 

On the other hand, a charity website is trying to reach beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, fundraisers, corporate partners, funders, and journalists, often all on the same day, sometimes on the same page. Each group searches differently and needs something different when they arrive.

Much of your content is held to a higher standard. Google says its systems give even more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) for topics that could significantly affect someone’s health, financial stability or safety. 

It calls these “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics. If your charity publishes information about a medical condition, mental health, debt, housing or domestic abuse, that’s you. For these topics, Google is clear that content must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.

You’re often competing for your own name. Search for most charities, and you’ll find their Charity Commission register entry, a Wikipedia page, news coverage, and fundraising platform pages all jostling for position. Some of that’s helpful. But if a third-party page outranks your own donate page for “[your charity] donate”, you’re handing over the supporter relationship and the data that comes with it.

Teams are small, and budgets are tight. That’s not a revelation to anyone working in the charity or not-for-profit sector. In the 2025 Charity Digital Skills Report, 69 per cent of charities named squeezed finances as the biggest barrier to digital progress. Any SEO plan needs to work with the resources you have available.

The upside is that organic search tends to be one of a charity’s biggest channels already, whether anyone’s working on it or not. When Torchbox analysed acquisition data from 20 of its charity clients, organic search made up an average of 51 per cent of total traffic. 

That data is from 2020, so treat the exact figure with some caution, but the point holds. For many charities, search is already a factor; it just isn’t being managed. 

Who Is Searching for Your Charity?

Before you think too much about SEO, it helps to know who you’re trying to reach. Charity searches tend to fall into four groups, and each one should land on a different kind of page. (All search volumes below are UK monthly estimates from Ahrefs; please take them with a pinch of salt.)

Cause searches. People trying to understand an issue — a diagnosis, a species, a social problem. These are often the biggest searches you could rank for, and the most competitive. “Dementia symptoms” gets around 12,000 searches a month, but with a keyword difficulty of 81 out of 100, you’re up against the NHS and the largest health charities.

Help-seeking searches. People who need your services, often urgently, often on a phone, and often with a location attached. “Bereavement support” gets around 2,800 searches a month, and “food bank near me” around 8,000. These are the searches that have the most at stake, and the pages that answer them are your service pages, your “get help” pages and, for local charities, your Google Business Profile.

Fundraising and involvement searches. People who want to give their money or time. “Volunteering near me” gets around 8,500 searches a month, “London Marathon charity places” around 800, and “leaving money to charity in will” around 150. These are smaller numbers, but these people are also ready to act.

Brand searches. People looking for you by name, usually because they’ve seen a campaign, read a news story, or been told about you. These are often (and should be) the easiest searches to win and the most damaging to lose.

One Website, Different Readers

When we built the new website for the Vincent Wildlife Trust, a mammal conservation charity that’s been working across the UK and Ireland since 1975, this was the central challenge. Its audiences range from conservation academics, partner charities and government bodies to members of the public who simply care about local wildlife.

So the information architecture had to balance scientific depth with accessibility, and the content had to serve both without patronising one or losing the other. Species pages needed clear identification content for the curious, alongside the evidence-based detail experts expect. 

And the brief covered three sites: the Trust’s UK work, its Irish work, and Martens on the Move, a pine marten conservation project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Craft CMS’s multi-site capabilities let each one have its own navigation and focus while sharing the same components underneath.

💡 Further reading: Charity Branding: Building a Digital Identity that Inspires Trust

Charity SEO Priorities: Where to Start

Like we said up top, SEO for charities is much like SEO for any other business, but there are also some nuances to consider. 

Our recommendation is to work back from the searches that are easiest to win (and costliest to lose), outwards to the ones that take the most effort.

1. Own Brand Search

Take an incognito window and search for your charity’s name. Then search for your name plus “donate”, “volunteer”, “contact,” and “jobs”. Document what comes up.

In an ideal world, your website will be first for all of them. In theory, brand search should always be the easiest to win. 

If a fundraising platform, an old campaign site, or a directory listing is outranking you, you need to aim to fix that before anything else. It’s usually down to a weak or poorly titled donate page, an inconsistent charity name across the web, or a website that doesn’t make clear which organisation it belongs to.

2. Get Your “Service” Pages Right

These are the pages people find when they need you, and they are incredibly important (we don’t need to tell you!). Every distinct service should have its own page, named plainly for what it does, with clear information on who it’s for, where it’s available, and how to access it. 

If you deliver services locally, say where in plain text, not just on a map. Be as clear and thorough as possible. And don’t bury information.

3. Fix Your Fundraising Pages

Donate, volunteer, events, legacies, corporate partnerships. Each needs its own indexable page with a descriptive title, authentic content explaining why someone should get involved, and a clear next step.

Recurring events deserve a special mention. If your sponsored walk gets a new URL every year (/events/bath-walk-2025, /events/bath-walk-2026), every year’s page starts from scratch, and last year’s links and rankings go to waste. Give it one evergreen URL and update the content annually. Redirect the pages for each year into the new URL.

4. Then Build Your Cause Content

Cause content brings the biggest audiences, but it’s also where competition is fiercest and where AI Overviews bite hardest (more on that below). Focus on topics where you have verifiable first-hand expertise that other sites can’t match. 

Being realistic, a smaller charity is unlikely to outrank the NHS on “dementia symptoms”. It might well own a more specific search about living with a particular condition, or caring for someone who has it.

Technical SEO for Charity Websites

The fundamentals of technical SEO — crawling, indexing, speed, structured data — are covered in full in our checklist. What follows are the technical issues we find crop up on charity websites in particular.

💡 Further reading: Our Full Technical SEO Checklist

Is Your Donation Journey Fast on Mobile?

A lot of giving is impulsive and in the moment, often on a phone, straight after reading a story or seeing an appeal. If the page is slow, jumps around as it loads, or the form lags when they tap, many users won’t finish donating.

Google’s Core Web Vitals give you something to aim for: your main content should load within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the page should respond to taps within 200 milliseconds (INP), and the layout shouldn’t shift by more than 0.1 (CLS). Audit what’s loading on your donate page specifically, and test it on a mid-range phone on 4G rather than a desktop on office wifi.

Where Do Your Donations Happen?

A lot of charity websites don’t process donations themselves. The donate button sends people to a third-party platform, or the donation form is embedded from another service in an iframe. That can create two SEO issues. 

Your donate page may be close to empty. If everything meaningful sits inside an embedded form from another domain, search engines see a page with a heading and very little else. Make sure the page itself carries useful and informative content in its own HTML.

Your analytics may lose the trail. When the donation completes on someone else’s domain, your analytics often can’t see it. You’ll see a visitor arrive from Google, click donate, and vanish. More on how to deal with that in the measurement section below.

What Happened to Your Old Campaign Sites?

Charities run a lot of campaigns. Campaigns tend to get their own microsites, subdomains, or vanity URLs. Then the campaign ends, the site is switched off, and every link the press, partners, and supporters gave it now points to a 404. Well, hopefully not… 

Go back through old campaign URLs and redirect each one (with a 301!) to the most relevant live page, ideally a permanent hub for that campaign or cause. Where possible, run future campaigns from a section of your main site rather than a separate domain, so the authority they build stays with you.

💡 Further reading: How to migrate your website without damaging SEO

Are Your Best Resources Under Lock and Key?

This is a prevalent issue, and not just for charities. B2B businesses have been locking good content away in PDFs for years. 

Annual reports, impact reports, factsheets, research summaries, information leaflets. Charities publish a huge amount of valuable content as PDFs. Google can index PDFs, but they’re harder to read on a phone, harder to make accessible, harder to link around, and they don’t tell you much in analytics once opened.

You don’t need to convert everything. Start with your most-downloaded information resources and turn them into proper web pages, keeping the PDF as an optional download if people still want to print it.

Structured Data for Charities

Structured data describes your organisation and content in a format machines can understand. For charities, the useful types are:

Organization, or the more specific NGO type, on your homepage, with your official name, logo, contact details and social profiles. Schema.org also has a UKNonprofitType vocabulary for the nonprofitStatus property, covering charitable incorporated organisations, trusts, charities limited by guarantee and unincorporated associations.

Event, on fundraising event pages, with dates, location and ticket details. Google documents Event structured data for exactly this kind of page.

Article, on news, stories and information content, with an author and publication date attached.

One caveat, and we’ve been explicit about it before: schema won’t magically get you into AI answers, and Google has said it isn’t required for AI Overviews. What it does is remove ambiguity, which makes your content easier for any machine to understand and attribute correctly.

💡 Further reading: Schema Markup: What it Does, What it Doesn't, and Why it Still Matters

Writing Charity Content That Ranks (and Gets Cited)

In our experience, charities have a natural content advantage. Generally speaking, charities are either extremely knowledgeable about their subject or the thought leaders in the space. 

But you need to make that expertise visible to both people and search engines.

Use the words people search with. Charities tend to name services after the programme rather than the problem. Your “Family Link Programme” might be exactly what someone needs, but nobody searches for it by that name. 

They search for “support for parents of disabled children” or “help for families after a diagnosis”. Keep the programme name but make sure the page title, heading, and opening lines describe what it does in plain language.

Show who wrote it and who checked it. Google encourages publishers to make it clear who created content, how and why, with bylines that lead to more information about the author. For YMYL content in particular, add the name and role of the person who reviewed it, and a date for when it was last reviewed. If you publish health information, consider the PIF TICK, the UK’s only assessed quality mark for print and digital health information.

Answer the question first. Someone searching “how to apply for carer’s allowance” at 11pm doesn’t want three paragraphs about your history. Answer the query, then expand. That’s kinder to readers, and it’s also the format AI tools find easiest to quote accurately.

Publish what only you can. Google’s own self-assessment questions start with whether content provides original information, research, or analysis. Charities are full of it: service data, beneficiary stories (shared with consent), research findings, policy positions. That’s the content other sites can’t copy, and the content most likely to earn links and citations.

Quick Wins for Charity SEO

It’s always nice to get a few things ticked off early. We get it, and would start with…

Claim your Google Business Profile. If you have offices, centres, hospices or charity shops that people visit, each one should have a complete, verified profile with accurate opening hours and a link to the relevant page on your site. “Charity shops near me” alone gets around 42,000 UK searches a month.

Rewrite your most important page titles. “Donate | Charity Name” tells Google very little. “Donate to Support Families Living with Dementia | Charity Name” tells it, and the person searching, exactly what they’re giving to. Do the same for volunteer, services and events pages.

Check your Charity Commission register entry. Make sure it links to the right website and uses the same name you use everywhere else (and the same goes for OSCR or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland if you’re registered there). Consistency helps Google connect the dots between your organisation and your website.

Ask for the links you’ve already earned. Funders often list their grantees. Corporate partners announce their charity of the year. Event organisers list participating charities. Local press covers your work. Check each one links to you, and politely ask if it doesn’t.

Redirect dead campaign URLs. Pull a list of old campaign domains and pages, check what they return, and 301 redirect anything broken to a live, relevant page.

Turn your most popular PDF into a page. Pick the one information resource people download most, and give it a proper home on your website.

Link your cause content to the next step. Every information page should point somewhere useful - your services, your helpline, a way to get involved. Most charity information content is read and then the user leaves.

Charities and AI Search

Search has changed, is changing… will change more. And that affects charities too. 

The challenge for you sits mostly with cause content. When Google shows an AI Overview at the top of the results, fewer people click through. 

Ahrefs’ latest study found that by December 2025, AI Overviews reduced click-through rates for the top-ranking page by around 58 per cent. If a big share of your traffic comes from people asking informational questions about your cause, some of those visits will end on the results page instead.

The opportunity is that charities are exactly the kind of source AI tools want to cite. Trusted, specialist, often the definitive voice on a niche topic. Zoe Amar, co-author of the Charity Digital Skills Report, made a similar point in a conversation with Torchbox about the 2026 report: charity leaders need to understand how their role is shifting as communities change the way they look for advice, information and support.

Make sure your pages are crawlable, and your key content sits in the HTML, answer questions clearly and early, show your expertise, and publish original information worth citing. You just need to accept that visibility in AI answers won’t always result in a user on your website.

💡 Further reading: Google AI Overviews: What They Mean for SEO 

How to Measure SEO for Charities

Rankings are easy to report, but they tell you very little in isolation. What matters is whether search is bringing in the people your charity exists to serve, and whether they do something when they arrive.

Separate branded from non-branded searches. In Search Console’s Performance report, filter queries to include or exclude your charity’s name. Branded traffic tells you how well-known you are. Non-branded traffic tells you whether you’re reaching new people.

Set up key events in GA4. Donations, volunteer applications, service enquiries, event registrations, newsletter sign-ups and calls from your website should all be tracked as key events, so you can see which ones come from organic search.

Plan for blind spots. If donations are completed on a third-party platform, add UTM parameters to the links that send people there, check whether the platform can pass data back to your analytics or CRM, and look at referral data from the platform itself. Some giving will always happen offline or by phone after a search, so a simple “how did you hear about us?” question on forms is worth it.

Review quarterly, against goals. Monthly fluctuations in search are mostly noise. A quarterly look at whether branded visibility, service page reach, and conversions from organic search are trending the right way is more useful, and much easier to explain to trustees.

Can a Small Charity Do SEO In-House?

A lot of it, yes. Most of the quick wins above need time and attention more than technical skill, and the core tools are free: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for verified sites, PageSpeed Insights, and Screaming Frog, which crawls up to 500 URLs for free.

Skilled volunteers can help, too. Digital Candle connects charities with digital experts for free one-off calls, and Reach Volunteering matches charities with skilled volunteers, including digital marketers. 

And the sector knows the skills gap exists: in the 2026 Charity Digital Skills Report, 59 per cent of charities said building digital skills was a priority for the year ahead, and 44 per cent named training as their biggest funding need.

Where it’s worth bringing in help is anywhere a mistake is expensive and hard to undo: a website migration or redesign, fixing how a site renders or redirects, or rebuilding a donation journey. Those are the jobs where a few days of experienced developer time can save months of lost traffic.

💡 Further reading: How to Choose the Right Web Design Agency

SEO for Charities Is About Being There When It Matters

People search for charities at important moments. When they’ve had a diagnosis, lost someone, or can’t pay the rent. When a news story moves them to give, or they’ve decided to run a marathon for a cause close to their heart. Those moments don’t wait for your next campaign.

With fewer people giving and more people needing help, nobody can afford to be invisible at those moments. You can’t control how many people search for your cause. You can control whether they find you when they do.

Get your brand and service pages right, fix the technical basics, measure what matters, and build from there. It’s slow, unglamorous work. But it keeps paying back long after the campaign has ended.