Faced with an extremely modest budget, our recommendation was quite simple: to use SEO as a primary focus, supported by using their Google grant to fuel as much PPC activity as possible; thereby making the charity as visible as possible to potential donors using search as the natural gateway to charitable content on the internet.

We took a systematic and forensic approach to auditing all of Action For Children’s content and links. As a charity, we knew that the links they had would tend to be from supporters who would have a naturally higher propensity to update link text and URLs to improve generic term coverage. In terms of onsite work, we collaborated with their PR team to optimise all digital assets and press releases (including optimising video, images and PDFs each month; something that is often overlooked) and improved internal links and technical scores versus audit and best practice.

As the Google PPC grant is limited to $1 CPC, SEO prioritised keywords that we couldn’t otherwise afford to bid on in PPC. Integrating SEO and PPC enabled us to make search work effectively overall, whilst identifying gaps and efficiencies across both disciplines.

The charity’s position on “donate to charity” has gone from 38th to 11th in natural search, versus a prohibitive PPC cost of £8 for the term: this was only possible through the integration and optimisation of all of Action For Children’s digital assets, structured more coherently and visibly across the web. Groups relating to “childrens charity” phrases now genrate 2700 visits per month (positions 1 to 7) versus a previous high of 1205 vists per month, generating £Ks in additional revenue; now the second largest revenue driver after the brand term and saving £Ks on PPC. Importantly for Action For Children, their position on “child neglect” went from 500+ pages to page 1 and position 1-2 in just 2 months.