Every fortnight, we run an open Digital Q&A session for charity and nonprofit teams – a chance to bring your questions and challenges: the things you’re stuck on, the decisions you’re not sure about. You can find out more and sign up for a future session here.
This fortnight’s session covered a lot of ground, writes Matt Saunders. We had people from a survivors’ support charity, a participatory arts organisation, a disability and social care charity, and a charity-run preschool – and the conversations ranged from technical SEO questions through to some real talk about governance, resource, and what it actually takes to grow from scratch with no budget. Here’s what came out of it.
Q: We’ve got pages on our website that are ranking well, but we want to restructure and change the content. Will we lose those rankings?
Not if you handle it properly. The key is 301 redirects – a technical instruction that tells search engines “this page has moved to here.” When you change a URL (which you’ll almost certainly need to do if you’re changing the content and purpose of a page), a 301 redirect preserves the ranking value of the old URL and passes it to the new one. Without it, search engines hit a dead end and the ranking is lost.
Even if you’re staying on the same platform and not building a whole new site, you still need to think about redirects any time a URL changes. It’s worth making a simple spreadsheet of old URLs and where they should point to before you make any changes – it doesn’t take long and it protects work you’ve already done.
One practical tip: if you’re planning page changes in WordPress before they’re ready to publish, make sure draft pages are set to “noindex” so search engines don’t crawl and rank content that isn’t finished. Most SEO plugins have a setting for this.
Q: We’ve got a load of old draft pages showing up in Google. Should we delete them or redirect them?
If they’re genuinely draft pages that you don’t want the public to see and they’re not driving any meaningful traffic, deleting them is fine. The risk to your overall site rankings from removing a handful of low-value draft pages is minimal – especially on a smaller, niche site.
If you want to be cautious, you can set up redirects from those URLs to your homepage or a relevant page, just in case they’re linked from somewhere. But honestly, for most organisations in this situation, deleting them and moving on is the right call. The more useful exercise is to audit what’s actually on your site and make sure everything that’s there has a clear purpose – search engines reward clarity and coherence, not volume.
Q: Our website needs to appeal more to funders – but we’re not sure how to write for them. Where do we start?
Start by talking to the people in your organisation who deal with funders directly. What questions do funders ask? What concerns do they raise? What information do they need before they’ll commit? The answers to those questions are your content brief. Your website should be answering those questions before a funder even picks up the phone.
The broader principle – and this applies to service users as much as funders – is to write about the people you help and the difference you make, rather than about your organisation. What does someone’s life look like after they’ve worked with you? What problem are you solving for them? Quotes, testimonials, and real stories do this work better than any amount of organisational history or mission statements. If you can let the people you’ve helped speak for themselves, even better.
One useful exercise if you’re staring at a blank page: before you write anything, ask yourself who this page is for and what they’re looking for. Even just jotting down two or three bullet points in answer to those questions gives you a framework. You can even ask an AI tool to role-play as a funder and tell you what questions they’d want answered – it’s not perfect, but it can surface things you hadn’t thought of.
Q: We’re a preschool that’s just moved to a new area. We have no budget for marketing and we need more children enrolled. What can we do?
This was probably the most candid conversation of the session – and it’s worth being honest about what it surfaced, because the situation will resonate with a lot of people.
The first thing to say is that without a budget, you’re working with time and relationships. That means being very deliberate about where you spend energy. The question to start with is: how did your current families find you? If you don’t know the answer, find out – ask them directly. Whatever the answer is, do more of that.
For a preschool specifically, word of mouth tends to dominate how parents choose childcare. That means the most effective thing you can do is get known in the circles where parents already gather – prenatal groups, baby classes, soft play centres, local Facebook community groups, family hubs. Not to sell, but to show up, be useful, and be known. An open day or a free drop-in session can give people a reason to come to you and give you a reason to collect their contact details and start building a list.
Partnerships with other local organisations who already have relationships with your target families are also worth pursuing. If someone well-established in the community is willing to share their space with you, run sessions from your building, or mention you by name – that kind of association carries more weight than any leaflet drop.
The harder truth is that building community recognition in a new area takes time. Months, not weeks. That’s not a failure of effort – it’s just the reality of how trust gets built. If you’ve only been in a new location for a matter of weeks, you are at the very beginning of that process, and it’s reasonable to say so clearly to the people above you.
On the website question specifically: if people aren’t currently finding you through search, a website won’t immediately change that. It takes time to rank. Right now, the most effective thing is probably showing up in the places where parents already are – and a website can come once you’ve got a bit more stability and can invest in it properly. There are free hosting options for UK charities worth looking into when the time is right.
Q: We’re doing okay on SEO – we’re in the orange to green zone on our plugin. Is there anything we should be doing to push further?
Rather than chasing better SEO scores, the more useful question is: what is your website traffic actually turning into? If you have enquiry forms, are they being filled in? Are those enquiries converting into anything? If the answer is yes, great – then increasing traffic becomes a sensible goal. If the answer is unclear, that’s the thing to fix first.
Improving your conversion rate – even modestly, from say 1% to 2% – has more impact than doubling your traffic if the site isn’t working for the people who land on it. So before optimising for more visitors, make sure the journey you’re asking them to go on actually works. What happens after someone fills in a form? Is the follow-up email doing more than just saying thank you? Those are the levers worth pulling before you start worrying about rankings.
These sessions are always a reminder that the challenges facing charities aren’t really about size – they’re about resource, confidence, and finding the right place to focus. If any of the questions above resonated with you, we’d love to see you at a future fortnightly session. You can find out more and register here.
And if you’d rather have a one-to-one conversation about what any of this means for your organisation specifically, feel free to get in touch with me at All Things Equal – this is exactly the kind of work we do.