Leading children’s charity focuses on digital and moves to data driven decisions

London - 14 November, 2012 - UK children’s charity Action for Children has deployed Searchmetrics’ latest search and social analytics software to shape its digital strategy and increase its search and social media visibility across all of its campaigns and activities, which range from supporting children’s fostering to highlighting child neglect.

Founded 140 years ago, Action for Children is committed to helping the most vulnerable and neglected children and young people break through injustice, deprivation and inequality, so they can achieve their full potential. It is using Searchmetrics to analyse its online activities, track other charities in the sector and recommend strategies, partners and tactics to move up the search rankings and increase engagement.

Action for Children’s in-house search team began using Searchmetrics in March 2012 and has already seen tangible return on investment. The software has helped the charity to increase search visibility, contributing to a substantial rise in donation traffic as well as improving online brand recognition.

“By using Searchmetrics data to drive decisions on content, links and strategy, our site has moved up the rankings for key search terms such as Fostering Children and Neglect, improving our online presence and helping to attract more supporters for our work,” explained Darren Robertson, Digital Communications – Data Scientist at Action for Children.

The charity is now using the new Searchmetrics Suite, which became available in August 2012. This includes new features such as detailed site optimisation information which highlights technical issues that can be improved to support a web site’s search visibility along with in-depth insights on competitors’ strategies and comprehensive reporting.

“Action for Children has been working with vulnerable children for over 140 years,” said Darren. “In the past much of our activity has been led by high profile PR campaigns – digital is now becoming a greater focus, and Searchmetrics provides us with the data we need to shape our strategy and deliver on our objectives. It produces a constant stream of recommendations, such as for new content to add and sites, such as local charities, that we can build long term partnerships with. The breadth and depth of Searchmetrics is delivering real results, and its powerful reporting capabilities enable senior management to understand our digital achievements and plan for the future.”

The charity sector is both large and varied, with hundreds of organisations vying for online attention from supporters. This means that ranking highly for generic charity terms such as ‘donate’ is extremely difficult. Searchmetrics not only helps Action for Children by recommending changes to its web pages to improve organic rankings, but also makes suggestions on new search terms to focus on.

“Action for Children’s work has a positive effect on thousands of children and families every year,” said Kevin Thiele, Sales Director, Searchmetrics Northern Europe. “In an extremely competitive sector, ensuring the organisation has the right online visibility to showcase its activities and attract supporters is crucial. Searchmetrics provides Action for Children with a single solution to manage its online search and social rankings. It’s wonderful to see how our software is directly helping the charity achieve its goals and improve the lives of vulnerable children across the UK.”

As well as organic search, Action for Children is using Searchmetrics to monitor social media and to inform PPC activity under the Google Grants programme. This provides eligible charities with free AdWords spend. By using Searchmetrics Action for Children has been able to increase the grants it receives from Google by over 100%.  It is also central to marketing Action for Children’s myactionforchildren site, which enables people to find and support projects in their local area or that meet their specific interests.

Searchmetrics is an on-line subscription service that automates many aspects of SEO analysis, monitoring and reporting for agencies and in-house search marketers. It provides search performance data and analysis relating to multiple domains to support campaign measurement and planning.  It helps organisations to analyse the visibility of their sites on key social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.