YMCA England & Wales
Strategic content gives YMCA an SEO boost.
200k
increase in impressions
Project
YMCA England & Wales SEO
YMCA England & Wales was looking for a robust SEO strategy to hero their vibrant new brand.
YMCA England & Wales is the world’s oldest and largest youth charity, dedicated to supporting young people and communities by providing housing, training, health, and family services. Working across over 700 communities, they focus on enabling young people to belong, contribute, and thrive through local, tailored support.
We launched their new website in 2024 as they looked to compete with other charities organically through a robust SEO strategy to improve visibility in service-related searches.
SEO.
that grows with you.
Strategy–
After a workshop with the team, we proposed a three-pronged content-led strategy to position YMCA England & Wales as a leading youth charity in search.
This content would span the two core user groups of their website – service users and supporters. Not only would this allow for UX and messaging nuances on-page and avoid any alienation, but also meant we could serve relevant searches with better intent.
Getting support—
YMCA England & Wales were struggling to compete with lower volume service providers within SERPs due to the breadth of their services and restrictions around core brand messaging.
The ‘Get Support’ pages looked to target service-users with long-form informational content that provides advice and support related to YMCA England & Wales service offering. The subjects of these pieces were based around key topics for young people including mental health, unemployment and housing.
Driving donations—
Due to the number of their services, it was difficult to categorise YMCA England & Wales under the typical types of charities that people would be searching for to support.
We used existing impact reports to create pages to showcase YMCA’s multifaceted position as a youth charity and highlight their work in those areas. These pages mirrored the support pages and looked to target searches like “youth homeless charity”, “youth unemployment charity” and “youth mental health charity”.
Offering help & advice—
As part of previous activity with YMCA, we created a Help & Advice section to target long-tail informational searches related to YMCA’s searches and position them as a reputable source and trusted provider.
Throughout the new retainer year, we expanded this area and regularly published new content.
Encouraging sign ups—
Another way to support YMCA England & Wales is to sign up to one of their fundraising events. These pages were live all year round and presented a good opportunity to drive additional traffic and encourage more signups throughout the year.
We optimised these pages with relevant meta data, H tags and on-page content. Crucially, we enriched on-page content with FAQ schema related to the event to capture query traffic and increase the change of YMCA England & Wales appearing in AI overviews.
Results
Though there was a number of changes to search generally throughout the year, we were super pleased with the results of the retainer. We effectively managed to improve visibility of YMCA England & Wales across relevant searches where they previously did not appear.
Over a 3-month period YoY, we saw an increase of over 200K impressions with organic traffic seeing a 15% increase in engagement rate generally. Many new areas of visibility included AI Overviews and other citations.
The site ranked for over 86 new keywords compared to the previous year, including: “youth unemployment advice” Position. 1 , “youth unemployment support” Position. 2 , “youth homeless charity”Position. 8 , “youth homeless shelter” Position. 7
Harrison Carloss are an extremely talented and committed group of individuals, with a real passion for delivering for their client. They were dedicated to each step of our project, thinking about how it would be received, and how it could be developed to become even better. They care, and that makes all the difference to an organisation like YMCA.
