How to optimise your charity’s online presence using the Yoast SEO plugin

7 April 2025  |  Stuart Palmer

If you’re one of the 60% of UK charities that use WordPress to power your website, installing the free Yoast SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin could be one of the smartest moves you make.

Although there is a paid Premium version, Yoast’s basic offering will give you all you need to create powerful web pages and articles that are popular with both search engines and your supporters.

Here is a brief guide on how to install, set up and use Yoast SEO:

Getting started with Yoast

To install and activate Yoast SEO, use the same process as you would with any other WordPress plugin: add a new plugin and type Yoast into the ‘Search plugins’ box.

Follow the simple configuration steps and then navigate to the edit screen of one of your pages or posts.

Introducing the Meta Box

Scroll down to the bottom of your content editor, and you should see a new ‘Yoast SEO’ section featuring several tabs and sections as well as some coloured face icons.

This is the Yoast ‘Meta Box’ and we will walk you through the most relevant parts of it. By default, the SEO tab will be active, so this is the ideal place to start.

The SEO tab: optimising your search engine results

As you might expect, the goal is to have a smiley green face icon on the tab label, so let’s look at what you need to do while in this area.

Your first task is to choose a ‘focus keyphrase’. Yoast needs to know what search term you want your page to rank for before it can support you in optimising your content. You will need to do some keyword research to decide on this, and you can click the question mark icon for a helpful Yoast article on this topic.

Once you’ve entered your focus keyphrase, the face icon will instantly update to give you a basic idea of how your content is faring so far (don’t worry, we will go into the nuts and bolts in the next section).

Search appearance section

This section may already be open but if not, click the label to expand it.

This part of the Yoast Meta Box enables you to see and control, to some degree, how the link to your web page will look in the search engine results pages (SERPS). You can switch between mobile and desktop views using the radio buttons.

There are four elements, three of which you can change directly in Yoast.

• The thumbnail image (taken from the post itself, so you can’t change it here)
• SEO title
• Slug
• Meta description
• You will probably find that the default SEO title and meta description do a poor job of representing your page, so go ahead and change them.

As a rule, your focus keyphrase should appear near the beginning of both your SEO title and meta description. This gives the search engines clear direction as to what your page or article is about.

From a human perspective, think of your SEO title and meta description as the headline and body text of a free advert. Use the title to grab attention and ensure your description accurately reflects your content and includes a call-to-action that persuades an interested reader to click.

To ensure your titles and descriptions are not truncated (cut off), aim to keep them below 60 and 140 characters respectively. Keep an eye on the coloured bars below the text field. These should be green.

The ideal slug will be short and include your focus keyphrase. Hyphens can be used if necessary for readability.

Note: Only change your slug if you are working on a new web page or one that has no external links from other websites (backlinks). Changing your slug will update the address of the page, breaking any external links.

SEO analysis section

The SEO analysis section is the most important part of the Yoast plugin when it comes to ranking on search engines. On the label, you will notice another face icon alongside a reminder of your focus keyphrase. Click the label to expand the section.

You will see a list of over a dozen factors that Yoast believe are important to get a page to ran well on search engines. Your aim is to get a green blob next to all of them (which will then result in a smiley green face icon!)

The factors are self-explanatory, and include linked articles, so we won’t go through them all here. However, it is common for pages to fall down by having too little text (aka thin content) and by not including the focus keyphrase in the opening paragraph.

Cornerstone section

Optimising hundreds (or even thousands) of pages for the search engines is impractical for a small charity admin team, which is where Yoast’s ‘cornerstone content’ section comes into its own.

Out of all the web pages and articles you create, there will be a handful which target search terms that you really want to rank for. When editing those pages, simply open up the cornerstone content section of the Meta Box and toggle on the ‘Mark as cornerstone content’ switch.

Next time you select ‘All Pages’ or ‘All Posts’ from your dashboard menu, you can click the ‘Cornerstone content/articles’ label to filter by your most important content. Yoast will also be tougher on you when it comes to your SEO analysis. For example, according to Yoast, cornerstone content articles should be at least three times longer than a less critical article.

If you upgrade to Yoast Premium, you will be prompted to create lots of links from your less important articles to your cornerstone content.

Tip: The number of external and internal links per page/post are displayed in the table when you select ‘All Pages’ or ‘All Posts’ from your dashboard.

Advanced section

You probably won’t need to change much in this section, but it is worth checking that ‘Yes’ is selected under ‘Allow search engines to show this content in search results?’ This will normally be allowed by default, but you can override this using the dropdown menu.

Linking to poor quality or low value content like admin pages, sponsored links or user-generated content can negatively affect your rankings, so you can discourage search engines from following links on a specific page by selecting the ‘No’ radio button.

Does your site contain a lot of duplicate content? You have the opportunity to prioritise your strongest copy and enter this as the ‘Canonical URL’ for the weaker duplicates. This will reduce competition between pages.

The Readability tab: enhancing the user experience

Next, let’s look at the Readability tab. Again, the goal is to end up with a smiley green face icon on the tab label.

Apart from the obvious plus of pleasing your potential donors and supporters, ensuring your content is easy to read has multiple benefits, including:

• Improving behaviour-related metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration and pages per session.
• Easier content parsing which can increase the likelihood of your content being used and linked to.
• Compatibility with voice search technology.

Yoast assesses your content for readability by looking at factors such as sentence length, paragraph length, use of headings and whether your articles use an active or passive voice.

You will find linked articles explaining these factors and a handy eye icon which will highlight specific text within your article.

The Schema tab: more help for search engines

Schema markup is a type of web language which gives search engines specific information about the type of content you are providing and how that should be displayed in search results.

The default settings are usually fine for most charity articles, but if you are creating a specific type of page (e.g. an FAQs or Contact page), selecting this from the dropdown box can improve how your page appears in SERPS.

The Social tab: stand out on your social platforms

If social media is a powerful driver of donations or support, spending a little time in the Social tab can add extra polish to your content. For example, you could create perfectly sized branded images for your strongest platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X, etc.) using software such as Canva or Adobe Spark. You can then upload and set them as custom social images. You can also customise unique titles and descriptions for your social media sharing, but you will need to upgrade to see live previews.

We’re almost done here, but there are a few tweaks you might want to make that will improve the overall performance of your website.

For this, we need to go back to your dashboard.

Global settings: fine tuning your website’s performance

From your dashboard go into Yoast SEO, then Settings.

First, we’re going to pop into the ‘Site representation’ page (under the General section). Fill in as many fields as you can. These include your charity’s name, logo and social media addresses. You can also unlock more fields with a Premium subscription.

Going the extra mile to fill in this information will increase the likelihood of your charity being displayed as a knowledge panel rather than a standard search page link.

If you intend to link your website to multiple third party platforms (Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Pinterest, etc.), Yoast enables you to paste your various verification codes in one place. You can access this from the ‘Site connections’ page, also under the General section.

Yoast can also help you to speed up your website’s performance by removing unnecessary code. We recommend you visit the ‘Crawl optimisation’ page (under the Advanced section) and consider which options you can remove (your developer can help you decide).

We recommend you at least select the option to ‘Remove generator tag’. This will stop WordPress from displaying information about the plugins and software you are using. This info has no value and makes it easier for hackers to target your website.

Finally, if your theme supports breadcrumbs, you can enable this feature under the Advanced section. You can customise the appearance of your breadcrumbs and then toggle on the option at the bottom of the page. Yoast have written an in depth article about the benefits of breadcrumbs and how to add them to your website.

And that’s it. You now have everything you need to write human and search engine friendly articles that rank well and stand out on the search engine results pages.