How to Use SEO Traffic to Make the Website a Better Place

Hello!

There are lots of fine blog articles about how to enhance the SEO or even promoting for charity and nonprofit sites. This isn’t one of these articles.

Using SEO Success for Social Good

In this blog article, I’ll explore how high-ranking websites with powerful search engine optimization can leverage their success to help improve the world — even if only in a small way — by driving clicks and awareness toward important on-brand social issues.

While socially responsible for-profit companies have become a major trend over the last two decades, the practice of simply donating resources to a good cause (and receiving tax benefits in the process) is recognized as a standard part of doing business.

According to Charity Navigator, U.S. businesses gave over $20 billion to charities in 2026.

Of that, we are guessing little to no donation has been accounted for in the Non-Branded SEO Awareness Impressions column.

At my company’s site, BMC Blogs, we love to think of our search rankings as real estate and our non-branded SEO awareness traffic as a valuable business asset.

Just like owning and maintaining the value of your home, preserving search rankings requires ongoing improvements over time — not only to keep the property in the excellent condition it ideally started in, but also to enhance it as time passes.

Normally, we use the traffic that results from our search ranking to promote ebooks, whitepapers, analyst reports, free trials, demos, webinars, survey results, and other useful B2B content.

Recently, we came up with a fresh idea: what if we donated some of our content’s existing ad placements — normally dedicated to our own messages and content — to good causes?

Could we generate traffic and awareness for major social issues without harming our current traffic and conversion volumes?

The answer so far is a resounding yes, with minimal extra effort beyond the work we already do to maintain our search positions and resulting traffic.

How the SEO for Issue Awareness Program Works

In 2026, we established an initiative to give away some of our audience’s valuable attention to support good causes.

One day a month, we swap out our right-rail skyscraper banner ad across our site to raise awareness for worthy causes.

To keep things simple, we select one distinctive global cause for each month of the year, such as World Health Day in April and International Museum Day in May.

For ease of management, we use our A/B testing tool to deploy the content change to 100% of traffic on the designated days each month.

In addition, we have made efforts to loosely align the causes we support with our other corporate charitable initiatives.

This is what it looks like to our users:

The Results of Our Program

After two weeks with this program in place, we have shown a Great Cause CTA to ~16,000 pageviews, and we are on track to show a Great Cause CTA to ~100,000 pageviews within this pilot 12-month period.

We have not yet generated much traffic or clicks for these causes.

However, as we refine the program and identify the best-fit causes, we expect to move in that direction.

We love to think of this as our own small version of Google Ad Grants, where Google donates free search-result ad space to nonprofits.

Tips for Getting Started

• Use your SEO traffic to support existing corporate initiatives first, then expand to fill the gaps until you have what you feel is a sufficient plan.
• Consider starting small, with just a couple of days or causes per year that are hyper-relevant to your audience. Don’t give away your users’ attention if you can’t afford to. As flight attendants say, put the mask on yourself first before helping others.
• Try to streamline your CTA process as much as possible so the program runs smoothly with practically no extra effort by using existing testing tools, scheduling, and standardized CTA formats.
• Gain leadership’s approval before starting the program. You wouldn’t want your manager to learn about a program like this the wrong way. Many leaders would applaud and support this type of initiative.
• Create a blog post or a short webpage explaining the program so your visitors understand exactly why they’re seeing a message supporting a good cause.

Also read:

• 7 Privacy Trends for Companies to Look Out for in 2025
• Why Transaction Monitoring is Critical
• How to Create Themes for Gravity Forms

A Call to Action

Are you a website owner, manager, or SEO professional looking to do something meaningful with the hard work you have invested in generating traffic from search engines?

• We invite you to identify excellent causes and nonprofits that could interest your site’s audience and simply get started.
• In addition to creating goodwill and improving the world, this is a simple way to:

Support your company’s other charitable programs.
Lead the way toward becoming a more socially responsible business.

If you work for a good cause or nonprofit in need of awareness and traffic, there are a couple of things you can take from this post.

• Check out Google Ad Grants to see if you can receive donated SEM visibility from Google Ads.
• Identify content sites that could be a good synergy with your cause — websites that already run banner ads or similar. Reach out to the owners of those sites and ask whether they might be interested in donating some of their visitors’ attention.

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