SEO maximized is a cross-functional effort

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence. See their case study linked in the end of the newsletter.

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After a couple of newsletters where I minimized the impact of SEO, I want to focus again on how valuable this channel can be when done right.

SEO is commonly approached as a marketing tool at the endpoint of product development. As a result, many of the decisions that drive the SEO decision-making come with a marketing viewpoint. This practice undercuts the real potential that SEO offers. 

When SEO is viewed simply as a marketing effort, relegated to a marketing organization, investments in technology happen too late in the product cycle. As a separate organizational silo outside product and engineering initiatives, SEO might even be thought of as a stop along the way before launch. However, having SEO as an afterthought hampers the impact of the effort due to a lack of flexibility to change course in a significant way if needed.

For example, suppose the technology choices made by infrastructure teams for hosting content are not aligned with best practices on visibility for search crawlers. In that case, it may be too late to revisit this decision meaningfully when it is pointed out. In the same regard, if the decisions around what content to produce are already made by the C-suite or worse, if the content is already written but does not meet an audience use case, the entire content investment might be for naught.

When SEO is the last stop before anything is released to the world, SEO teams are tasked with firing tickets to other developers about words that should be changed, URLs that could be updated, and general best practices. From an ROI standpoint, these suggestions will be low-impact at best.

CFO’s know this, and when the budget asks for SEO efforts, it’s hard to demonstrate the right ROI on that investment. This is the perfect recipe for an unsuccessful budget request.

(I have the start of a newsletter draft on how to pitch for the budget with this potential built-in, allowing the SEO team to overcome the all-too-familiar budget haircut. If you are reading this and not yet a subscriber, sign up for my newsletter so you can read it when it comes out. )

Furthermore, when viewed as a marketing effort, the SEO team will likely be limited by resources that could otherwise be directly deployed for SEO. While a marketing team will influence design, content, and messaging, they have little influence on directives related to the product itself and engineering. Any suggestions around development or engineering will usually have to first travel vertically up through a marketing silo before it is transmitted horizontally between product and tech leaders.

The solution

Obviously, if you have read my book “Product-Led SEO” you know that I am a huge proponent of thinking of SEO with a product lens, but this isn’t always possible for everyone. In my book, I share more ideas on how to “act as if” even when SEO is on marketing, but assuming you can impact the structure of SEO, it should be on the product team to achieve its cross-functional requirements.

This allows SEO to be the central player in an effort that can be one of the most potent sources of revenue within a company. As a part of the product team, SEO best practices will be considered when any web product has expectations of a search engine audience. Considerations around product naming conventions, technology decisions, and content taxonomy will all be considered when the direction can still be altered. 

Structured in this manner, SEO discussions and implementation will be a team effort that considers the knowledge and input from various cross-functional teams and will, therefore, lead to the best output. The engineering team does not have to be the source of all the most excellent SEO ideas, and the SEO team does not have to possess great general wisdom; instead, together, they achieve what could not be done alone in each silo.

When SEO is on a separate team from the product team, the product managers only check in with SEO after the fact. That is not going to lead to the best results.

Organizational charts at some of the most successful SEO companies are sometimes confidential and even trade secrets. Still, you can be confident that considerations around SEO at some of the world’s most dominant web properties were not made late in the process. 

Amazon won in e-commerce because SEO is a crucial feature of their website, something many brick-and-mortar competitors only found out too late.

On the flip side, you can look at the websites of significant banks versus the popular credit card review sites. The banks are certainly more authoritative in their product offerings than review sites, but as financial organization, they do not have SEO built into their decision-making. Review sites do not have the same restrictions and are, therefore, able to be more dominant in reviews for the products of these very banks.

Banks must pay review sites for customers they should have gotten for free because some lack the organizational flexibility to do SEO.

Deciding where and how to structure SEO first requires understanding the scale of returns that can come from implementation. If leadership recognizes that a product developed with SEO in mind has the capability and potential to build some of the greatest brands in the world if structured correctly for their audience, they will undoubtedly want to include SEO as an integral part of the development process. Alternatively, if SEO is thought of as something that needs to be done, it will be left to a junior employee or even an external agency to get to when everything else is done. 

Recognition of the potential is the key, as this will open the doors to organizational structure – i.e., team players – that allows this channel's potential to be infinite.

Regardless of whether SEO is on a product or marketing, it never hurts to continuously demonstrate this channel's potential.

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