Why SEO Requires a Seat at the Executive Table
SEO professionals have long been a silent force, educating, empowering and bringing teams to work together towards a truly integrated digital marketing strategy, working on overall marketing effectiveness and doing clean up work for many disciplines for years. It’s time to break down these silos and recognize SEO as a strategic leadership function.
The SEO’s Burden: Fixing Everyone Else’s Problems
It’s the developers’ job to ensure proper technical implementation of meta tags, structured data, crawling, indexing issues, and page speed optimizations, which often get passed to SEO teams despite being core development responsibilities.
It’s the branding team’s job to align messaging and tone to the brand’s identity in all marketing efforts. This includes crafting compelling titles and descriptions for key pages that match the brand’s overall vision and resonate with target audiences.
It’s the branding and social media team’s job to fix Open Graph issues, improve the Google My Business profile, and keep it up to date with posts that promote the most important pages and highlight key campaigns.
It’s the content team’s job to create high-quality, engaging, and optimized content. SEO can provide guidelines on topics, keywords, and structure, but it’s not the SEO team’s responsibility to write or rewrite all website copy, blogs, and promotional materials to fill gaps left by a lack of strategy.
It’s the design team’s job to create user-friendly, visually appealing, and functional website layouts. SEOs often step in to address UX/UI issues that hurt rankings, like poor mobile responsiveness, confusing navigation, or inaccessible design, but these tasks belong squarely in the design department.
It’s the PR team’s job to build relationships and secure media placements. SEOs shouldn’t have to take the lead on outreach campaigns or clean up the fallout from poorly coordinated PR efforts that fail to generate meaningful links.
It’s the analytics team’s job to provide comprehensive reports and dashboards that track KPIs across all marketing channels. While SEOs can assist with creating actionable metrics for search performance, they often get tasked with fixing broader tracking and analytics issues. SEOs shouldn’t have to troubleshoot broken forms, misaligned landing pages, or ineffective calls to action.
Ultimately, SEO professionals have been stepping into the roles of Digital Marketing Managers and Chief Marketing Officers to set priorities for all teams, ensure resource allocation aligns with company goals, and foster cross-departmental collaboration.
And we do it because we care about driving results. However, organizations need to either acknowledge the distinct responsibilities of each team or place SEO at the level it merits.
Recognizing SEO’s Strategic Value: A Call for Change
If SEO is expected to serve as the connective tissue between development, content, branding, social media, and design, it must be recognized as a strategic leadership function, not just a technical or operational one.
This means giving SEO a seat at the decision-making table, ensuring it has the resources and authority to direct priorities, and compensating professionals in alignment with the significant value they deliver.