The vicious cycle of implementation
In our most recent interviews, we heard the same story over and over again. A pattern emerged, and it’s a vicious cycle.
1. The rate of implementation slows down
Organic campaign activity begins to decline, with very few tickets or campaigns activated.
2. Performance eventually begins to plateau or decline
Organic performance reports start to show traffic and conversion decline due to a lack of campaign activity.
3. Skepticism starts to build around SEO and buy-in dwindles
Disappointing results leave stakeholders questioning the efficacy of investing in SEO and wondering if they could get a greater return by investing in other channels.
4. The amount of resource available to action SEO declines
A lack of advocacy for SEO means that developer and marketing resources are locked into other projects, leaving minimal resource available for implementation.
And then the cycle repeats itself, again and again.
Why is getting SEO strategies implemented such a big challenge?
Getting SEO initiatives out of strategy docs and onto live websites theoretically should be a straightforward task. Once the strategy is agreed, a roadmap is developed and the tasks should be executed accordingly. And yet, getting to execution has become a major challenge for so many organisations.
Traditional blockers
There have always been implementation barriers for SEO. We often hear that SEO is:
1. Siloed
Organic is not fully embraced as Marketing or as Product, despite often needing to collaborate with stakeholders on both sides.
This also goes beyond Technical SEO too, with Digital PR and Organic Content team members often working separately from their traditional PR or Editorial counterparts.
2. The ‘mystery box’
SEO is misunderstood and shrouded in mystery. Many people working outside of SEO are confused by the jargon-heavy rhetoric, and are unsure how investment in SEO improvements can translate into commercial benefits.
3. Mistrust
Historically, poor education around SEO and an association with old or dubious black hat tactics has cultivated an air of mistrust around SEO. For some, these past negative experiences are hard to move past.
New challenges
So, if implementation barriers have always existed, what’s changed to make this an even bigger challenge?
1. Restructures
Since Covid, we have seen a significant number of restructures impacting organisations. From reductions in headcount and outsourcing teams, to the reshuffling of hierarchies and responsibilities, restructures are creating an increasingly tougher environment for SEO to be prioritised.
Crucially, this means that decision-makers are juggling more responsibility outside of their traditional remit. This means that SEO initiatives have an increasing amount of competition from other potential projects while the stakeholders themselves have less time to uncover value of SEO.
2. Innovation projects
A new wave of Digital Transformation powered by advances in AI has been taking the world by storm. Naturally, C-Suites and senior stakeholders are keen to jump onto these new technologies and innovations early to ensure that they reap the rewards and critically, that they do not lose ground to competitors.
At large companies, these innovation initiatives have quickly emerged as a new top priority but also take up a huge amount of resource. Which we’ve already established there’s less of in a post-Covid and post-restructure world.
A new approach
To overcome implementation barriers in 2025 and beyond, we need to address our BAU blockers, but also directly target the new challenges that our stakeholders and decision-makers are facing.
Broadly, we can summarise the above challenges into two groups:
- More responsibility
- More complexity
To tackle these challenges directly, Builtvisible has developed a new approach to SEO projects that’s been designed to:
- Align commercially
- Reduce complexity
We look for opportunities to do just that across all phases of an Organic campaign. You can read more about this approach in our recent blog, “The Commercial Case for SEO: Introducing Named Project Workflows”.
We also know that Organic campaigns often interact with multiple teams in an organisation and at the enterprise level, these relationships and workflows can be very complex. As a result, we always ensure to tailor the approach depending on the stakeholder we’re communicating with.
Below, you can find some practical tips for adopting our new approach in your business – whether you’re working with clients via an agency, or as an in-house SEO function.
How to align SEO projects with commercial objectives
Understand stakeholder motivations
- The SEO community often talks about assigning revenue impact for potential SEO campaigns – a critical part of any process – but we don’t often discuss how we address our stakeholder’s KPIs and motivations.
- Ensure that you understand your stakeholders’ north star as well as their primary KPIs – and look to adapt your language, level of detail and packaging of SEO accordingly to each stakeholder.
Demystify SEO Forecasting
- Calculating an estimated business impact or forecast calculation for SEO can often be met with skepticism – or worse, silence!
- Set up meetings to ensure that key decision-makers have a comprehensive understanding of your calculation process – and ideally, come armed with results from previous initiatives or A/B tests to build credibility.
- For larger companies, you may also benefit from receiving official sign-off from the Finance team.
Amplify your results
- Stop relying on Dashboards and formal QBRs to show SEO results.
- Take results from SEO tests and key updates of projects direct to all involved stakeholders, adapting to their preferred method of communication.
- For example, Product and Developer teams may be less likely to open long PDFs.
How to reduce complexity for stakeholders
Use A/B Testing wherever possible
- A/B Testing is fantastic for validating proposed site-wide changes and also builds credibility for SEO as a channel as recommendations go from theory to tangible outcomes.
- Even simple experiments such as Metadata testing can be a great first step in driving a culture of experimentation.
- These results are often also important levers in building confidence in SEO forecasting and estimated revenue improvements as stakeholders begin to recognise the potential ROI that SEO can deliver.
In 2025, we’ll be introducing Testing As Standard into our SEO workflows to prove our strategy works, by testing our implementation on a representative section of the site to demonstrate impact and unlock buy-in.
Adapt your cadence
- Structurally, SEO teams tend to sit within Marketing reporting and workflows, and therefore tend to follow a Marketing calendar rather than the processes embedded within Product, PR or Editorial.
- Ensure that your key delivery and planning dates work backwards from your decision-makers and not the other way around.
- This ensures that delivery of high impact SEO campaigns and tickets are going to be well-received and fit seamlessly within their timelines.
Shoulder and simplify
- If you’re finding that implementation is seemingly impossible, look for opportunities to refine complicated SEO proposals into more simple tasks.
- Often, lower-effort proposals which involve fewer teams and have less dependencies will get picked up over high-effort proposals, as decision-makers and teams increasingly struggle with securing resource.
- Once you’ve built momentum and cultivated buy-in, higher-effort proposals can be revisited.
Post-it note your proposal
- SEO teams can often be seen as underestimating the effort level of developer tickets, as well as not having visibility over potential dependencies and blockers.
- As SEOs, we should be inviting key stakeholders and team members into the proposal process early on.
- One way to do this would be through an informal tissue session or ‘post-it note’ session.
- Stakeholders are invited to envision a proposal or process across lots of post-it notes.
- Through identifying the different teams and processes which will be required, the true effort level of tickets and potential blockers will emerge.
- The session also allows for potential workarounds to be discovered while significantly improving trust and communication.
Conclusion
Our key points to overcome implementation blockers in your organisation:
- Align commercially – understand stakeholder KPIs, clearly communicate forecasts, and share results in a tailored, accessible way
- Reduce complexity – build credibility, align delivery with decision-maker timelines, and simplify complex proposals
Get in touch if you think this approach might help your organisation, or if you’d like to hear more about how we’re overhauling typical SEO workflows.
