Raise the status of SEO within the business

Ash says: “Enterprises should elevate the SEO function. The person/people who manage the SEO team should have their positions moved higher up in the org chart. The SEO manager should ideally sit in the C-suite.

Ask anyone who's been an enterprise SEO, either in-house or as an external consultant or an agency, and they can give you at least one example of how the SEO team was blindsided by some website decision that was taken without their knowledge – usually too late for anyone to change it.

Let me give some examples. The re-platforming of the company's core software included a new CMS because the vendor threw it in for free or you have to use it because it’s integrated with a core software. The old one would need developer resources and a budget for implementation. Maybe the timeline for implementing the new CMS is hardwired so not all content can be transitioned to the new templates.

Perhaps there was a fear that people were scraping your content with bad intent, so the company implemented a smart firewall, and web crawlers that are run by the SEO team were impacted. Maybe SEO developer requests were kept in the backlog because there was revenue-generating work that was given higher priority.

The marketing agency might have recommended they build and operate a niche website on a new domain for some campaign or that it be implemented as a subdomain – and it was already in the marketing collateral, so you couldn’t change it. Do these examples strike a chord with you? They're a blend of real examples from my own experience (with details altered so you can’t identify where I might have seen them).

My recommendation is an ideal scenario, so you may not get it as a first win; it might take you a bit of effort. In this perfect world, the company creates a C-level position that some companies have called a Chief Web Officer (CWO) or a Chief Webmaster (CWM). A less formal title for this person is Web Success Officer because that describes the responsibility given to them.

Nothing should happen to the website without the knowledge of the CWO. That does not mean that this C-suite executive is inserted into every website process and invited to every meeting. They analyse and modify workflows at a high level to ensure that organic traffic is not impacted. For example, they might find that the web developers need some training in HTML tags that have an SEO impact and they might need to run SEO 101 sessions at regular intervals in small group sessions. That would be the ideal situation.”

Are enterprises open to the CWO role or do they not recognise it as a requirement at the moment?

“Some have definitely done it. I did a search on LinkedIn for these titles, and I found about 10 such people in the world – some of which were past positions.

One company that came to mind was Colgate-Palmolive in the US. They had a Chief Web Officer at one point, I don't know if they still do, but someone certainly thought that it was a good idea. I commend them for having done that and I hope that they have continued such a position. A few other companies have had similar titles like Chief Webmaster.

Chief Digital Officer is a relatively common title. It seems to have spun off from the title of Chief Information Officer. Sometimes the CIO does everything that is vaguely digital. However, as companies mature, they can put the CIO in charge of infrastructure and create the CDO position to look at the website, apps, data privacy, etc.

Companies have definitely made a move, and I've recently been in a structure where the CDO was the C-level suite, and he was certainly very aware of SEO. I was fortunate in that scenario, but I'm speaking for other people whom I've met and spoken to, or interacted with online. Many of them have no clue how far up the ladder their reports circulate, and some of the examples that I hear confirm that decisions are made for many reasons – and SEO is not one of them.

It's as though organic traffic is not that important to them. Even though they might say that they are trying to get more sales or more leads through other means, they are embarrassed to admit that what they decided does impact SEO.

A few years ago, I was in a situation where the CMS was changed simply because it was free and allegedly integrated with their new, very expensive, multi-million-dollar transformation project. The website was a very tiny component of it. They spent a lot of time working on this free CMS and, later on, I heard that they threw it away and went for one of the big million-dollar solutions.”

How can an SEO encourage the organisation to introduce this kind of role in the future?

“You want to try and give regular presentations at senior meetings.

It all depends on how many layers of management there are. I usually find that the SEO manager role has around three levels above them. At the most, you might be presenting to your manager's level but, from time to time, you need to watch out for those opportunities and say, ‘Would it be a good idea to talk about these wins?’

Initially, you want to present some wins higher up. You won't get any objections if your manager can tell their managers that they've achieved a few SEO wins. That would give the SEO manager the chance to speak at the high-level meetings, so that's where you can begin.

Later on, once it becomes a regular thing, you can slip in some of the negative discoveries that you’ve made and, sooner or later, someone's going to say, ‘How can we improve things for you?’ That's the opening you need to watch out for and that’s where you need to play your cards carefully.”

Could SEOs then tell their high-level managers that there should be a CWO role to prevent issues in the future?

“Absolutely. I've seen a situation where decisions were made by someone who wore the hat of an Information Architecture Specialist. We were shaking our heads in the SEO team as to how would they have the knowledge of the impact they had on SEO just because they decided to change the CMS.

It can happen that these decisions are made by completely random corners of the company. For example, information security can suddenly take an interest in the firewall and decide that no one's going to be able to crawl the website at a high speed. Hopefully, they've heard of Googlebot but, if they haven't, they might discover that they've suddenly stopped the search engines. If they did that without telling the SEO team, they might be scratching their heads as to what's happened.”

If there's not a lot of buy-in or it's challenging to talk to those higher up in the organisation, is there an alternative internal route that the SEO manager can take?

“In my last role, I was very fortunate to be part of a scrum squad comprising people from different parts of the company. We had a QA person, a UX person, developers from a couple of disciplines (a mobile developer, a desktop developer, an app developer, etc.), and more. In an agile workplace, these people belong to different verticals in the company, and they've often gone back to tell them what SEO is about. Then, I was invited to speak to those different groups.

When you are invited to another vertical's internal meetings, you start to influence people from the ground up, so you don't always need to look for a C-level person. It’s fortunate if you do run into them at the water cooler, or you run into the CEO’s secretary – and you can have conversations and throw out the word ‘SEO’. One of the happiest moments in any SEO team's life is when they start seeing other teams talk about SEO in their conversations. It shows that the word has spread – and it's usually in a positive light.

Even if they don’t understand everything straight away, at least they are interested. I've had to bring a few people up to date over the years, and they appreciate that. It's all a question of how you do it.

At two different workplaces, I've created an internal wiki just for SEO. This was partly for the education of the company (anyone interested could browse the topics that we had listed), but its main purpose was for the SEO team. We would record all our learnings there.

For example, I was at companies where half a dozen brands were migrated to new CMSs, one after the other. If the first one was disastrous, we would apply the learnings from that to the next one, and there would be fewer mistakes. The last four or five transitions would be completely flawless; we did not make those earlier mistakes again.

Having an internal wiki is a great way for people to discover what you're doing, and they can ask you questions. I definitely encourage the sharing of knowledge – not just at meetings but also in a more semi-permanent form, in internal documents such as a wiki.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“I am not sure you need to stop doing anything, but you really need to find out who has not heard about the SEO team in your company, especially at the higher levels. Try to bump into a senior executive in a corporate social context. Many companies have occasions where you can mingle with senior people over Friday evening drinks, although it all depends on the workplace culture.

Look for every opportunity to drop some SEO stories – especially the wins. Everyone likes to hear about your wins. Then just ask if they happen to have read your last report, and if they aren’t aware of it, they’ll ask about it. Look for those openings and then ask, ‘Would you like me to include you in future reports?’ They'll always say yes, even if they don’t open them.

The whole point is that the more people you manage to make aware of SEO, the better it will be in the long run.”

Ash Nallawalla is CEO at CRM911 Digital, and you can find him over at CRM911.com.