Controlling Your Brand Position Online With SEO via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

As search engines become more AI-driven with Overviews and the rise of large language models (LLMs), organic search is still one of the most significant brand touchpoints.

Whether through Google Search or AI-powered tools, a user’s first interaction with your brand often comes from these online results unless they’ve encountered your out-of-home (OOH) advertising, such as billboards, bus stop ads, TV commercials, or sponsored segments.

Brand “activity” is often not considered part of SEO. However, integrating brand management into your SEO strategy is as essential as your offensive and defensive tactics.

You risk losing control over the narrative if you don’t actively manage your brand’s search presence.

A relevant example is when I presented at a conference in Qatar a couple of years ago.

A company there inquired about its presence in what was then Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE). Google’s AI-generated response described its airport lounges as having some basic amenities but being overcrowded, noisy, and not offering good value for money.

Knowing how to control your brand’s search presence is essential not only for direct brand searches, but also to counteract potential negative perceptions.

Understanding Your Brand Position

Your brand position refers to how your company appears on traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) when users look up your business or brand terms. Understanding this allows you to take charge of your online narrative.

Unlike non-branded SEO, where companies compete for rankings, branded search is about controlling your message.

You aim to ensure search results display accurate, relevant, and brand-approved content rather than outdated pages, negative results, competitor ads, or misleading information.

For example, if someone searches for a company’s contact number and the top result directs them to a page with only a contact form and no phone number, they’ll return to the search results to find the information elsewhere.

Worse, they may come across incorrect phone numbers on third-party sites, leading to a frustrating experience.

Managing your brand’s search presence helps set the right expectations and prevents misinformation from harming customer trust.

Risks Of Losing Control Of Branded Search

If you don’t actively manage your branded search results, your business becomes vulnerable to several risks.

• Competitor Ads: Competitors may bid on your brand name through paid search ads, potentially diverting traffic from your website.
• Negative Press & Reviews: Google strives to provide a balanced perspective, meaning older controversies and unfavorable reviews can surface prominently in search results.
• Outdated Information: Old press releases, discontinued product pages, or outdated corporate details may rank highly and mislead potential customers.
• Third-Party Misinformation: Unverified details on Wikipedia, business directories, or forums can create a confused or inaccurate perception of your brand.

Key Areas Of Branded Search

To maintain control over your brand’s search presence, it’s crucial to understand the elements that influence your positioning.

Branded organic results include your homepage, blog, and key site pages, such as About, Contact, and FAQs.

Google SERP features and “decorations,” including Knowledge Panels, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, and AI-generated Overviews, can impact your brand’s appearance in search results.

Knowledge Panels display automatically generated information about your business, while PAA boxes showcase common user queries.

AI Overviews and Featured Snippets pull data from various sources, and you can optimize these by providing structured data and authoritative content.

Strategies For Controlling Branded Search Positioning

Effectively managing your brand’s search presence requires a multi-pronged approach.

From dominating the top search results to optimizing third-party content and Google Search features, a comprehensive strategy helps shape your brand’s online narrative and protect it from negative influences.

If your brand name has multiple meanings (e.g., it’s also the name of a city), structured data, internal linking, and a clear site hierarchy can help reinforce relevance.

Ensuring your most essential pages rank at the top for branded searches strengthens your positioning.

Managing Google’s Search Features

Optimizing Google’s Search features is key in controlling how users perceive your brand online.

Google provides various search elements that influence user engagement, and fine-tuning these ensures that searchers find accurate, positive, and authoritative information about your brand.

Influence PAA Boxes & Featured Snippets

These elements appear prominently in search results and provide quick answers to user queries.

Structuring your website’s content to address common brand-related questions clearly and concisely increases your chances of being featured.

This helps mitigate misinformation and ensures users receive accurate details directly from your brand.

Optimize For AI Overviews

AI-generated summaries pull data from multiple sources. To ensure your brand is represented accurately, provide well-structured, authoritative content.

Implementing schema markup, maintaining clear and accurate information, and producing expert-level content improve your chances of being included in AI-generated search responses.

Monitoring & Improving Third-Party Listings

Third-party listings significantly influence how your brand is perceived in search results. It is essential to actively monitor and optimize these listings.

• Track Brand Mentions: Tools like Google Alerts help you stay informed about how your brand is being discussed online.
• Engage with Reviews: Responding professionally to positive and negative reviews builds credibility.
• Run Branded Search Ads: This helps counteract competitors bidding on your brand name.

Handling Negative Press & Search Results

Negative search results aren’t always an SEO problem – they’re often a public relations issue. The best way to counteract negative press is to generate enough positive coverage.

While achieving 100% customer satisfaction is unrealistic, brands can proactively shape perceptions by addressing common pain points and ensuring positive customer experiences before and after a sale.

A well-rounded strategy includes public relations, offline marketing, and brand-building activities like out-of-home (OOH) advertising. These efforts help establish a strong brand presence beyond individual product campaigns.

Measuring & Monitoring Brand Search Performance

Tracking brand search performance should be an ongoing process. Regular monitoring ensures you stay ahead of shifts in search trends and take action when necessary.

Branded Keyword Tracking

Use SEO tools such as Google Search Console or a third-party rank tracking tool to monitor branded search rankings over time.

Google Search Console

It helps distinguish between branded and non-branded search trends, offering insights into user behavior and traffic sources.

Google Trends

It tracks brand search interest over time, helping assess the impact of marketing campaigns and brand awareness efforts.

Monitor Search Features

Track your brand’s appearance in Google’s Knowledge Panels, Featured Snippets, and PAA boxes to ensure accurate representation.

Brand Sentiment Analysis

Beyond search rankings, monitoring brand sentiment provides deeper insights into public perception.

• Use Google Alerts & Social Listening Tools: These help track media coverage, customer reviews, and social media discussions that influence brand sentiment.
• Address Negative Mentions: Engaging with critics and amplifying positive content can help shape public perception.

Establishing A Reporting Framework

To maintain a strong brand presence in search, businesses should develop a structured reporting framework, comparing branded search performance monthly and yearly.

• Key performance indicators (KPIs) include branded search volume, click-through rates (CTR), organic visibility, and the prominence of brand-related SERP features.
• Aligning reporting efforts with these KPIs ensures relevant stakeholders stay informed about brand performance in search results.

Bottom Line

Branded search should be a proactive strategy, not a reactive one.

By optimizing your website, managing third-party content, leveraging Google Search features, and defending against competitor bidding, you can ensure your brand is accurately and positively represented.

Taking control of your search presence strengthens your reputation, trust, and market position, making your brand more resilient to external challenges.

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Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock

Key Elements Of Technical SEO For Large Companies via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

Working with large organizations to improve their technical SEO is, in my opinion, the best and most enjoyable time to practice technical skills.

More often than not, you’re faced with complex systems and infrastructures, a host of legacy issues, and different teams responsible for different sections of the website.

This means you need to work with a number of teams and prove business cases, including “the why,” to multiple stakeholders to enact change.

For this, you need strong technical SEO knowledge, but you also need the ability to make multiple people (and teams) care about why something is an issue, and the reasons why they should be invested in fixing it.

Juggling complex technical issues and maintaining communications with multiple stakeholders, ranging from C-level through to brand, product, and engineering teams (in addition to your direct contacts), can be an overwhelming experience.

But it also provides great experience and allows you to develop key technical SEO skills outside of checklists and best practices. These are valuable experiences you can then apply to the run-of-the-mill technical projects.

Issue Communication At Scale

Enterprise brands have large teams, and you’ll need to coordinate and work with multiple teams to get things done.

Some companies have these teams operating as one beat, with known overlaps and free-flowing communications.

Others operate teams in silos, with the website (or websites) and/or regions being carved up into different teams. This can make it more challenging to show results in the more “traditional” way and can make getting buy-in for website-wide technical issues to be resolved more challenging.

Each team within the business has its own set of priorities – and often its own key performance indicators (KPIs).

While the marketing teams may be broken up, engineering teams are usually a single resource in the business, so you’re competing against the other marketing teams, brands, and products.

This means you not only need to make sure your main point of contact cares about the issue but also communicate to the wider teams how resolving the issue is also in their best interests.

The way to do this is through effective, multi-department reporting.

This doesn’t mean producing one big report for all departments to pick and choose what they look at, but using the data available to you to create multiple reports that are simple, clean, and digestible that communicate to each stakeholder group the metrics that matter to them and influence their ability to be successful.

These can be as simple as Looker Studio reports or, if you’re API savvy, your own reporting dashboards.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

SOPs allow you to create a framework with the client to set benchmarks in consistency and scalability and document key changes, decisions, and implementations made.

Creating a knowledge center to document key changes is common practice, even outside of an enterprise, but developing SOPs that are reviewed and revised regularly goes one step further.

This also helps the client in onboarding new team members to bring them up to speed and smooth that process. It also provides frameworks for other client teams, reducing the risk or potential of them not adhering to an agreed best practice for the brand or experimenting with something they’ve read on a random blog or something that has been suggested by a large language model (LLM).

You can develop SOPs for all manner of scenarios, but from experience, there are three common SOPs that cover a range of basics and mitigate potential “SEO risk” from a technical SEO perspective:

• Internal linking.
• Image optimization.
• URL structures.

Internal Linking

Internal links are crucial for SEO. Every content piece, except for landing pages, should include internal links where relevant. A simple SOP for this could be:

• Avoid using non-descriptive anchor text, such as “here” or “this article,” and provide some context as to the page being linked to.
• Avoid internal links without context, such as automating the first or second instance of a word or phrase on each page to point to one specific page.
• Use Ahrefs’ Internal Link Opportunities tool or Google search (site:[yourdomain.com] “keyword”) to find linking opportunities.

Image Optimization

Many overlook image SEO, but optimizing images can improve page load speeds – and, if important to you, improve your visibility within image search. A good SOP should include:

• Using descriptive file names, and not keyword stuffing them.
• Writing alt text that accurately describes the image for accessibility, and not including sales messaging within them.
• Choosing the right file format and compressing images to improve load speed.

URL Structures

Ensure URLs are optimized for search engines and users by making them clear, concise, and keyword-relevant. The SOP should cover:

• Removing unnecessary stop words, punctuation, and white spaces (20%).
• Using hyphens instead of underscores.
• Not keyword stuffing the URLs.
• Using parameters that don’t override the source or trigger a new session within Google Analytics 4.

Technical Auditing Nuances

One of the more complex elements of performing a technical audit on any enterprise website with a large number of URLs is crawling.

There a number of ways you can tackle enterprise website crawling, but two common nuances I come across are the need to perform routine sample crawls, or tackling the crawl of a multi-stack domain.

Sample Crawling

Sample crawling is an efficient way to diagnose large-scale SEO issues without the overhead of a full crawl.

By using strategic sampling methods, prioritizing key sections, and leveraging log data, you can gain actionable insights while preserving crawl efficiency.

Your sample should be large enough to reflect the site’s structure but small enough to be efficient.

I typically work to the following guidelines for the size of the website or the size of the subdomain or subfolder.

You also want to choose your samples strategically, especially when your number of URLs enters hundreds of thousands or millions. There are four main types of sampling:

• Random Sampling: Select URLs randomly to get an unbiased overview of site health.
• Stratified Sampling: Divide the site into key sections (e.g., product pages, blog, category pages) and sample from each to ensure balanced insights.
• Priority Sampling: Focus on high-value pages such as top-converting URLs, high-traffic sections, and newly published content.
• Structural Sampling: Crawl the site based on the internal linking hierarchy, starting with the homepage and main category pages.

Crawling Multi-Stack Websites

Crawling websites built on multiple stacks requires a strategy that accounts for different rendering methods, URL structures, and potential roadblocks like JavaScript execution and authentication.

This also means you can’t just crawl the website in its entirety and make broad, sweeping recommendations for the “whole website.”

The following is a very top-line checklist that you should follow, and it covers a lot of the key areas and “bases” that you may encounter:

1. Identify and map out which parts of the site are server-rendered vs. client-rendered.
2. Determine which areas require authentication, such as user areas.
3. If sections require login (e.g., product app), use session cookies or token-based authentication in Playwright/Puppeteer.
4. Set crawl delays if rate-limiting exists.
5. Check for lazy-loaded content (scrolling or clicking).
6. Check if public API endpoints offer easier data extraction.

A good example of this is a website I worked on for a number of years. It had a complex stack that required different crawling methods to crawl and identify issues at a meaningful scale.

The above are extreme approaches to crawling. If your crawling tool allows you to render webpages and avoid using tools like Puppeteer to fetch content, you should do so.

Final Thought

Working on technical SEO for large organizations presents unique challenges, but it also offers some of the most rewarding experiences and learning opportunities that you can’t find elsewhere – and not all SEO professionals are fortunate enough to experience.

Making a lot of the “day-to-day” more manageable – and gaining buy-in from as many client stakeholders as possible – can lead to a better client-agency relationship, and lay the foundations for strong SEO campaigns.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock

TAM, SAM, SOM: Understanding Their Role In Enterprise-Level SEO Strategy via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

Understanding total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable obtainable market (SOM) isn’t just useful for marketers. It’s an important tool for assessing whether a business idea is viable.

These metrics give various business stakeholders, including marketers and product teams, the clarity they need to evaluate whether a new product has the potential to succeed.

TAM, SAM, and SOM play a key role in crafting a solid go-to-market strategy, and can influence the overall business plan.

They help fine-tune marketing and sales strategies, set realistic revenue goals, and determine which markets are worth your investment of time and resources.

While these metrics are deeply interconnected and don’t always have strict boundaries, their value lies in how they evolve alongside your brand, product lines, and customer needs.

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)

SOM is a smaller part of the SAM that your business can realistically capture within a certain period of time.

How much you are able to capture depends on factors like your competition, resources, and how effectively you can execute your tactics.

As the SOM is the smallest audience size in the framework, it is often overlooked as the bigger numbers and bigger audiences are more appealing – and look better on slide decks.

To enhance SEO for your SOM, start with in-depth market research to pinpoint your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) in this reachable group.

• What are their habits?
• What challenges do they face?
• What terms are they searching for?

Use this insight to form content that speaks directly to them.

Develop a keyword strategy that includes niche-specific terms, and support it by publishing high-value content, optimizing for local search, and building authoritative backlinks.

The goal is to meet your customers where they are while creating meaningful engagement.

This is where you can also apply the Pareto Law as outlined by Byron Sharp in the book “How Brands Grow.”

In the book, Sharp cites that 60% of Coca-Cola sales come from just 20% of the buyer base. Their SOM is responsible for 60% of sales.

Serviceable Available Market (SAM)

Your SAM is an expansion on your SOM, and represents the slice of the TAM that’s feasible for your business to target, given its unique offerings and practical reach.

It narrows the TAM by focusing on customers who align with your specific product and logistical capabilities.

For an online sports shoe store, the SAM could be fitness enthusiasts and amateur athletes who shop online and live in areas where the company offers delivery and actively markets its products.

By refining your TAM into a SAM, you’re ensuring you prioritize the most realistic opportunities for your business.

This then translates into your SEO strategy, and helps you prioritize your content and digital PR focuses by working to reach these audience profiles.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

The TAM is the largest market opportunity. It represents the total revenue your product or service could generate if you somehow captured 100% of the market.

TAM serves as the starting point for understanding the full scale of an opportunity, offering a broad perspective before you narrow things down.

In the sports shoe example, the TAM could include everyone in the world who buys sports shoes, whether they shop online or in-store.

This overall market might include professional athletes, casual gym-goers, and even occasional joggers, spanning all sales channels like ecommerce sites, retail stores, and third-party marketplaces.

You then also have the fashion and collector markets, who see sports shoes as casual everyday wear or as a monetary investment.

While TAM is more theoretical, it sets the foundation for evaluating the overall potential of your industry.

TAM Vs. SEO TAM

“TAM” represents the total revenue potential if a company captures 100% of its market. “SEO TAM” narrows this to the revenue achievable by reaching all potential customers through search engines.

It represents the potential revenue attainable by engaging all customers who could discover your product via search engines, where their intent aligns with the value of your content or product/service.

I wrote an article exploring the SEO TAM more here.

The TAM Trap

The alignment of your value proposition to what the user is looking for is important, even more so now than ever.

The “TAM trap” in calculating your potential SEO market happens when you assume that everyone who searches a specific keyword shares the same intent.

Keywords can have multiple interpretations; some you would class as having multiple common interpretations, some more dominant interpretations, and others potentially lesser common interpretations.

A number of factors can influence these interpretations, including time of the year and the searcher’s location.

Some common examples involve brands, such as Jaguar: Are people searching for the car, the animal, or the sports team?

A less common example I’ve experienced was a variation of the term “WAF.”

The dominant interpretation of this search term (globally) is Web Application Firewall, but our rank trackers picked up that on Texas IPs, for around a month, Google alternated between our CDN client and the World Apostolate of Fatima church.

This was around the time of a religious festival, so, for a short time, the most prominent interpretation of the queries in that locale changed to users wanting details for the church. This impacted our WAF rankings from the top three to lower page one.

After the two-week period, when the change in demand subsided, the SERP “reset” to reflect the regular interpretations.

This is important to note, as just classifying queries by intent isn’t always enough when estimating audience size – especially when big marquee head terms are involved – as not all 10,000 searches of the query will come from users with the same interpretation, same prior knowledge levels, or same end-intent.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

Why Your SEO Playbooks Need To Collaborate With Sales And Brand Teams via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

An SEO playbook acts as a guide for creating, executing, and sustaining effective SEO strategies.

It ensures that all participants, from marketers to developers, adhere to a unified and methodical approach.

Typically the playbook encompasses essential elements that steer SEO initiatives, aligning them with business goals and promoting teamwork across different teams.

Communicating and working with the majority of the C-suite is rewarding and collaborative. Although overall “SEO knowledge” might not be as high (which is why we, as specialists, are brought into the fold), the core objectives provide common ground to align on:

• Creating effective contribution of SEO (as a channel) against overall marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Effectively communicating with all business departments (C-suite, product, brand, sales, engineering) and getting “SEO buy-in.”
• Reaching your Serviceable Available Market (SAM), Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), and Total Addressable Market (TAM) with relevant brand touchpoints.

This is where developing SEO playbooks come into effect.

In my experience, your SEO playbook needs to be put together in collaboration with other MarComm teams and agencies and teams like product and engineering.

When I was consulting with Gitlab, one of the biggest opportunities we found was from holding a call with the product team and asking them for their unfiltered opinions and input on how products were being represented on the website.

Combining these insights from engaging non-marketing teams enabled more streamlined buy-in for SEO initiatives.

By integrating SEO into every aspect of an organization’s marketing communication strategy, brands can ensure that all channels function together effectively to enhance visibility, engage audiences, and contribute towards the overall, meaningful KPIs.

Developing SEO Playbooks

The first step in developing a successful SEO playbook in collaboration with sales, brand, and engineering teams is to understand the unique goals, priorities, and workflows of each team.

While all teams are pulling in the same direction to the overall business goals, their individual team goals, KPIs, and how they contribute to the bigger picture will differ.

By understanding and respecting each team’s unique priorities, you can create a foundation for a collaborative and impactful SEO playbook, as well as how to more effectively communicate how your SEO initiatives can positively impact their objectives.

Sales Team Priorities

The sales team’s main focus is on converting leads into customers and driving revenue. Their priorities (and direct responsibilities) often include:

• Using data to improve the likelihood that prospects will complete desired actions (e.g., signing up for a product demo, a trial, or making a purchase).
• Understanding pain points, objections, and decision-making factors of potential customers. Then, providing feedback to other MarComms teams on how products/features are being represented at the various touchpoints.
• Meeting or exceeding monthly, quarterly, and annual sales targets.
• Ensuring that leads generated through SEO efforts are effectively managed and nurtured.

Brand Team Priorities

The brand team’s goal is to create a cohesive and compelling identity that resonates with target audiences.

There is substantial overlap here with the SEO team. More likely, we see elements of the brand team in any content tone of voice guides we receive. Their main responsibilities include:

• Ensuring all communications reflect the company’s tone, voice, and values.
• Building strong relationships with customers through storytelling and emotionally resonant content.
• Maintaining a consistent look and feel across all digital and offline touchpoints.

Engineering Team Priorities

The engineering team plays a critical role in ensuring the technical infrastructure supports SEO initiatives and provides a seamless user experience.

Understanding their processes from the get-go is imperative to not only implementing any technical SEO recommendations you provide, but also to proactively keep you in the fold and informed of any deployments that could affect SEO performance.

Depending on the structure of the engineering team, their responsibilities will range from proactive development and bug fixing to managing infrastructure.

Define The Objectives Of The Playbook

The basic definition must outline a playbook for SEO purposes so that all teams have collective common goals.

Such goals create the guiding principle behind measuring SEO impact with the business and sales priorities of the brand.

Establish clear objectives to align SEO with business priorities:

• Increase organic traffic, improve conversion rates, and boost brand awareness.
• Track keyword rankings and clicks from keyword clusters (aligned with stages of the funnel/your audience segments).
• Measure organic leads, SEO-driven conversions, and revenue attribution.
• Branded search volume, content alignment, and engagement (measured through events in Google Analytics 4).

These objectives create a measurable framework for success.

Create Playbook Sections For Each Team

Create specific sections for each team in order for the playbook to ensure actionability and relevance to teams.

Specific strategies and guidelines should stem from the goals and responsibilities of each section.

Encourage sales team members to submit content addressing typical objections or questions from prospects, ensuring SEO efforts bring in qualified leads and the content not only ranks for search terms but resonates with prospects at a level that keyword research tools and basic level intent classification don’t tell us.

Brand teams should contribute clear guidelines for brand consistent maintenance of meta-descriptions, headings, alt texts, and other SEO elements.

They need to share positive reviews, customer testimonials, and stories to help build trust and credibility and provide a better understanding to the SEO teams on what the target audience values pre- and post-conversion.

Engineering teams need to contribute and (working with the SEO team) define a process for issue raising, prioritization, and deployment.

They should also share their overall processes and include the SEO team in scrum notes or agendas so any major potential issues can be understood and mitigated if necessary.

Feedback Loops And Reporting

Regular check-ins create a continuous cadence for teams to hear updates on progress and address issues.

Weekly or bi-weekly meetings would provide an opportunity to review ongoing SEO initiatives, address impediments, and maintain alignment across departments.

Sessions of this nature would also provide an open platform for communication and keep the focus on the same objectives.

Cross-departmental reporting interlinks core SEO performance metrics like keyword rankings and organic traffic to tangible business outcomes like conversion and brand engagement.

This would illustrate the impact SEO efforts have on revenue or the brand’s visibility to stakeholders concerning the strategic worth of SEO and its continued investment.

An SEO Playbook Is A Dynamic Resource

Your SEO playbook should contain actionable insights to guide the next steps in underperforming pages, highlighting technical issues or suggesting areas for strengthening conversion paths so that teams could address such problems quickly and seize new opportunities for growth.

Data visualization takes these further. Instead of dashboards, charts, or interactive tools, show stakeholders the different possibilities the data presents.

Monitoring and analysing metrics at a more granular level will allow you to better visualize user engagement, making it a lot easier to spot trends, measure progress, and prioritize strategic actions.

Incorporating structured feedback loops and transparent reporting turns an SEO playbook into a dynamic, ever-evolving resource.

It adapts continuously, driven by new data, open communication, and collective insights, ensuring each SEO initiative delivers maximum value.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Face Stock/Shutterstock

Communicating The Impact Of AI On SEO To C-Level via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

AI has emerged as one of the most transformative and disruptive forces in marketing as an industry in a long time, probably the most impactful since the mass adoption of the internet.

It will continue to evolve and change search as a practice for years to come.

While brands are working on AI adoption at an organizational level, the benefits and applications to most departments within the business are clear to the C-level.

When it comes to SEO, the opportunities and threats are less clear.

As an industry, we’re still deliberating how we classify ChatGPT (and other large language model tools). Are they search engines or discovery engines?

If we don’t have clear definitions of what is happening in the industry, we can’t expect our C-level stakeholders to understand – and this can breed uncertainty.

There are enough headlines surrounding AI from various mainstream publications that the perception of, and application capabilities of AI can vary greatly depending on your field of view.

To best explain and communicate how worried – or excited – your C-suite stakeholders need to be with the impact of AI on your SEO program, you need to be able to make it relatable.

This often comes down to the potential impact on website traffic (all channels), and the measurable impact on conversions (and the ROI/CPA stemming from specific channels). But also includes how it affects your audience.

AI Adoption In Your Audience

Before, we look at how to assess your SEO opportunities and threats with AI. A key part of this is understanding how your target markets perceive AI, their planning on adopting AI in their daily lives, and what opportunities AI has to enter their lives seamlessly.

Depending on your target markets, you’ll find active AI adoption rates differ.

Adopting any new technology relies on its ability to provide value by either enhancing user experience or solving a disutility. To do this, it has to achieve ARC:

• Accessibility.
• Reliability.
• Cost.

Only by achieving these three things while providing value can a new technology gain mass market adoption.

Different demographics are adopting AI at different rates.

Looking at consumer surveys and reports, we see Gen Z and Gen Alpha embracing AI and actively utilizing platforms other than Google as the first port of call to discover information and content.

This is supported by a recent data release by Ofcom (Online Nation 2024 Report), which identified that those aged 18-24 are the highest adopters of AI technologies.

It is reported that 1 in 4 (27%) uses ChatGPT at least monthly, with 1 in 3 of this age segment using it.

Another notable data point from this report is that men are more likely to adopt AI, with 50% reporting using AI tools, compared to only 33% of women.

Adoption rates don’t tell the full story.

Threads reached 100 million users in less than a week, but quality issues have seen demand and daily active users (DAU) drop substantially.

A key part factor in this has been Threads’ algorithm capabilities to return satisfying and relevant content to users, and this same challenge is facing LLM tools such as ChatGPT.

The Ofcom Online Nation 2024 Report found that only 1 in 5 (18%) of adults found the information on ChatGPT to be reliable, but this rose to 33% among young adults.

Passive AI Adoption

ChatGPT and the other LLM tools fall under the banner of active AI adoption. Using these tools is a conscious adoption of AI, as you don’t accidentally log in to Claude or Perplexity.

In my opinion, the greater “softening” of the mass market and normalization of LLM tools and AI in the mainstream will come from the passive AI touchpoints that our target audiences are subjected to.

These include things like:

• The appearance of Google AI Overviews and Bing Generative Search frequently appearing as part of routine internet usage.
• Additional prompts to use AI tools such as virtual try-ons.
• Phone manufacturers promoting AI-driven features such as Gemini and Circle Search as product unique selling points (USPs).
• Apple’s integration of Intelligence.
• Spotify’s AI DJ.
• Meta AI’s integration into their suite of products.

These non-invasive touchpoints will, over time, soften attitudes towards AI and build trust, leading to increased adoption elsewhere.

This means that we need to understand where our users spend their time, and the potential exposure to passive AI interactions.

To do this, we need to understand which channels have higher than average term usage, and this helps us identify which platforms our audience over-indexes on.

For example, the topic of “eyeliner” over-indexes on Facebook and Instagram and under-indexes on Reddit and LinkedIn, which is the same channel indexing patterns as “Adidas Samba”.

Understanding which channels your audience is actively engaging with also aids buy-in from other internal marketers and agencies handling the non-SEO channels, and reaches closer to a collaborative integrated communications strategy.

This is a great opportunity to get buy-in from other marketing stakeholders, but if your success metrics are bound to metrics such as directly attributable organic traffic – this is a threat.

Adapting To AI-Origin Users

AI introduces opportunities, but also raises the bar for channel performance.

As mentioned earlier in the article, this means a better understanding of your product and which channels are the right fit, in addition to visibility in organic search.

One way we can do this, in addition to data from third-party tools, is to utilize the Kano Model. The Kano model is a framework traditionally used to categorize and prioritize customer needs and can be effectively applied to assess and enhance product-channel fit in marketing.

For marketing product-channel fit, think of the channel (e.g., email, social media, SEO, paid ads) as a “feature” and map how well it satisfies user expectations.

To adapt and reach our target audiences as they adopt AI tools, or AI product features in existing tools, we as marketers need to:

• Shift from Broad Channels to Intent-Driven Channels: Focus on channels that align with customer intent, as AI improves its ability to match consumer needs in real-time.
• Embrace AI-Native Platforms: Platforms like ChatGPT or AI-powered discovery engines require new strategies for delivering benefit-focused, concise, and conversational content.

Monitoring AI Traffic

Another key part of communicating your exposure to LLMs and AI chatbots is the accurate tracking of AI traffic to your website.

This also informs your marketing strategies and adaptation to cater to shifting user behaviors within your target audience.

Traffic from LLMs can be easily monitored through Google Analytics 4 Explore reports, or through Google Looker Studio.

The method for segmenting data depends on the objective, who needs data access, and to what depth.

Tracking LLM traffic via Looker Studio. Image from author, December 2024

GA4 Explore Reports are effective for routine updates, such as monthly reporting, and provide clients with direct access to data through their Google Analytics accounts.

Looker Studio offers two distinct approaches. The first focuses on detailed, client-specific reports that track granular data, such as landing pages and events triggered by LLM traffic, tailored to individual needs.

The second is a quick overview dashboard, which is less customized but allows easy navigation through GA4 accounts, making it useful for ad hoc analysis and monitoring.

Marketers Must Adapt And Align

AI is transforming marketing, offering new opportunities and challenges across all marketing channels. To adapt, marketers must align strategies with evolving user behaviors and clearly communicate AI’s impact on traffic, conversions, and audience engagement to the C-suite and wider business stakeholders.

By focusing on clear communication, measurement and simple visualizations, and strategic adaptation of AI technologies into existing processes, brands can successfully navigate and take advantage of opportunities presented by AI while transforming and future-proofing the marketing function.

More Resources:

Featured Image: wenich_mit/Shutterstock

Getting C-Level Buy-In For SEO Initiatives via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

One of the biggest challenges in enterprise SEO is getting buy-in from the wider C-suite.

Typically, the CMO will sign off on your vendor engagement, having been involved in the selection process (more often than not) and helping smooth onboarding with other inbound and demand generation stakeholders.

Despite its potential to drive revenue, generate new-to-brand touchpoints, and improve customer acquisition, SEO’s value isn’t always immediately obvious to non-marketing stakeholders in the C-suite.

Over the past two decades, we’ve educated C-suite and SEO clients, in general, to judge the value of SEO campaigns on metrics such as rankings and traffic.

While these are important metrics in competitive enterprise verticals, relying solely on these metrics isn’t always a good indicator of a successful (or functional) SEO engagement.

C-level tends to focus on the bigger picture how the business can grow, how risks can be mitigated, and, importantly, that a return on investment (ROI) can be demonstrated from investment in marketing, operations, and internal resources.

To gain wider buy-in, SEO needs to be positioned and communicated as a part of the organization’s overall strategy and not a standalone tactic in the user acquisition playbook.

Understanding What Matters To C-Level Leaders

The first step is understanding what matters to those in the C-suite. With this, we can make our communications more relatable.

As mentioned in the introduction, three core things I’ve found all C-levels to care about regardless of the organization size are:

1. Reducing paid media reliance.
2. Risk management.
3. Increasing revenue and long-term profitability.

SEO can be presented as a way to achieve all these objectives in some form, whether it be improving the technical proficiency of the website for search engine and LLM crawlers, or developing content to increase brand visibility and new-to-brand (NTB) touchpoints.

These outcomes can be measured and can tangibly be connected back to these things that C-level care about, and what they might be judged on by the executive board as to whether or not they have been successful themselves.

From my experience, outside of the CMO, the general understanding and view of SEO within the C-suite is that it is unpredictable.

Or, knowledge is limited, and the difference (and value) between consultancy and an automated report from any given tool isn’t understood.

The only way to overcome this perception is through clear, SEO-jargon-free communications that tie back to tangible business outcomes in the short-, medium-, and long-term.

Instead of reporting back keyword rankings and the “day to day” campaign metrics, we should be giving C-level the topline numbers and outlining the bigger picture outcomes of what we’re trying to achieve.

Simplifying the narrative ensures that the C-level sees SEO as a reliable growth driver.

Engaging Stakeholders Across The Organization

Securing C-level buy-in for SEO requires building support across the organization.

Executives rarely make decisions in isolation, so engaging key stakeholders who influence their decision-making is critical.

Fostering alignment with other marketing, sales, and engineering teams can go a long way to gaining unified support for SEO initiatives, as well as active SEO team involvement in different projects that might affect overall web performance.

Start by identifying advocates within the organization. The marketing team, for example, can help highlight how SEO complements broader campaigns by driving organic traffic and reducing dependency on paid media.

Sales teams can reinforce how SEO brings in high-intent leads that convert into revenue.

Partnering with IT ensures that technical roadblocks are addressed, demonstrating operational readiness for SEO initiatives.

These collaborations build a coalition of support that strengthens your pitch.

Anticipate objections and address them proactively. Common concerns from executives often revolve around costs, resource allocation, and uncertainty of results.

Be prepared with data-driven answers that highlight SEO’s ROI, examples of quick wins, and the compounding benefits of long-term investment.

If cost is a concern, show how SEO’s efficiency compares to other acquisition channels. If timelines are questioned, outline a realistic roadmap with measurable milestones.

Building Roadmaps & Reports

Roadmaps and reports fulfill two important functions.

Roadmaps help visualize and communicate the tangible executables towards achieving the goals of the strategy, and reporting closes the loop on how effective they have been.

Effective reporting should be a pivotal communication tool in developing and maintaining the C-level relationship.

Effective Roadmaps

A clear and realistic roadmap is essential to turn approval into action.

Executives expect a well-defined plan that outlines key milestones, timelines, and measurable outcomes, ensuring resources are allocated effectively and progress is trackable.

Start by setting realistic expectations. SEO is a long-term investment, but breaking it into manageable phases helps demonstrate early wins while keeping the long-term vision intact.

Define key deliverables for each phase, such as improving site speed, optimizing high-impact pages, or fixing critical technical issues.

Pair these milestones with clear KPIs such as increases in organic traffic, conversion rates, or revenue growth so progress is easy to measure and communicate.

Budget and resource planning should be a central part of the roadmap.

Highlight the tools (if additional investment is needed by the business), talent, and time needed to execute the plan, showing how each investment contributes to business goals.

It’s also important to emphasize adaptability. A lot of SEO roadmaps often come across as Gantt charts of tactics without being brought to life and highlighting how they are contributing to the overall objectives, or that they are, more often than not, placeholders based on the current data and open to change should it be needed.

SEO priorities can shift as business needs change, so build flexibility into the roadmap to accommodate evolving goals or market conditions.

Regularly review progress, gather feedback, and adjust the plan to stay aligned with both SEO objectives and broader company strategies.

Effective Reporting

Effective reporting for C-level goes beyond performance reporting and pointing to SEO metrics and graphs.

While they are invested in the overall success of the business and how SEO is contributing to it, they are also often time-poor.

You need to use concise, visual tools like a Four-Box Report to keep executives informed without overwhelming them with lots of data and commentary. The Four-Box should be concise (by default, it’s a single page) and digestible.

A Four-Box Report is a visual reporting framework that organizes information into four quadrants, typically arranged in a 2×2 grid.

Image from author, November 2024

From experience, the quadrants aren’t always the same size since the information within them differs.

What’s important is they don’t move around the page, so over time, the recipients become familiar with the layout and which quadrant contains what information.

Each quadrant usually represents a distinct category, perspective, or type of data, depending on the report’s purpose.

Not all Four-Box Reports are the same, but my starting template typically consists of:

• “SEO Focused” PESTLE: This version helps evaluate an organization, project, or initiative’s internal and external factors. Looking at the wider ecosystem helps tie back performance to “real-world” impacts, which is important given how many mainstream headlines Google tends to get in the marketing space.
• Performance Metrics: Focus on four key areas, such as financial results, customer metrics, internal processes, and future growth.
• Strategic Prioritization: Examples of upcoming high-impact initiatives and how they tie back to the overall KPIs.
• 30,000-ft View Status Updates: Categories like “What’s Going Well,” “Challenges,” “Next Steps,” and “Support Needed.”

These reports also need to evolve over time and with feedback from the recipients to remain relevant and provide value.

Other elements I’ve added over time include project statements and RAG tables for specific tactics.

In Conclusion: Align SEO Wins With C-Level Priorities

Tie progress to KPIs that align with business goals. If organic traffic increases by 25% and adds $X in revenue, celebrate that win.

By consistently demonstrating SEO’s tangible impact, you ensure it remains a strategic priority.

By framing SEO as a strategic investment, aligning it with executive priorities, and delivering measurable results, you can secure and sustain the support needed to make your SEO initiatives a success.

More resources:

Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock