How do I get buy-in for SEO beyond the marketing team?

Overview

SEO becomes successful when it’s treated as an enterprise capability rather than just another marketing task. To get support from all departments — from product and engineering to IT, sales and the C-suite — you have to show them how SEO turns into business outcomes. Your stakeholders will buy in when you remove friction from workflows and deliver quick, visible wins that matter to them.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to make SEO relevant, measurable and operational across the organization.

What I Think

I’ve seen too many SEO programs stall because they live in a silo. When SEO reports only circulate inside marketing, other teams don’t see the connection to revenue, retention, or product usage. On the other hand, the teams that win incorporate SEO into existing processes like product roadmaps, release schedules, content briefs and sales enablement.

The most effective way to get the entire company on board with SEO is to shift your language. Instead of talking about search rankings, start talking about the things that truly resonate — leads, conversions, page performance and time-to-value. I’ve found that when you show metrics that the CFO, head of product, or VP of sales already care about, resistance melts and collaboration follows. It’s less persuasion and more translation.

Deep Dive: Make SEO Operational Across Teams

Start by mapping how each department touches discoverability and value. Product owners control features and landing pages; dev teams control performance and schema; sales cares about lead quality; support wants lower ticket volume.

Document these intersections with concrete examples. For instance: “A 5% page-speed improvement on Product pages → X% uplift in sign-ups” or “Better FAQ markup → fewer support tickets.”

Create a common dashboard that surfaces SEO signals alongside business KPIs. I recommend integrating organic conversions, assisted revenue, page-level engagement and support-ticket reductions into whatever BI tools leadership already uses. When SEO appears on the same scorecard as sales and product metrics, it stops looking like a vanity project.

Build a short list of rapid wins for each function — technical fixes for dev, conversion copy tests for product, resource pages for support and keyword-aligned collateral for sales. Run small, measurable experiments and report outcomes in business terms. Celebrate the wins publicly and document the playbooks so teams can repeat them.

Finally, institutionalize SEO with governance. Host training for content creators, an SEO QA step in release checklists, a single source of truth for structured data and a cross-functional steering group that meets monthly. The goal is to make SEO operational, not an extra task someone has to chase.

24-Step Action Plan

1. Inventory all teams that touch web content and discoverability
2. Map the specific SEO dependencies per team (dev, product, sales, support, legal)
3. Translate SEO outcomes into business metrics each stakeholder cares about
4. Build a one-page executive brief linking SEO to revenue and retention
5. Create a shared dashboard that combines SEO and business KPIs
6. Identify three rapid technical wins (speed, redirects, schema)
7. Identify three rapid content wins (FAQ, landing pages, comparisons)
8. Run an A/B test tied to a clear conversion metric
9. Present early results in a stakeholder forum within 30 days
10. Recruit an SEO advocate inside engineering and product
11. Add an SEO QA checklist to sprint and release processes
12. Document standard schema templates and publishing rules
13. Create a short training module for content authors and product managers
14. Provide sales with keyword-aligned one-pagers and battle cards
15. Build a simple support-reduction metric tied to improved help content
16. Automate weekly reports of organic leads and assisted conversions
17. Hold a monthly cross-functional review to prioritize SEO work
18. Rotate credit for wins—acknowledge other teams publicly
19. Get a formal commitment or establish service level agreements for implementing high-priority SEO fixes
20. Maintain and prioritize a product management tool backlog
21. Run quarterly “SEO hackathons” to fix backlog items fast
22. Publish, archive and share case studies showing before and after impact
23. Review KPIs quarterly and adjust the dashboard as necessary
24. Provide ongoing training, refresher sessions and onboarding materials

Want to turn SEO into a company-wide growth engine for your business?

SEO works best when the entire company understands how it impacts all aspects of the business. We can help you educate everyone — from IT to the C-suite and beyond — on the value that SEO brings to the whole organization.

Get Your Company on Board With SEO

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About Us

Here at Bruce Clay Inc., we build SEO programs that help teams translate search opportunities into product improvements, engineering priorities, sales enablement and measurable revenue. From hands-on audits and dashboards to cross-team training and governance playbooks, we embed SEO into your operations so the whole company, not just marketing, benefits.

Learn more about our story.

Bruce Clay is founder and president of Bruce Clay Inc., a global digital marketing firm providing search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media marketing, SEO-friendly web architecture, and SEO tools and education. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.