When SEO cannot be implemented

Search engine optimization is relatively simple, I usually say. It’s not very difficult to know what’s best in many situations, because the basics of SEO are straightforward. It can get complex when facing choices—whether one type of navigation is better than another. But there’s another situation where it’s nearly impossible.

I’ve wanted to write this article for a while, and I’ve decided now is the time. It’s about a former client who, despite major investments, never really managed to untangle the knots. In many ways, this is a story of bureaucracy and backstabbing, but it’s also about the need to communicate knowledge properly—or to be able to do the job yourself.

We had been hired in an advisory role. The company had its own in-house SEO department, but they lacked experience. This is not an unusual situation, so our task was to help guide the SEOs onto the right track.

The company had announced that it was now making a major push into SEO and that the channel would be prioritized above all others. The SEOs at the company were, of course, thrilled, since SEO had previously been given very little importance within the organization. As SEO was delivering the most revenue, the SEO department received plenty of internal praise. A huge improvement compared to the beginning of the project, when hardly anyone at the company wanted to give SEO any credit at all.

This is where the problems began

In my view, the company was terribly mismanaged, which is an important part of the background here. The reason for their success was strong founders and a really good product. At every other level, however, the company had filled positions with what I would describe as “the people who just happened to be standing at the nearest bus stop when they needed to hire.” So it wasn’t just the SEO department that lacked experience—virtually everyone I spoke to at the company was either brand-new in their role or longtime hangers-on thriving only in a deeply bureaucratic hierarchy.

Whether it was jealousy over the SEO team’s new internal success or simply incompetence, I can’t say. But what happened was that every change the SEO team tried to implement was either only partially added to the site or blocked entirely. “The developer didn’t think it was important to…” was one of the common phrases when it came to SEO. The marketing department (which SEO didn’t belong to) prioritized a certain font, so text had to be published as images when the exact font wasn’t available, and so on.

Combined with a rather weak senior SEO leading the effort, this meant that not only did optimization stall, but in many cases, the site grew worse optimized day by day. From my perspective, it seemed that the SEO team eventually gave up on trying to push through changes. We began receiving increasingly odd requests for help with different projects, and we responded as we always do in such cases: sure, we can help with that, but it’s not good SEO.

Several possible solutions

I’m convinced there were several solutions to this problem. The simplest would have been to hire a senior SEO who actually knew what he was talking about and was confident in his expertise. At this company, it was easy for others to overrule the senior SEO because he guessed and missed too often. We did our best to provide him with solid arguments for meetings, but the competence simply wasn’t there (and as an agency, we couldn’t very well override our client). Since he didn’t have the confidence or the skills to back up his recommendations, the changes weren’t implemented.

Another solution would have been to be a healthier company overall. When internal politics and personal careers overshadow the company’s goals, you’ve clearly reached a point that’s difficult to recover from. For the marketing department, it was more important to get credit for success than for there to actually be success (and I’m sure this mindset existed in the SEO department as well).

They could also have relied much more on measurable differences. From the start, they put themselves in a strange position by evaluating SEO based on all traffic coming from search engines. This meant brand searches were heavily prioritized, since much of the traffic came that way. That creates a distorted view, because of course they were ranking #1 for all brand-related searches, and then measuring SEO success based on how many people searched. That metric should have been attributed to marketing, since it’s the marketing department that drives demand.

What happened to their SEO?

The truth is, this was quite a while ago, and I don’t really know what they’re doing now. They don’t appear on any of the major keywords in their segment, but maybe they’ve found other avenues. It may be that they never became anything more than a cautionary tale.