Beyond Marketing: The Cross-Functional Blueprint That Turns Search into Strategy

The Purpose of this Article Installment

I have seen SEO grow into a powerhouse, having first become intrigued by making one simple title tag change in 2006 which, a week later, resulted in 5x the amount of consumer business being generated. Even at this point in history it wasn't nascent; no longer an infant, yet not yet an adolescent. In the last 20 years, and I don't say this lightly, I have never seen the search market and practitioners thereof so fractured...although the age old debate of subdomains vs subfolders is a very close second.

Whether you are on the GEO, AEO, LMAO, or EIEIO bandwagon, or prefer anchoring to the established industry term "SEO", and whether you're on board with llms.txt, cats.txt, or believe robots.txt should serve the use case as an already established standard (which apparently CloudFlare seems to believe given Content Signals), the purpose of this article series is to make the case that Search, as a function of the internet, is a key strategic set of disciplines which, if empowered properly by businesses and organizations, can result in remarkably resilient business franchises.

The first installment will cover the origins of SEO and its evolution; it's strategic value and risks of siloing SEO into organizations like Marketing, Product, or Technology. The next several installments will be deeper dives covering risks and potential pitfalls for putting it into organizations focused on those core disciplines, and an extra 2-3 more. Finally, the last installment will make the case for what I believe is the most effective strategy; Web Effectiveness.

Historical Context: SEO's Origins

In the early days of search, SEO was a skill typically developed in technology teams as a tactic to drive website traffic. Companies typically had a “webmaster” responsible for maintaining a website's technical health, structure, and visibility; essentially the site's caretaker, builder, and optimizer rolled into one.

They wrote HTML manually, managed server configurations, uploaded pages via FTP, and handled metadata. SEO at the time was largely about technical implementation (keywords in titles, meta tags, alt text, and directory submissions). Webmasters were often sole proprietors or small-team developers who directly influenced how search engines saw their sites.

In this era, Google's earliest product for site owners, Google Webmaster Tools (launched 2006) was literally named for them, and eventually became what we know today as “Google Search Console”.

SEO's Evolution into a Cross-Functional Practice

Modern SEO sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines -marketing, engineering, product management, editorial, and UX design to name a few; this speaks to the multitude of search ranking factors that are able to be influenced in modern search algorithms. Content, Architecture, HTML & Code, Reputation, Links, User Experience. The reason SEO should be cross functional is precisely due to the depth and breadth of the experience and expertise needed to identify and understand the most problematic issues and the most effective (and sustainable) remedy.

In large organizations especially, SEO teams directly control very few levers; success comes from their ability to influence and collaborate with other departments. The reason is simple: product managers and developers generally deploy the site changes, UX designers shape page layouts, content writers create the copy, and analysts measure performance -all of these impact SEO. Below are common organizational models for SEO, each illustrating that effective SEO cannot thrive in isolation:

• SEO within Marketing: This traditional model ensures alignment with branding and campaign messaging. Marketing-led SEO teams excel at content strategy and keyword research tied to customer personas. They work closely with content creators and PR to produce optimized content and earn backlinks. But as noted, a pure marketing silo risks underestimating technical needs -site fixes might be de-prioritized without engineering support, and there's danger of focusing only on content volume over quality or UX.
• SEO embedded in Product/Engineering: Some companies treat organic search performance as an integral product feature. Here an “SEO Product Manager” works alongside developers and UX designers to bake SEO considerations into every site release. The benefit is that new features or pages are search-friendly by design -for instance, at Booking.com and Zillow, the SEO and engineering teams collaborate to programmatically generate optimized pages and internal linking structures for millions of listings. Having direct access to engineering means technical SEO improvements (like page speed boosts or schema markup) can be implemented rapidly, and A/B tests can be run on SEO changes. This approach yields technically robust sites, though it must be balanced with good content; otherwise, there's a risk of viewing SEO as just “technical tweaks” without a strong content strategy.
• SEO in Content/Editorial: Content-driven organizations (news publishers, blogs, etc.) often place SEO experts within the editorial team. These SEOs guide writers on crafting search-friendly headlines, structuring articles for search, and targeting topics with high search demand. For example, in news and media businesses, SEO specialists partner with editors to ensure important stories have discoverable titles and proper metadata. The advantage is a tight integration with content creation -SEO insight directly influences what content gets produced and how it's presented. The drawback is similar to marketing-led teams: if the tech side (page templates, site structure) isn't cooperative, even great content can underperform in search. Thus, editorial SEO teams must still coordinate with developers for things like site redesigns, structured data implementation, and mobile optimization.
• SEO as a “Center of Excellence”: As organizations mature, many establish SEO as its own team or center of excellence that serves the entire company. This team doesn't sit strictly in marketing or product, but works cross-functionally with all departments. In some cases, SEO in this model reports high up (to a VP of Growth or Chief Digital Officer), underlining its strategic importance. A few innovative companies have even experimented with C-suite titles like Chief SEO Officer (CSEO) or Chief Search Officer, aiming to give SEO a permanent seat at the strategy table. The intent is for an executive to champion an “organic search mindset” across product development, content, PR, and engineering. Expedia Group provides a real example: it maintains a central SEO team that works with each brand (Hotels.com,VRBO, etc.) to ensure best practices, effectively acting like an internal SEO agency or governance body. The benefit of this model is holistic integration -SEO isn't an afterthought but part of the DNA of projects. The challenge, however, is that even a central team can become a silo if not proactively collaborating. SEO leaders in this model must actively evangelize and communicate across teams so they're not seen as “those SEO folks doing their own thing”. In my opinion, this is the most effective model which has the benefits of all the others, the drawbacks of none, and ensures sustainability in business outcome performance.
• SEO in a Growth or Data Team: Some tech companies fold SEO into a broader Growth or Analytics team, alongside functions like conversion rate optimization (CRO) and data science. This reflects the view of SEO as one lever in the growth engine. In practice, such teams approach SEO with a heavy emphasis on data and experimentation: SEO initiatives are run as growth experiments (e.g. testing new landing page designs or signup flows influenced by SEO data). The upside is rigorous A/B testing and a focus on ROI -treating organic traffic as a measurable input to customer acquisition. It requires SEOs who are analytically savvy and comfortable working with data scientists and marketers alike. The downside can be that long-term content or brand-building aspects of SEO take a backseat to immediate growth metrics.

No matter the org chart, one theme emerges: SEO is inherently cross-functional. The most successful enterprises build collaborative workflows where product managers, engineers, designers, writers, and marketers jointly own outcomes influenced by SEO teams. As SEO maturity grows, organizations progress from a single SEO specialist tweaking meta tags in isolation to fully integrated programs where every team understands their role in organic search success. Industry leaders even talk about an “SEO maturity model” -at the highest level of maturity, SEO has executive support, dedicated budget, and company-wide awareness of how each department's work (from PR to web design) affects search visibility. SEO is the connecting thread that ensures all these efforts align with maximizing search visibility.

Strategic Value of SEO

Far from being just a marketing checkbox, SEO has become a make-or-break strategic enabler for businesses. Strong SEO execution confers advantages that resonate at the highest levels of business strategy -from lowering customer acquisition costs to building durable competitive moats -while mistakes in SEO can punish a company's bottom line and reputation overnight. Key strategic benefits include:

Long-Term Growth with Lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Unlike paid advertising, which stops delivering the moment you stop paying, SEO investments yield compounding returns. Content created or technical improvements made for SEO can keep attracting visitors for months or years without additional spend.

This makes organic search traffic extremely cost-effective over the long run. Executives and investors have taken notice: many high-growth companies (Pinterest, Zillow, HubSpot, etc.) highlight their strong organic traffic when pitching, because it implies a lower CAC and a form of “free” ongoing demand generation. In practical terms, ranking in the top organic spots saves marketing dollars -every click earned via SEO is one less click you have to buy via PPC.

A recent analysis by AdLift found that companies which increased their ratio of organic (SEO) traffic relative to paid search traffic saw dramatic CAC reductions, up to 30–60% lower acquisition costs as organic began to do the heavy lifting. The chart above illustrates this effect: as the share of traffic from SEO grows (relative to paid traffic), the average customer acquisition cost plummets -evidence that robust SEO can significantly reduce reliance on expensive ads. In one scenario, websites that achieved traffic parity between SEO and PPC experienced over 60% lower CAC than those leaning mostly on paid search.

This essentially means SEO was delivering customers at less than half the cost of paid campaigns. The takeaway for leadership is clear: investing in SEO can improve the bottom-line efficiency of marketing spend, especially important when ad costs are rising or budgets are tight.

Competitive Moat and Structural Advantage: SEO can create high barriers to entry for competitors. If your company has spent years producing quality content, earning authoritative backlinks, and optimizing site infrastructure, a new competitor can't easily replicate that overnight. The top organic search positions tend to yield outsized rewards -studies have shown the #1 result can get around 30% of all clicks for a given query. Once you hold that top spot for a critical keyword, you enjoy a self-reinforcing advantage: users click your site, which builds your brand recognition, which in turn leads to more branded searches and links for you, further cementing your authority.

This dynamic has led to a “rich get richer” in many markets online -the leaders in organic search often keep pulling ahead. Executives increasingly view such organic visibility as an asset with real business value (even if it doesn't appear on the balance sheet). It's telling that when startups like TripAdvisor or Pinterest went public or raised funding, they pointed to their SEO-derived traffic as a key strength -it signaled they had a growth engine that wasn't solely dependent on paid marketing. Conversely, losing SEO ground can directly benefit competitors. In eBay's case (detailed in one of the source links), when Google demoted eBay's pages, Amazon and smaller rivals gladly stepped in to capture that traffic-an illustration that search rankings can literally shift market share between companies. Thus, maintaining strong SEO is a form of defensive moat: it protects your share of online demand from competitive attack. And structural barriers to competitive attack are much more durable competitive advantages than process optimization and efficiency.

Search is a 0 sum game; if you aren't winning, you're losing; further to this point, as the level of competitive intensity increases the more small nuances have an outsized impact on the outcome.

Brand Building and Trust: High organic rankings don't just bring clicks -they also confer brand credibility. Users inherently trust the Google results, especially the top organic listings, more than they trust ads. Appearing on the first page (or better yet, in the top 3) for important queries lends an aura of authority to your brand.

For example, if a consumer keeps seeing AcmeCorp rank #1 for “best project management software,” they start to assume AcmeCorp is a leader in that space (even before clicking). This has subtle but powerful effects: over time, users are more likely to click results from a brand they recognize, so strong SEO can actually feed into more direct traffic and branded searches as awareness grows. This is one reason many enterprises view SEO as part of their brand strategy. It also works in reverse -if your competitor consistently outranks you, they may be accumulating mindshare that translates into sales or user trust, even if your product is objectively better.

In “Your Money, Your Life” industries (healthcare, finance, legal), search visibility is especially linked to perceived trustworthiness. Companies in these sectors see SEO as crucial for reputation management, ensuring that their authoritative content is what searchers find first (and not lower-quality alternatives). In short, SEO success can be seen as a proxy for market leadership in the digital realm, reinforcing other marketing efforts to position the brand as the go-to source.

SEO as Continuous Market Research: One often underrated benefit of SEO is the wealth of data on user intent that it provides. Every query typed into Google is essentially a customer telling you what they want or the problem they need solved. SEO professionals mine this search query data to glean insights far beyond marketing.

For instance, SEO keyword research might reveal that thousands of people are searching for a feature your product doesn't have -indicating potential demand for your product team to consider. (A hypothetical example: if many users search “Acme app Gmail integration,” and you don't offer that, it's a strong signal for product managers about where to invest next.) Similarly, questions that appear frequently in searches (e.g. “How does X compare to Y?” or “Is [product] secure?”) give clues to sales and customer support teams about common objections or knowledge gaps that they can address. Companies like Salesforce have famously leveraged SEO insights to build out huge libraries of content (such as Salesforce's “Trailblazer” knowledge base) specifically because they saw via search data what information users were seeking.

Even UX design can benefit: the Nielsen Norman Group (a leading UX consulting firm) advises that understanding what users search for can help shape website information architecture and content layout, ensuring that user intent is satisfied efficiently. In sum, SEO turns Google into the world's largest focus group -savvy organizations feed these insights into product strategy, CX design, and content planning on an ongoing basis. This makes SEO not just a traffic source, but a critical input into decision-making across the business.

Synergy with Other Channels: SEO doesn't operate in a silo; when done right, it amplifies and is amplified by other marketing channels. A strong SEO presence means your brand is discoverable by people who may never see your ads or social posts -it broadens the top of the funnel by pulling in new prospects organically. Those new visitors might join your email list or follow your social media, where you can nurture them further (SEO feeding the email and social channels). Conversely, campaigns in other channels can boost SEO -for example, a successful PR campaign might earn news coverage and backlinks that enhance your search rankings.

Many companies now approach search marketing holistically, coordinating SEO and PPC. One common tactic: if you rank in the top organic spot for a keyword, you might reduce or avoid pay-per-click bids on that term (saving money), and redirect that budget to keywords where you don't rank organically. On the flip side, if there are high-value keywords where organic ranking will take time, you cover them with PPC until SEO catches up. This coordination ensures maximum coverage on search results in a cost-efficient way. Additionally, organic search visitors often have strong intent (they were actively looking for something), so they tend to be higher-quality leads. If they don't convert on first visit, they're prime candidates for retargeting via ads.

Companies use this to their advantage: SEO brings them in for cheap, and retargeting ads bring them back to convert, yielding a better ROI than targeting cold audiences. All these interactions underscore that SEO is part of an ecosystem -when integrated with content marketing, PR, email, social media, and paid ads, the whole customer acquisition engine becomes more effective. This is why forward-thinking CMOs encourage cross-functional collaboration between SEO teams and other marketing functions (and even have shared goals and KPIs across them) to break down silos.

Driving Digital Excellence (Indirect Benefits): Focusing on SEO often forces an organization to make generally positive improvements to its website and digital content. Google's criteria for ranking -fast loading pages, mobile-friendly design, clear site structure, authoritative content -are essentially best practices for web experience overall. When an SEO team pushes for improving page speed or Core Web Vitals, every user benefits from a snappier site (not just those coming from search).

Efforts to make navigation and internal linking more crawlable tend to result in a more logical site architecture that users find easier to navigate as well. Accessibility improvements (like proper alt tags on images, descriptive link text, etc.) made for SEO also aid users with disabilities. In effect, “doing SEO the right way” aligns closely with good UX design and good engineering practices. Companies have found that when their SEO and UX teams work hand in hand (for instance, to avoid invasive interstitials that hurt SEO and annoy users), the outcome is a better overall customer experience and often higher conversion rates.

Google has explicitly incentivized this convergence by incorporating UX signals like mobile usability and page experience into its ranking algorithms. One study cited by Google noted that speeding up a mobile page by just 1 second can significantly boost conversion rates -so an initiative initially justified for SEO can directly lift sales. This is why some executives frame SEO as part of digital governance or digital resilience: it's the watchdog that keeps the website aligned with industry best practices, which in turn future-proofs the company's digital presence. In summary, SEO-centric improvements are usually win–win for both search engines and users, leading to a virtuous cycle of better user satisfaction, better search performance, and better business results.

Evolving SEO Roles

As SEO's impact on revenue and brand has become clearer, many companies have elevated SEO roles and created new positions to ensure it gets the cross-functional attention it requires. It's increasingly common to see job titles like Head of SEO, Director of SEO, SEO Product Manager, or VP of Search at enterprise firms, whereas a decade ago SEO was junior-level or outsourced. These roles exist because leaders recognize SEO's broad scope:

• SEO Leadership and Reporting Lines: Some organizations have moved the SEO function out from under the marketing department and have it report directly to C-level growth or digital officers. For instance, an SEO leader might report to a Chief Growth Officer or Chief Digital Officer, reflecting that organic search ties into product strategy and overall digital performance, not just marketing campaigns. There have even been instances of a Chief SEO Officer (CSEO) or Chief Search Officer in the C-suite. Although still rare, these titles send a strong message that SEO is on par with other chief domains. A CSEO's mandate is typically to champion an “organic-first” mindset in everything the company does online. The role should be “deeply integrated into the fabric of the organization… aligning SEO strategy with broader business goals and enhancing collaboration [with] other departments”. In practice, whether or not a company has a formal CSEO, many enterprise SEO leaders act in this capacity -they sit in strategy meetings to ensure, say, a new product launch considers search demand, or a rebrand doesn't torpedo years of SEO equity.
• SEO Product Managers: The creation of SEO-focused product manager roles is a notable trend in tech companies and large online businesses. An SEO Product Manager works within the product development process to prioritize and implement SEO requirements. For example, at a travel site, an SEO PM might own the backlog for content or technology building new page templates that target emerging search queries or various parts of the funnel (e.g., adding a section for “Covid-19 travel restrictions” when that became a hot topic). This role straddles worlds -they need to understand SEO deeply, communicate requirements to engineers in agile terms, and advocate for SEO in product planning meetings. Companies like LinkedIn and Indeed have had product managers specifically for SEO, ensuring the site's architecture and features align with maximizing organic reach. The existence of such roles underlines that SEO has product and engineering dimensions that can't be handled solely by content marketers. This is a fairly good balance which empowers SEO practitioners.
• Central SEO Teams and Centers of Excellence: We discussed earlier the “center of excellence” model. Enterprise SEO leaders who run these central teams often describe their job as part educator, part consultant, and part enforcer. They develop internal SEO best-practice documentation and training programs for other teams. For example, they might train all developers on how to avoid common pitfalls that hurt SEO (like lazy-loading content without proper fallbacks, or deploying pages without title tags). They might also create checklists for designers (e.g., ensure any new site design is mobile-friendly and fast) and for copywriters (guidelines on headline lengths, keyword usage without sacrificing quality). At the same time, these SEO leaders advocate at the executive level for resources and buy-in. It's not uncommon for them to present to the CMO or CEO using business metrics -e.g., demonstrating how a 0.5s improvement in page load time led to X% more conversions, or how ranking #1 for a certain term increased monthly revenue by $Y. By translating SEO into dollars and cents, they secure continued investment. Many enterprises now include organic traffic and SEO health metrics in their top-level dashboards and OKRs, so that the executive team is always aware of this channel's performance. This is a major shift from a decade ago, when SEO was often an obscure line item buried in the marketing report.
• Analyst and Consulting Firm Insights: Industry analysts (like Gartner and Forrester) have also emphasized SEO's expanded role. Gartner's digital marketing frameworks frequently mention organic search as a critical component of web presence management and digital commerce success. They advise CMOs to facilitate cross-functional collaboration specifically to support things like SEO initiatives, recognizing that silos between marketing and IT hurt search performance. Forrester research has noted how customer journeys often start with organic search, meaning SEO has implications for customer experience and even sales strategies, not just marketing. SEO contributes to what Gartner calls “digital resilience” -a company's ability to be found and chosen by customers in a digital landscape. This has pushed SEO onto the agenda of not just marketing leaders but also IT architects (for site infrastructure), content strategists, and business continuity planners. In short, the external advisory world is telling executives that SEO is multi-disciplinary and strategic, not a narrow tactic.

The net effect of these developments is that in enterprises today, SEO professionals are gaining a more prominent voice. It's increasingly likely to see the Head of SEO presenting in quarterly business reviews, or SEO data being referenced in board meetings when discussing customer acquisition and market trends. Companies that “get it” are ensuring their SEO experts are embedded or consulted in projects ranging from website redesigns and new feature rollouts to marketing campaigns and even PR responses. They realize that decisions made without considering search implications can be costly to unwind later. The empowerment of SEO roles is a direct response to how critical organic visibility and traffic quality have become.

The Risks of a Siloed, Marketing-Only SEO Approach

Just as strong SEO can drive growth, mismanaging SEO can cause serious harm -especially when it's treated myopically as just a quick-hit marketing tactic.

On a more mundane level, a siloed SEO approach can also mean missed opportunities or inefficient processes. For instance, if the SEO team isn't in the loop when the web team plans a site redesign, the result might be a beautiful new site that unknowingly breaks SEO fundamentals (like massive URL changes or removed content that kills rankings). Or if SEO isn't consulted when the content team develops a blog calendar, the writers might put out articles on topics no one searches for -lots of effort, little payoff. These kinds of mishaps occur when SEO is an afterthought. The antidote is exactly what we've discussed throughout this report: make SEO a shared responsibility across teams. When SEO experts sit with developers, designers, writers, and strategists from the start, they can catch risks and spot synergies early.

There's often an unfortunate gap between SEOs and developers -each not fully understanding the other's work -and closing that gap leads to “a lot of potential for collaboration and winning things together” that is otherwise untapped. In the end, avoiding SEO disasters and unlocking SEO gains both hinge on the same principle: integration. SEO must be built into the planning, QA, and execution processes of marketing campaigns, website builds, content creation, and beyond. Otherwise, one team's actions can inadvertently undermine search performance, or one-dimensional tactics can put the whole business at risk.

Conclusion: SEO as a Strategic, Multidisciplinary Team Sport

Over the past two decades, SEO has transformed from a niche tactic of tweaking websites for rankings into a broad strategic function that touches almost every aspect of online business. The old misconception was that SEO is just about gaming Google with keywords and links, best left as a subset of marketing. The reality in 2025 is very different. SEO is marketing, product, engineering, content, PR, and strategy all rolled into one -a true cross-functional effort that, when played in concert, delivers compounding long-term wins. Companies that recognize this have reaped the rewards: lower acquisition costs, stronger brands, invaluable customer insights, and resilience against algorithm shifts. Those that underestimate SEO's scope have stumbled, sometimes very publicly, when search performance tanked.

The trend among enterprise organizations is unmistakable: break down silos and elevate SEO to a company-wide priority. Treating SEO as “just a marketing discipline” is not only limiting, it's risky in a world where search engines can determine a large share of your customer flow. Instead, leading companies foster a culture where everyone -from web engineers to content writers to VPs -understands the basics of SEO and how their work contributes to it.

SEO specialists act as facilitators and strategists, guiding these efforts and ensuring alignment with search engine best practices and trends. In an era of rapid change (think mobile, voice search, and now AI-driven search results), this agility and cross-team collaboration around SEO is even more crucial. As Google's algorithms and presentation of results evolve (e.g. AI summaries, rich snippets), SEO professionals are often on the frontlines interpreting what it means for the business and coordinating a response that might involve content tweaks, schema markup, or feeding data to new platforms.

In summary, SEO's true power lies in its breadth and nuance. Search, as a function of the internet, not only drives traffic and/or discoverability but also informs product development, sharpens marketing messaging, improves user experience, and safeguards the brand's visibility in the digital landscape. The organizations that get the most from SEO are those that embed it everywhere -making it a shared mindset rather than a silo; however there needs to be a seat of ownership.

This cross-functional approach is what separates sustained SEO success from sporadic wins or chronic struggles. The point isn't that search rankings no longer matter; in fact, quite the opposite. AI generated output cites the ranking sources. However SEO is no longer the quirky side project of the technology or marketing team -it has become a central, integrative discipline of digital strategy. And the companies that embrace that fact will be the ones best positioned to win in the search-driven economy of today and generative search-driven environment of tomorrow.

This is part 1 of an article installment discussing overlaps between SEO and other critical functional areas of modern organizational structures.

 

The arguments and examples above are supported by a range of sources, including Google's own documentation and webmaster advocates on the importance of integrating SEO with development, case studies from industry leaders (Booking.com, Amazon, Zillow, etc.) illustrating cross-functional SEO success, statements from enterprise SEO practitioners and executives highlighting SEO's strategic role, and analyses of Google penalties (Overstock, eBay) that demonstrate the pitfalls of siloed SEO practices. These sources collectively paint a clear picture: SEO delivers the best outcomes when it permeates the organization rather than being confined to a single department; that said, due to nuance, those with long established domain expertise should be entrusted to make and inform the big decisions.

Relevant Sources:

• SEOs and developers: Why they're better together [Video]
• Impact of SEO on lower customer acquisition costs -AdLift
• CMO Guide to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration -Gartner
• 6 Big Brands That Fell Victim To Google Penalties - Bulldog