SEO strategy needs buy-in. Learn how to manage SEO stakeholders, secure budgets, and communicate performance to execs, devs, and content teams.
Working effectively with SEO stakeholders is all about communicating business impact in a way that builds trust and fosters collaboration.
How do you do that?
Use language and visuals that stakeholders can understand and tell them about the takeaways they really care about.
When stakeholders trust you, you’ll have an easier time pitching, selling, and implementing SEO projects. And, if you work for an agency, it will help you win and retain more clients—all while driving positive outcomes for the business.
Want to know more? In this article, we look at:
- Who SEO stakeholders are
- Why you need advanced stakeholder management skills
- How to handle conflicting priorities and differences in SEO knowledge
- How to effectively communicate SEO ideas and results
Who are SEO stakeholders?
An SEO stakeholder is someone who has an interest in and/or some level of responsibility over SEO activities and results. They aren’t necessarily doing the work, but you need their buy-in and cooperation to do your job effectively.
Stakeholders can be higher up in the organization, like a decision maker or budget holder. They can be responsible for a broad area—like marketing—that SEO falls under. Or they could be from a separate team you need to work with to get things done.
If you work in house, these stakeholders will mostly be people within the business. But if you’re agency side, they will likely be external (i.e., your clients and other agencies).
Examples include:
- CEOs, business owners, and managing directors
- CFOs and finance directors
- Other C-suite executives, board members, and directors
- Shareholders
- Marketing, content, and PR teams
- Design and UX teams
- Analytics and business intelligence (BI) teams
- IT, DevOps, programmers, and web developers
- Legal and compliance teams
- External clients, partners, and agencies
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Why advanced SEOs need stakeholder-management skills
Need budget? Resources? Time? Support from another team? Without stakeholder buy-in and alignment on serving business objectives, you may have trouble accessing those things.
Developing your stakeholder-management skills means you can explain the value of SEO more clearly. And by extension, explain the value of the work you’re doing (or intend to do).
For agency-side SEOs, it’s about winning and retaining clients. Or if you work in house, stakeholder-management helps you work more effectively with other teams while shining a light on the great work you’re doing.
Stakeholders have different priorities from you
Why don’t stakeholders automatically see things your way?
It’s simple: They have their own priorities. They’re busy. They may not understand SEO. They might feel threatened by it or resent having to delay projects to consult you. They might not have any idea what the reports you send them each month even mean.
Your day-to-day might be focused on keyword rankings, Core Web Vitals, or backlinks. But the CEO doesn’t care about those things. They care about revenue and growth. And they don’t necessarily know that SEO can drive revenue—or brand visibility, or UX improvements, or risk mitigation—unless you tell them.
Stakeholders have different priorities from each other
In a complex organization, you’ll likely have to deal with more than one stakeholder, each with their own agenda.
The ecommerce manager might be interested in traffic growth, while the UX team wants better conversion rates. Meanwhile, the creative director is focused on brand governance.
It’s your job to align these different goals, work out what’s most important, and get buy-in for SEO solutions that support the bigger picture.
Also, SEO can be unpredictable, particularly now that AI is changing the landscape and SERPs have been consistently volatile for some time. It’s more important than ever to break down silos and build cross-functional teams that allow for agile decision making.
Handling conflicting stakeholder priorities
Okay, so stakeholders have different priorities. What can you do about it?
It comes down to selling the potential benefits of your work and being prepared to compromise if necessary.
In general, you’ll want to:
- Make sure there are regular meetings with the right people from the very beginning of a project. By giving stakeholders some ownership over what you’re doing, you’re more likely to get their buy-in. And you can make sure SEO requirements are always front of mind.
- Clearly outline the benefits of what you’re suggesting, and make sure you’re speaking the stakeholder’s language. Emphasize the things they care about. We outline a framework for this below.
- Highlight how SEO can aid or improve the stakeholder’s work. If a copywriter’s magazine-style articles aren’t getting read, SEO can boost visibility. Or you could use keyword research to uncover customer pain points for the client experience manager to address.
- Try to see things from their point of view, and discuss alternative solutions if you can’t agree.
- Pick your battles. Be prepared to let less important things go, and focus on activities that will most benefit the business.
- Try to see stakeholders as potential allies. Having someone with influence on your side is never a bad thing.
Let’s look at some more specific examples.
Balancing brand voice vs. SEO keyword strategy
You might get pushback when optimizing content or creating new pages on your website. This often occurs because the person in charge of protecting the brand’s unique tone of voice feels that SEO optimization practices can undermine that.
What can you do?
- Ensure you know and understand the company’s brand guidelines. If you can write SEO content with the organization’s tone and voice in mind, you’re less likely to get pushback.
- Prioritize and plan ahead so the approval or editing process doesn’t delay SEO progress.
- Ensure you aren’t keyword stuffing or putting SEO above the needs of users. Keywords should be included in a way that flows naturally.
- Encourage the brand steward to make suggestions rather than direct edits. Highlight important elements like keywords and entities in your content. There’s nothing worse than carefully crafting a piece and then realizing that all the SEO goodness has been stripped out during the edit.
Managing IT demands vs. SEO’s need for agile deployments
SEO is often agile, fast-paced, and iterative. We make small changes, assess the results, and repeat the process.
But IT teams must often adhere to more traditional “waterfall” project management processes. There are defined stages of a project. Each one must be approved before going on to the next, and it’s hard—if not impossible—to go backwards.
It’s the difference between building a brand new website every few years and making small, continuous improvements to your existing one.
The waterfall approach often makes sense when it comes to IT, because IT teams need to have good version control, ensure uptime, patch security risks, and deal with CDN constraints. They need predictability.
Getting the IT team to be more agile would be great, but if that isn’t possible, here are some ways to work together more effectively:
- Have a shared list of tasks or requirements (and the order in which they need to occur), so SEO asks don’t get forgotten about.
- Make sure your SEO briefs are clear, as mistakes might be difficult to fix after the fact.
- Hold review meetings after each project, so lessons learned can be taken forward into the next one.
Dig deeper: Agile SEO: A playbook for online brand management.
Negotiating content quality vs. speed-to-market pressures
With Google’s ever-increasing focus on helpful, reliable, people-first content, you can’t afford to produce anything that’s thin, slapdash, or of questionable value. That quality of content is likely to harm your rankings, organic traffic, and generative search citations.
However, sometimes there’s pressure to get a new project live quickly. There may have been a lot of investment in a new product or initiative, and stakeholders want to see a return on that investment ASAP.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” — Voltaire
Remember that “quality” doesn’t mean “perfection.” You can usually improve the SEO of a webpage after it goes live, and it can be useful to have a baseline to work from.
If you have time for perfection, go ahead. But if you’re under pressure, the real benchmarks are:
- Is it better than the previous version?
- Does it provide value for search engines and users?
To answer the second question, it can be useful to decide on minimum quality thresholds. By making it measurable and a process that everyone agrees to, it’s easier to push back against a stakeholder who’s trying to rush things.
Those thresholds could include minimum standards for E-E-A-T, word count, headings, schema markup, alt text, or meta tags.
Agree to a publishing schedule in advance that allows for a good balance of speed and quality—and stick to it.
And if something is rushed, be sure to show the impact when you report on its success or failure.
AI-driven SEO vs. legal and regulatory approvals
If you intend to use AI for automation, personalization, or experimentation, there could be genuine legal and regulatory concerns.
For example, AI-powered personalization can be a powerful tool. But in the healthcare industry, there are regulations around protected health information (PHI) to consider. You wouldn’t want to inadvertently reveal private information about someone’s health to a member of their family who has access to the same device.
Stakeholders might be inclined to say “no” as soon as they hear the word “AI,” but it’s possible to work together to decide how far AI-driven SEO can push without risking noncompliance.
Going back to our healthcare example, there are elements of personalization you could use that aren’t considered PHI—such as location and device. And you could explain to the legal team what data security, privacy, and quality control procedures would be in place.
Using AI doesn’t mean there’s no human oversight.
Communicating SEO proposals and performance
At its heart, working with stakeholders comes down to effective preparation, prioritization, and communication.
We’ve put together a framework that provides guidance on everything from identifying and prioritizing stakeholders, to presenting and analyzing data, making a business case, and more.
Identify the stakeholders
You’ll have a tough time working with another team or getting approval from a decision maker if you don’t know who they are. Or if you focus your efforts on the wrong person.
This might seem obvious, but for agency-side SEOs in particular, you could be working closely with a marketing manager who doesn’t have the authority to sign off on new projects themselves. By finding out who the decision-maker is and requesting a meeting with them, you increase your chances of accepted proposals.
And it also gives you some security if your direct contact leaves the business.
Stakeholders usually fall into the following broad groups:
- C-suite executives (CEO, CFO, CMO), board members, shareholders, and directors
- Marketing, Content, and PR
- Design and UX
- Analytics and BI
- IT and DevOps
- Legal and Compliance
They could be internal teams, or external clients or vendors.
Segment and prioritize
Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, it’s time to prioritize who to pitch to and who to keep updated once the project moves forward.
Although you may have particular contacts that you work with day-to-day, keeping key decision makers in the loop can help things run more smoothly.
A quadrant chart is a good tool here. Divide a square into four sections, with an axis for power and another for their level of interest in SEO:
- High power / high interest: These are key decision makers with a lot of authority within the organization, as well as an interest in its overall direction, marketing, or website (e.g., CEO, CMO, or IT lead).
- High power / low interest: These people have little direct interest in SEO, and probably don’t possess much knowledge of how it works. But their control over budgets or legal compliance gives them a lot of authority (e.g., CFO or legal team).
- Low power / high interest: People with less influence whose work is directly or indirectly related to SEO or marketing (e.g., wider marketing, content, or PR teams).
- Low power / low interest: There are unlikely to be stakeholders in this box, since stakeholders have an interest in, or some control over, your work. A marketing intern might fit into this category, but would you consider them a stakeholder? Probably not.
While you might most frequently work with the low power / high interest group, bear in mind the most important stakeholders are high power / high interest.
Overall, it’s a good idea to send targeted updates to all these groups, varying the content and frequency appropriately. For example, people in the high power / high interest group probably have full inboxes, so sending them too many updates or minor details might not go over well. But allied teams like marketing and content would probably appreciate being kept in the loop with more frequent updates.
Note: Who the stakeholders are, and their relative importance, may vary from project to project.
Map key interests and KPIs
When talking to stakeholders, it’s important to speak their language. The CEO probably doesn’t care all that much about (or understand) the minutia of schema markup implementation. But if that schema increased organic traffic and conversions by 20%, that’s something they’ll want to know.
Identifying each stakeholder’s interests and the KPIs that relate to them can give you a great starting point when it comes to pitching and reporting.
Here are some examples.
| Stakeholder | Interests | KPIs and outcomes |
| C-suite | Strategic impact Growth ROI Brand risk | Revenue Sales Leads CPA (cost per acquisition) vs. paid channels |
| Marketing, Content, and PR | Brand voice Editorial alignment Marketing goals Thought leadership | Organic and referral traffic Conversions CPA Brand visibility E-E-A-T metrics (e.g., checklist scores) Topical authority Link equity |
| Design and UX | Website design User experience CRO | Conversions Conversion rate Revenue Sales Leads |
| Analytics and BI | Measurement Analysis Data integration | Analytics and pixel implementation (GA4, Meta Ads, MS Clarity, etc.) Integration with GA4, Looker Studio, or Big Query |
| IT and DevOps | Technical feasibility Resource allocation Uptime and stability Website speed | Crawl efficiency Pagespeed Security |
| Legal and compliance | Laws and regulations(e.g., HIPAA and GDPR) | Risk mitigation Content accuracy Trust signals Data privacy and cookie compliance |
Pro tip: Not all organizations are the same. Some are focused on rapid growth, while others want to improve efficiency. Think about the specific stakeholders at the organization you’re working with and what you know about their interests.
Align SEO and business goals
As an SEO, you might want to get a particular keyword to position one on Google. But in and of itself, organic rankings are unlikely to be a business goal.
Business goals are more likely to relate to sales, revenue, or ROI. Higher rankings can help to improve those metrics, but the rankings themselves might not be that important to your stakeholders.
It’s important to find out what your stakeholders’ goals are early in the process. If you start with goals for the business as a whole and develop your SEO strategy based on them, you’re more likely to demonstrate the kind of value the stakeholders are looking for.
For example, if the goal is to grow sales revenue by 20% year over year, you’ll likely need to look at a holistic SEO strategy across content, on-page optimization, backlinks, and technical.
On the other hand, if the emphasis is not on growth but on cutting costs, you might work closely with the paid media team to look for opportunities where SEO could reduce the need to bid on the most expensive keywords.
Build business cases with forecasts and scenarios
Whether you’re putting together a proposal for a client or a business case for an internal stakeholder, outlining several different scenarios can be a great way of highlighting the importance of the work.
- The present situation: Outline the opportunity or concern that the SEO work you’re suggesting is designed to help with. For example, organic traffic and revenue has fallen 10% following a Google algorithm update.
- Do nothing: In most cases, doing nothing will mean the situation doesn’t improve (or gets worse). It gives competitors the opportunity to gain ground, and that could have an impact beyond SEO—on brand recognition, direct traffic, and overall growth.
- Partial investment: Give the stakeholder the option of a lower level of investment. However, emphasize that it will mean gradual, incremental gains and slower ROI.
- Full investment: Predict what could happen if they fully sign off on your plan. Be realistic and don’t over-promise—simply explain that this will give the fastest results and ROI, and what that looks like.
The good thing is that you don’t have to guess or make up numbers. Use AI-powered forecasting tools to give your numbers credibility.
Semrush, for example, has AI-driven “potential” metrics built into its keyword tracking tool. These show how much extra traffic, visibility, and ranking positions you could gain by optimizing content over a period of three months.
When combined with information about your organic conversion rate and average order value, you can work out roughly how much of that extra traffic will turn into sales, and how much revenue those sales could be worth.
For example, if the tool estimates that you could get an extra 1,000 visitors, and your organic purchase conversion rate is 2%, you’d expect to generate around 20 sales. If those are worth on average $100 each, the extra traffic could generate $2,000.
Other tools with AI forecasting elements include BrightEdge, Frase, and Surfer SEO.
Educate your audience
Stakeholders are unlikely to have the same level of SEO—or even marketing—experience that you do. To get them fully on board, it’s important to educate (and sometimes re-educate) them.
- Ensure they understand key terms like sessions, conversions, and organic traffic.
- Challenge outdated or strange ideas about how SEO works or what it can do. They might think it’s like pressing a button or a simple case of “putting the keywords on the site.”
- Introduce the concept of GEO. If search engine traffic drops in the future, you’ll want stakeholders to understand that you have an opportunity to pick up traffic or exposure from generative AI instead.
This education could be informal, like going through a report with the stakeholder in person and explaining what things mean. It could be an update on something new during a full-team meeting. Or it could be a more structured “lunch and learn” inter-departmental training session.
You’ll want to treat the training as a process and not a “one and done.” The C-suite, in particular, may need reminders, as they likely aren’t exposed to SEO concepts very often.
Visualize data with stakeholders in mind
When producing reports, dashboards, or pitches for stakeholders, you don’t want to overwhelm them with SEO metrics they don’t need or understand.
Instead, look at what KPIs those people are most interested in. Then, visualize the data in a way that makes it easy to digest. It’s much easier to look at a graph of year-over-year data than to analyze a chart of monthly figures.
It might look like this:
Create a deck or dashboard template that starts with top-level, business-imperative data. Leave more granular detail until the end. Then, you can copy small sections of the template to use with particular audiences.
Here are some examples:
- Executive dashboards: These should be high level and ROI focused. Key metrics could include organic revenue, cost per lead, and market share.
- Marketing, content, and PR department dashboards: These might be more granular, covering elements you’ve collaborated on. Include organic traffic, conversions, keyword rankings, backlink stats, or content engagement metrics.
- IT and DevOps dashboards: These should focus on website health and stability. For example, technical SEO audit scores, Core Web Vitals, pagespeed, and crawl stats.
Use tools like Looker Studio and Tableau to automatically pull data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other platforms. Not only does doing so allow you to customize what your reports look like—it means you won’t waste time manually collating data.
You can even use AI summaries to save time and make decisions faster. But be aware that AI tools won’t have the context to fully make sense of the data.
Dig deeper: Need a hand visualizing data? Check out our Ultimate Looker Studio SEO campaign dashboard.
Tell the stories behind the data
Say your Looker Studio report has a graph showing that organic traffic is down 15% year over year. If your commentary just says “Organic traffic is down 15% year over year,” that isn’t very reassuring. As a stakeholder, the last thing you want to see is negative performance without an explanation or a plan.
Instead of just describing what you see, tell the story behind the data. Non-SEO stakeholders may not understand what the data represents. And Looker Studio doesn’t know why things happened. So it’s your job to fill in the gaps.
Telling a story allows you to add context. And context allows you to:
- Explain the patterns in the data
- Take credit for successes (where appropriate)
- Reassure if the results are negative
- Suggest what should happen next
All of those are great for building stakeholder confidence and trust.
Let’s take our example of organic traffic falling 15%. On the face of it, that sounds bad. But what if the commentary were to say:
“This month, we identified an issue where crafters with no interest in buying a sofa were requesting free fabric samples. Since deindexing the sample request page, organic traffic has fallen by 15%, while the conversion rate of leads to sales has doubled.”
Suddenly, that negative stat doesn’t sound so negative.
The importance of context also means that allowing stakeholders to have real-time access to dashboards isn’t always a good idea. Raw data can give the wrong impression. Consider sending PDF versions of reports instead.
Establish monthly or quarterly business reviews
It’s important to align SEO and business goals throughout a project—not just at the beginning. Regular business reviews with stakeholders can help you:
- Evaluate and explain performance
- Ensure the SEO strategy is still aligned with business goals
- Propose and agree on a roadmap
So, how often should these meetings be?
Although you might report to your primary contact on a weekly or monthly basis, business reviews with people further up the chain are best conducted monthly or quarterly.
The meetings should be strategic, top level, and to the point.
Send an agenda beforehand so you can establish expectations and minimize wasted time.
Embrace quick wins and pilot projects
Trust plays a big part in relationships with stakeholders, and quick wins and pilots are a great way to establish it.
Work on low-risk, high-reward activities and projects first. For example:
- Improve poor meta tags on key pages (particularly if the site has high domain authority already)
- Fix index bloat
- Add schema markup for FAQs
Don’t rush things, though. Sharing before-and-after performance data is another great way of building trust. But if you’re looking to improve keywords rankings, for example, make sure you give your position-tracking software time to build a baseline for comparison.
You can also pitch smaller, targeted pilot projects to establish a relationship with stakeholders, prove what you do can work, and secure larger projects like migrations or AI-driven SEO initiatives.
Mitigate risks and predict objections
Picture this: You’ve worked hard on an SEO proposal, but while presenting it, someone chimes in with an objection. It can be hard to think of a response on the fly. And so you stumble, and the pitch loses momentum.
That doesn’t have to happen. Try to predict potential objections in advance and have an answer ready.
For example:
- “We don’t have dev resources.” Outline the cost of delays, or suggest alternative phased approaches that are less resource intensive.
- “SEO takes too long.” While organic traffic and revenue may take time to improve, you can highlight metrics that are earlier indicators of success. For example, improvements to indexation health or ranking changes that—while not yet driving significant traffic—show things moving in the right direction.
- “Legal won’t approve AI-generated content.” Have AI governance policies to hand, and emphasize that there will be human editors involved.
Many objections can be swept aside if you show that you’re able to mitigate potential risks and demonstrate the consequences of doing nothing.
Have a plan for your stakeholders
Engaging with stakeholders is a crucial part of SEO. It’s what helps agencies win and retain clients. And it’s what helps in-house SEOs succeed and feel happy in their roles.
But you have to go into conversations with stakeholders with a solid plan. They’ll want to see proactive suggestions, delivered with confidence.
SEO is changing rapidly, not least because of the impact of AI. Not certain you’re up to date? Brush up
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