How to Communicate the Value of SEO to Senior Leadership

Before they cut the budget and traffic tanks

With AI upending traditional search and paid budgets under pressure, SEO has never been more strategic and challenging to explain. Most marketers know SEO matters, but explaining why, especially to leadership, can be murky. There are no clear outcomes, fixed costs, or promises.

That ambiguity is a problem. When SEO breaks, there's no red flag. Just a quiet slide in traffic, leads, and pipeline. By the time anyone notices, you’re in a hole that takes months to climb.

We’ve seen it up close:

• A competitor’s single blog post drove more traffic than their entire site. That kicked off a complete reset.
• Launched a site redesign, and rankings tanked due to canonical issues and duplicate pages.
• Cut SEO support after layoffs, only to scramble months later when performance stalled.

Here's the thing

SEO works quietly. When it’s firing, nobody asks questions. When it’s not, it’s already too late. That makes it easy to ignore and hard to advocate for, unless you connect it to outcomes leadership cares about.

So, how do you prioritize SEO before it becomes a problem?

• Connect it to dollars. SEO can lower CAC and reduce dependency on paid. It’s not magic. It’s margin.
• Point to wins. Show the competitor outranking you. Show the traffic lift on optimized pages. Make it real.
• Keep it on the radar. Bring SEO into pipeline conversations, not just content reviews. It is part of growth, not a side project.

The teams that win in the long term treat SEO as a strategic asset, not a quarterly experiment. The marketers who get buy-in know how to make SEO visible, even when it’s working in the background.