What differentiates a great SEO professional from a good one is often their ability to manage stakeholders effectively. This is especially true in technical SEO, where projects often depend on multiple teams, and it can be difficult to communicate the need for implementation.
Stakeholder management typically comes down to one thing: the perceived value of the work. With technical SEO, that can be hard to establish. Non-SEOs are unlikely to inherently understand the value of improving a website’s internal linking architecture or implementing schema markup.
The most effective technical SEO initiatives aren’t framed only as SEO improvements. They’re directly tied to business outcomes such as revenue growth, conversion improvements, and operational efficiency. The stronger the connection, the easier it becomes to secure stakeholder support and demonstrate long-term value.
Why you need to align technical SEO work with business impact
Technical SEO work is rarely a top priority for executives or development teams. That’s why technical SEO recommendations need to be tied directly to business goals and measurable outcomes.
For example, when a company changes the CMS used for its website, the SEO implications of changing the site’s underlying code can be overlooked. On a project manager’s long list of priorities, SEO mitigations often rank low. It’s usually not until the risks and their potential impact on the migration’s success are clearly demonstrated that SEO is properly considered.
Technical SEO projects are also often complex workstreams. They require a strong understanding of your company’s systems and teams, along with strong communication and management skills.
Although you may view this work as critical to the website’s SEO health, non-SEOs may struggle to appreciate its value if they’re only hearing about crawl budget or index management. Measuring success against core business goals makes your work easier to understand and value.
The best way to secure buy-in for technical SEO initiatives and demonstrate their impact is by aligning them with business performance and goals.
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The business outcomes that drive SEO buy-in
To show how technical SEO work is likely to impact business performance, it’s critical to understand the metrics and goals that matter to your business.
Most companies set corporate goals each year, whether that’s growing reach, increasing revenue, or entering new markets. These goals will vary by organization, but they typically align with a few core focus areas.
Revenue
The bottom line for most businesses, whether they’re charities, ecommerce brands, multinationals, or SMEs, is revenue.
Linking technical SEO work directly to revenue growth is a clear way to secure buy-in and demonstrate its value.
Conversion
Another way to demonstrate the value of technical SEO is by connecting it to conversion optimization.
For example, numerous studies show that a one-second delay in page load speed can reduce conversions by up to 7%. You may want to improve page load speed because it’s hurting your Core Web Vitals scores, but in practice, it could have a much larger impact on conversion rates.
“We stand to see a 7% increase in conversions for every 1 second we save on load speed” is a much stronger justification for investing development resources in page speed improvements than “I want all our Core Web Vitals scores to be green.”
Cost reduction
Another business priority SEOs often overlook is cost reduction. You might wonder how SEO contributes to cost savings beyond canceling a few tool subscriptions.
However, SEO can contribute to unnecessary website costs. For example, you may not realize how much each visit to your website costs your business.
On a small scale, the cost may seem negligible, but hosting, infrastructure, and security expenses add up quickly, especially for large websites or sites with heavy traffic. Every visit or bot hit to your site costs money.
Linking your technical SEO work to reducing unnecessary spend is key.
Dig deeper: How to prioritize technical SEO fixes by business impact
How to strengthen buy-in for technical SEO work
These four approaches can help stakeholders better understand, support, and prioritize technical SEO work.
1. Determine the value of the work
Never assume a technical SEO activity is worthwhile simply because it’s considered “best practice.” Everything you work on should have a demonstrable business benefit. When planning work, discussing resources, or reporting on outcomes, always tie it back to a core organic KPI.
For example, direct organic revenue, assisted revenue through multi-touch journeys involving organic, increased visibility in traditional and LLM search platforms, increased qualified traffic, or improved conversion rates.
The work may not immediately generate new revenue, but it should at least support revenue growth, conversion improvements, or cost savings.
For example, you may want to review cannibalization across product pages. By implementing canonical tags and reviewing the internal linking structure to reinforce which pages should be canonical, you’re not just helping Google better understand your site. This work should reduce cannibalization, improve rankings, and increase organic traffic.
Conservatively, if you have 10,000 organic visitors per month, an average conversion rate of 3%, and an average order value of $15, increasing organic traffic by just 5% could generate an additional $7,500 per month.
There’s no guarantee that traffic will increase the moment canonical tags go live. However, you can model the expected gradual traffic growth over the next 12 months and estimate how revenue may be affected.
By doing this, you shift the conversation from “this is a good technical SEO activity for improving search visibility” to “this is a good technical SEO activity for driving revenue growth.”
2. Identify how the work will impact company goals
Once you understand the value of your technical SEO activities, you can connect them to your company or project goals.
For example, let’s say a global ecommerce company has a goal of “increasing profitability in the LATAM region over the next 12 to 24 months through increased website traffic from LATAM countries and a 50% increase in spend from LATAM consumers.”
The company’s SEO team wants to review its hreflang implementation, but it has struggled to secure developer resources to support the work.
Rather than explaining the importance of the x-default tag or reciprocal references to engineering leadership, the SEO team should focus on how the work supports the company’s business goals. For example:
- “We’ve identified significant traffic from the LATAM region being misdirected to the U.S. website because Google is surfacing the U.S. version instead of the appropriate localized version. Visitors who land on the correct regional and language version of the site convert at a significantly higher rate than those who land on the wrong version. By reviewing our hreflang tags, we expect to improve search engines’ understanding of our international website. That should increase the number of LATAM visitors landing on the correct version of the site by Y%, leading to higher conversion rates. Based on our current traffic levels, we estimate that improved conversion rates could generate $$$$ in additional revenue at the cost of one engineer for half a sprint.”
3. Communicate effectively
One challenge with technical SEO work is that senior stakeholders don’t always understand its practical implications. When discussing the business impact of SEO work, it’s important to break it down into the core components stakeholders need to understand: who, what, where, why, when, and how.
Who
What resources will this work require? For example, will it involve only the SEO team, or will it require two developer sprints for implementation? Will the entire SEO team need to support the project, or can it be handled by a single account manager?
What
What exactly are you planning to do? Communicate this in a “wide-to-narrow” format. Start with an explanation suited for a broader, nontechnical audience, then add more specific details as the communication progresses.
This approach allows stakeholders who want a quick overview to get an executive summary upfront, while those interested in the finer details can continue reading.
Where
This doesn’t necessarily mean listing every page affected by the work. Instead, focus on the products, regions, or business areas involved.
For example, does the product owner responsible for the LATAM webpages need detailed information about hreflang tag updates? Probably not. However, they’ll likely want to know that technical SEO work is being carried out on their section of the site and that it will be completed within two weeks.
Why
What is the intended impact of this work? Explain why it matters to existing business priorities and communicate its level of importance.
If you’re seeking stakeholder sign-off or buy-in, this is often your strongest opportunity to secure it. Clearly explaining the “why” in the context of projects and goals stakeholders already support will help them understand the value of the proposed work.
When
Be specific about timelines. Whenever possible, estimate when the work is likely to affect the business. Even if the impact may take several months, setting expectations gives stakeholders a useful frame of reference.
You should also include project milestones that stakeholders can track. This demonstrates progress before the work is completed and before search engines fully process the changes.
For example, an hreflang review project may involve several phases: reviewing existing hreflang tags, making recommendations, creating developer tickets, and implementing updates. Rather than saying the project will take several months, break the timeline into milestones.
This gives stakeholders regular visibility into progress and can also highlight where a project may slow down because of resource constraints or competing priorities from other teams.
How
The way you communicate technical SEO work can strongly influence how stakeholders understand its business impact. Instead of reporting only on reduced crawl errors or improved Core Web Vitals scores, make sure reports for non-SEO stakeholders connect the work back to business outcomes.
For example, monthly reports should include details about technical SEO improvements, but more importantly, they should highlight:
- Organic revenue.
- Incremental revenue from SEO.
- Organic sessions (qualified traffic only).
- Share of voice.
- Organic conversion rate.
- Technical health score.
When discussing technical SEO activities, always explain how they affected one or more of these KPIs. Even if the explanation becomes technical, anchoring the discussion in familiar business metrics helps stakeholders understand and appreciate the impact.
Dig deeper: Where to focus technical SEO when you can’t do it all
4. Prove the impact over time
The best way for SEOs and stakeholders to align technical SEO work with business goals is by demonstrating results over time.
This is an effective way to keep your technical SEO strategy aligned with business goals. It also makes future stakeholder conversations much easier when they can see how your recommendations consistently benefit the business.
When you complete a technical SEO implementation, don’t immediately move on to the next project. Regularly review performance over the following months to understand how the work is paying off. This also helps you better estimate time-to-impact in future projects.
For example, if you’ve completed a website rearchitecture project to improve topical relevance, don’t just wait to see whether rankings improve.
Instead, review log files each month to see how quickly Googlebot identifies changes in the site architecture. How soon after new pages launched were they crawled?
If you don’t have access to log files, you can map crawl rates in Google Search Console against technical SEO fixes to see how quickly Googlebot is responding and increasing crawl activity in the affected section of the site.
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Business impact matters more than technical best practices
Sometimes your best assumption about what would move the needle turns out to be wrong. In many cases, it may take several months before that becomes clear. If you don’t revisit previous implementations, you won’t know what actually worked.
Just because something is considered “best practice” doesn’t mean it will work for your site. Always check whether your technical SEO implementations are delivering the intended outcomes, even months after deployment.
Don’t keep these learnings to yourself. Include them in future updates and proposals. Doing so makes it much easier to demonstrate the value of your technical SEO recommendations.
Dig deeper: Advanced technical SEO tips: 14 technical SEO issues you’re missing