How to build an enterprise SEO strategy that actually gets buy-in

Most enterprise SEO strategies die in slide decks. Beautiful presentations, airtight data, and solid recommendations, all collecting dust because nobody bought in. 

I’ve watched it happen at companies with eight-figure marketing budgets. I’ve also watched a single SEO insight convince a company to create an entirely new business unit and make a multimillion-dollar investment.

The difference had nothing to do with the quality of the SEO work. I’ve spent 17 years finding out what it actually comes down to. Let me walk you through how to build an SEO strategy that gets the attention it deserves.

The two ways enterprise SEO strategies fail

Before I get into what works, let me talk about the two failure modes I see again and again.

Leadership expects SEO to work like PPC

The founder, CMO, or whoever the decision-maker is often doesn’t come from an SEO background or have experience standing up a successful organic program. Many come from performance marketing.

They expect SEO to behave like PPC: invest money on Tuesday, see results on Wednesday. When it doesn’t, they deprioritize the channel, which creates a death spiral. Less investment leads to worse results, which “confirms” their bias that SEO doesn’t work.

SEO gets stuck in a silo

This one’s on us. SEO leaders who get too deep into the technical weeds, who can’t translate their work into business language, and who never get a seat at the table because they’re speaking a language nobody else in the room understands. They become consultants shouting into the void instead of strategic partners influencing decisions.

Both failure modes share the same root cause: a disconnect between what SEO can deliver and how the organization thinks about growth.

Lead with narrative, back with data

Most SEO leaders get this backwards. They walk into a meeting with the CEO armed with 40 slides of data: crawl reports, keyword rankings, and technical audits. Leadership doesn’t have time for that. They’re juggling a hundred priorities, and your data dump just became background noise.

Start with the story instead:

• “Here’s the narrative.” 
• “Here’s the opportunity.” 
• “Here’s what I need from you to take us from A to B, and here’s how we’ll get there.” 

Then bring in the data to support the narrative.

The higher you go in your SEO career, the more critical it is to be a listener first. Before I present anything to a new CEO or CMO, I invest time in understanding their leadership style, the organization’s macro challenges, and what the top three enterprise goals are. Not SEO goals — enterprise goals.

Then I frame every recommendation through that lens: “As an enterprise, our goal is X. Here’s how this recommendation gets us there.” When you do that, friction disappears. Nobody can argue against working toward a goal they already signed up for.

One tactic I’ve found consistently effective is anchoring conversations in competitor intelligence. Every CMO, every C-suite executive, cares deeply about competition.

When I show them, “Here’s what competitor A has been doing for five years, and here’s the market position it earned them. I’m not asking for five years, but I need a year, and that’s being five times more efficient than they were,” the conversation shifts. 

You’re no longer justifying SEO’s existence. You’re helping them win a competitive battle they already care about.

Retrofit your goals into their OKRs

Here’s the cross-functional playbook that has worked for me across multiple enterprises.

Your success at an enterprise depends on two teams: creative and engineering. But they have their own goals, their own KPIs, and their own OKRs. If you show up with a list of SEO requests, you’re just another stakeholder creating tickets.

Instead, I start by genuinely understanding what each team is trying to achieve — and I mean actually understanding it, not assuming. In my first month at any new company, I schedule 30-minute 1:1s with the leads of every team I’ll need to work with: product marketing, engineering, creative, brand, and analytics. I ask three questions:

• What are your top two OKRs this quarter? 
• What’s the biggest thing slowing you down? 
• What does a win look like for you by year-end?

I don’t mention SEO once in those conversations. By the end of that listening tour, I have a map:

• Product marketing wants revenue and retention. 
• Engineering wants development velocity. 
• Creative wants engagement metrics. 
• Brand wants consistency. 

I know exactly how to position every SEO recommendation as a solution to something they already care about, in their language, toward their goals.

In my previous role, I worked closely with a product marketing manager on naming a new feature. My research showed that thousands of prospects were searching for a specific term every month. Instead of framing it as an SEO recommendation, I said: 

• “If you name this feature to match what people are already searching for, you’ll get free brand mentions, natural anchor text, and on-page relevance from day one. That directly hits your acquisition and retention target.” 

He got it immediately. That’s not an SEO win; it’s a product marketing win that SEO data enabled.

This approach transforms you from a requestor into a force multiplier. You’re helping them hit their goals. Now they want to listen to you.

Case study: Turning a sales insight into an SEO-driven business strategy

The best example I can give of enterprise SEO that drove real business impact came from a conversation I wasn’t even supposed to be part of.

Back in 2021, FreshBooks, my previous employer, was competing against a much larger incumbent, QuickBooks. Think David versus a Goliath with two times the feature set and more than a hundred times the budget. 

During a cross-functional meeting, I heard the director of sales mention that they were losing prospects at the finish line. The reason was that small business owners would get excited about the product, but ultimately defer to their accountant’s recommendation. And the accountants were all loyal to the incumbent.

This was a business problem, but I saw a search-driven solution. I proposed building a professional accountant directory on our domain — a searchable database of FreshBooks certified partner accountants organized by city. (The approach was inspired by two concepts: Eli Schwartz’s product-led SEO framework and Ross Simmonds’ idea of building an SEO moat: something only your brand can do.)

The domain already had strong authority. Keyword research showed significant search volume for terms like “accountant near me,” “bookkeeper in [city],” and similar local queries across hundreds of markets in the U.S. and Canada.

The strategy was a triple win. Small business owners would find a vetted professional. Accountants would get qualified leads, and because our site outranked their own websites in their local markets, they had a strong incentive to join the program.

For every accountant we onboarded, we’d gain multiple end customers they managed. It also addressed churn: freelancers who grew their businesses and hired accountants were leaving for the competitor. A partner accountant ecosystem would keep them.

I built the full business case with sizing data, the potential to scale from low triple-digit partners to more than 10,000, and presented it up the chain: director of performance marketing, VP of marketing, and CMO. Each approved it. We hired an agency and spent six months building it.

Did the directory launch? Not in its original form. Halfway through the build, the company recognized the strategic importance of the accountant channel so clearly that they created an entirely new business unit, invested multimillions in the accounting product line, and eventually built something much larger than what I’d originally proposed.

That’s what a strategy that drives real organizational change looks like. The SEO insight didn’t just get approved; it fundamentally reshaped the company’s thinking about an entire market segment.

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Why AI visibility makes cross-functional alignment non-negotiable

Everything I’ve described — the narrative framing, the OKR retrofitting, and the cross-functional listening tour — used to be a competitive advantage. Now it’s the minimum requirement, because the AI visibility shift has made cross-functional alignment a survival skill, not a leadership style.

We started tracking traffic coming from LLMs separately. What I found was revealing: conversion rates from LLM-referred traffic were four to six times higher than traditional organic. Users arriving through AI-assisted search had already done their research inside the LLM. They were arriving with high intent and ready to act.

But here’s the challenge: roughly 85% of the sources that LLMs cite when generating responses about your products and services are third-party sites. If you want to influence what AI says about your products, you can’t do it alone. You need alignment with affiliate teams, PR, brand, product marketing, and even legal.

I essentially did a roadshow internally, went to every department, and explained (with data):

• Customers are making buying decisions inside LLMs now.
• If we want to control the narrative about our brand and products in these AI-generated responses, every team needs to be on the same page.
• The affiliate team needs to know which third-party sites to prioritize.
• PR needs to think about how press coverage feeds into AI training data.
• Legal needs to understand the implications.
• All of our content, not just SEO content, needs to be optimized for how LLMs process and cite information.

In the old world, you could publish content, build links, and win at SEO in relative isolation. That world is over. 

Enterprise SEO in the AI era requires the same cross-functional alignment I’ve been describing throughout this article, but now it’s not just a competitive advantage. It’s survival.

Your first 30 days: Show, don’t tell

If you’re stepping into an enterprise SEO leadership role for the first time, or inheriting a function that’s been siloed and undervalued, here’s the approach I’d recommend.

• Understand your product-market fit from the inside. Sit with finance, analytics, and data teams. Identify which customer cohorts deliver the best unit economics: ARPU, MRR, and LTV. Most SEOs never get this visibility, and it’s the single biggest unlock for building a strategy that leadership actually cares about. I call it the “know thy numbers” strategy.
• Nail down your ideal customer profile (ICP) with product marketing. Understand who the ideal customer is, where they are, and what content they’re looking for.
• Do an honest competitive assessment. What’s working, what’s not, and where are the gaps?

Find one low-effort, high-impact win and execute it immediately. Show is 10 times more important than tell in enterprise SEO.

Early wins build credibility. Once leadership sees tangible impact, they become more open to listening. The more they listen, the more you can educate, and the less friction you face.

Mindset over tactics

Building an enterprise SEO strategy that drives real business impact isn’t about having the best technical audit or the most comprehensive keyword research. It’s about building an organization that thinks about search as a foundational growth lever.

That means being a listener before you’re a presenter. It means speaking in business outcomes, not SEO jargon. It means helping your cross-functional partners hit their goals first, and baking SEO into their success.

It means being willing to follow an insight wherever it leads, even if it ends up bigger than anything you originally proposed. The accountant directory I pitched was a six-month SEO project. The outcome was a multimillion-dollar business unit. That’s what happens when the organization believes SEO is worth investing in, because you’ve shown them why.

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