I just spoke to an SEO who, along with his entire team, was recently hired. The company was rapidly losing momentum, the leadership was frustrated, and in their opinion, nothing was being done to fix it. SEO saw it very differently. They had handed out more than 1,400 tickets in the past 18 months, each listing the issue and explaining the importance of what needed to be done. The backlog was extensive, detailed, and, in their mind, proof that the SEO team was working hard to reverse the decline. The problem was that none of the requested actions were performed. Engineering time was being redirected to CEO initiatives, product launches, and other internal priorities that seemed more important. From an SEO perspective, the work was there. From a business perspective, nothing had changed. Traffic decreased, visibility decreased, and eventually the decision was made to eliminate this dysfunctional group.
Backsliding is not progress. It is an unrealized goal.
This is an uncomfortable truth that many doctors find difficult to accept. Submitting tickets is not a job. To make them usable. If your recommendations don’t make it productive, they don’t exist in any meaningful way. They don’t drive traffic, they don’t improve visibility, and they don’t protect the business as Google continues to evolve. And right now, that shift is accelerating, making the gap between work and impact even more dangerous.
Align with What’s Already Important
You can see how organizations are reacting to the pressure to perform in AI search with haste, or with subtlety. A task that has gone untouched for months like “SEO optimization” is suddenly prioritized when it is reframed as AI readiness, Productivity Engine Optimization, or content planning for AI. There is nothing about the basic work changes, but the framework does, because it is in line with what the leadership believes is important at the time. It may sound frustrating, even cynical, but it reveals a deeper truth.
At IBM, we’ve struggled to get many SEO programs prioritized. A report later flagged that our site’s search performance was poor and negatively impacting our search product sales. The improvements required were very similar to what we were recommending for external SEO. By rebranding ourselves as “site search optimization” under this new mandate, we were able to accelerate implementation and improve internal and external search performance. Work is not prioritized because it is the right thing to do. It is prioritized because it is relevant to the current issue of impact and key priorities. To understand why so much SEO work fails to cross that boundary, you have to look at where the decisions are actually made.
The Line You Can’t See Until You Stop
After selling my agency, I took on a project for a company that was already doing well in organic search. Then Google introduced paid search, and everything changed. Major advertisers began to reallocate their budgets because buying search traffic on Google suddenly proved more effective than advertising on websites that simply rely on organic traffic to generate impressions for the ads they bought. The board’s response was swift and direct. They wanted to dominate in every aspect of their division and be in the top three across the board, and they were willing to give me whatever resources were necessary to make that happen.
So I went to engineering with my plan and list of tasks in full control, expecting perfect alignment and momentum. Instead, the CTO walked me over to the whiteboard and pointed out a dead line of dots. Anything above that line, he explained, could come into effect this fiscal year. Anything below will not. There was no debate or discussion. Every idea, no matter how brilliant, had to fit above that line or remove something that already existed. It was a simple limitation of available resources, and it made one thing clear: what was already there was important. He told me that those programs were also blessed by the same officials who enlighten mine. These existing systems were tied directly to revenue, some to compliance or security, and others were already protected by stakeholders with enough influence to keep them in place.
That’s when the truth became clear. This line, which is not visible in all tests and not in all SEO tools, determines what is actually being built. I call it the “IT death row.” Your goal, as an SEO or GEO manager, is to find creative ways to import your jobs or include one of those projects above the line.
From Activities to Contribution Value
Most SEO recommendations fail because they are wrong. They fail because they cannot compete within that resource allocation system. This means that everything is a trade-off. Engineering does not evaluate your recommendations in isolation; they test it against everything else that competes for their time and resources. Revenue driving factors, compliance requirements, infrastructure development, and existing obligations are all weighed. And the petitioner did so. If SEO is seen as a set of disconnected fixes, it struggles to compete because it doesn’t have clearly defined costs, ownership, and relative impact.
That recognition is forcing a change in how SEO needs to be approached. It is no longer enough to identify problems. You have to justify why they deserve to be above the line and are as important or more important than the other job. That means translating work into effort, impact, and trade-offs. It means moving from the activities to the value of the contribution. Audits, tickets, and backlogs define work, but engineering teams don’t support work. They finance the results. If you can’t explain why your recommendation is more important than the other party’s request, it won’t be done.
This is where most SEO programs stop. They are rich in insight but weak in prioritization, and that gap is even more apparent when you look at how the work is actually done. It’s often difficult to correlate SEO activities directly with revenue or basket size, but that doesn’t remove the burden of trying.
Fix Systems, Not Symptoms
Once you understand your organization’s IT death row, the question becomes real. How do you make work work in an environment where everything is competing? The answer is not to push harder, but to work differently within the program. In many organizations, the fastest way to get started is not to create new work but to adapt work that is already in progress. Engineering teams are constantly updating templates, redesigning page layouts, migrating platforms, or refactoring components. Those plans are already sitting above the line. They already have the budget, the attention, and the momentum. When SEO is presented as a separate application, it should strive for priority. When it is embedded in an existing system, it gains that priority. Some of the most impactful SEO changes are made this way, rolled into broader projects rather than presented as stand-alone efforts.
This works even more effectively if you focus on scale. A single fix rarely justifies prioritization, but changes that act as powerful multipliers. Updating a template on more than one page may affect thousands of URLs. Fixing CMS logic can eliminate all categories of problems. Adjusting navigation or internal linking can reshape how the entire site is understood and understood. These are the types of changes that combine relatively little effort with great impact, making them more competitive down the line.
However, success depends on understanding the problem at its source. One of the most common points of failure in SEO is diagnosing symptoms instead of causes. Big numbers create urgency, but they can also be misleading. Thousands of redirects, tens of thousands of 404 errors, and duplicate pages across the site often trigger major remediation efforts, yet are often the visible result of a very minor problem.
I worked with a company that generated pages from a product feed every day, with URLs based on the product name and its first attribute. It seemed logical, but the attribute was unstable. Every time it changed, the URL changed too. That one design decision created a series of problems. New pages were constantly being created, old URLs were converted to 404s, and the site successfully opened its index. The Search Console error log showed this mess, filled with tens of thousands of issues that needed fixing. But none of those stories were a real problem. The solution was not to clean up the mistakes; it was to stop creating. By redirecting the URL structure to a stable identifier like SKU, the whole system is stable. Errors have disappeared because the mechanism that generates them has been removed. One change replaced thousands of maintenance jobs.
This is the difference between a job that stays below the line and a job that goes over. The first treats the symptoms, the second solves the system that produces them. This dynamic is not unique to one company or one moment in time. It is often seen across organizations, industries, and levels of Search maturity. Whether the limitation is engineering bandwidth, compliance requirements, or competing product priorities, the result is the same. Work you can’t justify on the line is not doing. We explored this further in a podcast episode, analyzing how this pattern repeats itself and why many well-intentioned initiatives stall before they reach production. The conclusion was mutual. Most SEO work doesn’t fail because it’s wrong; it fails because it is not structured in the way that the organization can do it.
Once you understand that, the role of SEO changes. You don’t just mention problems anymore; he shapes decisions. He explains what needs to be done, why it’s important now, and what impact it will have compared to everything else competing for attention. That’s what moves work from backlog to action.
Ultimately, nothing is done because it is best practice. It is done because it is worth doing.
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Featured image: Roman Samborskii/Shutterstock
