Last week, I did two calls initiated by startup investors after being introduced to them as an expert in the strategic use of Search Marketing. After a few minutes of discussing my thoughts on the strategic application of Search, both investors had their startup CEOs join the call to understand how I can help them improve their Search performance.
Both CEOs stated, “Organic search traffic is critical to reaching our revenue goals,” which is subscriptions. They both asked me a variation of the same question, “So what is your secret sauce, and how are you different than what my team and agency are doing?”
I told them I didn’t have a secret sauce or a magic wand, only a strict focus on deeply integrating Search into the workflow and company DNA. I then asked three questions that often tell me the relative importance of Search within a company.
- How many subscriptions has SEO generated?
- What phrases or pages have generated the most subscriptions?
- Who owns SEO, and how is it integrated into the website workflow?
Neither could answer the first two questions, and both admitted their Dev teams felt SEO was a black box” and most of their SEO activities were done by content teams with advice from an SEO agency. These answers, or lack thereof, get to the heart of why many startups fail to capture their full organic search potential – they treat a business model imperative as merely a marketing channel.
Why Search Performance Is Your Business Model
Let’s be brutally honest: If your startup requires organic search traffic to hit revenue targets, treating SEO as simply another marketing channel is organizational malpractice. Here’s why:
The economics are undeniable. Every dollar spent acquiring customers through paid channels impacts your burn rate and unit economics. Meanwhile, organic search visitors typically convert at 2-3x the rate of paid traffic due to higher intent-to-content alignment, and your acquisition costs decrease over time. Unlike paid channels with linear or increasing costs, organic search compounds – each piece of successful content makes the next one easier to rank.
But here’s what most CEOs miss: Search performance (paid, organic, and onsite) is the output of your entire organization’s execution, not just your marketing or content team’s efforts. Your engineering and user experience team’s decisions impact all aspects of organic, from indexability, relevance, page load speed, and core web vitals. Your product team’s roadmap affects your ability to rank for high-intent terms. Your customer success team holds the key to understanding your prospects’ exact language when searching. Your sales team knows which search terms indicate the highest likelihood of conversion and what does convert.
Making Search Everyone’s KPI
I told both CEOs I would start by ensuring everyone understood the need to take key steps to transform search from a “black box” and an after-thought marketing metric to a critical company-wide performance indicator. If organic search traffic is essential to generating subscriptions, you must understand and ensure that anything connected to that pathway is optimized and any activity or role that interacts must understand that interaction and ensure all actions are positive.
There is a need to create both macro performance metrics and micro factors at the team level, including some of the following:
Engineering Team KPIs
- Core Web Vitals & Mobile experience metrics for key landing pages
- Technical debt impact on search performance
- Time to implement SEO-critical features
Product Team KPIs
- Feature coverage of high-intent search terms
- Product-led content performance
- Search-informed roadmap priorities
- Competitor feature gap analysis
Sales Team KPIs
- Organic Search revenue and how it contributes to each revenue stream
- Search presence for sales-identified terms
- Content gaps identified from prospect calls
- Close rates from organic search leads
Customer Success KPIs
- Search visibility for common support queries
- Self-service content effectiveness
- Support ticket reduction through search content
- Conquesting competitor support issues
Marketing Team KPIs
- Revenue (not just traffic) from organic search
- Share of voice for critical concepts and phrases
- Landing page conversion rates
- Content performance by revenue impact
The CEO’s Role: Empower and Enforce
The CEO and senior leadership must enforce search integration to drive this transformation and empower the collective teams to maximize their contributions. This can start with these essential questions startup CEOs need to ask each team:
Engineering:
- What’s blocking us from perfect Core Web Vital scores, and how does that impact our ability to rank?
- How are we prioritizing SEO-critical technical improvements, and what is needed to fix backlogs?
Product:
- How are we incorporating search demand into our roadmap?
- What features, functions, and problems are consumers searching to solve?
- Which features are we missing that prevent us from ranking for high-intent terms?
Sales:
- Which organic landing pages produce the most trials and subscriptions? Have we expanded them?
- What terms do our best prospects use before they find us?
- Are we represented across the entire customer journey?
Customer Success:
- What questions do prospects and customers repeatedly ask that we should rank for?
- How can a better search presence reduce our support costs?
- What are the most common bugs and product defects being searched or having social mentions?
Marketing:
- What percentage of our high-intent keywords are we currently ranking for?
- How are we measuring and improving organic search conversion rates?
- What content is driving the most engagement?
- How have we aligned Search with other marketing activities?
The Future of Search-Driven Growth
As Google’s AI Search results evolve, the bar for search success gets higher. The winners won’t be the companies with the biggest SEO budgets but those who have embedded search performance into their organizational DNA. Your competitive advantage in search comes from your entire company’s ability to:
- Ship features that serve search intent and consumer needs
- Create content that genuinely helps users and can be indexed and understood
- Build technical experiences that delight both users and search engines
- Convert search traffic more effectively than competitors
- Understand and serve user needs better than anyone else
The companies that win at search don’t just have a great SEO team or agency – they have entire organizations aligned around search performance as a core business metric and Senior executives that support and enforce Search alignment. I discussed this challenge in my recent article on the lack of C-Suite representation for Search Marketing and the International Webmastery Podcast.
Remember: In a world where organic search can make or break your startup’s economics, SEO isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a CEO problem. The question is, are you accepting that fact and acting accordingly?