Last week Eoin Clancy posted on LinkedIn that he was told by an Enterprise SEO that their CEO’s focus on ranking #1 in Google for 4 terms was costing the company millions of dollars. The SEO said that the CEO is stuck in the dark ages regarding what matters to users and search engines today. A few others jumped in, saying it was not the CEO’s job to focus on keywords and SEO and the SEO had not educated the executives.
A few people sent me this post after seeing my previous LinkedIn post on the need for startup CEOs to be involved in search and a deeper dive on the International Webmastery Podcast. Of course, they wanted my take since it seemed to contradict what I was advocating. It does and did not since my article was specifically about startup CEOs – more on the difference below.
CEO Micromanagement
My initial reaction was to click the celebrate button indicating full support, agreeing that a Fortune 100 CEO has more important things to do than micromanage keywords ranking in Google. Note my wording here, it will be relevant later. Unfortunately, my multidimensional thinking brain and personality quirk of dissecting statements prompted a blog post rather than a simple affirming LinkedIn post.
First, it would be hypocritical of me not to agree that sometimes during my career I wished CEOs and senior executives would butt out and let us do our jobs. I agree that all CEOs have better things to focus on than whether the company ranks in Google. I have had projects, mentioned below, where their obsession to rank for specific ego terms has wasted a lot of energy and resources precisely as Eoin describes in his post.
Second, there is a big difference in a Fortune 100 CEO and a startup CEO’s involvement in SEO. My recent articles were specific to startup CEOs and how they must encourage deep integration of SEO across the organization.
In my 30 years of experience as an Enterprise-level Search Strategist, working with most Fortune and Global 100 companies, I have only been permitted to present search topics to maybe a dozen F100 CEOs. As noted, it is so far down their need-to-care hierarchy that we could not get on the schedule, or mid-level executives interfered so that we could not present it. Despite their lack of need to be involved, I will outline reasons why they might be using keywords to rank in Google.
Context Clarification
The SEO in the original post refers to four keyword phrases—not a macro keyword strategy of thousands of words dominating the SERPs, but four phrases. I agree that it is micromanagement, and the CEO is not doing their job if they are obsessed with hundreds. However, when focused on FOUR keywords, there are valid reasons why they would be fixated on rankings.
There are still 10 blue links.
Despite many writing off traditional search and pontificating on AIO promoting their latest technique to dominate AI-generated search results, many business verticals still only have 10 blue links, and many of these CEO peers have not yet migrated to AI platforms. As long as they can go to Google and do a search related to their brand and not find their company presented, they will task you with fixing that defect.
Yes, businesses must migrate tactically to dominate these new frontiers. However, we must still maintain and, in some cases, gain our positions in the “old format” that those who control budgets still use. Many companies devastated by the new formats must aggressively pivot their business to survive. As long as someone else is at the top of the organic SERPS for that query, it will be hard to convince a CEO that we should not worry about it. Imagine Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the largest global banking company and #12 on the F100 list, doing a query for “global banking solutions” and not seeing his brand at the top of the SERPs. That revelation and email will send shockwaves through the marketing department, forcing hours of work researching and trying to remedy this injustice.
They are asked why they don’t rank
I have been in meetings like the one mentioned above, trying to explain to an upset executive why they were not ranked—a worse experience when they were not considered for a big sale. For example, a multimillion-dollar deal was announced, and a salesperson asked why they were not asked to pitch, only to be told “we did not know you offered that,” because your solution did not appear in Google when we were doing our research. That feedback hurts. Similar post-acquisition, when the CEO of a company was frustrated that a month post-acquisition, a trade report noted that there was no mention of the newly acquired solution in their site search or site navigation.
With all the changes in search, it is becoming more common for finance reporters and analysts to ask about organic search performance during earnings calls. This is why many companies now include statements that I refer to as “Google Warnings” in their financial reporting.
I remember that about 10 years ago, a major brand was “influenced” into doing TV advertising by some analysts who found that the volume of brand searches decreased when they looked at Google Trends and AdWords data. It was true that branded searches had declined, but not due to the lack of brand awareness; it was the opposite. They owned the search results for their category, so people knew they would be in the SERPS for their query, negating the need to add a brand name. Nevertheless, the brand spent millions on TV commercials to increase their brand awareness, which did not change the frequency of use of the brand name in queries.
Board Member or CEO Spouse
I recently commented in our podcast that the “spouses of Board Members” were one of my former agency’s best lead sources. Looking back over the years, I have had many projects initiated because the spouse of a senior executive or board member searched for something related to the company, did not find it, and “complained,” triggering a mini-crisis in the organization. Most common in fashion and consumer products categories. I have done a few reputation management projects because the spouse saw negative reviews of products that the company was unaware of.
CEO Ego and Arrogance
Many CEOs assume they do rank for their core categories and products. To many executives, if they are the biggest, sell the most, spend the most, or whatever “bigness” you can infer, there is no excuse for not being represented. I once had a CEO argue that because Yahoo listed the stock ticker symbol next to the company name, they clearly knew they were a big company, and this fact should have boosted them to the top of the list on that alone.
About 10 years ago, during a quarterly earnings call before the Christmas holiday, a reporter asked a CMO about the retailer’s focus on the fragrance category – specifically branded perfume. The CMO gave a long-winded answer, high margins, seasonality, etc. The reporter followed up by asking why they were not ranking in Google for it if it was so important. He immediately responded, “We must be ranking, we are the largest fragrance products retailer in the world.” We know the capitalization or share price are not ranking factors. This effectively jump started a significant focus on search performance at this company.
You have not educated them!
The comment that frustrated me the most was that the SEO had not educated the CEO on the nuances of SEO. I have heard it many times at conferences and similar posts. This one emphasized a lack of fundamentals education and the changes in the Search Universe. In this and other cases, this may be true. I don’t know many Enterprise SEOs who have ever met with, let alone explained search to C-Suite executives. Given their marketplace position, they cannot reconcile it logically, even when presented with the facts of how search works.
From my experience, when they are appropriately educated, it can remove significant friction and create focus that enables true enterprise scale SEO to happen. I wrote about some of my breakthroughs from unique company-centric performance reports. One of my biggest wins in Search adoption and project revenue came when I presented to the C-Suite of a large CPG company. We already had a multi-million dollar engagement with multiple brands, but significant resistance to a centralized strategy. Finally, one day their overpaid business consultants told them they needed a broader digital strategy, which included search, after which I was summoned to HQ to present on the business value of Search and what it has contributed. Immediately after our strategy for global search domination was blessed.
The biggest frustration when I worked at IBM was that a couple of executives focused on ranking for the phrase “laptop” and “laptop computers”. They did not care about anything else. Even after delivering $1 billion in Search Influenced revenue, my inability to rank for these two terms overshadowed all of the team’s efforts. It did not matter that our legal team banned us from using those phrases on the website, nor how many times I explained how search works, and even when one of the founders of Google presented the impossibility (accurate at the time) of ranking for terms not represented on the page – they did not care – we were the biggest, sold the most, so there was no excuse for not being represented.
Ultimately, I created a page with analyst reviews from top publications containing these phrases. We got legal to add a disclaimer that these were not IBM’s recommendations and these devices are not meant to be used on your lap blah, blah, blah, linked it from our home page and boom – top of Google. Despite all our other greatness, we finally achieved senior management’s desire to be at the top of Google for these phrases.
Should they focus on ranks?
The simple answer is NO, but if they are harassing the SEO team over a few words and not performing, there must be a legitimate reason, and doing so, I believe they are doing their job maintaining the company’s reputation. Ultimately, the CEO is responsible for the business and the overall strategy. Any CEO’s focus should be strategic and specific to supporting their teams and ensuring others understand the brand and the implications of not being represented.
Let me be crystal clear, I have always hated rank as a metric of success, especially for branded queries, and have always focused on revenue. I admit I have used a lack of ranking as a fear factor to win projects. I won that CPG brand mentioned earlier by introducing the concept of SERP Shelfspace by showing that they missed out by not having all brands ranked for category queries.
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