In the age of AI, many companies still treat SEO as a bolt-on tactic, something to patch in after the website is designed, the content is written, and the campaigns are launched. As I explored in “Why Your SEO Isn’t Working – And It’s Not the Team’s Fault,” the real obstacles aren’t a lack of knowledge or talent. They’re embedded in how companies structure ownership, prioritize resources, and treat SEO as a tactic. It’s infrastructure. And unless it’s treated as such, most organizations will never realize their full growth potential.
Search is no longer about reacting to keywords; it’s about structuring your entire digital presence to be discoverable, interpretable, and aligned with the customer journey. When done right, SEO becomes the connective tissue across content, product, and performance marketing.
Effectively Engage Intent-Driven Prospects
As I first argued in my 1994 business school thesis, and still believe today, search is the best opportunity companies have to engage “interest-driven” prospects. These are people actively declaring their needs, preferences, and intentions via a search interface. All we have to do is listen and nurture them in their journey.
When organizations structure content and infrastructure to meet that demand, they not only reduce friction – they unlock scalable demand capture.
Search:
- Works across the funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion.
- Reduces customer acquisition cost (CAC) by meeting customers on their terms.
- Surfaces unmet demand signals that never show up in customer relationship management (CRM).
- Reveals how people describe, evaluate, and compare products.
- Can be a cost-effective tactic for removing friction by matching sales and marketing content precisely with the needs of the person seeking it.
In short, SEO gives you real-time visibility into what people want and how to serve them better. But only if the business treats it as a growth engine – not a last-minute add-on.
Case In Point: Search Left Out Of The Business
In one engagement, we analyzed 2.8 million keywords for a large enterprise with a $50 million PPC budget. The goal? Understand how well they were showing up across the full buying journey. This was a significant data and mathematical problem. For each product or service, we identified the buyer’s journey from awareness to support. We then created a series of rules to develop and classify queries representing searchers in each phase.
We could easily see the query chains of users from their first discovery query all the way through the buy cycle until they were looking for support information. It wasn’t perfect, but it did capture over 100 patterns of content types sought in different phases. By monitoring these pages and user paths, we were better able to satisfy their information needs and convert them into customers.
We checked organic rank: If the page wasn’t in the top five or had a paid ad, we counted it as having no exposure. Once we had the full picture, we saw the dysfunction clearly:
- In the critical early non-branded discovery phase, we had no presence for nearly 400 million queries related to technologies the company sold.
- Even more shocking, we missed 93% of 130 million queries tied to implementation-specific searches – like power specs, BTU requirements, or images for engineering diagrams.
The content existed, but it was buried in PDFs or trapped in crawl-unfriendly support sections. These were highly motivated searchers building proposals or writing budget justifications. We were making it hard for them to find what they needed.
To build our business case for change, we took all of these queries and layered in marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualified lead (SQL) metrics to quantify the potential missed opportunity. Using conservative assumptions to avoid executive panic, we demonstrated that this gap represented over $580 million in unrealized revenue.
This wasn’t a content gap – it was a mindset and infrastructure failure. Search wasn’t seen as a system. It wasn’t connected to growth.
SEO As Strategic Growth Infrastructure
But what we uncovered wasn’t just a content gap but a mindset and infrastructure failure. Search wasn’t seen as a system. It wasn’t connected to growth. Organic search had been siloed into a tactical role, and paid search was framed as an acquisition driver, both disconnected from each other and from how the business grows. The result? A website optimized for internal org charts, not for how customers think, search, and decide. This is where the true value of SEO as infrastructure comes into focus. It’s not just about saving money on media; it’s about building systems that align with the full buyer journey.
When SEO is embedded into product planning, content creation, and experience design, you don’t just show up more often. You present the right content at the right time to advance the user to the next step, whether that’s deeper research, a sales inquiry, or successful onboarding. This isn’t about creating more content. It’s about orchestrating a connected, intent-responsive experience that nurtures buyers across every phase of the journey. That’s the shift from SEO-as-tactic to SEO-as-infrastructure. When treated as infrastructure, SEO provides a high-leverage system that reveals market opportunities, drives persistent visibility, and reduces acquisition costs over time.
Done right, SEO delivers:
- Scalable, evergreen visibility across product lines and geographies.
- Lower marginal acquisition costs as rankings compound.
- Faster adaptation to evolving user needs and market trends.
- Systemic alignment between product, content, and experience.
Just like investing in cloud infrastructure enables engineering agility, investing in SEO infrastructure enables commercial agility, giving product, marketing, and sales teams the insight and systems to execute faster and smarter. I believe AI search results will act as a system-wide health check: It reveals messaging gaps, content blind spots, unclear product positioning, and even operational issues that frustrate customers. It’s the clearest signal you’ll ever get about what customers want and whether you’re delivering.
And as digital maturity rises, functions once seen as tactical, like SEO, are now key contributors to:
- Operational leverage.
- Customer acquisition.
- Digital product-market fit.
- Margin protection at scale.
Technical infrastructure is a key enabler of this shift. Sites that embed SEO principles into their content management system (CMS), development workflows, and indexing architecture aren’t just faster, they’re more findable, interpretable, and durable in an AI-shaped ecosystem. It’s the technical foundation that powers business visibility.
SEO is no longer just about rankings. It’s:
- A lens into unmet customer demand.
- A framework for reducing acquisition costs.
- A lever for improving digital experiences.
- A driver of compounding traffic and long-term growth.
This mirrors the broader theme in “Closing the Digital Performance Gap” – where we argue that digital systems like SEO must be treated as capital investments, not just marketing tactics. When commissioned correctly, SEO becomes an accelerant, not a dependency. Without that mindset shift at the executive level, web performance remains fragmented.
But Isn’t SEO Dead? Let’s Clear That Up
Yes, zero-click results are rising, especially for simple facts and generic queries. But that’s not where business growth happens. Most high-value customer journeys, especially in B2B, enterprise, or considered purchases, don’t end with a snippet. They involve exploration, comparison, and validation. They require depth. They demand trust. And they often result in a click. This is even more critical with AI search providing richer information.
The users who do click after scanning AI results are often more intent-driven, more informed, and further along in the buying process. That makes it more critical – not less – to ensure your site is structured to show up, be interpreted correctly, and deliver value when it matters most. SEO isn’t dead. Lazy SEO is. The fundamentals haven’t changed: Show up when it matters, deliver what people need, and reduce friction at every touchpoint. That’s not going away – no matter how AI evolves.
Final Thought
In “From Line Item to Leverage,” we made the case that digital infrastructure, when aligned to strategy, drives measurable shareholder impact. SEO is a prime example: It compounds over time, improves capital efficiency, and scales without inflating costs. To win in today’s environment, SEO must be commissioned like infrastructure: planned early, engineered with purpose, and connected to business strategy. Because the most significant growth levers are rarely flashy – they’re usually buried under decades of organizational neglect, waiting to be unlocked as a competitive advantage.
To achieve this, organizations must move beyond silos and recognize the chain reaction between searcher needs and business outcomes. That means understanding what potential customers want, ensuring that content exists in the correct format and mode, and making it discoverable and indexable.
Search marketing can be a cost-effective tactic for removing friction by matching sales and marketing content precisely with the needs of the person seeking it. In today’s AI-first environment, search becomes even more vital. It’s your early detection system for what customers care about – and the most capital-efficient lever you have to meet them there.
More Resources:
- Industry Pioneer Reveals Why SEO Isn’t Working & What To Refocus On
- AI Search Changes Everything – Is Your Organization Built To Compete?
- State Of SEO 2026
Featured Image: Master1305/Shutterstock
