I recently spoke with an SEO who, along with his entire team, had just been laid off. The company was rapidly losing organic traffic, leadership was frustrated, and from their perspective, nothing was being done to fix it. The SEO saw it very differently. They had submitted more than 1,400 tickets over the previous 18 months, each documenting an issue and outlining 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 had been implemented. Engineering time had been consistently redirected to CEO initiatives, product launches, and other internal priorities that always seemed to matter more. From the SEO’s point of view, the work existed. From the business’s point of view, nothing had changed. Traffic declined, visibility dropped, and eventually a decision was made to eliminate this underperforming team.
A backlog is not progress. It is an unimplemented intent.
This is the uncomfortable reality many practitioners struggle to accept. Submitting tickets is not the job. Getting them implemented is. If your recommendations never make it into production, they do not exist in any meaningful way. They do not drive traffic, they do not improve visibility, and they do not protect the business as Google continues to evolve. And right now, that evolution is accelerating, which makes the gap between activity and impact even more dangerous.
Align With What Already Matters
You can see how organizations are frantically responding to the pressure to perform in AI Search, albeit subtly. Work that sat untouched for months as “SEO improvements” suddenly gets prioritized when it is reframed as AI readiness, Generative Engine Optimization, or content structuring for AI discovery. Nothing about the underlying work changes, but the framing does, because it aligns with what leadership believes matters in that moment. It may feel frustrating, even cynical, but it reveals a deeper truth.
At IBM, we struggled to get many SEO initiatives prioritized. A report later flagged our site search experience as poor and negatively impacting sales of our own search product. The required improvements were largely the same as those we had been recommending for external SEO. By relabeling them as “site search fixes” under this new mandate, we were able to accelerate implementation and improve both internal and external search performance. Work is not prioritized because it is the right thing to do. It is prioritized because it aligns with the current narrative of impact and executive priorities. To understand why so much SEO work fails to cross that threshold, you have to look at where decisions are actually made.
The Line You Don’t See Until It Stops You
After selling my agency, I took on a project for a company that was already performing well in organic search. Then Google launched paid search, and everything shifted. Large advertisers began reallocating their budgets because buying search traffic directly from Google suddenly looked more efficient than advertising on websites that simply arbitrage organic traffic to generate the ad impressions they had purchased. The board’s response was immediate and direct. They wanted to dominate every aspect of their category and be in the top three across the board, and they were willing to provide me with whatever resources were necessary to make that happen.
So I went to engineering with my plan and list of activities for total domination, expecting complete alignment and momentum. Instead, the CTO walked me to a whiteboard and pointed to a faint dotted line. Anything above that line, he explained, might get implemented this fiscal year. Anything below it would not. There was no debate or negotiation. Every idea, no matter how strategically sound, had to either fit above that line or displace something already there. It was a simple constraint of available resources, and it made one thing clear: what was already there mattered. He told me that those initiatives were also blessed by the same executives who greenlit mine. These existing initiatives were tied directly to revenue, others to compliance or security, and some were simply protected by stakeholders with enough influence to keep them in place.
That was the moment the reality became clear. This line, invisible in every audit and absent from every SEO tool, determines what actually gets built. I call it the “IT line of death.” Your mission, as an SEO or GEO manager, is to find creative ways to get your activities into or to replace one of those above-the-line projects.
From Tasks To Contribution Value
Most SEO recommendations do not fail because they are wrong. They fail because they are not competitive within that resource allocation system. This means everything is a trade-off. Engineering does not evaluate your recommendation in isolation; they evaluate it against everything else competing for their time and resources. Revenue-driving features, compliance requirements, infrastructure improvements, and existing commitments all carry weight. And so does the requester. When SEO shows up as a collection of disconnected fixes, it struggles to compete because it lacks a clearly articulated cost, ownership, and relative impact.
That realization forces a shift in how SEO needs to be approached. It is no longer enough to identify issues. You have to justify why they deserve to exist above the line and are as important as or more important than another activity. That means translating work into effort, impact, and trade-offs. It means moving from tasks to contribution value. Audits, tickets, and backlogs describe activity, but engineering teams do not fund activity. They fund outcomes. If you cannot explain why your recommendation is worth more than another team’s request, it will not get done.
This is where many SEO programs stall. They are rich in insight but weak in prioritization, and that gap becomes even more visible when you look at how work actually gets implemented. It is often difficult to tie SEO activities directly to revenue or basket size, but that does not remove the responsibility to try.
Fix The Systems, Not The Symptoms
Once you understand your organization’s IT line of death, the question becomes practical. How do you get work implemented in an environment where everything is competing? The answer is not to push harder, but to work differently within the system. In most organizations, the fastest path to implementation is not to create new work but to align with work already in motion. Engineering teams are constantly updating templates, redesigning page structures, migrating platforms, or refactoring components. Those initiatives already sit above the line. They already have a budget, attention, and momentum. When SEO is introduced as a separate request, it has to fight for priority. When it is embedded into an existing initiative, it inherits that priority. Some of the most impactful SEO changes are implemented this way, folded into broader projects rather than introduced as standalone efforts.
This becomes even more effective when you focus on scale. Isolated fixes rarely justify prioritization, but changes that act as force multipliers do. Updating a template rather than a single page can affect thousands of URLs. Adjusting CMS logic can eliminate entire categories of issues. Fixing navigation or internal linking can reshape how the entire site is understood and crawled. These are the types of changes that connect relatively small effort to large-scale impact, which makes them far more competitive at the line.
Even then, success depends on understanding the problem at its source. One of the most common failure points in SEO is diagnosing symptoms instead of causes. Large numbers create urgency, but they can also mislead. Thousands of redirects, tens of thousands of 404 errors, and duplicate pages across a site often trigger large remediation efforts, yet they are frequently just the visible output of a much smaller issue.
I worked with a company that generated pages from a product feed daily, with URLs based on the product name and its first attribute. It seemed logical, but the attribute was not stable. Every time it changed, the URL changed with it. That single design decision created a cascade of problems. New pages were constantly being created, old URLs turned into 404s, and the site effectively churned its own index. The Search Console error log reflected this chaos, filled with tens of thousands of issues that needed fixing. But none of those issues was the real problem. The solution was not to clean up the errors; it was to stop creating them. By realigning the URL structure to a stable identifier such as a SKU, the entire system stabilized. The errors disappeared because the mechanism producing them was removed. One change replaced thousands of remediation tasks.
This is the difference between work that stays below the line and work that crosses it. The former treats symptoms, the latter resolves the system that generates them. This dynamic is not unique to a single company or a single moment in time. It shows up consistently across organizations, industries, and levels of Search maturity. Whether the constraint is engineering bandwidth, compliance requirements, or competing product priorities, the outcome is the same. Work that cannot justify itself at the line does not happen. We explored this further in a podcast episode, breaking down how this pattern repeats and why so many well-intentioned initiatives stall before they ever reach production. The conclusion was consistent. Most SEO work does not fail because it is wrong; it fails because it is not framed in a way the organization can act on.
Once you understand that, the role of SEO changes. You are no longer just identifying issues; you are shaping decisions. You are defining what is worth doing, why it matters now, and what impact it will have relative to everything else competing for attention. That is what moves work from backlog to implementation.
In the end, nothing gets done because it is best practice. It gets done because it is worth doing.
More Resources:
- Internal Silos Are An Overlooked Problem That Can Hurt Search Performance
- Key Elements Of Technical SEO For Large Companies
- Agile SEO: Moving From Strategy To Action
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
