Why Define SEO’s Role in the Company’s Strategy Before Deciding Which Actions to Take?
“We want to increase our organic search traffic.”
This is a request I hear regularly, and in itself, there is nothing surprising about it. When you invest in your website, you naturally want more people to visit it. However, before looking for ways to improve that number, there is one essential question I believe we should ask: “What for?” If traffic increases six months from now, what should have changed for the business?
This question may seem simple, but it fundamentally changes how we approach the subject. A company does not seek visibility just to fill a dashboard. It wants to grow its business, gain more independence in customer acquisition, support an offering, or attract new customers. SEO can contribute to these goals, provided we know what role we expect it to play.
Otherwise, we risk producing content, fixing technical issues, and tracking performance charts without having clearly defined a direction.
1. Understand Where the Business Wants to Go
The starting point is not the website. It is the business itself.
Which services currently generate revenue? Which ones does the company want to develop in the future? What is already working in its customer acquisition strategy, and conversely, what makes it too dependent on a single channel or a handful of clients?
We also need to discuss constraints. A small team, a limited budget, or a busy commercial calendar will inevitably influence what can realistically be implemented.
Increasing traffic may be desirable, but on its own, it tells us nothing about which direction to take.
Imagine a B2B services SME receiving approximately 1,500 organic visits per month. Management would like to reach 3,000 because they feel the website could perform better.
However, after a discussion, we discover that the company primarily wants to develop a new service, which is more profitable than its traditional business but still relatively unknown to potential customers. It also lacks a marketing team capable of running several projects simultaneously.
The question then takes on a different meaning. The goal is no longer simply to double traffic, but to support the growth of this new service without spreading resources too thin.
This clarification may seem obvious, yet it prevents us from rushing into an action plan that might be relevant to the website but secondary to the company's actual priorities.
And we still haven't opened a single SEO tool.
2. Define the Role SEO Can Actually Play
Once the company's business objective has been established, we need to assign SEO a specific mission. Not a vague promise of “better visibility,” but an expected contribution to an identified business challenge.
This mission must also remain realistic: SEO is one growth lever among many, not a universal solution.
For our SME, the mission could be:
“Help the new service become an effective part of the company's customer acquisition strategy by making the offering more visible and easier to understand in search engines.”
This is already much more useful than simply saying, “Increase organic traffic.”
This formulation provides a clear direction for the decisions that follow. It promises neither an arbitrary number of visits nor business results that SEO alone cannot control.
One important point deserves emphasis: SEO does not operate in isolation.
If the offering is difficult to understand, if its competitive advantage is unclear, or if the contact process discourages visitors, increased visibility will not be enough.
In our example, we might first need to clarify how the service is presented, working alongside the people who sell it every day.
SEO can help make an offering accessible and visible; it cannot replace strategic thinking about the offering itself or the work of the sales team.
Defining SEO's role therefore means giving it a meaningful mission while also acknowledging its limitations.
This step prevents us from asking SEO to solve a problem that actually lies elsewhere.
3. Translate This Mission into SEO Priorities
Only at this stage should we decide which actions to take.
An SEO audit may reveal numerous opportunities: pages that need improvement, new content to create, internal linking to strengthen, and technical issues to fix.
However, not everything deserves the same level of urgency, and two companies with similar website issues will not necessarily have the same priorities.
The right question is not “What could we optimize?” but rather:
“What will best support the mission we have defined?”
Let's return to our SME.
If the new service is barely visible on the website, the first thing to examine is how it is presented.
Is there a dedicated page that clearly explains who the service is for, in which situations it is useful, and what the company actually offers?
Can visitors easily find it from the website's most important pages?
Is the information detailed enough for potential customers to understand the offering before getting in touch?
In this context, improving this section of the website and strengthening the internal links leading to it could make more sense than immediately launching a series of blog articles.
Not because articles would be useless, but because the mission defined beforehand determines the order in which decisions should be made.
This shifts us from a list of “things to optimize” to a selection of projects chosen for a specific and clearly explained reason.
This reasoning is particularly important for small businesses.
When time and budgets are limited, a recommendation only has real value if the company understands why it matters now, what needs to be improved, and what might happen if the work is postponed.
The company's business strategy should guide SEO actions, not the other way around.
4. Accept That You Cannot Do Everything
This is often the most uncomfortable part: temporarily putting certain optimizations aside.
A small or medium-sized business does not have an unlimited budget or a dedicated team for every project.
A list of recommendations, however relevant, does not automatically constitute a strategy.
Imagine our SME has forty old blog articles, several of which would benefit from an update.
This is a legitimate project, but should it take priority over clarifying the company's new service?
If the team can only dedicate a few days to SEO this quarter, it would make more sense to prioritize activities that directly support the chosen mission, while still keeping an eye on genuinely critical technical issues.
The remaining optimizations can be added to a roadmap for later.
Postponing other tasks does not mean neglecting SEO. It means recognizing that businesses operate under real-world constraints and that a strategy must take them into account.
A good SEO recommendation is not simply about explaining what should be done. It is also about explaining why certain actions can wait.
Starting Tomorrow: The Three-Sentence Test
Before launching a new SEO initiative, take ten minutes to complete these three sentences, ideally together with the person who best understands the company's commercial priorities:
- This year, our company's main priority is to...
- To contribute to this objective, SEO needs to help us...
- Consequently, our SEO priorities for the coming months are...
Then review your list of planned actions and ask yourself, for each one:
“How does this action contribute to the mission we have assigned to SEO?”
If the connection is difficult to explain, it does not necessarily mean the action is wrong. It may simply not be a priority right now.
This exercise does not replace an SEO audit, but it provides a framework for deciding what to do with its findings.
So yes, you can absolutely want more traffic. But before trying to increase it, make sure you know why you want it.
The goal is not to do more SEO. It is to do the SEO your business actually needs.
Note: The SME example used in this article is fictional and is intended to illustrate the reasoning.
