The art of scaling your SEO to your business goals and resources
I know what should be done for this client. But I won't do it.
What I would ideally do, and what I actually do
Ideally, we should start by defining an overall strategy. Before writing a single page, we should think about the website's architecture, how pages are organized by topic (topic clusters, silos: groups of pages covering the same subject, interconnected to strengthen one another), and how they link together, while taking commercial priorities into account. This strategy should also be coordinated with UX, branding, technical considerations, and so on.
However, the budget isn't there. And the value of this preliminary work isn't immediately obvious to the client. What they want is to get their products online quickly without spending too much.
So we decide to take a different approach. We optimize and write the pages, building logical internal links page by page, but without creating an overall architecture. It's not what I would have done in an ideal world, but it's the compromise we've reached in the real world of this business.
What I refuse to compromise on is common sense and proportionality. Getting the balance right doesn't mean doing less; it means choosing what is actually worth doing.
Scaling SEO means aligning ambition, actions, and resources with the desired outcome. For an e-commerce website, we don't try to rank everything at once. We first identify the commercial pages to prioritize: the ones promoting what the client most wants to sell. These priorities will evolve over time. That's why the foundation needs to be solid and flexible enough to adapt.
I explain the implications of the client's decision. Targeted optimization doesn't have the same power as a properly structured website architecture: pages may reinforce one another less effectively, and the chances of ranking for highly competitive searches may be lower.
It's their business, their budget, and they make the decision with a clear understanding of the trade-offs. I don't promise the results of a strategy I'm not actually implementing.
Why accept a project if I can't roll out my entire strategy and aim for maximum efficiency? Because my role is to help clients make informed decisions, not impose them.
Turning down the project carries the risk that the work will be done in-house, without anyone there to show the way. And even this more limited approach serves part of the client's objective: getting products online and giving them a chance to become visible.
I refuse to do anything that goes against my values, misleads the client, or works against their interests. As long as the arrangement is honest and useful, and the work allows me to earn a living, I'm willing to adjust the scope.
But adapting SEO to a budget doesn't mean that the budget is necessarily sufficient to achieve the desired objective. When that's no longer the case, I say so, and I don't commit to the project.
When we overdo it
A developer colleague showed me a local business website with a simple offering. AI-generated articles were being automatically published every day, sometimes several times a day.
The quality was poor, and there was no real reason for these texts to exist. This process could actually damage the website and its reputation. On top of that, it consumes resources without providing any obvious benefit to readers.
As for Google, it can penalize large-scale content production that offers no genuine value, especially when the goal is to manipulate search rankings.
Publishing just for the sake of publishing is content for content's sake. It's nothing but hot air.
That's a perfect illustration of using a tank to kill a fly!
And the tank isn't just about accumulating useless content. It's also about deploying an oversized strategy: trying to build an entire network of supporting pages around a simple five-page local business website, when neither the offering nor customer search behavior justifies it.
Sustainable SEO: Robustness in the service of performance
The example of this local business website illustrates performance without a real need: publishing content at scale simply because the tools make it possible.
My e-commerce client's situation is different.
The research of researcher and biologist Olivier Hamant draws a distinction between performance and robustness: the ability of a system to remain stable and viable despite fluctuations.
Something less than ideal, but built on a foundation that can withstand change: that's robustness.
In SEO, performance often means chasing the top position, maximizing volume, and deploying the entire arsenal.
Robustness means having an SEO strategy solid enough to withstand changes in budget, Google algorithms, or AI-generated answers.
For me, robustness doesn't rule out performance. It builds performance on foundations that can stand the test of time.
Robust SEO doesn't chase every new development. It's designed to absorb shocks.
How to scale your SEO to your business
The right scale depends on the business, and no two businesses are the same.
To start thinking about it, we can begin with the commercial objective: How many contracts does the client want to sign? Which prospects do they need to reach? And what role can SEO play in achieving those goals?
This puts the objective before the actions.
We then compare that ambition with what we actually observe: existing search demand, competition, the current state of the website, and the client's available resources.
An independent professional aiming to acquire around ten clients a year needs a clear offering, trust signals, and a strong local or brand presence. They don't necessarily need a blog or an extensive SEO strategy, unless their prospects are searching for specific answers before making a decision.
An online catalog featuring a large number of products needs a sales hierarchy: what matters most now and what can come later.
A multichannel business needs to coordinate its SEO with other acquisition channels, such as advertising, social media, and email marketing, rather than expecting SEO to generate all its sales on its own.
The number of pages to optimize, the level of analysis required, and the role SEO plays in customer acquisition cannot therefore be determined by company size alone.
They depend on what the business sells, how customers find it, the competitive landscape, and its objectives.
There are many ways to get discovered: Google, AI-generated answers, social media, citations, YouTube, Reddit, and more.
No one needs to master all of them, all the time.
And what about our own business as service providers?
So far, I've been talking about the client's business. But when we talk about SEO and business, there's obviously our own business to consider as well.
It has to be part of the equation, and we need to be honest about it. We need to say it openly.
There are three things we need to protect: our relationship with the client, the quality of our work, and our ability to make a living.
It's our responsibility to propose what's right for the client and for ourselves.
We can narrow the scope of a project. What we cannot do is sabotage it or deliver the same amount of work for less money.
This isn't a methodology. It's the rule of the game.
Well-scaled SEO is robust SEO: SEO where we can clearly explain what it will achieve, and what it won't.
