Integrated Search Marketing

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 four 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.

Before our recent podcast episode, “SEO as a Team Sport,” Bill Scully and I discussed how this lack of integration is still happening in 2025. A few of our reasons made it into the episode, but it is worth a deeper review of why SEO and web development are often poorly integrated. After that session,

The most significant value of search marketing comes from being findable no matter where a customer searches, but too often, we do not align any of the many silos that could benefit from integration.  When a searcher is searching, they are not thinking about paid search or organic; they are trying to find a solution

A more politically correct naming would be “Developing a Shared Keyword Strategy,” based on feedback from Center of Excellence clients as the mere mention of arbitration makes it sound defensive and punitive. Large organizations with multiple business units (BUs), verticals, and product segments run parallel paid and organic search efforts, often without coordination. This fragmented