Holistic SEO as a catalyst for market leadership: Part 1
Learn how a holistic SEO approach can turn traffic into real revenue and long-term growth by aligning your search strategy with real business goals.
Turn big SEO ideas into clear priorities, real roadmaps, and measurable business results that actually drive revenue growth.
You can build a big SEO strategy, map out directions, ideas, and hypotheses, but until it turns into clear, practical steps, nothing really happens. Leveraging advanced SEO tactics early on can make a huge difference in turning these hypotheses into actionable outcomes.
When you finally move to actions, another problem shows up: there are just too many tasks. Everything feels important. You want to fix technical issues, create content, build links, improve the structure — all at the same time. McKinsey research shows that 70% of strategies fail not because they are bad, but because companies don’t think through how to make them happen.
And this is where SEO prioritization changes everything. You’ve got to figure out what’ll make the biggest impact first. If you choose well, the strategy actually works. If you don’t, your team just drowns in a never-ending to-do list. You burn through time and resources, but nothing really changes.
In real life, no company has an unlimited team, budget, or time. Even if you have a long list of important tasks, you simply can’t do everything at once.
Let’s imagine a company has three developers and one content manager. This team simply can’t, for example, completely rebuild the site structure, rewrite a hundred articles, start link building, and set up new analytics all at once.
The company has to set priorities, and if it gets them wrong, the team could spend months working hard and still not see any real results.
You can’t just do everything in any order. Some stuff has to come first; the rest just won’t work.
Like, if your website is slow and broken, there’s no point dumping tons of content on it. It won’t rank well anyway. If your domain authority is weak, you can’t just go after the biggest, juiciest keywords right away. Mess up the order of things, and your team will end up redoing work and wasting time.
Some opportunities just don’t last forever. You’ve got seasonal searches like before holidays, moments when competitors are weak, algorithm updates, and new search trends popping up.
If you don’t jump on it when the time’s right, the window closes. And later on, you won’t get the same results. Even if you do everything perfectly.
One decision could double your conversions, slash your customer acquisition costs, and bring in real revenue growth. Another might just slightly improve rankings for some random secondary keywords. When a team spends time on low-impact stuff, they miss out on the things that could actually move the needle.
Let’s think of an SEO strategy like a tree with lots of branches. The roots are your business goals. The trunk is the holistic SEO approach with the five key components we’ve talked about. And the branches are the specific tactical actions that grow out of each component.
Each branch of your strategy is made up of dozens of specific tasks and initiatives. So how do you figure out what to tackle first? The best way is to look at each initiative using two criteria:
Potential impact
Here’s what actually helps a stakeholder to figure it out:
Effort required
These questions help figure out the work and resources needed:
There are four categories of initiatives.
Basically, a strategy is just a way of figuring out what’s important and where the company is headed — like, where it wants to end up and how it’s gonna get there. But a strategy alone isn’t really a plan yet. Prioritization is when the company actually looks at all the stuff it could be doing and decides what will actually move the needle. What will get results faster, what needs less work, and what just makes sense to do right now. And once the company does that, its strategy turns into a real roadmap.
A roadmap isn’t just some abstract idea anymore — it’s a structured, time-based plan. Usually, it’s split into quarters or sprints, shows the goals for each phase, highlights which processes run at the same time, takes team capacity and resources into account, and includes checkpoints where you can see how things are progressing. Most teams revisit the roadmap every quarter because new data comes in, the competition shifts, or business goals change.
When you explain priorities, it’s really important to put SEO activities in business terms. If you just say, “We need to do technical SEO” or “improve Core Web Vitals”, it sounds abstract to leadership. They won’t really get why it matters or what it actually does for the company.
You need to explain it in terms of real business impact. For example, you could say, “Improving site speed will boost conversion by 15–25%.” That makes it clear this actually affects revenue, not just “making the site better”. You can even use real numbers to show the value, like: “With our current traffic, this could add $150,000 in annual revenue without extra marketing spend.” This way, managers don’t just see tasks — they see results that actually move the company’s bottom line.
Every SEO initiative should be tied to a clear business outcome. This could drive more revenue, cut costs, grow market share, protect the company’s position against competitors, or increase the value of its assets.
Keep one thing in mind: decision-makers are super busy. They don’t have time to read long explanations about SEO strategies or how things work behind the scenes. What they actually need is to quickly get the point — like, what’s the risk, what’s the opportunity, and how does it impact the money. That’s why visuals work so much better. So, what are the ways to show priorities to decision-makers?
For example, an Impact vs. Effort matrix is a really simple way to show priorities. You basically map projects on a chart: one axis is business impact, the other is the level of effort required. And right away, it’s clear which initiatives deliver a big payoff without requiring a ton of work.
A leader doesn’t have to dive into the details — they just look at the “high impact, low effort” quadrant and immediately get it: this is what should be tackled first.
A timeline roadmap with revenue projections is really about time and money. You’re showing when each initiative starts, when you expect to see results, and how much revenue it could potentially generate.
It turns SEO from this vague “we’ll see growth at some point” idea into something concrete. Like, we invest now, in three months we see traffic going up, and in six months that translates into additional revenue. For a business, that clarity is a big deal.
A channel comparison just helps put everything into perspective. You’re showing the projected ROI of organic search compared to, say, paid ads or other marketing channels.
So leadership doesn’t just hear “we need SEO”, they can actually see how strong of an investment it is compared to the alternatives — and whether it makes more financial sense in the long run.
It’s basically a clear visual of where you stand versus your competitors in terms of search visibility around your key topics.
If you can clearly see that a competitor is capturing a huge share of organic traffic in a strategically important category, it’s no longer just an “SEO issue”. It becomes a market position issue.
Be ready for the usual pushback when you’re presenting priorities or bigger SEO initiatives. Most of the time, you’ll hear three things: “It’s too expensive”, “It’s going to take too long”, and “How will we even know if this worked?”
“It’s too expensive” means that they’re afraid of investing without a clear guarantee. Leadership doesn’t think in terms of traffic — they think in terms of budget and return. So you need to show in advance what kind of impact you expect and why the investment actually makes sense.
“It’s going to take too long” is really about expectations. SEO doesn’t deliver results in two weeks — that’s just the reality. So you need to be ahead of the timeline and also show interim milestones, so they can see progress along the way and feel that things are moving, not just sitting there.
“How will we even know if this worked?” is about measurability. Lack of clear metrics or projections makes it hard for stakeholders to believe it will work. That’s why it’s important to agree upfront on how you’ll measure success — traffic, leads, revenue, or market share.
Once the priorities are set, the real work begins. It’s super important to stay transparent. That means regularly sharing short, clear reports: what’s been done, how the numbers changed, and what the team has learned from it. When leadership sees that things are transparent, the numbers make sense, and decisions are well-grounded, approving the next initiatives becomes much faster. They gain confidence that the team is actually managing the process, not just “doing SEO”.
Traditional SEO metrics like rankings or the number of indexed pages don’t really show the real impact on the business. A holistic SEO approach needs a more sophisticated measurement framework — one that tracks not just tactical progress, but also the strategic effect on your business goals. A structured SEO performance framework ensures priorities align with business goals and measurable outcomes.
Strategy growth indicators are like a navigation system — they show whether you’re moving toward your goals, if you’re on track fast enough, and whether you need to adjust course.
A custom SEO solution includes a tailored framework that takes your specific business model, industry dynamics, and strategic goals into account, because what matters for ecommerce is different from what’s important for B2B SaaS or healthcare.
In the first part, we looked at the difference between quick wins and long-term competitive advantage, broke down the key components of a custom SEO solution, and explained why a holistic SEO strategy works like an investment. Now the focus shifts from strategy to SEO tactics — and that’s exactly where Attico comes in.
Our Drupal SEO services cover every stage of the SEO journey, from a comprehensive technical and strategic audit to ongoing optimization and performance improvements that align with your business goals and KPIs.
By tying every initiative to business impact — whether it’s revenue growth, reduced acquisition costs, or stronger market share — Attico helps companies move beyond abstract SEO tasks toward real, measurable results.
Learn how a holistic SEO approach can turn traffic into real revenue and long-term growth by aligning your search strategy with real business goals.
At Attico, we have prepared a comprehensive Drupal SEO checklist that allows you to check your Drupal site for compliance with SEO best practices, find issues, and resolve them to boost ranking and visibility.