| Question | Short Answer |
|---|---|
| Is SEO still worth it in 2025? | Yes. It is one of the few channels that compounds, lowers CAC, and boosts valuation. |
| What is the CEO’s role? | Set the SEO vision, protect it from short-term cuts, and tie it to revenue, not rankings. |
| How fast can you see results? | Typically 6-18 months for strong momentum, faster with an existing site and brand. |
| Biggest SEO risk in 2025? | Thinking AI and paid media replace organic, and ignoring brand + content quality. |
| What should CEOs track? | Revenue from organic, CAC vs paid, search share vs competitors, and brand search volume. |
Organic search is now where your buyers research, compare, complain, and decide. That is the short version. If you are still treating SEO as a technical checkbox or something “the marketing team handles later”, you are leaving margin, market share, and valuation on the table. Not in theory. On your P&L, in your CAC, and in how investors look at your growth engine.
Why SEO is now a CEO problem, not a marketing task
For years, SEO sat in a corner: meta tags, keywords, backlinks. A line item. Nice to have.
That world is gone.
Your buyers Google (and Bing, and search inside AI tools) before they ever talk to sales. Your category is defined by what shows on that first page, in the answer boxes, in video carousels, in those new AI-generated snapshots. If you do not shape that, someone else does.
This affects:
– Pricing power
– Sales cycles
– Perception of risk
– Your ability to enter new markets without bloated paid budgets
Think about it this way: if you lost paid ads for 6 months, would your pipeline collapse? If the honest answer is yes, SEO is not just a marketing topic. It is a strategic weakness.
If your brand does not show up where your buyers search, you do not exist in their buying process, even if you have the best product.
The shift from “rankings” to “owning demand” in 2025
In 2025, SEO is less about “ranking for keyword X” and more about owning the journey from problem to purchase.
Your future customer searches:
– Problem symptoms
– Comparisons
– Solutions
– Pricing
– Implementation risks
– “Is this worth it?”
If you only show up on branded searches or bottom-of-funnel terms, you are late to the conversation. Someone else framed the problem. Someone else educated them. You are just a line item they compare.
SEO in 2025 is how you insert your story earlier, in a way that compounds.
Organic traffic vs paid: what the numbers really mean for a CEO
You do not need an SEO dashboard. You need a business dashboard where organic is a key input: traffic, pipeline, revenue, CAC, and payback.
Let us keep it simple.
The cost and compounding difference
Paid traffic is rent.
Stop paying, traffic stops. Your CAC rises the second auctions get more crowded, or a big player floods your category with budget.
Organic traffic is more like a property.
You invest, it takes time, then it starts to produce “rent” on its own. It can decay if you neglect it, but it does not vanish just because you pause spending for a month.
A rough model you can think through:
– Paid channel:
– Spend: $100,000 / month
– CAC: $600
– Turn off spend: pipeline drops almost immediately
– Organic channel after a steady 18 months:
– Spend: $60,000 / month on content, tech, links, people
– CAC from organic: maybe $200-$350 per customer
– Turn off spend for 2 months: traffic dips slowly, but you still get leads and sales
These numbers will vary, but the structure is similar in almost every serious space I have seen.
Paid fills gaps. Organic reshapes your cost base and your valuation over time.
If you plan multi-year, you cannot ignore a channel where content created 18 months ago still brings in qualified leads with no extra per-click cost.
Why SEO directly changes your CAC and payback period
Look at your blended CAC.
If half your new revenue comes from channels with rising media costs, your blended CAC creeps up. You then either:
– Raise prices
– Accept weaker margins
– Or squeeze sales and marketing harder
Organic traffic pulls the blended CAC down, even if each organic lead is not “free”. You pay through content, tech, and people, but the marginal cost of a new visitor is almost zero.
Also, organic traffic tends to:
– Be higher intent when targeted well
– Bring in clients who already know your brand
– Need fewer sales touches
That shortens sales cycles and improves win rates. So even if the top-funnel numbers look “smaller” than paid, the downstream impact is strong.
What changed in SEO by 2025 that CEOs cannot ignore
SEO in 2025 is not what it was in 2015. The backdrop changed.
AI search, snippets, and brand visibility
Search engines now show a lot more:
– AI-generated answers
– “People also ask” style questions
– Video blocks
– Featured cards with a small set of brands
If you are not present in these surfaces:
– Your expertise is invisible
– Your competitors’ narratives become the “truth”
– Your sales teams fight uphill
This does not mean “chase every new AI search product”. It means your content and technical setup need to send clear, consistent signals about:
– Who you serve
– What problems you solve
– Where you are clearly better
That makes it easier for search systems to pick you up as part of their “default” set of sources.
The rise of content quantity with no quality
Everyone is churning out AI content now. Entire websites with thousands of articles written in days.
That flood changed what works.
You cannot win with thin generic content. Search engines, and more importantly buyers, ignore it. What works now is:
– Real expertise
– Clear points of view
– Concrete examples and numbers
– Unique data or experience
This is where you, as a CEO, have a unique role. Your company has:
– Customer stories
– Success and failure experiences
– Internal data and patterns
– Opinions about the right and wrong way to operate in your space
If that lives only inside sales decks, or in the heads of senior leaders, you miss the SEO upside.
AI can draft words, but it cannot steal your real experience with customers. That is your edge in organic search.
Brand matters more for search now
Search engines now use brand signals more clearly.
They favor:
– Entities they recognize
– Brands with mentions across the web
– Companies with strong engagement and loyalty
This means:
– PR supports SEO
– Podcasts support SEO
– Events support SEO
– Your social presence supports SEO
The old view:
“SEO is keywords and links.”
The current view:
“SEO is how the web sees and trusts your brand, plus how well your content answers intent.”
You are already investing in brand. The question is whether that brand work feeds organic search, or lives in its own silo.
The CEO’s job in SEO: where you actually move the needle
You are not going to write title tags. You do not need to pick keywords.
Your leverage sits in a few core levers.
1. Set the timeline expectation correctly
If you expect SEO to behave like paid, you will kill it just before it works.
Most serious companies need:
– 3-6 months to fix technical debt and content gaps
– 6-12 months to see clear organic trend shifts
– 12-24 months to see organic become one of the main revenue sources
This varies by domain authority, market, and competition, but this range is common.
Your role is to:
– Approve SEO as a multi-year growth lever
– Protect the budget when short-term pressure rises
– Ask for clear milestones tied to business outcomes, not vanity metrics
If your team reports “we improved our rankings”, push them. Ask:
– “Which pages?”
– “How much revenue comes from those pages?”
– “What did we learn about buyer behavior?”
2. Choose a strategic position, not “everything SEO”
Most teams fail at SEO not because of lack of effort, but because they try to chase every keyword.
A better question for you to ask:
“What category or problem do we want to own in search, in the next 2 years?”
Pick:
– 1-2 core problems you solve
– The 20-50 highest value topics surrounding those problems
– The parts of the journey where you can create the strongest content
Then let your team go deep there.
It is fine if you do not rank for every keyword connected to your field. You just need to own the ones that map to your strategy and revenue.
3. Break down internal walls that block SEO
SEO touches:
– Product marketing
– Brand
– Sales
– Customer success
– Engineering
If these teams are not sharing insights, your SEO will stay shallow.
You can unblock by:
– Having marketing sit with sales to extract real questions buyers ask
– Getting product and marketing to plan content around upcoming releases
– Making engineering accountable for fixing technical issues that hold back performance
One practical step:
Have marketing present, every quarter, the top organic pages by revenue, plus what sales is hearing from leads who came from those pages. Ask other functions how they can support these pages.
SEO becomes a shared responsibility, not a side project.
4. Tie SEO to narrative, not just numbers
Most SEO reports bore CEOs because they are full of jargon: impressions, click-through, canonical tags, and so on.
You do not need that.
What you need:
– What story are we telling in search about our category?
– Where are we shaping that story, and where are we absent?
– Which competitor is owning parts of that story we should care about?
Ask your team to show you:
– Real search result pages for your most important queries
– Your presence there vs competitors
– How that experience feels as a buyer
Then ask:
– “Is this how we want our company to show up?”
– “What narrative is missing?”
– “Where are we losing deals before sales even talks to them?”
This connects SEO directly to your positioning and messaging.
How to think about investment levels and teams
You do not need a huge team, but you do need a clear ownership model.
What a healthy SEO setup can look like
Let us say you are a mid-market or enterprise company.
A practical structure:
– 1 SEO lead or head of organic:
– Owns strategy, measurement, and coordination
– 1-3 content marketers / writers:
– Owns content creation with real expertise
– Part-time support from:
– Developer / engineering for technical work
– Designer or video person for content formats
– PR or comms for outreach and visibility
If you are smaller:
– You can pair one strong generalist marketer who understands SEO with quality external experts on a project basis.
The key:
Somebody has to wake up every day thinking about organic. If SEO is an item number 12 on a marketer’s job description, it will never grow enough.
Budget: what is “serious” vs “token” here
This will vary by your revenue level, but here is a rough directional guide.
If your company is doing:
– Under $5M ARR:
– Think in the range of a few thousand per month at least, across people, content, and tools
– $5M-$25M ARR:
– Low to mid five figures per month is often reasonable
– $25M+ ARR:
– High five or low six figures per month, as a steady investment, is common if you want organic to be a major source
What matters more than the absolute number is:
– You are funding consistent content with real subject expertise
– You are funding technical improvements
– You are measuring impact in revenue, not raw traffic
A smaller, steady, focused SEO investment beats a one-time splurge followed by long silence.
What CEOs should watch: a simple SEO scorecard
You do not need 40 metrics on your desk. You need a short list that tells you if your organic machine is healthy.
1. Revenue and pipeline from organic
Ask for:
– New ARR or revenue sourced from organic search
– Pipeline sourced from organic
– Closed-won rate from organic leads vs other channels
If your CRM and attribution are set up, these are not hard to pull.
Look for trends:
– Are these numbers growing quarter over quarter?
– Do organic leads close faster or slower?
– Do they churn more or less?
2. CAC from organic vs paid
You will not get a perfect number, but an estimate is useful.
You can define:
– Organic CAC = (SEO people cost + content cost + tools + agencies) over a period / number of new customers where first touch is organic
Compare that to your main paid channel CAC.
You want:
– Organic CAC lower than paid
– Organic CAC stable or trending down as you scale content, within reason
If organic CAC is rising sharply, that is a red flag that content quality or focus is off.
3. Share of search vs key competitors
Your team can use standard tools to estimate:
– What percentage of clicks in your core topic set you receive vs top competitors
You do not need the raw keyword data. A simple view like:
– “Across our 100 most important non-branded queries, we estimate:
– Us: 18 percent of clicks
– Competitor A: 27 percent
– Competitor B: 12 percent”
This tells you where you stand in your space’s information layer.
4. Branded search volume
This is the number of people searching for your brand name and product names.
It tracks:
– Awareness
– Word of mouth
– Brand strength
If organic content and PR are working, branded search often rises over time. It is not perfect, but it is a useful signal.
The hidden risks of ignoring SEO in 2025
Not investing in SEO is not neutral. It has costs.
1. Your competitors shape the category story
When someone searches:
– “Best [product type] for [your audience]”
– “[your category] pricing”
– “[your category] problems”
If you are not present, your competitors define:
– What matters
– What “good” looks like
– How expensive is “normal”
– Which trade-offs are acceptable
Your sales team then walks into conversations where the buyer has a biased view against you, even if logically you are the better fit.
You can still win some deals, but it is harder and more expensive.
2. Over-reliance on paid makes you fragile
When economic pressure hits, marketing budgets get cuts. The first place people cut is paid media.
If you have no strong organic base, cutting paid hurts:
– Pipeline
– Sales morale
– Confidence of investors and board
With strong SEO in place, you can choose where to cut without killing the business.
There is another risk: platform shifts.
– Auction prices can spike
– Algorithms in ad platforms can change
– Privacy rules can affect tracking and targeting
Organic search is not fully stable either, but it is harder for one policy update to wipe out your presence if your site is well built and your content is real.
3. Talent attraction and employer brand suffer
Great candidates Google you.
If your search presence is thin, outdated, or dominated by review sites and third-party content, they will:
– Doubt your stability
– Doubt your growth story
– Not see your vision
SEO-fed content like:
– Founder letters
– Deep pieces on your category
– Case studies
– Articles on your way of working
All shape how top candidates feel about joining you.
You can support HR without setting up a separate content engine. SEO and employer brand can share assets if you plan with intent.
What good SEO looks like in practice for a CEO
Let us make this concrete. Imagine a B2B SaaS CEO with ARR around $15M, selling to mid-market.
Here is what a strong SEO setup might look like.
The assets in place
– A structured content hub:
– 4-6 pillar pages on key problems they solve, each 2,000-4,000 words with video, diagrams, and clear CTAs
– 60-120 supporting articles that answer specific questions, comparison searches, and integration topics
– Product and solution pages:
– Clear, focused, with sections that match search intent like “pricing”, “use cases”, “alternatives”
– A technical base:
– Fast site, clean internal links, clear URL structure, no major crawl waste
The executive involvement
You, as CEO, are not writing every article.
Your role:
– Quarterly: sit with the marketing lead and review:
– Top organic pages by pipeline and revenue
– Where you appear for your top 20 non-branded queries
– New content themes planned for the next quarter
– Monthly: share real stories:
– Problems you see in the market
– Deals won or lost and why
– Opinions on industry shifts
Your team then turns this into thought pieces and guides that support both SEO and sales.
You also:
– Show organic metrics in your board deck for growth
– Call out strategic wins like:
– “In Q3 we became the top answer for [core problem] searches, contributing X in new pipeline.”
The results over time
Year 1:
– Organic becomes a stable contributor to pipeline, maybe 10-20 percent
– CAC for organic is lower than paid, but volume is still catching up
– You see better fit leads from markets where you had no reps before
Year 2:
– Organic is now 25-40 percent of pipeline in many months
– Blended CAC improves
– Paid spend is more focused on high-intent and remarketing
– Brand search volume is up
– Board conversations shift from “Can we afford current CAC?” to “How fast can we feed this organic engine with more expertise and data?”
None of this is magic. It is compounding.
What CEOs get wrong about SEO in 2025
A few patterns show up again and again.
Myth 1: “AI search will kill SEO, so why invest?”
AI has changed how some queries look, yes. It has not killed the need for:
– Trustworthy sources
– Clear explanations
– Case examples
– Product-specific content
AI systems still draw from real sites, brands, and experts. Strong brands that publish strong content still get surfaced.
If anything, this shift rewards real expertise and brand more than ever.
Myth 2: “We tried SEO once, it did not work”
Often what “SEO” meant was:
– A short project with a generic agency
– A thin content sprint
– No tie to revenue or real user problems
That is like saying:
“We tried sales, we made calls for one month, it did not work, so sales does not work for our space.”
SEO is not a one-time campaign. It is a channel that needs:
– Direction
– Consistency
– Feedback loops with sales and product
If you had a bad experience, dig into:
– Did we give it enough time and budget?
– Did we have someone with real ownership inside?
– Did we measure the right things?
Myth 3: “SEO is just a technical fix”
Technical health matters. But in 2025, the big wins come from:
– Owning key topics that match your strategy
– Bringing expertise and data to those topics
– Shaping how your market thinks
If someone tells you “you just need to fix your tags and speed”, they are simplifying the problem.
Technical is table stakes. Strategy and content move the market.
How to start making SEO a CEO-level priority this quarter
You do not need a massive overhaul this week. You can start small but focused.
Step 1: Ask for one simple report
Next leadership meeting, ask marketing for:
– Top 10 pages by organic traffic
– For each page:
– Conversions or revenue tied to it
– Main search intent it serves
– Buyer persona it attracts
Then ask:
– “Does this top 10 match our strategic priorities?”
– “Are we attracting the right people on these pages?”
– “What are we telling them to do next?”
This alone will spark useful conversations.
Step 2: Define your top 20 non-branded queries
Have the team come back with:
– The 20 non-branded searches that:
– Your ideal buyers use
– Connect directly to your main offering
– You believe you should show up for
Look at:
– Where you rank now
– Who owns those spots
Then ask:
– “In 12 months, for how many of these do we want to be a top choice?”
– “What do we need to publish or fix to earn that?”
This gives your SEO a clear target tied to strategy.
Step 3: Commit to one year of consistent investment
Agree on:
– Budget for people, content, and tech
– Clear roles
– Quarterly checkpoints focused on revenue and search presence for your key queries
Make it explicit:
“We are treating SEO as a long-term growth channel. We will assess on 12-month and 24-month horizons, not just 3-month ones.”
That clarity alone gives your team the space to build something real.
You do not need to love SEO. You only need to respect what organic traffic does to your CAC, your brand, and your valuation over time.
If in 2025 you still treat SEO as a minor marketing tactic, your competitors will welcome the space you give them.
