How to help your SEO team make better decisions

I used to make too many decisions for my SEO team. I felt more comfortable taking control, including over decisions that should have belonged to the person doing the work. Eventually, I was doing parts of their job as well as my own. I had created the dependence myself.

I’ve since learnt to ask questions that help people work through the problem, and encourage them to investigate and try things before coming to me. It takes patience, particularly when I think I already know the answer. But if I keep deciding for them, they get little practice at deciding for themselves.

Someone can run an audit or write a sound content brief and still struggle to judge which work is worth doing. That judgement needs practice too.

Be clear about which decisions belong to them

First, I need to understand what they’re asking for. Someone who wants approval to change an agreed plan is in a different position from someone who wants me to decide what they should do next.

If they need approval, they may already have done the thinking. Ask for their recommendation and why they want to change course. If they’re waiting for you to choose, find out whether they know the decision is theirs to make.

“Be more strategic” doesn’t explain what you expect. Name the decisions they should own: which audit findings deserve engineering time, whether to update an existing page or commission a new one, or what should wait when an urgent request arrives.

For each type of decision, agree whether they can act themselves, should discuss it with you first, or need approval. The answer will depend on their experience and the consequences of getting it wrong. Someone who can confidently manage a content plan may still need close support through their first site migration.

Then allow reasonable choices that differ from your own preference. If every difference is overruled, people learn to predict you instead of deciding.

Narrow down the problem before trying to solve it

When someone comes to me for a decision, I first try to establish exactly what is stopping them from moving forward. Otherwise, we can spend a long time discussing the project without resolving the thing they’re stuck on.

They might have an audit full of findings but no idea which deserve engineering time. Or their content might be attracting more visitors without producing more business. Those need different investigations. First, establish what they’ve checked and where their understanding stops.

If they keep circling back to what they’re already doing, more questions may not get us any further. Sometimes a nudge is enough: “Have you tried this?” Other times, I’ll say, “I know how to approach this. Let me show you the workflow”, and take them through it.

Teach them to prioritise audit findings

An audit can produce a long list of findings. I want the team member to assess which fixes are worth doing, then explain their recommendation.

Urgent or blocking problems need a separate assessment. If a release has stopped important pages from being indexed, address that immediately. It shouldn’t compete with routine improvements through a scoring exercise. Afterwards, explain how you diagnosed it.

For the remaining work, a simple starting point is to score two factors out of five:

Factor	What the score should reflect
Likely impact	What the fix would improve, which pages would benefit and how much that matters to the business. Five means high impact.
Ease of delivery	The work needed to investigate, implement and check the fix, including engineering time. Five means relatively little effort.

Add the scores together, then discuss the proposed order. The total starts the conversation; it doesn’t settle it. Several small fixes may achieve more between them than one substantial project, but a difficult fix can still be the most worthwhile.

The useful coaching is in the explanation behind each score. If someone assigns high impact to a warning because it affects thousands of URLs, ask which URLs they are and what the issue prevents them from doing. Do those pages matter commercially? Is there evidence of a problem beyond the crawler’s warning?

Their answers show whether they understand the finding or are relying on the tool’s severity label. If they can’t explain the likely consequence, that is something to investigate before asking an engineer to fix it.

Help them recognise content that brings business results

When traffic grows without a corresponding business result, I want the team member to identify what actually tends to bring customers. Which types of content attract useful enquiries or contribute to sales?

A group of pages might get less traffic but convert better than the rest. That could justify more attention to similar content: other buyer questions or use cases where the same approach would be useful. Before recommending it, they should check whether the pattern holds across enough visits and enquiries to be convincing.

If they’re producing lots of top-of-funnel content that attracts people who are unlikely to buy, I ask them to look more closely at what buyers need. More traffic from the same audience may do little for the business.

That research can go beyond keyword tools. Useful places to look include:

Discussions between professionals on social media: what problems keep coming up?
Major industry conferences: which subjects are speakers and attendees concerned with?
Customer calls and sales data: what are customers asking, and what do they need to understand before buying?

These sources give the team something to investigate. A popular conference topic still needs a clear connection to the customers we want to reach.

The resulting content might generate enquiries, or help sales answer questions from people already considering the product. Agree its purpose before judging its performance. A page that sales regularly uses to address a buyer’s concern may be useful even if it attracts little search traffic.

The decision I want them to reach is where to put their attention next. Should they expand a type of content that converts well, answer an unmet buyer question, or reduce work on topics that mostly attract unsuitable visitors? They need to compare the alternatives and explain why their proposed change is worthwhile.

This is where Chris Argyris’s double-loop learning is relevant: question the assumptions behind the work. If the audience is wrong, better rankings won’t fix the original choice of topics.

Check whether they can use the method again

When you demonstrate an investigation, explain why you make each check and how the result affects your next step. This is part of cognitive apprenticeship: making the thinking behind skilled work visible to the learner.

The next time a similar problem comes up, I ask whether they’ve tried the workflow and what results they got. If they’re still stuck, we look at where it went wrong. There might be a problem with the workflow itself, how they used it, or how they interpreted the results.

As they become more capable, let them lead the investigation and bring you a recommendation. Agree when they can make that kind of decision without your approval.

For substantial work, record what you expect it to achieve and when you’ll review it. If it disappoints, I ask them to explore whether another activity could produce better results. A well-supported recommendation to stop should be welcome, including when the original idea was mine.

Respond openly to problems and poor performance

I want people to feel comfortable telling me they’ve made a mistake. My first concern is to understand what happened and why. We all get things wrong, and a mistake can teach someone a great deal if we take the time to work through it properly.

The same applies when a plan isn’t working. I want to hear about it quickly and openly, while we can still respond without too much disruption. I’ll help them work out how to fix the problem or change the approach.

That is what psychological safety means in practice for me. People need to know how I’ll respond when they bring me something difficult. “Bring me solutions, not problems” can discourage someone from raising an issue they don’t yet know how to solve.

Clear communication has to work both ways. If something isn’t acceptable, I need to say so. Repeated mistakes or a failure to communicate a known problem belong in coaching conversations, with a clear account of what needs to improve and what support I’ll provide. I also need to examine whether my instructions and expectations were clear.

If that doesn’t resolve the problem, I may need to move to a performance improvement plan. I want to support people and give them a fair chance to do well. But someone may simply be unsuited to the role. In that case, I’d look at whether another project would suit them better. Replacing them would be a last resort.

Review what happened and what they can handle next

After a difficult decision, compare what you expected with what happened. Refer to the original note, then ask:

What did we get right or wrong in our reasoning?
What would we do differently now?
Which part could you handle yourself next time?

A poor result doesn’t automatically mean the decision was poor. Look at what was knowable at the time and whether the agreed checks were completed.

I want team members to become more confident working through problems themselves, while still coming to me when they need help. The next similar decision is a chance to see what they’ve learnt, and what I still need to teach.