A traffic number is easy to agree and easy to defend. What organic search is supposed to do for the business, and who holds the decisions that determine whether it can, is harder. I'd settle that before accepting the number.
I've worked on websites where the biggest SEO opportunity was already on the site, waiting to be fixed. On one project, content cannibalisation was affecting some of our highest-value commercial search terms. We refocused the content, and rankings improved from around position 12 to positions three to five, with search visibility roughly doubling. What made that work worth prioritising was the commercial importance of the searches involved. A larger increase in traffic from unrelated informational queries could have looked better in a monthly report while doing considerably less for the business.
Give a decent specialist access to Search Console, a crawler and the performance data, and they'll find plenty to investigate. There's almost always something that could rank better, another topic worth covering or a technical problem that deserves attention. You could keep a reasonably sized SEO team busy indefinitely. The difficult part is deciding which of those opportunities should receive investment, and being prepared to explain why the others can wait.
A traffic target doesn't provide enough information to make those decisions. It tells you what the business wants to increase, but very little about where the effort should go. For that, SEO needs to understand what the organisation is trying to achieve commercially and have enough influence to act on it. I also think SEO leaders accept traffic targets more readily than we admit, because a traffic number is the one measure we can defend without anyone else's cooperation.
The target changes the decisions
There's nothing wrong with measuring organic traffic. I use it constantly, alongside rankings, impressions, conversions and other performance data. If traffic falls unexpectedly, I want to know why. If visibility improves, I want to understand what's driving it. These measurements help us diagnose problems and evaluate whether our work is having an effect. The problem comes when one of them becomes the objective, because people start prioritising work that moves the number they're being judged against.
Take two types of SEO opportunity. One improves visibility for a small group of commercially important service pages. The other expands informational coverage around a subject with far more search demand. Both could be worthwhile, and informational content can influence buying decisions long before a customer converts. But they require different levels of investment and serve different purposes. Without the business's priorities, the expected customer value and a view of how each contributes to the buying journey, there's no reliable basis for deciding which comes first, and a traffic target gives the higher-volume informational work an advantage because it promises a bigger number.
This becomes more complicated across international markets. A traffic increase in a large, mature market can be worth less commercially than a smaller improvement in a country where the organisation is trying to establish a particular service. Search demand varies, competitive conditions differ and customers don't buy in the same way. Aggregate traffic conceals those differences. I've managed organic search across more than 60 country websites, and at that scale the question of where to concentrate resources becomes as important as the work being proposed. A global percentage target doesn't make that allocation decision for you.
SEO teams can become very good at finding search problems without questioning whether solving them will materially help the business. I include myself in that criticism. I enjoy technical investigations, and when you understand how to fix something there's a natural temptation to get on with it. But identifying a problem and establishing its priority are separate pieces of work. A technically sound recommendation can still be a poor investment if it consumes engineering capacity that would deliver greater value elsewhere.
Commercial accountability comes with a problem
The obvious objection is that SEO is being asked to own something it can't deliver alone. Whether organic search eventually produces revenue depends on engineering capacity to implement changes, on the experience Product has built for customers who arrive, on pricing, availability and the strength of the proposition, and in businesses with a sales function, on lead handling by people who had no part in the search strategy. Each of those sits outside the SEO team's direct control, and the objection is right.
That creates an awkward position for SEO leadership. The business wants organic search to contribute more revenue, but the team responsible for delivering that growth has limited authority over the changes required to achieve it. An SEO director can identify a commercially valuable opportunity, investigate the technical requirements and make a convincing case for investment. If the work sits in an engineering backlog for six months, the opportunity remains unrealised. Holding that director solely responsible for the missing revenue would be difficult to justify, yet allowing SEO to retreat into reporting traffic because other departments influence the outcome is no better.
My view is that SEO should accept responsibility for its commercial contribution, and that the responsibility has to be agreed on terms. I'd expect access to the commercial performance data, a place in planning discussions and a clear process for resolving dependencies with other teams. If we're investing in organic growth for a particular service, someone needs to own the decisions about content, technical implementation and the customer journey. Those responsibilities can sit across several departments, but the work still needs a shared priority and a route to delivery.
This also means accepting that SEO won't always get what it wants. Engineering capacity is finite, and a product change with a stronger business case deserves priority over an SEO recommendation. I've no problem with that decision when the trade-off has been examined. What concerns me is when SEO is given an ambitious growth target at the start of the year, while the investment and delivery decisions needed to achieve it happen elsewhere without SEO in the room. The target can remain in place long after the original assumptions have stopped being realistic.
Measurement has to withstand scrutiny
Commercial reporting is harder than traffic reporting, and SEO leaders need to say so. Search Console tells us which queries generate clicks and which pages receive visibility. Analytics can connect organic sessions with website behaviour and recorded conversions. But many businesses have longer customer journeys, several stakeholders and sales processes that continue well after the first visit. The information needed to understand the full commercial contribution is spread across analytics, CRM systems and internal reporting, and some of it is never joined up.
I'd rather work with those limitations than present a revenue figure that looks precise but rests on weak assumptions. In the cannibalisation example, the ranking and visibility improvements were measurable, and they were valuable results for commercially important searches. I wouldn't claim that visibility doubling meant revenue doubled. Establishing that would need evidence about enquiries, customer quality and what happened further down the buying journey, and I'd want to know whether the work attracted additional demand or changed which channel received credit for a customer who was already likely to buy.
AI search is where that discipline is currently most tested. Citations, brand mentions and appearances in AI-generated answers are worth tracking, and a citation may influence a customer's research without producing a visit. That possibility matters, but it doesn't establish a commercial outcome. The data is also less stable than classic search data because results vary by prompt, geography, model and day. I want those figures reported with their uncertainty attached, and a rise in AI visibility that coincides with a fall in organic clicks from commercial pages is something to investigate before anyone calls it a success.
Senior management should be able to examine an SEO investment and understand the opportunity, the work required, the likely commercial benefit and the uncertainty involved. Rankings and traffic remain important evidence within that assessment. The SEO data supports that conversation. It shouldn't become the conversation.
The work SEO chooses to leave alone
One of the more difficult parts of SEO leadership is deciding what the team won't do. It's easy to build a roadmap from everything an audit identifies, then spend months delivering improvements without revisiting whether they're still the best use of people's time. It's harder to tell a technically capable specialist that their recommendation is valid but the organisation has more important work to complete. The decision needs to be explained, especially when that person has invested time investigating the problem and knows exactly how to resolve it.
I want people on the team to understand the commercial reasoning behind those decisions. That means knowing which customers and services matter to the business, why particular markets receive investment and how to assess the consequences of a technical issue, and none of it requires a finance qualification. When specialists understand those priorities, they're better equipped to challenge my decisions as well. They see opportunities and risks that haven't been accounted for in the wider plan.
Before committing to a commercial SEO target, I want the business to agree the outcomes we're trying to influence, how we'll measure our contribution and which teams are responsible for delivering the changes required. I also want agreement on how priorities will be reconsidered when circumstances change. Otherwise, the SEO team can be left defending a number that depends on decisions it was never allowed to make.
That's a conversation I'd have before agreeing the annual SEO target.