We’ve worked with SEO agencies on both ends of the spectrum. The bad ones bury you in jargon, send an invoice, and do almost no real work. I hate those guys. A report thick with words like “canonicalization” and celebrates how many keywords you rank for, but doesn’t talk about if they’re relevant to what you do. Everything they send you implies something important happened, and but you have no idea if that’s true.
The good ones are a different experience entirely. And I love those guys! They roll up their sleeves and do the technical work well. They move rankings that have sat stuck for years. They earn their retainer and genuinely care. If you’ve found one of those, hang on to them.
(As an aside, if you need a good SEO agency, I have someone that I enthusiastically recommend. They’re a small agency in Metro Detroit that has done great work for multiple clients of ours and they are the most business focused, hard working group I’ve come across. Send us a note if you want an intro.)
But there’s a gap we see even with the great ones. An SEO agency optimizes for metrics, and it should, because that’s the job it was hired to do. Rankings, traffic, links. What almost none of them have is the view from inside your actual business. They’re not in your leadership meetings. They don’t know your margins, which product line you’re pushing this year, or which customer is worth ten of another. So they optimize hard toward numbers that look like progress, with no reliable way to tell whether those numbers point at anything that actually grows the company.
That’s not your fault for missing it, either. You’re running a business, and it’s not an SEO agency. You’re selling custom suits, or manufacturing aerospace parts, or doing executive search for top publishing houses. You’re not required to be a SEO expert. Somebody hands you green arrows and up-and-to-the-right charts, and you don’t have the time or the vocabulary to interrogate whether the arrows point anywhere useful. So you trust that they do, but you’re missing out on an opportunity to funnel the work towards growth on your P&L.
That trust needs a seat to sit in, and that seat is the fractional CMO. Someone who knows SEO well enough to hold the agency accountable and collaborate with them, and who knows your business well enough to direct their efforts towards work that pushes your ultimate business goals. Put a well-versed FCMO next to a solid, hardworking SEO agency and that’s where real magic happens. One team knows how to move the metrics. The other knows which metrics are worth investing in.
Picture this, you got a SEO competitor report from your agency. The raw data said what SEO data usually says. You ranked for 897 keywords. Your closest competitor ranked for 1,892, and held 1,297 top-ten positions to your 769. A backlink report showed 923 domains linking to competitors where you weren’t represented at all.
Did all those numbers make your head spin? Know what to do with them? Good news – we do.
What a fractional CMO does with the same file comes down to three moves. Here’s what we learned in that report, and what we actually did with it.
Digest
Most of that data doesn’t matter, and the skill is knowing which data does. Of the link gaps, most were low-quality directories and spam-adjacent domains nobody would want their name near. Maybe a couple dozen reinforced who you were trying to be to the people you wanted to sell to: menswear media, wedding and formalwear publications, legitimate local authority. So the plan wasn’t to attack all of the links. It was that short, targeted list. The bigger find was hiding in plain sight. The homepage was ranking for the majority of your primary commercial terms, which read like a win in the data and was actually the biggest structural risk on the site. It meant Google couldn’t find a more specific page to serve, so the whole roof was resting on one page. The move was to build dedicated pages for those terms so you owned them on purpose, before a competitor with a real page took them. You only catch that if you’re reading for what the data means, not what it counts.
Communicate
As a business owner, you should never have to interpret a keyword position report. On that account it came down to one sentence: your homepage is doing a job five different pages should be doing, and that’s why competitors are creeping past you on the terms worth the most. No jargon, no ranking table, just the one thing quietly costing you and what we’d do about it. If you need a glossary to follow the update, the update failed.
Make it actionable, toward growth
This is the whole point. Every recommendation gets run through one question: does this help the business grow, or does it just improve a number? If your core product lines ranks twelfth on your main commercial term while a competitor sat fifth. That’s real money left on the table, so we prioritized it: strengthen that one page with clearer metadata, internal links, and structured FAQ content, rather than scatter effort across terms with no buyers behind them. And instead of a competitor-comparison page, which ranks but reads cheap, we scoped a buyer’s guide for the people actively building a shortlist. It lets you show up in comparison searches while staying the kind of brand you’d actually want to hire.
Which is where managing the agency comes in, and it’s most of the value. You can’t tell a strong SEO recommendation from an expensive one. You’re not supposed to be able to. So you either rubber-stamp whatever the agency proposes or you micromanage work you can’t actually judge, and both go badly. A fractional CMO sits in the seat between you and the vendor. We take the business goals and translate them into what the agency should be working on. We hold the agency to a scorecard tied to pipeline and revenue instead of vanity metrics. We kill the busywork before it gets billed. The agency keeps doing the technical work it’s genuinely good at, and for once it’s pointed at the business.
10 things in your SEO reports to ask questions about and take action.
1. Which page on your site shows up when you Google the term you most want to be found for
What it tells you: If it’s your homepage, you’re ranking by default, not by strategy. Google couldn’t find a better page, so it’s serving the front door.
Questions to ask: Do you have a real page built around this term, or is the homepage carrying it? What happens to that ranking the day a competitor builds a dedicated page?
What to do: Build the dedicated page and own the term deliberately so you show up properly before your competitors.
2. The relevant terms where you’re already on the first page but stuck around fourth to eighth
What it tells you: You’re already on the radar for these. This is your closest, cheapest growth opportunity.
Questions to ask: Which of these actually have buyers behind them? Where would moving up two positions change the pipeline, not just the report?
What to do: Pour effort here instead of into terms where you rank thirty. Four-to-two captures buyers. Thirty-to-twenty is good movement, but it’s not capturing sales in the short term.
3. Where you’ve got real depth versus where one thin page is doing all the work
What it tells you: When you’re strong in one group of terms and weak in another, that’s the difference between real depth and a thin page pretending to be a strategy.
Questions to ask: Which group is genuinely built out, and which one is one page doing all the work? Which group is closer to what you sell and want more of?
What to do: Protect the strong group and build the weak one. Don’t spread the budget evenly across both just because a report lists them side by side.
4. How many people are actually searching the terms you’re winning
What it tells you: A number-one ranking on a term nobody valuable searches is a meaningless trophy in your trophy case.
Questions to ask: How many of the terms you’re winning are terms your customers actually type into Google? What are you celebrating that doesn’t convert?
What to do: Ignore the empty wins, however good the position looks, and move that effort to a term with buyers behind it even if you’re currently losing on it.
5. The “how much does this cost” and “what should I expect” searches buyers make before they call anyone
What it tells you: These read like information questions and they’re buying questions in disguise, asked by someone comparing you to two other names right now.
Questions to ask: Do you have a page that answers these plainly, or are you sending buyers to a competitor who does? Why haven’t you built these already?
What to do: Build the unglamorous pages most owners skip. Nobody’s super pumped about a “what does this cost” page. It won’t win an award or get shared in the group chat. It might even make you a bit uncomfortable. But, it does catch a buyer mid-comparison instead of handing them to a competitor answered the question on their website.
6. The “best of” and “how do I choose one” searches where people build their shortlist
What it tells you: People searching these are building a shortlist. The comparison is happening whether you’re in it or not.
Questions to ask: Are you anywhere in these results? If not, whose framing is the buyer using to judge you?
What to do: Publish a brand-appropriate buyer’s guide, not a competitor takedown. Get into the comparison instead of watching it happen without you.
7. The number and quality of the backlinks your competitors have that you don’t
What it tells you: A report saying competitors have hundreds of domains you don’t is built to scare you into chasing all of them.
Questions to ask: How many of these actually reinforce who you’re trying to be to the people you want to sell to? How many are directories and spam you’d never want your name near?
What to do: Throw out the junk, find the handful that make you look like the company you’re becoming, and pursue only those.
8. The outside sites, Reddit threads, and lists that outrank your own website for your own category
What it tells you: When Reddit, an editorial list, or a directory outranks you for your own category, that’s where the buyer is forming their opinion, not on your website.
Questions to ask: What are those sources saying about you, if anything? Is that the story you’d want a buyer to read first?
What to do: What other people say about you matters, a lot. Get accurately represented in those specific rooms. Increasingly that’s what AI answers quote, not your service page.
9. The terms where competitors built a dedicated page and you never did
What it tells you: Every one of these is a term you’ve conceded without a fight.
Questions to ask: Which of these gaps match what you actually sell and want more of? Which ones are you fine letting go?
What to do: Build the handful that fit the business. Let the rest go. The goal was never a page for every gap on the list.
10. How many people search your company name directly, and whether that’s growing
What it tells you: This is the truest read on whether your marketing is building a business people seek out, and agencies rarely report it because they can’t take credit for it.
Questions to ask: Is this number climbing while your rankings climb, or flat while they climb? Are you getting found by accident or chosen on purpose?
What to do: Treat this as your real scoreboard, the one number that belongs on your EOS Scorecard if any SEO number does. Rankings can rise while this stays flat, and when it does, you’re getting discovered, not sought out.
The connective tissue through all ten
The data tells you what’s rankable. Only someone holding the business goals can tell you what’s worth ranking for. Good marketing numbers work like headlights, showing you the road ahead. Most SEO reports are dashboard decoration, lit up and pointed at nothing, with nobody digesting them into decisions.
That’s the line between having SEO done and having SEO that grows the company. One is activity. The other is a plan with an owner. We don’t take orders on which keywords to chase. We take ownership of whether any of it moves the business.
So if your agency sends reports that look good while the business grows no faster, that gap is worth fixing, and it’s probably not the agency’s fault. They’re doing the work you hired them to do. It’s that nobody’s been sitting above the work, holding the goals, deciding what’s actually worth doing. That’s a seat, and it’s been empty. Filling it is the whole point, and honestly it’s the part that takes the weight off your shoulders, because it stops being one more thing you’re supposed to understand and can’t.
If that’s the seat you’ve been trying to fill yourself, let’s talk.
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