Organizations typically embody a variety of orientations that affect every facet of their operations, including finance, marketing, sales, and overall business operations.
This diversity of orientations also extends to the marketing technology stack, where decisions made can profoundly impact the effectiveness of marketing channels like SEO.
When organizations choose the technologies for their stack, stakeholders pursue various objectives and criteria to meet their goals.
Regardless of specific stakeholder goals, the overarching objective remains: to ensure that the Martech stack significantly enhances business success and performance, whether by directly driving customer acquisition and conversions or indirectly by optimizing operational efficiencies.
What Is A Martech Stack?
A marketing technology stack, often referred to as a Martech stack, encompasses the collective suite of software, hardware, and tools that an organization procures or utilizes to enhance marketing performance, facilitate sales activities, and streamline various business operations, such as efficient order fulfillment and error-free payment processing.
Typical Martech stacks consist of a range of software and technologies designed for diverse tasks and objectives, including:
- Data analytics tools (data warehousing, visualization)
- CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems)
- Teamwork and project management tools (e.g., JIRA, Trello)
- Payment gateways and order fulfillment/dispatch systems
Traditionally, Martech decisions are primarily driven by engineering and infrastructure teams, with significant influence from marketing, sales, community feedback, and C-level executives.
So why is this important to SEO?
Many of these decisions have significant implications for SEO performance, underscoring the importance of participating in these discussions. It’s crucial to ask pertinent questions and present compelling arguments to highlight the potential SEO impact and ensure the business understands it.
CMOs and organizations typically collaborate with SEO experts to achieve several key objectives:
- Enhancing organic search visibility for relevant non-branded queries across different stages of the customer journey.
- Ensuring stability and prominence of desired messaging for branded queries.
- Collaborating across departments to enhance website user experience and conversion rates for all web traffic.
Not every component of the Martech stack affects SEO performance, and not all debates merit equal attention.
For instance, if an organization is deeply integrated with Salesforce CRM and decides to adopt Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Experience Cloud as its website platform, this may not be a decision you can sway. However, it’s essential to stay informed to ensure that aspects like SEO migration and initial strategy are positioned for success from the outset.
When Can Martech Decisions Impact SEO?
Let’s explore how the Martech stack can influence SEO. We’ll examine scenarios where business decisions regarding Martech could have either a beneficial or adverse effect on SEO outcomes
Integrations With Sales CRMs & CRM Led Decision-Making
Sales-focused organizations often prioritize technology decisions aimed at enhancing sales enablement. Consequently, website technologies frequently integrate closely with sales CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.
While these platforms are robust, websites heavily influenced by sales priorities often aim to swiftly guide users towards completing sales actions such as downloading marketing assets, filling out contact forms, or requesting demos.
However, this direct funnel approach in page templates and content doesn’t always foster an optimal environment for organic search. Although these pages are highly focused on user conversion, they may lack the value proposition and messaging that search engines prioritize for ranking across various queries.
The challenge lies in balancing the heavy emphasis on sales conversion with the desire to rank for high-volume search queries, irrespective of the user’s stage in the sales funnel.
To achieve long-term organic success, it’s crucial to advocate for content and a user experience that addresses and satisfies diverse user intents beyond immediate contact, thereby catering to all reasons users visit your website.
C-Level Led Platform Decisions
In an ideal scenario, CMOs and CTOs collaborate to identify and address gaps in the Martech stack, prioritizing customer-centric technologies that support marketing, sales, and operational functions.
Most CMOs and CTOs have their preferred set of tools and platforms, often forming playbooks they carry with them as they move between roles. These playbooks may have dependencies on specific stacks.
Another common scenario occurs when a new CMO or Marketing Director joins an organization, bringing experience from previous roles where different platforms or technologies were used.
In the SaaS industry, it’s frequent for new CMOs and CTOs to advocate for headless architectures or technologies like React/Nuxt over existing systems. Similarly, in ecommerce, incoming leaders often prefer familiar platforms, potentially causing disruptions even if the current platform performs adequately.
The scale of disruption varies with the organization’s size. For instance, transitioning from a well-established Salesforce Commerce Cloud setup to Shopify entails changes in CRM, order management, and team dynamics. From an SEO perspective, such transitions might necessitate adjustments to URL structures and other dynamic on-site elements, as Shopify lacks features like Einstein or Lightning.
Beyond outlining the variables affecting SEO performance and their associated risks, this transition presents an opportunity to leverage SEO data for informing the new site’s architecture. This ensures that the new Martech stack aligns with the marketing team’s requirements and audience needs.
Adopting Technologies For Competitive Advantage
Businesses also strive to continually explore and integrate emerging technologies to maintain a competitive edge over their rivals. According to a 2019 study by Gartner, 68% of CTOs actively invest in emerging technologies for this purpose.
In addition to personal preferences, CMOs and CTOs also initiate changes for product enhancements, financial benefits, and operational efficiencies.
In such scenarios, while marketing and SEO considerations are paramount, there is typically a prevailing belief that marketing is the most adaptable and innovative stakeholder in this dynamic mix.
Technologies For UX & Legal Compliance
Many website performance issues, particularly with page load times and speed, stem from third-party tools and software, often used for user experience monitoring and AB testing.
These technologies can inadvertently slow down site loading speeds, diminish user experience, and potentially lead to non-compliance with data privacy regulations.
From our experience, many of these tool-related issues become apparent early on in an SEO partnership and can be resolved effectively once identified through a baseline technical review.
However, when organizations intend to implement these tools, it’s essential to involve SEO specialists in the implementation and deployment phases.
Issues can also arise from the integration of cookie consent banners and other accessibility tools. With the European Accessibility Act slated for enforcement in 2025, such issues are likely to increase as organizations adopt third-party accessibility solutions.
These tools often introduce additional scripts that not only degrade page load speeds but in some cases, can prematurely close the section or create unintended internal linking issues.
Educating stakeholders about best practices for integrating these tools is crucial to maintaining optimal website performance and ensuring compliance with consent requirements.
How SEO Can Influence Martech Decisions
SEO, though just one facet of marketing, arguably hinges most on a business’s technology choices. Despite this recognition of technology’s substantial impact on SEO, many decisions are frequently made without consulting SEO or marketing teams.
Most businesses blend various strategies to ensure success, prioritizing enhanced customer experience. SEO yields crucial data that illuminates user journeys and website interactions.
Equipped with such insights, CMOs and CTOs can anticipate how their decisions might detrimentally affect their primary traffic-driving channel.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal