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Your Next CMO Won’t Come from Marketing — They’ll Come from SEO

  • Eric LaCasse
  • Sep 11
  • 3 min read

Updated: Oct 8

Your next CMO will be a SEO



Why the Traditional CMO Model Is Broken


The traditional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role has been built around one thing: ROI. For decades, the best way to boost ROI was simply to throw more money at ads, campaigns, and brand awareness. Growth was measured by vanity metrics and expensive media buys, not by genuine customer connection or organic brand building.


But AI and SEO have shifted the landscape. Today, growth is driven by finding better ways to communicate human to human. Old search results used to be 10 blue links where people had to guess. Now, AI and search engines personalize results, delivering the “best” option for the individual. Companies that fail to adapt are stuck treating marketing as a cost center instead of a growth asset—often prioritizing investors’ dividends over real customer service and strategy.



The Rise of SEO as Strategic Leadership


Modern SEO is no longer tactical. It’s strategic brand-building in the digital realm, a constant chess game against competition. What you post, how often you engage, how you handle bad reviews, what backlinks you secure—all of these moves compound over time.


Keyword stuffing belongs to the past. Today, SEO looks like product positioning: staying top of mind for what you sell. That’s why SEOs are uniquely positioned for the executive table. They bring data and knowledge, stripping emotions and guesswork out of leadership. SEO knows the market, the audience, the adjacent audience, and the trends. It guides branding with facts, not intuition.


Beyond Keywords — SEO as the Voice of the Market


SEO data reveals what customers want before sales teams ever hear it. Semantic keywords, EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust), and search queries are raw customer feedback—unfiltered, honest, and predictive. This insight drives product launches, branding, and pricing strategies by showing not only what customers search for but why they choose one business over another.


The Paid Ads Fallacy


Angel investors and accelerators often push startups toward paid ads. Ads deliver quick money, but they’re rented customers. Once the spend stops, so does the growth. The hidden cost? Branding. Ads build dependency, not equity. SEO, by contrast, compounds. It builds knowledge, brand equity, and long-term culture. When ads go dark, most businesses fail. When SEO compounds, brands dominate.


SEO as the Growth Engine


Too often, businesses treat SEO like a vendor. They want thousands of visits in days, and when that doesn’t happen, they move to ads. But SEO is the backbone of marketing, revenue, and development. It reflects real customer behavior, reviews, and social proof. When SEO is elevated to the executive table, leadership decisions become targeted, data-driven, and future-proof against AI-driven search.


The SEO-CMO Hybrid Role of 2025


A modern SEO brings data mastery, AI expertise, strategy, and cross-team leadership. They guide product development, HR reputation, and operational efficiency. They predict market shifts and strengthen brand authority. To a boardroom that dismisses SEO as “just ranking pages,” the truth is: rankings tell you everything—who your competitors are, what customers want, and which products have staying power.


Final Challenge to Leaders


If you’re still keeping SEO in a box, you’re already behind. The AI train has left, and SEO professionals have been on it for years. The biggest risk of ignoring this shift is stagnation—no calls, no leads, no growth. Companies that elevate SEO to the same level as finance or operations will be the winners in the AI world.


The future of business growth won’t be defined by the biggest ad budgets—it will be led by the companies that understand SEO as strategy, not a service. The CMO of tomorrow will come from SEO.


The only question is: Will your company be ready?

👉 Let’s connect and continue the conversation:


If you’re serious about making SEO the engine of your company’s future growth, now is the time to act.

 
 
 
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