Introduction to Digital Transformation
The way companies think about their corporate websites is often outdated. Many CEOs and CFOs still view their website as a necessary expense, rather than a valuable asset that can generate revenue and drive growth. This mindset can lead to a website that is little more than an interactive brochure, rather than a strategic tool for building brand equity and driving business outcomes.
The Economic Value of Performance
To change this mindset, it’s essential to reframe the economic value of performance. Digital visibility, findability, and functionality are not just tactical wins, but they also affect shareholder value. By evaluating digital performance in the same way that we evaluate other business investments, we can start to see the website as a capital asset that generates revenue and drives growth.
Web Execution: Expense or Asset?
When it comes to evaluating digital performance, most companies think in terms of expenses, rather than assets. They see SEO as a free traffic driver, content as sales and marketing copy, UX as design polish, and analytics as a reporting tool. However, performance-minded leaders think differently. They see SEO as an organic demand capture engine, content as a business development asset, UX as a funnel velocity multiplier, and analytics as an optimization flywheel.
The Cost of Underperformance
If a company’s digital infrastructure is fragmented, under-optimized, or reactive, it can lead to a range of problems. These include spending more on paid channels to make up for poor organic performance, losing visibility to competitors in AI and search environments, delivering confusing or outdated experiences that erode brand trust, and wasting employee and agency hours chasing after misaligned key performance indicators (KPIs). These problems can compound, leading to lower customer lifetime value, higher customer acquisition costs, and missed revenue opportunities.
The Invisible ROI Leak: Misalignment
When multiple teams touch the website, but no one owns outcomes, it can lead to wasted spend, lost traffic, duplicated content, and security or compliance risks. These problems show up on the balance sheet as missed revenue, higher customer acquisition costs, and lower conversion rates. To avoid these problems, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of who owns web performance and to establish a framework for digital accountability.
The Capital Efficiency of SEO and Organic Visibility
Capital efficiency is a critical factor in CEO evaluations, and it’s essential to consider the role of SEO and organic visibility in driving shareholder value. SEO is often dismissed as "free traffic," but this is misleading. It requires real effort to optimize content, retrofit pages with structured data, and resolve infrastructure gaps. When viewed holistically as a strategic function, SEO becomes a high-efficiency, compounding return channel that gets stronger with alignment and investment, and weaker with neglect.
AI Search and the Future of Digital Performance
Search is no longer just about blue links; it’s about recommendation systems. AI overviews, summary blocks, and generative results are now front and center. If a company’s content is not optimized for AI search, it will be invisible. To succeed in this new landscape, companies need to prioritize SEO and organic visibility, and ensure that their content is structured and usable by AI systems.
The Impact on Shareholder Value
When SEO and digital performance are working, they can lower customer acquisition costs, increase customer lifetime value, strengthen brand equity, and improve operational efficiency. They can also protect valuation by owning the digital demand footprint. However, when they are not working, they can erode these advantages and lead to missed revenue opportunities and lower conversion rates.
A Real-World Example
In one real-world example, a public company was preparing to spin off half its business into a new entity. However, there was no plan for preserving or migrating organic search performance. This could have resulted in $350 million in lost lead value and tens of millions in unplanned ad spend. By reframing SEO’s contribution across the three drivers of shareholder value – financial, operational, and strategic – the company was able to secure executive alignment and integrate SEO into the platform roadmap.
A Call to Action for Senior Leaders
If you’re a CEO, CMO, or CFO, it’s essential to ask yourself some key questions. Do you treat your website as a strategic asset or a sunk cost? Is there executive ownership of performance or just distributed responsibility? Are you capturing, measuring, and maximizing organic opportunity, or plugging gaps with paid media? Is your content structured and usable by AI systems, or just accurate but invisible?
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital performance is not just good marketing; it’s good business. By treating the website as a strategic asset, rather than a sunk cost, companies can drive revenue, lower acquisition costs, and improve operational efficiency. They can also protect valuation by owning the digital demand footprint. To succeed in this new landscape, companies need to prioritize SEO and organic visibility, and ensure that their content is structured and usable by AI systems. By doing so, they can build leverage, drive shareholder value, and achieve their business goals.