Your SEO and Content teams no doubt toil extremely hard to produce work they’re proud of. But they could also be undermining each other’s effectiveness.

Inadvertently, of course. I’m not suggesting your teams are deliberately sabotaging each other; just that they’re probably pulling in different directions. It’s hard not to when they’re primed and incentivised to prioritise and value very different outcomes. Both teams could smash their numbers month after month, and the business might still lose ground.

The problem isn’t the people but the siloed structure they’re forced to work within. Once the content team is happy with what they’ve created, they lob it over the wall for the SEO team to optimise. The SEO team then tweaks, modifies and patches what it can before the final asset is sent out into the world. Depending on the content’s purpose, Marketing then lobs any (often unqualified) leads over another wall for Sales to sort out. Which is why Sales usually has a problem with Marketing, but that’s another story.

For most of the last two decades, treating SEO and content as two very different disciplines appeared to make perfect sense. They require different skills, different tools, and even different ways of thinking. Editors and writers have enough to do without fretting over crawlability and keyword mapping. Similarly, SEOs shouldn’t need to worry about whether an article’s lede is strong enough (or even what a lede is). Keeping them in separate lanes wasn’t laziness or shortsightedness; it was a reasonable response to complexity. You hired specialists and let them specialise.

Meanwhile, SEO grew more sophisticated and technical while content became almost impossibly competitive. But while the game has changed dramatically in recent years, these long-established team structures and workflows haven’t. In fact, the opposite happened; org charts got bigger, teams became even more specialised, and the walls between them grew higher still.

Divergence, distrust and dysfunction

If you’ll excuse the oversimplification for a moment, SEO teams chase rankings, traffic, and impressions, while content teams chase engagement, shares, downloads, and so on. Yes, other metrics are available, but these two sets still dominate in many of the organisations I’ve worked with over the years.

It’s easy to see why; these metrics produce solid numbers that are easy to collate and report upwards. But they also incentivise both teams to prioritise different things.

Worse, both sets of metrics instil very different ideas about what the business values, while neither set maps cleanly to what the business really cares about: revenue.

Of course, the walls between silos also serve another unspoken purpose: When something doesn’t perform, there’s always someone on the other side to blame. While these silo-hopping workflows might appear organised and efficient on paper, in practice they risk undermining any true accountability – not least because the definition of success changes at every step.

And because both teams see their contribution as the primary driver of success, two pervasive but opposing myths develop.

The content myth: High-quality, original content naturally performs well in search

Recently, I wrote about SALT research which showed that high quality, original content isn’t in itself the silver bullet to higher search rankings and more AI citations. It takes more than just great content to rank well.

Most content teams might be okay with a little light-touch SEO – incorporating keywords, structuring headings, and writing meta descriptions, for example. But these are still quite minor signals. They’re unlikely to influence the rankings a great deal without the technical refinements a skilled SEO can bring.

Champion editorial quality above all other factors and you may end up with an impressive content library no one knows about. Is great content still great if it’s invisible?

Plus, with the arrival of AI search, many content teams have yet to take on responsibility for ensuring LLMs can readily parse and cite their content. Instead of learning how to structure the copy better from the outset, it’s easier to dismiss AI optimisation as a technical problem for someone else to solve. But these structural issues aren’t easy for SEOs to fix retroactively.

It’s like asking someone to make a house structurally sound after the walls are already up. While they can paint over the cracks, they can’t address issues with the foundations, meaning more cracks will soon appear.

The SEO myth: High-ranking, optimised content is automatically valuable

An SEO team might want some fast content to target a new keyword opportunity or flesh out the brand’s knowledge graph. And, because walls create friction in any workflow, they might decide it would be quicker to do the work themselves – writing and publishing their own landing pages and articles outside of the content team’s established editorial calendar and workflows.

It’s why the same organisation might employ both content writers and SEO writers, working independently of each other. But when the SEO team produces its own content, it’s not always great. I don’t mean it’s awful. I mean it’s merely competent. The content performs as intended because it hits the technical and keyword requirements. Any creative inspiration or stylistic flair is a bonus but may also be viewed as surplus to requirements.

Yes, you might be lucky enough to hire a so-called unicorn, capable of wrangling both words and search algorithms with equal skill. But they’re called unicorns for a reason; they’re incredibly rare.

This tendency to treat so-called SEO content as somehow separate and distinct from any other form of content – never mind the quality, feel the clicks – is sheer madness. Taken to its extreme, it can lead to some cynical, highly damaging practices, such as what happened to once reputable sites like CNET and Techopedia.

High-traffic strategies built on hastily written or AI-generated content, rehashing the same information as 50 competitors, just won’t cut it anymore.

Tearing down the wall

You can’t expect your teams to fix these structural issues while operating within the same flawed system. It would be like asking the flight crew to redesign a plane in mid-air.

You have to take ownership of the problem as the CMO.

Not only do you have a wider view of the business beyond the walls of each silo, but also the authority to bring the various teams and stakeholders together. Importantly, you have the ear of senior leadership to sell the need for change up the chain as well as down.

But this isn’t about reorganising the org chart. Shifting boxes around won’t change how people think, or how they’re measured. Moving desks closer together (whether literally or figuratively) won’t alter what happens when work is tossed back and forth over the wall.

Change starts with a conversation; one that both teams have probably never had beyond their silos.

Conduct a messaging audit

A messaging audit reviews all of your webpages and other assets through the lens of a single question: Does it actually speak to the people we’re trying to reach, in language that reflects what we’re trying to get them to do?

Of course, this assumes everyone already agrees on the target audience, so your first step is to test that assumption. Block out an afternoon, clean off the white board and bring your SEO and Content leads into the same room. Ideally, I’d recommend inviting Sales as well, to avoid the risk of solving one misalignment problem only to create a whole new misalignment elsewhere.

Once you’ve agreed and documented your answers, your team can then perform a messaging audit of the brand’s most significant content assets – homepage, key landing pages, pillar content, recent blog posts – and assess each one. Where does the content align, where does it drift, and where is it completely off message?

Establish shared goals (and metrics)

Tell people how they’re measured and you’ll define how they behave. An SEO team measured purely on rankings will find the easiest rankings to chase. A content team measured on pageviews will write for the broadest possible audience instead of the right one.

Rankings, clicks, engagements and downloads are still important, but they’re not outcomes in themselves. Unless you can draw a line from these metrics to a measurable bottom-line outcome the CFO cares about, their value is virtually impossible to gauge.

Everyone needs to work towards the same outcomes – ones directly connected to business value. Establish shared metrics that connect the efforts of both teams to genuine business outcomes – like pipeline contribution, qualified lead generation, or cost per acquisition – metrics neither team can hit without the other.

Implement a brand newsroom

Consistent messaging and shared metrics are all well and good, but it’s going to take more to achieve genuine integration.

Thankfully, traditional media companies and publishers already solved this problem by adopting a model that has worked extremely well for decades: the newsroom.

A brand newsroom centralises all your content activities in one place. Writers, editors, SEO strategists, designers, PR specialists collaborate to plan, create, optimise and publish content on a rolling schedule, all reporting to the same chief editor. Instead of each project or asset being handed from one team to another as part of some chaotic relay race, all these capabilities have input into the content from the very first conversation.

This does mean the SEO team’s own content writers would be surplus to requirements. They need to pick a side. Stick with SEO and hone their technical skills or work hard on becoming better writers. These days, a successful content writer needs far more than good grammar, a list of approved keywords, and a knack for memorable phrasing. They need solid skills in conducting interviews, performing deep research, crafting narratives, and transforming data into journalism.

The first step to setting up a brand newsroom is to agree on a unified editorial mission statement; the topics, themes, and stories your brand will tell to reach and connect with its ideal audience. Never mind what your brand wants to say about itself, you want to publish content your audience is actively looking for.

Any concerns about cost and complexity need to be balanced against the productivity and efficiency gains. The goal is to ultimately spend less on fewer and better assets, while also eliminating duplicated effort, streamlining workflows, and extracting maximum value from your various specialists.

One caveat: Setting up a brand newsroom requires a cultural shift, not just an operational one. It needs buy-in from the top, which brings us back to the point I made earlier. This is a CMO-level decision, and it needs a CMO committed to making it stick.

The breath of the potter

There’s a common saying in Farsi; foot-e kozegari (فوت کوزه‌گری). In English, it roughly translates to, “the breath (or blow) of the potter”. What it describes is that all-important piece of knowledge, the trick of a particular trade, or even the secret to a company’s competitive advantage.

It comes from Persian folklore, in a story my mother used to tell me when I was a boy.

The story goes that a master potter took on a young apprentice, the perfect student who quickly excelled in every technique. But whenever the apprentice removed his pots from the kiln after firing, they always seemed dull and cloudy. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t replicate the beautiful, bright and lustrous pots of his master.

He pleaded with the master to reveal the secret. The master picked up an unfired bowl and blew across its surface several times. “Before dipping your pot in the final glaze,” said the master, “you must first blow across it to clear the dust. Otherwise, your pot will come out from the kiln murky and dull.”

This was a simple trick gained from a lifetime of experience and close observation, a small habit the master performed without thinking that, while seemingly trivial, made all the difference.

The apprentice wasn’t a bad potter. He was skilled, diligent, and had learned everything the master was willing to show him. What he lacked was the kind of unconscious expertise that comes from years of doing the whole job, not just parts of it.

Every business has its own master potters, equipped with the instincts, institutional knowledge, and hard-won experience you won’t find in any textbook or company wiki. But when these specialised skills happen within silos, the “breath of the potter” is invisible.

SEO becomes this arcane practice carried out in another room, and no one is entirely sure what happens in there. Meanwhile, content writing becomes something other departments think they can just as easily do themselves, because anyone can write, right?

Any expertise can seem trivial or easy when the skilled work happens out of sight. Any process can be deemed unessential when the reason for it isn’t understood. Any task can appear low value when its contribution to the final outcome is poorly measured or misattributed. The problem with siloed teams isn’t a lack of talent, effort, or even strategy. What they lack is the breath of the potter; that instinctive knowledge or wisdom which thrives in the space between disciplines and can only be acquired through collaboration.

The potter’s breath is what happens when you break down the walls.

At SALT, we help organisations align strategy, messaging, SEO, and content around the outcomes that actually matter to the business. If you’d like an outside perspective on where your organisation’s silos are limiting growth, we’d love to talk. Get in touch.