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The C-Level Questions to Ask Your In-House SEO Team
Leaders are assumed to have all the answers. More usefully, you’re the person with the difficult questions. Here are the right ones, with what a good answer sounds like.
A set of targeted questions covering organisation, strategy, tools and planning, each with the reason for asking and what to listen for. There may not be immediate answers. The responses still tell you a lot about your team’s capabilities and needs.
Goals
- Give you questions that reveal how deep your SEO strategy really goes.
- Build accountability and continuous improvement without micromanaging.
- Offer a simple way to assess the answers you get.
You’ll walk away able to
- Ask strategic questions that cut through complexity.
- Judge whether the current strategy is working.
- Guide and improve how your organisation does search.
Some questions are specific to your organisation, like “where does SEO sit, marketing or development?” Some are fundamental, like “what tools are we using to measure our progress?”
What you’re listening for is rarely the technical detail. It’s whether the answer connects to a business outcome, and whether the person can explain it without hiding behind the tools.
Six of the questions, with what good sounds like
Where does SEO sit in our organisation: marketing or development?
Why ask: placement shows how connected SEO is to the functions that affect the site.
Good answer: cross-functional. SEO works alongside PR, marketing and technical teams rather than in a silo.
How does our SEO strategy align with our business objectives?
Why ask: rankings and traffic are not goals. Sales, satisfaction and market share are.
Good answer: specifics, ideally with an example of an initiative tied to a business result.
What tools are we using to measure progress, and why those?
Why ask: tools reveal sophistication, and whether you’re measuring what matters.
Good answer: named tools, each with a reason it suits your situation.
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities in our current strategy?
Why ask: it surfaces risks the team already knows about.
Good answer: honest. Algorithm and interface changes, competition, and a plan for each.
AI era How do we show up in AI answers for our category, and how are we tracking it?
Why ask: a growing share of discovery happens inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and assistants.
Good answer: a short list of the questions buyers ask, where you appear, where you don’t, and what’s already being done inside the current plan. If more is needed, a specific request: what for, how much, and what it should produce.
AI era Where are we using AI in our SEO work, and who reviews it before it ships?
Why ask: AI speeds up research and drafting. Unreviewed, it also produces confident errors under your brand name.
Good answer: named uses, a named reviewer, and something they decided not to automate.
The list has grown. Any team or agency should now be able to tell you how the brand appears in AI answers, how they measure it, which AI tools they use in their own work, and who checks the output. If the answer to “how do we show up in ChatGPT?” is a shrug or a sales pitch, you’ve learned something.
A quick way to organise the conversation: one question per MAPS pillar. Do buyers and machines describe us the way we’d describe ourselves (Meaning)? What proof backs our claims (Authority)? Are we where our audience looks (Presence)? Are our facts consistent and structured everywhere (Signals)?
- The full question set across organisation, strategy, tools and planning
- Past successes: how to tell a case study from a coincidence
- How results should be tracked and reported to you
- “What is our plan for the coming year?”, and what must be in it
- A simple scoring method for the answers
In the book.
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