I wrote up seven quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl, and the most common reply was not “which tool” or “how long does it take.” It was some version of: I know. I have known for six months. I cannot get it approved.
That is a different problem, and it is the one that actually costs money. A redirect chain you have diagnosed and not fixed is worth precisely as much as a redirect chain you never found.
So here are six people from the Unscripted SEO and Unscripted Small Business archives on the approval problem specifically. Five are practitioners. One is a founder on the other side of the table, saying out loud the thing agencies suspect their clients are thinking. That is the part worth reading twice.
Start with the founder, because he is the room you are pitching to
Tom Girgash is building Taproot solo. People give him website feedback constantly. Here is what happens to it:
I remember when I built my website out, people giving me different pointers about my website. I appreciate the feedback, but at the same time, making this small change in my website and really doing that for weeks is not going to move the needle in terms of getting clients or getting users as well as getting feedback from people and actually trying to solve a problem.
Tom Girgash, Taproot
Read that as a founder, not as an SEO. He is not saying the change is wrong. He is saying the change competes for weeks of his attention against talking to users, and it loses. Every unapproved fix in your backlog lost that same comparison. Your recommendation was not rejected on technical merit. It was rejected on opportunity cost, silently, by someone who never told you that was the criterion.
His actual constraint, in his own words, is that “cracking distribution and marketing has been, is going to be the toughest challenge.” If your fix cannot be connected to that sentence, it will not get approved, and no amount of crawl data will change that.
Pick the wins that will not burn the business
Ernesto Ortiz of Structural SEO has a selection criterion for which tactics make the shortlist, and it is not impact. It is survivability:
Out of those things that seem to move the needle, grab the ones that you think aren’t going to burn the business in six months.
Ernesto Ortiz, Structural SEO
He is explicit that the high-performing option is often the disqualified one. A private blog network of a hundred listicles saying you are the best at something will get you into ChatGPT inside a week. It will also, eventually, be the thing that ends the business. So the question he puts to a client is not “will this work,” it is a personal one: do you find this risky, and would you bet your own business, the future of your business, on this tactic?
“Most legit businesses will say, nah, we don’t do that because we want to ensure we stay around.”
That reframing does something useful to the approval conversation. It moves you from vendor asking for budget to advisor protecting a downside, which is a role executives already know how to say yes to.
Stop reporting the number that is not the number
Ortiz’s second contribution is the harder one, because it asks you to give up the metric your reporting is built on:
Are you actually losing sales or are you just losing traffic? Like what’s happening to revenue per session? Like people still need to go and buy your thing. It’s irrelevant if they read your article or if the AI gave you the answer, you want them to go and buy your thing. So I wouldn’t worry about traffic and that’s a mind shift that people that hire us need to have. It’s like traffic is irrelevant and it always has.
Ernesto Ortiz, Structural SEO
His diagnosis of why everybody is panicking about AI eating top-of-funnel traffic is unsentimental: “the fact that everyone’s complaining about it now is just because I think their graphs look bad. And usually high level marketing people just want to see something pretty going up to the right.”
If your justification for a fix rests on a traffic graph, you have tied your approval odds to a metric that is now structurally declining for reasons unrelated to your work. Move to revenue per session and the same fix becomes defensible in a year when traffic is down thirty percent.
The work that gets approved is rarely the work that looks good
Mike Ginley named the specific asymmetry that makes unglamorous fixes so hard to sell:
Ultimately I feel like that is what we do. We do the not pretty stuff, but it’s the things that really work. But everyone’s always looking for that silver bullet big splash.
Mike Ginley
His handling of it is worth copying, because it is neither dismissive nor accommodating. He genuinely welcomes the client’s ideas — and then rules on them: “I absolutely love when people are coming with ideas… but just being like, nah, that’s not going to do it. Let’s focus our time on this part as opposed to this random thing that looks pretty is tangible. But it’s just not going to move the needle like you want it to.”
The word doing the work there is tangible. He is not asking to be trusted. He is trading a visible thing for an invisible one and naming the trade out loud, which is the only version of that conversation that survives contact with a sceptical owner.
Fix the mindset before you pitch the fix
Charlie Sells of Clarity Over Everything argues that most rejected recommendations were rejected before you opened your mouth, because the owner has a fixed model of what marketing is:
Now you’re no longer thinking about the value, the service, the experience that you’re providing. You’re just assuming that this one billboard, so to speak, is going to be the thing… It does have value, but it’s not the most important thing. So if you can break that traditional mindset of sorts with small business owners and leaders, then you can start to lead them into the other areas that are really going to move the needle in other parts of their ecosystem.
Charlie Sells, Clarity Over Everything
He also names the disqualifying condition, which is useful if you have ever burned a quarter on a client who was never going to move: “The first thing I tell them is you’ve got to have a mindset of curiosity. If you are certain, if you are dead set, if you are rigid in your thinking about your brand, then this is not going to go well.”
Say the uncomfortable thing early
Sawsan Hamawandy works the seniority end of this problem, and her example is the one every in-house SEO recognises — the executive who wants to coin a term:
I know senior leaders a lot of the time want to sound like thought leaders, it’s great for their brand building, they want to coin new terms, but that’s a dangerous game to play because if people are not searching for that term, it’s all well and good having a cool term. But what impact will it actually have? So again, another uncomfortable conversation that needs to be had.
Sawsan Hamawandy
Her method for making those conversations survivable is to invert the usual order of operations:
When you can demonstrate that business impact as a result of it, people get excited about it with you and I think a lot of the time people do this in isolation but what I found by doing it backwards is actually you can bring people along on that journey and that will make your program a lot stronger.
Sawsan Hamawandy
Doing it backwards means starting from the business outcome the executive already cares about and working back to the fix, rather than starting from the fix and hunting for a metric that flatters it.
And the reason your message got worse on the way to approval
Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency supplied the line that explains what happens after you win the argument. He was asked what every business owner should add, and he named the vision and mission statement — no more than twenty-five to thirty words. Then he named the way it dies:
It should not be an opportunity for everyone in the C-suite to get their favorite phrase or concept thrown in.
Bruce Ashford, The Ashford Agency
That is committee decay, and it applies to far more than mission statements. It is what happens to your prioritised fix list between the meeting where it was approved and the ticket that finally gets written. Everyone adds their favourite item. The thing that shipped is not the thing that was justified.
Ashford’s own diagnosis of why leaders do this is that they consistently overestimate how clear their message already is — the argument he makes at length in You Can’t Read the Label From Inside the Bottle. The failure is not that they do not care. It is that from inside, it already looks finished.
The actual checklist
Put the six of them together and you get something closer to a procedure than a pep talk. Before you take a fix into an approval conversation:
- Name what it competes with. Girgash’s weeks-of-attention test. If you cannot say what the founder should stop doing to make room, you have not made a case.
- Lead with the downside, not the upside. Ortiz’s “would you bet your business on this” reframes you as the person protecting them.
- Denominate in revenue per session. Traffic is a declining metric for reasons that have nothing to do with your work. Stop hanging your approval on it.
- Name the trade out loud. Ginley’s move — the pretty thing versus the thing that works, stated plainly rather than implied.
- Check for curiosity first. Sells’s filter. Rigid client, no approval, no amount of evidence changes it.
- Work backwards from their outcome. Hamawandy’s inversion, which also front-loads the uncomfortable conversation instead of deferring it to the QBR.
- Defend the scope after the yes. Ashford’s committee decay is where approved work quietly becomes different work.
None of that makes the crawl findings better. It makes them shippable, which is the only property that has ever mattered.
Every quote in this article is verbatim from Unscripted podcast transcripts and attributed to the guest who said it. Light cleanup has been applied to filler words only.