Your client hired an SEO, and 30 days later the CEO says it isn’t working. You’ve probably lived that call. Angelo Ponzi has lived it from the other side of the table. He’s a fractional chief marketing officer and founder of Craft Marketing and Branding, and he once brought an SEO expert into a client only to hear “30 days later, it was like, it’s not working.” On the Unscripted SEO Podcast he explained what changed his own mind about SEO, and what he now does before an SEO program starts so that call never happens. You can watch the full episode here or listen on Castos.
Why executives give up on SEO at day 30
Angelo’s diagnosis is instant expectations. The client in that story could tweet and see the result the same day, and they couldn’t get past the fact that search doesn’t work that way. He’d told them up front it wouldn’t work in 30 days. It didn’t matter.
Here’s the part that should change how you pitch. The fix isn’t a better monthly report after the fact. It’s an agreement made before the work begins. Angelo works with a lot of industrial companies where nobody can promise that a dollar in returns a dollar out, so he sets the scorecard first:
“But here’s what the measurements we can set the foundations if you agree and that’s what will be measured on. And I think that’s important to avoid this. Hey it’s not working.”
If you run an agency, that’s the conversation to have in the kickoff, not in month two. Agree on the leading indicators, the timeline and what “working” means, then build your client reporting around proving that ROI against the numbers the CEO already signed off on.
The pitch that converts a skeptical CMO: Google is your number one customer
Angelo wasn’t always a believer either. When he joined a luxury watch reseller, the CEO asked him who their number one customer was. Angelo guessed a buyer with discretionary dollars. The CEO said Google.
Angelo ran a 15-person marketing team there, three days a week, and four of those people worked only on SEO: backlinks, blog posts, competitor analysis and a 75% quality criteria every piece had to meet. Eight months later he was converted. He went on to give that “Google is your number one customer” talk three or four times as a CMO.
You can borrow the framing for your own clients. A CEO who thinks of SEO as a marketing tactic will judge it like an ad. A CEO who thinks of Google as the customer who sends every other customer will fund it like a relationship.
Let the blog data tell you what the market wants
Angelo doesn’t stop at rankings. He reads what people land on and treats it as market research. If a manufacturing client’s sand casting post gets all the traffic, that’s telling him sand casting matters to buyers, and the content plan should follow.
His best example came from a sustainable products company selling home compostable straws. Three years after it was published, a post called Bioplastics 101 was still their top page. Buyers didn’t understand PHA, or industrial versus home compostable, or how state, county and city straw bans differed. The education page was doing the selling.
That lines up with a point I made on the episode. We build keyword buckets and traffic forecasts, but if the searcher doesn’t fit somewhere in the lead pipeline, the traffic is a vanity number. Before you commit a content budget, map each keyword to the intent behind it and cut the ones that can’t turn into a phone call or an email.
Check the brand search before you sell the category
Angelo has a current client who doesn’t see why they need SEO. His test is simple: search their exact name and they show up. Search the category and they’re on page 45, “but nobody’s ever gonna get there.” They get found only by people who already know them.
That’s the cleanest way to show a CEO the gap. Run both searches with them on a screen share. Brand terms prove demand exists. Category terms show how much of it is going to somebody else.
Audit the competitor’s channels before you copy them
Clients want to be everywhere a competitor is. Angelo had an industrial manufacturer ask for TikTok. His answer is to go look at what the competitor actually posts and whether it gets any traction. Usually they’re there to say they’re there.
- A blog whose last post was two years ago isn’t a blog.
- A YouTube channel with nothing new in two years reflects badly, so don’t link to it.
- On one software client, LinkedIn was the top channel, Twitter second, and three other networks had no hits at all.
Angelo’s rule for the whole thing: there are no silver bullets in marketing, and he quotes a stat that 92% of strategies fail because of poor implementation. For SEO that means the page has to exist, people have to be told it’s there, and the story has to hold when they land. A thousand visitors with 999 bouncing off a landing page is not a result.
So before your next kickoff, ask the CEO three questions. What will we be measured on, and when? Who is the customer, and does Google send them? And what is the content already telling us they want? You can hear Angelo’s full answers in our conversation on Unscripted SEO.