SEO in the Martech Stack: How Tech Decisions Can Impact SEO

Organizations typically are a mixture of orientations that impact all aspects of the business from operations, finance, and marketing and sales functions.

This also means it can influence the marketing technology stack, and subsequently, these decisions can impact the performance of marketing channels, including SEO.

When organizations determine the technologies they want to use to build their stack, there are several different objectives and criteria that stakeholders look to satisfy.

Regardless of a stakeholder’s objectives, the overall objective is for the Martech stack to significantly contribute to the success and performance of the business, either directly or indirectly.

This happens directly through acting as a vehicle to drive customer acquisition and conversion or indirectly as a mechanism to improve operational performances.

What Is A Martech Stack?

A marketing technology stack (Martech stack) is the collective noun for an organization group of software, hardware, and tools purchased (or utilized) by the business to monitor and improve marketing performance, monitor and enable sales activities, and improve other business functions such as speed of order fulfillment through to errorless payment gateways.

Typical Martech stacks are compromised of software and technology designed to achieve different tasks and objectives such as:

• Data analytics tools (warehousing, visualization)
• CRMs
• Teamwork and project management tools (JIRA, Trello)
• Payment gateways & order fulfillment/dispatch

Anecdotally most Martech decisions are led by engineering and infrastructure teams, but influenced by marketing, sales, community, and C-level.

So why is this important to SEO?

A lot of these decisions impact SEO, or potential SEO performance, so it is important that given the opportunity to contribute to these discussions, we do. We must ask the right questions and put forward the right arguments to make the case for, and make the business aware of, the potential impact on SEO performance.

CMOs (and organizations) typically engage with SEOs to achieve one or more of the following objectives:

• To improve organic search visibility for business-relevant non-branded queries at various stages of the decision funnel.
• To improve the stability and visibility of desired messaging for branded queries.
• To work with other departments within the business and improve the user experience and conversion rate of the website for all web traffic.

Not all of the Martech stack will impact SEO performance, and not all arguments are worth having.

If an organization utilizes Salesforce CRM and the tooling is firmly established, moving to Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Experience Cloud as a website platform isn’t likely going to be a decision you will be able to influence – but is one you need to be aware to ensure things like the SEO migration and out-of-the-gate strategy are geared for success.

When Can Martech Decisions Impact SEO?

So how can the Martech stack impact SEO?

Let’s take a look at some common situations in which the business might make Martech decisions that could impact SEO either positively or negatively.

Integrations With Sales CRMs & CRM Led Decision-Making

Sales-oriented organizations tend to base a large number of their technology decision-making around improving sales enablement.

As a result, you see website technologies closely tied to sales CRMs, such as Salesforce and Hubspot.

While both of these are good platforms, websites designed with too much of the influence coming from the sales orientation are often designed to try and funnel a user to completing a sales action, such as downloading a marketing asset, completing a contact form, or requesting a demo as soon as possible.

This direct funnel approach to page templates, and content, doesn’t always create the best environment for organic search. Whilst the pages are hyperfocused on user conversion, they don’t always hold the value proposition and messaging that search engines are looking to rank for all queries.

The conflict you find here with heavy sales orientation is that the client will want these conversion pages to rank for all the high search volume queries, regardless of the funnel stage.

Being able to influence and highlight the need for content and a user experience that caters for and helps satisfy the different reasons as to why a user visits your website (not only just to get in touch) is vital to long-term organic success.

C-Level Led Platform Decisions

In an ideal world, CMOs and CTOs work together to identify and fill gaps in the Martech stack, prioritizing customer-centric technologies that act as enablers to marketing, sales, and operations functions.

Most CMOs/CTOs have their preferred suite of tools and platforms, and they build their playbooks that they take when they move roles, and some of these plays have stack dependencies.

Another time this can happen is when an organization gets a new CMO or Marketing Director, and at their previous company, they’ve used another platform or technology.

In the SaaS space, I see this happen a lot with new CMOs and CTOs wanting to champion a form of headless or React/Nuxt website build in place of the incumbent technology, and similarly, in ecommerce I see this happen a lot when a CMO or CTO inherits a stack they’re not familiar with, and will prefer familiarly regardless of how the existing platform is performing.

Depending on the size of the organization these changes vary in terms of overall disruption. For example, moving from a performant established Salesforce Commerce Cloud build to a Shopify build will bring with it changes in CRM, order management, and development team (who will need to get used to the business), but from an SEO perspective, a forced change in URL structures and other dynamic onsite elements, as Shopify doesn’t have Einstein or Lightning.

As well as highlighting the change variables that will impact SEO performance – and their associated short and long-term risks – this is also an opportunity to utilize SEO data to inform the new site build architecture and use data (to try to ensure) the new stack meets the needs of marketing teams and your audience.