Building Digital Influence: Executive Strategies for Search Growth

8 October 2026

Search growth becomes an executive issue when it affects revenue, customer acquisition and long-term market visibility. Yet many leadership teams still treat search performance as a technical concern and hand it to a marketing specialist. That leaves a gap. A search growth strategy needs decisions that only senior people can make: what the business wants, how much to fund and how long to wait for results.

Executives can contribute far more by setting clear commercial priorities, funding the work over a realistic period and asking questions that connect rankings with business results. Done well, organic search becomes a measurable source of demand and customer insight.

Treat Search as a Business Investment

Any search growth strategy should begin with the organisation’s goals. A company entering a new market needs different content from one trying to increase repeat purchases or reduce its reliance on paid advertising.

Start with a small set of commercial outcomes, such as qualified enquiries, online sales or demo requests. Then identify the searches that suggest a potential customer is moving towards one of those outcomes. This creates a clear line between search activity and business value.

Your website also needs an executive owner. The Happy Manager’s guidance on making a website a strategic asset explains why leadership involvement matters when digital channels support wider organisational goals.

Different Executives Ask Different Questions

Search investment rarely stalls because nobody believes in it. It stalls because each executive wants a different answer. Siteimprove’s guide to winning senior backing for SEO notes that chief executives tend to ask whether the investment will pay back, and when. Finance leaders ask what it will cost and whether the same result is possible for less. Marketing leaders want to know how many extra qualified leads to expect and what competitors are doing.

One presentation rarely satisfies all three. Prepare answers to each set of questions, with benchmarks and a realistic forecast of how the work should move the figures each leader already tracks. Then apply the same standard to your own team. If a report can’t be translated into revenue, cost or customers, ask for a clearer one.

Decide When Specialist Support Makes Sense

Internal marketing teams can often handle basic content updates and reporting. More technical work may need outside support, especially when traffic has stalled, a site has been redesigned or competitors consistently appear above the business in valuable search results. Google’s own guidance suggests that the earlier a specialist joins a redesign, the better.

An SEO Agency can provide keyword research, website audits, link building and ongoing campaign monitoring. Before appointing one, define the outcome you expect and ask how progress will be measured. A useful brief might set a six-month goal for increasing qualified organic enquiries from a particular service category.

Google suggests a few other questions worth asking any provider. What results do they expect, and over what timeframe? Can they show examples of previous work and put you in touch with past clients? Do they have experience in your industry and country? Be cautious of anyone who guarantees a particular ranking, because nobody can promise that.

Executives should also confirm who owns implementation. Recommendations have little value if developers, writers and product teams have no time allocated to act on them.

Build a Strategy Around Customer Decisions

Strong search growth comes from understanding the questions customers ask before they contact a company. Those questions often change as people move from recognising a problem to comparing possible solutions. A search growth strategy built around these stages is easier to fund and easier to judge.

A practical content plan could include an introductory guide for early research, a detailed service page for evaluation and a case study for final validation. Each page serves a distinct decision stage and should direct the visitor towards a sensible next action.

Columbia Business School’s discussion of an effective digital marketing strategy highlights the value of understanding customers and selecting channels around strategic goals. Its faculty put integration ahead of individual tools. The question isn’t how to get one platform’s interface right, but where that platform fits within the whole plan. Search data supports that thinking because it reveals the language people use when describing their needs.

Give Teams Useful Measures

Executives need a focused dashboard, not a lengthy ranking report. Choose measures that show visibility, engagement and commercial impact together. These might include non-branded search traffic, conversions from organic visits, qualified leads and revenue influenced by search.

Review trends monthly, but judge major initiatives over a longer period. Google’s SEO Starter Guide notes that some changes show up within hours while others take several months, and it suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether work has helped. A new group of service pages may need longer still in a competitive category. In the meantime, teams can track whether pages are being indexed, impressions are rising and visitors are taking meaningful actions.

Clear reporting also helps secure executive SEO support. Connect every requested investment to a defined problem, an expected result and the cost of leaving the issue unresolved.

Why Clicks Alone No Longer Tell the Whole Story

Traffic figures need more careful reading than they used to. Pew Research Center analysed March 2025 browsing data from 900 US adults. People who met an AI-generated summary at the top of Google results clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits, against 15% for those who didn’t see one. Only 1% of visits to pages with a summary involved a click on a link inside it. Summaries also appeared more often on longer, question-style searches, which are typical of customers researching a decision.

A falling click total doesn’t automatically mean a weakening search growth strategy. More of the answer may simply be appearing on the results page. That’s a reason to widen the dashboard, not abandon it. Impressions, enquiry quality and conversions show whether visibility is still turning into demand, and Google’s Search Console now includes a report on performance in generative AI features. Columbia’s marketing faculty add a sensible warning: being able to measure something doesn’t mean doing more of it is worthwhile. Judge each measure by the decision it supports.

Remove the Barriers to Steady Progress

Search programmes often slow down because responsibilities are unclear. Marketing identifies an opportunity, legal review delays publication and development work sits in a backlog without an agreed priority.

Create a simple operating rhythm to prevent these gaps. A monthly meeting can bring together marketing, sales, product and technical leaders to review performance and approve the next group of improvements. Keep the discussion tied to a limited number of priorities.

Executives can also speed up delivery by assigning named owners and deadlines. For example, a technical issue might go to the development lead for resolution within 30 days, while a content manager updates five high-value pages during the same period. Visible ownership keeps search work moving.

Make Leadership Attention Count

Executive influence is most useful when it creates focus and removes delays. Leaders don’t need to select keywords or rewrite page titles themselves, but they should know which customer groups the business wants to reach and how search contributes to that aim.

The strongest signal of commitment is consistency. Protect time for implementation, review commercial measures at regular intervals and keep teams focused on a few valuable opportunities. When search performance appears alongside sales and customer acquisition figures, it becomes easier to spot where digital demand is growing and where the business needs to respond. That is what a working search growth strategy looks like from the top.

Conclusion

A search growth strategy succeeds when executives treat search as a business investment rather than a technical task. Start from commercial outcomes and prepare for the different questions each leader will ask. Bring in specialist help where it fills a real gap, but keep ownership of implementation inside the business. Shape content around the decisions customers make, and judge progress with a small set of measures that link visibility to revenue, read with care now that AI summaries are changing how people click. Then keep the rhythm going through named owners, regular reviews and consistent attention. Leaders who do this don’t need to understand every ranking factor. They need to make sure search is funded, owned and measured against results that matter.

Disclosure and Disclaimer

This is a partnered post. See our disclosure policy for details. The content on this site is provided for general information and educational purposes only. It is not intended as professional marketing, SEO, or financial advice. Search engine behaviour, advertising rules, and data protection requirements vary by country and change frequently. UK readers should refer to current ASA and CAP Code guidance on online marketing and ICO guidance on analytics and cookies. US readers should note that FTC advertising guidance and state-level privacy laws can affect how search-driven marketing is run. Readers should seek qualified professional advice for their specific situation. The Happy Manager and Apex Leadership Ltd accept no liability for actions taken in reliance on the content of this article.

Further Reading

• What Web Browsing Data Tells Us About How AI Appears Online — Pew Research Center: The fuller study behind the AI-summary click figures, including how often people meet AI-generated summaries and how that varies by type of search. Read the report
• How to Get SEO Buy-In: 7 Actionable Tips — Ahrefs: A practical guide to translating search metrics into the commercial language executives already use, and to building support across departments. Read the guide

References

1. Pew Research Center (2025), Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (8% of visits to a traditional result with an AI summary vs 15% without; March 2025 data from 900 US adults), https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
2. Columbia Business School Executive Education (2026), Building an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy (faculty interview on integrating channels rather than mastering single tools, and on the limits of measurement), https://execed.business.columbia.edu/interview/building-effective-digital-marketing-strategy
3. Siteimprove (2021), How to get executive-level buy-in for SEO (CEOs, CFOs and CMOs each ask different questions about return, cost and leads; updated 25 November 2021), https://www.siteimprove.com/blog/how-to-get-executive-level-buy-in-for-seo/
4. Google Search Central (2025), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (changes can take from hours to several months to appear; wait a few weeks before judging impact; updated 10 December 2025), https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
5. Google Search Central (2026), Do you need an SEO? (questions to ask before hiring, check client references, no one can guarantee a number-one ranking; updated 5 June 2026), https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/do-i-need-seo
6. Google Search Central (2026), Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (Search Console includes a generative AI performance report; updated 10 July 2026), https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide

Header photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Leadership Resources

For more leadership resources look at our great-value guides. These include some excellent tools to help your personal development plan. The best-value approach is to buy our Leadership bundle, available from the store.

We’ve bundled together these five e-guides at half the normal price! Read the guides in this order, and use the tools in each, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving your personal development plan. (6 guides, 167 pages, 27 tools and 22 insights, for half price!)

• Leadership Essentials
• Defining Leadership
• Leading Insights
• Leading with Style and Focus
• Transformational Change
• Making Change Personal