How the commodification of SEO, automation culture, and fractured Martech thinking are stunting the growth of marketers and companies alike.
The Problem Isn’t Pay — It’s Positioning
In a world where SEO drives 50–70% of inbound traffic for most brands, you’d expect the professionals behind that performance to be well-compensated and positioned as strategic growth leaders.
Instead, many are underpaid, undervalued, and misunderstood — still seen as tacticians in a role that now demands strategic vision, full-stack MarTech fluency, and AI-augmented decision making.
So if investment is on the rise and expertise is in demand what’s going wrong?
Strategy & Tech Misalignments: Modern SEO Leadership Roles
Most businesses — and even many marketers — although adopting tools quickly as they can haven’t evolved their thinking around What Google Really Rewards and how to lead businesses with innovative SEM.
Teaching business leaders deeply about how brand authority is built and defended, or topics such as what the future of modern marketing systems and teams should actually include are paramount not just for SEO success but meeting the needs of modern customer journeys at scale.
SEO is not a checklist. It’s not a channel. It’s a deeply important discipline that guides IT, sales, marketing & even weighs in on crucial aspects of product.
Success is an outcome of how well aligned all stakeholders external and internal can be served — strategy focus is often debated between data, systems, content, trust, and brand credibility across surfaces.
But how can companies really drive authority within their industrt that Google can verify?
What are the impacts and potential risks of companies that don’t act on the big picture?
Many orgs struggle to connect the dots, they invest heavily in SEO, meanwhile the discipline is still treated as:
- A technical service
- A group of set of one-off tasks
- A bolt-on tactic for “growing traffic”
This outdated view results in:
- SEO being handed off to the lowest bidder, strange agreements that don’t consider goals
- Misaligned SEO performance benchmarks
- Hourly-based work priced like design or copy, completely misplaces speed as top priority
- SEO professionals being excluded from key operations or strategy conversations
In truth, modern SEO professionals sit at the intersection of strategy, data, engineering, content, and product.
It’s the connective tissue of digital performance. And most businesses aren’t even close to optimizing it.
Enter: The Martech Trap
Over the last decade, we’ve seen the rise of SaaS platforms that automate, template, and scale every part of marketing. This has been a net gain for growth — but it’s also created an illusion:
“The tool is the strategy. Our marketing software can do everything and save you time and cures cancer.”
Platforms like SEMrush, Surfer, and even Google’s own Search Console push outputs that are built to look like relevant and purposeful insights — but often bypass context, brand nuance, and integrated decision making.
The result?
- Businesses often hope to think SEO success can be quickly achieved
- SEOs feel reduced to report builders and button pushers
- Strategy gets outsourced to a dashboard
Automation has reduced execution time — but increased the value of interpretation.
Unfortunately, few orgs are compensating for that shift.
The Average SEO Freelancer’s Race to The Bottom
Because so many SEO professionals are self-taught, self-employed, or globally distributed, the market is flooded with:
- $99/month audit offers
- Fiverr-style generic deliverables
- Spam link packages
- “One-and-done” fix all audits (there is no such thing)
This saturation erodes the perceived value of SEO and teaches clients to see SEO as interchangeable labor — not a leadership function.
The Hourly Model is Dead — and Holding the Industry Back
Let’s be clear:
- SEO is not about hours worked. Companies only pay hourly because inexperienced SEO’s can’t explain what outcomes will be likely generated.
- Technical fixes can preserve clicks, but misaligned IT & technical SEO processes isn’t a fix it’s a team sport and Google is something like a completely buyist referee.
- An audit that informs a redesign can change a brand’s growth curve.
So why are professionals still billing by the hour?
Hourly work:
- Penalizes efficiency
- Ignores strategic thinking
- Obscures the connection between insight and revenue
This is why a value-based retainer that prioritizes relationship, alignment, and leadership expertise that can guide entire organizations while rare are essential for SEO professionals to evolve into the strategic function needed to drive meaningful change and impact.
What Google Wants — and What Brands Need to Build
If you’re following the What Google Wants Framework, you know how we fell about this:
Authority is earned through clarity, relevance, technical precision, and verifiable influence — not through keyword stuffing or vanity metrics.
To support this, companies need marketers who understand:
- Cross-platform entity recognition
- Brand architecture as a ranking signal
- Content ecosystems that generate trust
- Structured data, UX, and crawl optimization
- Conversion as an SEO signal, not a separate funnel
These aren’t tactical skills — they’re leadership-level capabilities.
And they demand new compensation models, new career paths, and new ways of integrating SEO into organizational strategy.
The New Role: Full-Stack SEO Strategists
Today’s SEO leaders aren’t just “optimizers.” They are:
- Martech integrators (GA4, CRM, CDP, analytics tools)
- Data storytellers (dashboards, attribution, forecasting)
- UX collaborators (working across design and product)
- Brand architects (aligning content and entity visibility)
- Technical interpreters (audits that inform engineering)
And they need to be compensated — and empowered — accordingly.
How SEO Professionals Can Take Back Control
Here’s how to evolve from underpaid technician to high-value growth partner:
1. Shift from Deliverables to Impact
Don’t sell checklists. Sell Clarity of Outcomes.
Most SEO’s are terrified of making a call and being wrong, the truth is that the possibilities are much more terrifying without helping quantify risks to leadership.
- Use dashboards and outline drivers behind business KPIs
- Build performance narratives, not task reports
- Speak the language of revenue, CAC, CLTV, and retention
2. Expand into Strategic Martech Fluency
Master the tools — but lead with strategy.
- Connect SEO to CRMs, marketing ops, and paid media
- Report in platforms execs already trust (GA4, HubSpot, Salesforce)
- Become the integrator, not the implementer
3. Package Authority, Not Hours
Move into retainers, roadmaps, and fractional leadership roles.
- Offer Authority Audits tied to business risk and opportunity
- Create tiered offerings that reflect maturity levels (not effort)
- Define how your work supports CMO, CRO, or CTO goals
A Mission Addressing More Than Pay – Transforming Organizations
The reason SEO professionals are underpaid isn’t because they lack value.
It’s because they haven’t been positioned as critical to the business model.
That’s on:
- Outdated agency models
- SaaS companies overselling automation
- A lack of frameworks for integrating SEO into brand, product, and ops
The next generation of digital strategy leaders will be:
- Full-stack thinkers
- Data literate, AI-augmented, and outcome-oriented
- Paid for transformation, not transactions
TEK Enterprise: Transforming Authority
At TEK, we don’t just train SEOs — we transform them into growth architects.
We help professionals and companies build the Authority Infrastructure that future-proofs their brand — and the talent that powers it.
📈 Evolve beyond implementation.
📞 Talk to TEK about our Authority Frameworks, SEO Career Maps, and Strategic Positioning Playbooks.
Let’s fix the system — and build a better future for the marketers who actually make growth happen.
