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How To Secure And Defend Your SEO Budget For Executive Buy-In

December 8, 2023·36 min·3 clips

Will Critchlow uncovers an $18 million SEO budget at a major scale-up, reshaping how we view investment in organic search.

The setup is simple: Lauren Baker picks up with Will Critchlow after Brighton SEO San Diego, then shifts into 2024 budget buy-in and the pressure to do more with less. Critchlow's answer is practical, and a little inconvenient for anyone hoping rankings alone will carry the case. SEO has to prove it fits where Google and other engines are going, but it also has to survive contact with the business. Quick wins still have their place. He treats the sugar rush of short-lived success as useful for near-term reporting, then draws a harder line around sustainable ROI. That means widening the scorecard beyond rankings, clicks, and organic traffic uplift. The useful case connects organic gains with conversion rate and the user experience that follows the visit. If an SEO change makes the page worse, Critchlow does not expect it to age well. Product teams come up as the people who can stop an SEO test even when the numbers look net positive. That can be frustrating, but the episode makes it sound healthy: it forces search teams to defend the change, not just the traffic chart. Lauren also presses on attribution. A search visit rarely runs cleanly from keyword to site to purchase, so the conversation gets into mid-funnel content, multiple touch points, retargeting, remarketing, and the messy work of defending SEO without pretending the path is tidy. The ending stays loose, with LinkedIn, presentations, a possible follow-up next year, and a casual sendoff.

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