What I Learned Managing an SEO Agency Inside a 500-Person Business.
For six years I managed the external content and SEO agency behind a 500-staff services business. I wasn't writing the articles myself. I was deciding what the agency should focus on, and why, which taught me more about what SEO is actually for than any amount of hands-on keyword work would have.
Strategic oversight, not article-writing.
The business had an external agency producing content and running SEO. My role was to make sure that work actually served the business: setting direction, reviewing what was proposed, pushing back when it drifted, and connecting the results back to what the business cared about, which was rarely "more traffic" in the abstract.
That vantage point is different from being the person writing the content, and it exposed a few patterns that are easy to miss from inside an agency relationship.
Volume without a target is just noise.
Publishing schedules are an easy thing for an agency to report on, and an easy thing for a business to feel good about, regardless of whether any of it moves the number that matters. The useful question was never "how much did we publish this month," it was "which pages are actually producing enquiries, and why." Once that became the standard, a lot of low-value content stopped getting greenlit.
Rankings are not revenue.
An agency can, correctly, report a page ranking well for a target term. That's genuinely useful information. It's also not the same thing as that page producing a customer. Without a line back to enquiries and, ideally, to Zoho CRM, ranking reports and revenue conversations happen in two different rooms. Closing that gap, so a specific page's performance could be tied to an actual lead, was one of the more useful changes made during that time.
Agencies need business context, not just keyword lists.
The best output came when the agency understood what actually mattered to the business that quarter, whether that was a specific service line, a compliance milestone, or a new market, rather than working purely from a keyword list handed over once a year. Managing that relationship well meant treating the agency as an extension of the business's priorities, not a vendor to be briefed once and checked on later.
Part of a wider systems role.
This sat alongside building and maintaining the business's Zoho CRM setup and other internal systems, which is exactly why the SEO-to-revenue link mattered so much: the CRM was already there to make it visible, once the two were properly connected. The fuller picture of that role is in the Sentrex case study.
About the author. I'm Stephen Kevan, a Zoho CRM, SEO & AEO consultant. I spent six years running digital systems inside a 500-staff services business, including managing the agency behind its SEO and content. More about my background →