Explore how your Martech stack influences SEO performance and marketing channels. Learn how technology choices can enhance business success.

Organizations typically encompass a variety of orientations that affect all aspects of the business, including operations, finance, marketing, and sales functions. This diversity also extends to the marketing technology stack, where technology decisions can significantly influence the performance of marketing channels, including SEO.

Organizations consider multiple objectives and criteria to meet stakeholder needs when determining which technologies to integrate into their stack. Despite individual stakeholder goals, the purpose of the Martech stack is to significantly enhance the business’s success and performance, directly or indirectly.

Direct contributions include driving customer acquisition and conversion, while indirect contributions improve operational performance.

What Is a Martech Stack?

A marketing technology stack (Martech stack) is the collective term for an organization’s software, hardware, and tools for monitoring and improving marketing performance, enabling sales activities, and enhancing other business functions such as order fulfillment and payment processing.

Typical Martech stacks consist of various software and technologies designed to achieve different tasks and objectives, including:

• Data analytics tools (warehousing, visualization)
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management systems)
• Teamwork and project management tools (e.g., JIRA, Trello)
• Payment gateways and order fulfillment/dispatch systems

Although engineering and infrastructure teams often lead Martech decisions, they are influenced by marketing, sales, community, and C-level executives.

So, why is this important to SEO?

Many of these technology decisions impact SEO performance. Therefore, SEO professionals must contribute to these discussions, ask the right questions, and present compelling arguments highlighting the potential impact on SEO. CMOs and organizations typically engage with SEOs to achieve objectives such as:

• Improving organic search visibility for business-relevant, non-branded queries at various stages of the decision funnel.
• Enhancing the stability and visibility of desired messaging for branded queries.
• Collaborating with other departments to improve the website’s user experience and conversion rate for all web traffic.

While not all components of the Martech stack will impact SEO performance, it’s essential to be aware of those that do. For instance, if an organization uses Salesforce CRM and considers moving to Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Experience Cloud as a website platform, this decision may not be within your influence. However, being aware of it allows you to ensure that SEO migration and strategy are geared for success from the outset.

When Can Martech Decisions Impact SEO?

How can the Martech stack impact SEO? Let’s explore some common scenarios where business decisions regarding Martech can influence SEO, either positively or negatively.

Integrations with Sales CRMs & CRM-Led Decision-Making

Sales-oriented organizations often focus their technology decisions on improving sales enablement. As a result, website technologies frequently become closely tied to sales CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. While these platforms are robust, websites heavily influenced by sales orientation often prioritize funneling users toward sales actions, such as downloading marketing assets, completing contact forms, or requesting demos. This direct approach only sometimes creates an optimal environment for organic search, as these pages may lack the value proposition and messaging that search engines favor.

The conflict arises when clients want these conversion-focused pages to rank for high-volume search queries, regardless of the user’s stage in the funnel. Highlighting the need for content and user experiences that address various user intents is crucial for long-term organic success.

C-Level Led Platform Decisions

Ideally, CMOs and CTOs collaborate to identify gaps in the Martech stack and prioritize customer-centric technologies that enhance marketing, sales, and operations. However, CMOs and CTOs often have their preferred tools and platforms, carrying them from role to role. When a new CMO or Marketing Director joins an organization, they may advocate for the technologies they previously used, regardless of the incumbent platform’s performance.

In the SaaS space, this often leads to shifts toward headless or React/Nuxt website builds. In e-commerce, it can result in moving from a platform like Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify, bringing changes in CRM, order management, and development teams. From an SEO perspective, such changes can disrupt URL structures and other dynamic on-site elements.

SEOs must highlight the variables that impact performance and the associated risks while using SEO data to inform the new site architecture, ensuring the new stack meets marketing and audience needs.

Adopting Technologies for Competitive Advantage

Businesses continuously seek to adopt emerging technologies for a competitive edge. A 2019 Gartner study found that 68% of CTOs invest in emerging technologies to gain a competitive advantage. CMOs and CTOs make these changes for product, financial, and operational reasons. While marketing and SEO variables are considered, there is often an overriding belief that marketing can adapt to these innovations.

Technologies for UX & Legal Compliance

Third-party tools for user experience monitoring and A/B testing cause many website load speed issues. These tools can slow down site loading times, negatively affect user experience, and potentially violate data privacy regulations.

SEO issues related to these tools are often identified early in a partnership through a baseline technical overview. However, when businesses introduce new tools, SEOs should be consulted to ensure proper implementation and deployment.

Additionally, cookie consent banners and other accessibility tools can cause issues. With the European Accessibility Act coming into force in 2025, organizations will likely adopt third-party accessibility tools that may introduce scripts, degrade page load speeds, or create internal linking traps. Educating stakeholders on best practices for integrating these tools is essential to maintaining optimal website performance and adhering to consent requirements.

By being proactive and involved in Martech decisions, SEOs can help ensure that these decisions positively impact SEO performance and overall business success.

How SEO Can Influence Martech Decisions

While SEO is just one marketing channel, a business’s success is profoundly influenced by its technology decisions. Despite this, many Martech decisions are often made without input from SEO and marketing teams.

Successful businesses integrate various orientations to maximize customer experience. SEO can provide crucial data on the user journey, showing how users interact with and discover the website. By sharing these insights, SEOs can inform CMOs and CTOs about potential negative impacts on what could be their biggest traffic-driving channel.

Understanding the significance of these decisions is essential for maintaining and enhancing SEO performance. If navigating these complexities seems challenging, consider exploring our monthly SEO packages for expert assistance.