A force multiplier is anything—a process, tool, or person—that makes something or someone more effective, scalable, or impactful.
Bill Hunt
In my career, I’ve had several moments of clarity (epiphanies) that radically changed how I approach my life, job, or business. One of the most profound came when I worked at IBM and truly understood the power of force multipliers.
Force multipliers are the key to achieving disproportionate results with limited resources. My epiphany? That SEO doesn’t work best as an isolated function of actions driven from tickets and audits. Instead, it must be integrated at the source of creation and aligned with existing workflows to achieve scale.
To give context to this realization, I had built, run, and sold a large, successful digital and one of the largest search agencies a few years prior. We used a cookie cutter approach to SEO, similar to everyone else; we just did it for substantial companies. After attempting to retire, my former agency client IBM, called me to implement two parallel projects:
- Improve search performance across key business units
- Develop a world-class global search marketing organization
Kicking off the project focused on their extensive software catalog, which spanned 235 country and language versions and a labyrinth of different content systems.. My former agency had done an audit and written hundreds of tickets, most of them had not been assigned, and few were implemented.
Despite this being a seemingly priority project, nothing was being done. I quickly identified three key barriers:
- Many of the recommendations deviated from IBM’s web standards – seems my former team was aware of this but did not try to negotiate changes. This is what led to Epiphany 2 – Corporate Judo.
- Due to limited web resources and other higher-priority actions, I needed to find ways to boost my newly compliant tickets and get them actioned.
- The web and dev were divided into multiple teams, focusing on infrastructure, content, merchandising, and UX. Each team had its own goals and objectives, none of which included any consideration for SEO.
I quickly realized that traditional SEO tactics wouldn’t be enough. Instead, I had to rethink everything. I was effectively a team of one, tasked with pivoting an entire enterprise toward search-first thinking, so I needed to think like a Marine and improvise, adapt, overcome, and try to leverage force multipliers.
The Foundation of Force Multipliers in SEO
Success at scale required more than technical audits and keyword research. It required integrating SEO principles into the company’s DNA at the point of creation. I quickly realized I would need to break down each task to the root issue and go to the source of that issue. It became crystal clear that by changing the way things were done and integrating SEO elements deeply into technology, processes, workflows, and people I could scale the outputs.
Here’s how I broke it down into four core workstreams:
- Indexability – Ensuring pages were accessible to search engines.
- Relevance – Optimizing on-page elements to align with search intent.
- Authority – Strengthening credibility through strategic linking.
- Clickability – Maximizing engagement through compelling presentation.
By diagnosing issues through this structured approach, I was able to pinpoint inefficiencies that were hindering performance. And once I started leveraging force multipliers (making changes at the source of creation) across teams, the results spoke for themselves.
Transforming Workflows for Scale
The key was embedding SEO into existing workflows rather than treating it as an afterthought. A few game-changing shifts included:
- Standardizing and improving templates – A single person controlled the templates for global software product pages. Working directly with him, we integrated SEO-friendly elements at the source rather than optimizing after deployment. Using that template and rules set, any page worldwide was effectively 90+ percent optimized.
- Simplifying URL structures – We enabled consistent, scalable optimizations by normalizing URL logic across our multiple CMS platforms.
- Building SEO into content creation—Writers often resist “SEO mandates.” Instead of forcing changes, we introduced a Why IBM statement in the first paragraph of product pages, which strengthened the call to action and keyword-rich messaging used for meta descriptions and was gold when Google started auto-generating descriptions.
- Automating broken link detection – We reduced errors across global sites by implementing SEO-driven internal and cross-link validation while improving overall site quality.
- Leveraging data to incentivize change – We quantified efficiency gains, proving that optimized workflows saved over 3,500 labor hours and $375,000 in resource costs in the first year.
The Biggest Lesson: SEOs Don’t Control Anything
One of the biggest realizations I had during my time at IBM was that SEO teams don’t actually own most of what impacts search performance.
Think about it:
- You don’t control web servers.
- You don’t control CMS systems.
- You don’t control content creation.
- You don’t control IT roadmaps.
Instead, an enterprise SEO is like a building inspector—ensuring that digital infrastructure meets “Google code” rather than writing the rules themselves. Understanding how things are built, who controls what, and directly integrating into that workflow is critical to getting things done.
Overcoming the “IT Line of Death”
Learning from my resource challenges at IBM, I mandated C-Suite support for my next project to prioritize IT resources for SEO recovery. While not expecting it, the problem was so acute that I felt like I had been given the golden ticket: The CEO told me I could have whatever I needed to improve search. But when I walked into the IT department, I was met with a harsh reality—everything was prioritized on an internal IT roadmap, and the CTO told me my requests weren’t even close to making the cut.
This was my introduction to what I call the IT Line of Death—the fine line between what gets done and what gets ignored. Unless I could:
- Get my requests prioritized over others, or
- Embed SEO fixes into existing IT priorities,
Understanding workflows, ownership structures, and business priorities is key. If SEO isn’t baked into the original blueprint and does not have executive support, it will always be an uphill battle.
Final Takeaways: The Power of Integration and Adaptation
Looking back, the true epiphany was that any major transformation is about adaptation, augmenting and integrating tools, techniques, and resources into existing workflows to increase individual and collective performance.
Key Lessons:
Identify and leverage force multipliers – What small changes can create outsized impact?
Understand key workflows – Why is something done the way it is and can we improve it?
Integrate Change at the source – Minimize problems by changing the process – Fix issues before they go live, not after.
Align incentives across teams – Show how improvement and efficiency save resources and benefit everyone.
Leverage data to drive decisions – Make the business case for change with real numbers and find ways to benefit others.
When you think like an engineer rather than an SEO, you can transform from a set of tactics into a strategic growth driver. And that’s when true scale happens.
If you want to hear more examples and details about some of these projects and learnings, check out Epiphany 1 in the free Epiphanies of Search course.