Most teams aren’t failing—they’re being measured to fail together.
“Why can’t we just fix the SEO?”
Because SEO isn’t broken. Your incentives are.
I’ve been in the room with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, dissecting why their organic performance is flatlining despite massive budgets, smart people, and best-in-class tools.
The pattern is almost always the same. The SEO team is doing what they can. The dev team is pushing new templates. The content team is rewriting everything for brand tone. Paid media is flexing ROAS slides in QBRs.
And not a single one of them is measured on the same outcome.
That’s the heart of what I call The KPI Trap—and it might be the biggest invisible performance killer in modern digital organizations.
The Invisible Disconnect: Everyone’s Doing Their Job. No One’s Winning Together.
Here’s how the KPI Trap plays out in the real world:
- The development team launches a beautiful new experience. But it collapses structured data and introduces crawl blockers. Why? Their KPI is on-time delivery, not indexation health.
- The content team refreshes the product pages for brand tone and readability. But they gut the keyword alignment and topical authority. Why? They’re judged on editorial quality, not search impact.
- The paid media team bids on branded search terms and drives up ROAS. But they cannibalize organic conversions in the process. Why? Their bonus rides on platform ROAS, not incremental lift.
Each team hits their metrics. And yet—collectively—they’re underperforming.
That’s the KPI Trap in action.
The Trap Isn’t Obvious—Until It’s Too Late
What makes the KPI Trap so dangerous is that it doesn’t look like a problem from the inside. It looks like high performance.
Everyone has their dashboard. Everyone has their wins. But they’re pulling in different directions—or worse, actively undermining each other without realizing it.
The friction shows up in symptoms:
- SEO projects stalled for “resource constraints”
- Organic traffic slowly declining despite content investment
- No one willing to “own” a shared outcome like Core Web Vitals or structured data
Eventually, someone notices the performance gap. A VP asks, “Why are we losing search share?” The answer is never simple. And by then, it’s political.
Why It’s a System Problem, Not a People Problem
Let me be clear: most of the people I work with want to do the right thing.
- Developers care about product excellence.
- Content creators care about storytelling and clarity.
- Paid teams care about revenue.
But the system incentivizes them to optimize locally, not strategically.
We talk about “cross-functional collaboration,” but if no one is measured on cross-functional success, it becomes optional. And optional things don’t scale.
The result? Organizational incoherence. What looks like isolated execution gaps is really a structural misalignment of priorities.
The Root Cause: Unchained KPIs
At the core of the KPI Trap is a simple truth:
If your KPIs aren’t chained to a shared outcome, you’ll never get coordinated execution.
Let’s break that down.
Right now, most enterprise teams are held accountable for siloed KPIs:
| Team | Typical KPI | Result |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Page optimization, traffic | Little control over dev/content changes |
| Dev | Launch speed, bug count | No incentive to support SEO requirements |
| Content | Brand tone, consistency | SEO gets overwritten |
| Paid | ROAS by channel | Ignores search cannibalization |
These aren’t bad KPIs. They’re just incomplete—because they don’t reflect interdependence.
The KPI Trap is when no one is measured against the system they’re actually part of.
The Way Out: KPI Chaining
The solution isn’t just “better communication.” It’s better alignment—through KPI chaining.
KPI chaining means explicitly linking each team’s metrics to shared business outcomes. That way, success for one group doesn’t come at the expense of another.
Let’s revisit that earlier table—with chained KPIs:
| Team | Chained KPI | Shared Value |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Growth in qualified, indexable traffic | Tied to dev and content health |
| Dev | Launch speed + crawl/index standards met | Performance doesn’t break visibility |
| Content | Brand alignment + organic reach gain | SEO supports and measures reach |
| Paid | ROAS + non-branded search lift | Channel cannibalization gets flagged |
Now, instead of optimizing in isolation, teams are aiming at aligned outcomes. Collaboration isn’t extra—it’s built in.
Real Talk: Why Most Companies Resist This
Let’s not pretend this is easy.
KPI chaining requires:
- Executive buy-in to reset incentives
- Visibility across systems and teams
- Willingness to rewire accountability
And maybe most importantly: it challenges existing power structures. Some teams like their metrics just the way they are—because they’re easy to hit.
But if you’re serious about web effectiveness, organic growth, or digital leverage, then chasing isolated KPIs is like rowing in circles.
You don’t need more dashboards. You need more interdependence.
Final Thought: The KPI Trap Is a Leadership Problem
The real question isn’t “why aren’t our teams collaborating?”
It’s:
“What in our measurement structure makes collaboration optional, unrewarded, or risky?”
The KPI Trap doesn’t get fixed by SEOs writing better Jira tickets. It gets fixed when leadership recognizes that most performance failures are design failures.
If you’re not measuring the system as a system, don’t be surprised when the system doesn’t work.
This Is Just One of the Traps
The KPI Trap is just one of the forces I explore in my upcoming book, The KPI Trap: Reconnecting the Work to the Why.
The book breaks down why so many digital teams underperform—not because they lack talent, but because their systems are misaligned with outcomes. It’s a blueprint for untangling misincentives, resetting accountability, and unlocking what I call contribution value.
If this post struck a nerve, you’ll want to be on the early access list.
Complete the form below to join the launch list to get the book preview and bonus materials.
