In an earlier post, I wrote about why employees need to understand why—the importance of knowing the purpose behind the work. This one flips the lens. As consultants (or even internal advisors), we also need to understand why clients and other teams are doing what they do before we can make progress.
Here’s the truth: most barriers to search performance don’t stem from malice or incompetence. They come from rational decisions, made under constraints you may not see.
There’s Always a Reason
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is this: nobody wakes up and says, “Let’s make the website worse.” If something looks broken from a search perspective, there’s almost always a reason behind it.
- Regulations and Compliance: A healthcare client once blocked entire sections of content from being crawled—not because they didn’t care about SEO, but because internal auditors had raised red flags about exposing that information to consumers – it was for Doctors. Until we understood why, our recommendations sounded reckless to them.
- Resource Constraints: Server teams sometimes limited crawling, not because they didn’t want traffic, but because the infrastructure simply couldn’t handle the load. Telling them to “open it up” without addressing capacity was asking them to fail.
- Legacy Decisions: Many processes are the residue of earlier decisions—hard-coded templates, stop-gap fixes, inherited vendor contracts. People may not even agree with them, but they’re locked in until someone helps find a way out.
- Client or Executive Mandates: In one case, content duplication came straight from a CEO who insisted every product have a separate vanity page for trade shows. Teams knew it was inefficient, but didn’t have the authority to push back.
- Experience and Habits: Teams often do what they’ve always done, because it works in their world. A system administrator may prioritize uptime above all else, while a content editor focuses on ease of publishing. Neither is wrong—but both may clash with search effectiveness.
The point is: until you know the “why,” you don’t know where to start. You can’t dismantle a process if you don’t know what purpose it serves, and you can’t persuade someone to change if you don’t acknowledge the pressures they’re under.
The Coffee Truck Epiphany
The lesson hit me one morning in front of a coffee truck outside a client’s building. Inside, I was preparing to run a rare all-hands web team meeting: DevOps, server teams, infrastructure, content, and marketing all together for the first time. It had taken three months to schedule. Normally, we would present our SEO audit of all the things that were wrong and negatively impacting organic search performance.
Fortunately, in this case, we were unable to conduct the audit before this meeting, as the final contract was signed the previous afternoon. The client’s procurement team would not let us start any work or give any access until we had the final signature. The meeting was immovable and so we did enough to have key talking points. Yes, we had looked at the site and could have done an all-nighter to build a report; we did enough to yield 50 or so findings that we could present.
Back to the coffee line, two women in line ahead of me were talking about that very meeting. One said, “It’s going to be another consultant telling us how screwed up the site is.” Then her next statement stopped me cold:
“If they would only ask us why things are the way they are, maybe we could work together to fix them.”
They were talking about me. And they were right.
Instead of droning on about a long audit report, I changed my approach on the spot. In the meeting, I started with an overview of the key swimlanes that impact search performance, indexability, relevance, authority, clickability, and user experience. I mentioned that in the short time we had to review the site, we identified 50 items that are negatively impacting performance. We would like to break into groups and review these items to understand your system and the issue, determine what is changeable, and seek your help in making the necessary changes. I asked the teams, for each identified item to help us understand the following:
- Why is this done the way it is?
- What constraints are you working under?
- What changes would you make if you could?
The result? Interestingly, 30 items on our list were already identified by them, but were not possible to change under their current hand-coded system. The woman who was “anti-SEO Consultant” told me that if we could help her get a CMS, she would gladly work with us to ensure everything deployed was search-friendly. In my readout to the CMO, that was request #1 – that was the hub that would fix many issues. They got their system. And because they had it, they ensured it was implemented in a search-friendly manner.
It was a true win-win. Because we took the time to understand why they did things the way they do them. From that engagement on, we always started with a series of role-based surveys to understand their process. We would explain the why behind each identified defect, the root cause, and not only how to fix it, but also change the workflow that enabled or created it in the first place.
Why Consultants Must Ask Why
There are several reasons why understanding why matters so much:
- Root Cause vs. Surface Symptoms
Without context, audits only treat symptoms. Knowing why teams take certain actions uncovers systemic constraints. - Reducing Resistance
Teams resist when they feel judged. When you show curiosity about their reality, they become collaborators instead of blockers. - Unlocking Reciprocity
Helping a team solve their problem earns capital to solve yours. - Building Enduring Relationships
Some of the strongest professional friendships I have came from those conversations where I asked why first.
A Framework for Asking “Why” Without Insulting
The danger is obvious: if you ask “why” the wrong way, it sounds like blame. Here’s how to make it collaborative instead of confrontational:
- Start With Empathy
“I know you’re under a lot of constraints, and from the outside we don’t always see the whole picture.” - Ask About Constraints, Not Mistakes
Instead of “Why did you block crawling?” → “What challenges led to the decision to limit crawling?” - Use Prompts to Guide Conversation
- What are the bottlenecks you face?
- What would you fix if resources weren’t an issue?
- What’s the one change that would make your life easier?
- Validate Their Answers With Data
Show them you’re not just collecting complaints—you’re connecting them to measurable patterns (e.g., “40% of sitemap URLs fail, which confirms what you’ve been saying about CMS output”). - Frame the Shared Win
“If we can solve this together, it helps both your KPIs and our search performance.”
Closing Thought
In consulting, the temptation is always to prove your value by delivering the most thoughtful analysis or the longest list of fixes. But the real breakthroughs come when you stop talking and start asking why.
That coffee truck conversation reminded me that empathy isn’t a soft skill—it’s a strategic one. When you understand why teams do what they do, you unlock collaboration, reciprocity, and lasting results.
And just as employees need to understand the “why” behind their work, consultants need to understand the “why” behind organizational behavior. Only then can we create solutions that are not just technically correct but practically achievable.
Explore More Epiphanies
This article is part of my ongoing series, My Digital Marketing Epiphanies – realizations, hard-earned lessons, and mental models shaped by decades in the field.
If you want more insights, visit the full archive here: My Digital Marketing Epiphanies.
