SEO for Companies: Who Owns Each Part When the Site Gets Big

The new site went live on a Friday. Marketing had approved the layout, IT had brought up the new server, and the agency had emailed over the list of redirects.

Three weeks later, organic traffic dropped.

In the crisis meeting, each team opens its own dashboard. The layout is approved, the server responds, and the list was sent. Everyone did their part, and nobody can say where the traffic went.

On September 14, 2026, I opened three of the top ten results for “SEO para empresas” (SEO for companies). The search ran on Google in Brazil, where we are based. All three list techniques and services, such as content, keywords, links, and speed. None of them says who inside the company answers for them. ¹

At a company with in-house marketing, an IT team, and more than one location, someone usually knows the technique. What tends to be missing is someone who answers for the whole thing. This piece covers three things. Who owns what. How to change the site without losing what worked. And how to measure without every team reading a different number.

If the owner still does almost everything alone, the right piece is the one on SEO for small businesses. This one is for companies that already have structure, and have noticed that the structure also gets in the way.

Why SEO breaks between teams

Picture a remodel with three contractors. The electrician runs the wiring, the plumber replaces the pipes, and the painter closes up the wall. Each one delivers their own part, and delivers it well. A week later, a stain shows up on the new wall. The painter closed everything up before anyone tested the water pressure.

None of the three got their own job wrong. The project was missing a general contractor. He does not lay brick or run wire. He owns the sequence, the final check, and the words “go ahead and close it up.”

The SEO techniques at a large company are the same as at any site. What changes is where each one lives. Content lives with marketing. The server, the DNS, and the content distribution network (CDN) live with IT. The dashboards and conversion events sit with the data team, or with the agency.

What is missing, then, is a written agreement on who decides, who carries out, and who checks each part of the site. This is called SEO governance.

Outsourcing the work does not outsource the accountability. Google’s page for people thinking about hiring an SEO says it plainly: “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” ² It also suggests asking the vendor whether they will share every change they make to the site, with the reasoning behind each one. ² At a company with structure, someone has to be named in writing as the person who gets that answer.

Who owns what

There are three fronts, each with one owner. And each has a typical way of failing when that owner does not exist.

Content: who decides what goes on the site

The content owner answers for the territory. They know what the site answers for, for whom, and in what order. And they know how to turn down a request.

At a large company, page requests come from every direction. The executive team wants a piece on the topic of the moment. The product team wants a page for every launch. One location wants its own blog. With no owner, everything gets in, and the site slowly loses its center.

In the book, I propose two questions to run on every new content request. Does it move closer to the center of the site, or does it widen the radius? And does it serve the point in the decision where the company makes money? ³ A request that fails both needs to hear a no, with the reason in writing. ³ The technical reason, with the focus fields Google keeps about the whole site, is in the piece on semantic silos.

Technical: who controls what the crawler finds

The technical owner answers for the path between the server and Google’s crawler. That path holds things marketing never sees. The firewall, the attack protection, the CDN, the DNS.

Google’s documentation for changing web hosts carries a warning addressed to this team. The firewall and the denial-of-service protection must not block Googlebot from reaching the DNS or the servers. ⁴

I have seen this layer with no owner. Across a group of domains with a single owner, the team wanted to let AI crawlers in. They changed the crawler rules inside the content management system. We went back to check, and the block was still active. ⁵

It came from a managed block run by the CDN that sits in front of the site. And the rule varied from one domain to the next: four blocked, two did not. ⁵ Whoever edited the CMS did the right work on the wrong floor.

A large site has one more technical calculation. For crawling, Google treats each hostname as a separate site, with its own crawl budget. ⁶ The www host and a location’s subdomain draw on separate resources. Within each one, the factor the company controls most is its URL inventory. Duplicates and pages with no value eat up the time the crawler would give to everything else. ⁶

Google’s guide on this applies mainly to three profiles. Sites with more than a million pages that change every week. Sites with more than 10,000 pages that change every day. And sites where a large share of the URLs Google has discovered are still not indexed. ⁶ How to read the report is covered in the piece on crawling and crawl budget.

Data: who makes sure the number measures something

The data owner answers two questions before any report. Who has access to the dashboards? And what is marked as a conversion?

The first one looks like red tape until the day it fails. In Search Console, every property needs at least one verified owner. ⁷ If the only verified owner leaves the team, Google’s help says to verify ownership again to keep access. ⁷

Removing an owner does not delete their verification token either. As long as the token stays on the site, the removed person can verify again. ⁷ Read that with the agency from three contracts ago in mind. Its verification file may still be sitting on the server today.

The second question is about the measuring tool. In a scan of my own client roster, I found accounts with conversion rates of 100.00% and 91.94%. In one of them, the event marked as a conversion was a page view. Every session loads a page, so every session converted. ⁸

Nobody acted in bad faith. Someone set up the measurement in a hurry, on the day the site went live, and nobody opened that screen again. ⁸ Checking the tool before reading the number is the first exam of an SEO audit, the baseline exam.

Changing the site: redesigns, migrations, and URL changes

In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, wrote a line for the people who run websites: “URIs don’t change: people change them.” ⁹

Every URL change is someone’s decision. Google publishes the playbook in its guide to site moves with URL changes. It covers domain changes, merging several domains, and path changes within a site. ¹⁰

The playbook starts before the move. Think of moving house. The night before, every box gets a label with the room it goes to. Whoever does that does not spend the first week hunting for paperwork.

On the site, every old URL gets the new address it will go to. Google says to start with the important ones: the URLs in the sitemap, the ones with the most traffic, and the ones with links pointing to them. ¹⁰ This is called a URL map.

At a company with structure, the map needs an owner. The agency builds it, IT implements it, and marketing checks that the pages that sell are on the list. With the map ready, five rules from the same guide prevent most accidents:

1. One change at a time. If the company wants to switch domain, CMS, and layout, Google recommends one after the other. The domain first, then the layout. ¹⁰
2. A large site can move one section at a time. That makes problems easier to monitor, find, and fix. ¹⁰
3. Do not send everything to the homepage. Many old URLs pointing to a single, unrelated destination confuse users. Google may treat that as a soft 404. ¹⁰
4. Test blocks come off at launch. Many companies block crawling or use noindex on the development environment. The guide lists forgetting to remove those blocks among the common mistakes. ¹⁰
5. Redirects stay for at least a year. That is the timeframe the guide gives for Google to transfer signals to the new URLs. ¹⁰

For a domain change, the Search Console Change of Address tool comes in too. It requires the person making the request to be an owner of both properties, the old one and the new one. ¹¹ Go back to the data section. If the only verified owner is the agency that left, the migration stalls on launch day.

The playbook is public. Even so, moves tend to go wrong for another reason. I have a case that shows which one, and it does not flatter me.

A software company that sells to large organizations redesigned its site in June 2026. My team followed the process from start to finish. Two recommendations never got carried out. Site speed was never fixed, and not every page made it to the new site. ¹²

I compared the 40 highest-volume pages, before and after. None dropped out of the index. Thirty-four slipped in position. Searches for the brand name stayed at the top. ¹² Linking the drop to the redesign is my own reading, based on the timing. I do not call it a proven cause. ¹²

We were in the room as consultants, and the recommendation stayed in the meeting. What remains is a governance question. Who signs off on the “go” after the list of losses has been presented? Who answers if a page that brought in customers gets left out? ¹² If that person has no name today, the next redesign is born without an owner.

When the move already happened without a map, the remedy comes afterward. Nobody checks what went missing in the moving truck. You only find out something never arrived when you go looking for it. ³

The work is an inventory in four columns. URLs that disappeared. Blocks of text deleted from pages that stayed live. Internal links that were removed. And questions the site stopped answering. I call this forensic SEO. ³

Many locations, many brands, many domains

A company with structure rarely has a single address. It has the main brand’s domain, the acquired brand’s domain, a subdomain for each location, and the blog someone set up for an old campaign.

Each address tells a piece of the story, and the machine fills in the rest on its own. In the book’s case, with six domains under one owner, only one had Search Console set up. ⁵ The full diagnosis is in the piece on entity fragmentation. Here are three decisions that need an owner.

Measurement. A Search Console Domain property combines all subdomains and protocols. ¹³ It requires verification through a DNS record, and the DNS sits with whoever manages the domain. ¹³ To see each location separately, Google’s help suggests one property per domain or subpath, plus one that contains them all. ¹³ It follows that the Domain property already contains the subdomain’s data. Adding the two together counts the same click twice.

Merging domains. Merging domains is a site move with URL changes, and everything in the previous section applies. ¹⁰ There is one extra step. The Change of Address request goes out for every verified variant of the old domain, including subdomains and the www and non-www versions. ¹⁰

Location names. A multi-location business has its own rules in Google Business Profile. Google asks for consistent names and categories across all locations, so customers can recognize the business on Maps and in search. ¹⁴ It also prohibits more than one profile for the same location, in one account or several. ¹⁴ If each location registers its own profile, the rule depends on every manager remembering it.

The ownership sheet, in a one-hour meeting

Everything you have read so far fits on one sheet. You need one hour with someone from marketing, someone from IT, and whoever handles the data.

Draw four columns: the item, who decides, who carries it out, and who has access today. Fill in these seven rows:

1. The domain and the DNS.
2. The CDN, the firewall, and the robots.txt file.
3. The CMS and the page templates.
4. The Search Console properties and the verified owners of each one.
5. The events marked as conversions in Analytics.
6. The list of URLs that bring in customers, with the date it was pulled.
7. The business profiles for each location.

Every row calls for one person’s name. Wherever the “who decides” column is empty, you have found the next incident. Wherever access sits with someone who has already left the company, you have found the second one.

When the sheet shows gaps nobody inside can close, it may be worth bringing in someone from outside. A disclosure here, because I have a stake in the next sentence. SEO Genome sells SEO consulting, and part of that work is bringing order to an in-house team. The five questions we publish for judging any consulting firm, ours included, cover who does the work and who reviews it. If your sheet came out with a name in every row, you do not need us to get started.

The next redesign date

From now on, when someone sets a date for a new site, you will ask for three things before it. The name of whoever has veto power over any page that gets dropped. The URL map, starting with the pages that bring in customers. And the list of verified owners for each Search Console property.

If any of the three is missing, the date is not ready yet.

The first step fits into this week. Print the sheet, book the hour with IT and marketing, and write a name on each of the seven rows.