Enterprise SEO. Process
SEO Governance: Who Gets to Create, Delete, and Redirect a URL
Not every SEO problem is technical or creative. Some are organisational, and they are among the most damaging because nobody owns them. On a growing pet e-commerce brand, the biggest drag on organic growth for months was not the algorithm or the content. It was that four different teams could each create, change, and delete URLs, with no process, so the website was quietly fighting itself. This is an SEO governance problem, and most companies do not know they have one.
How URL Chaos Happens
It is nobody’s fault, which is exactly why it spreads. The marketing team launches campaign and landing pages that happen to target the same terms as core category pages. Merchandising creates and deletes collections as the catalogue changes. Developers add parameters and templates that spawn URL variants. Each team is doing its job. But with no one owning the URL as an asset, the result is duplication, cannibalisation, orphaned pages, and a steady trickle of broken links and lost redirects that no single person can see.
The damage is cumulative and hard to trace. A marketing landing page starts outranking, then suppressing, the category page it was meant to support. A deleted collection becomes a 404 that was earning links. A campaign URL gets indexed and competes with the evergreen page. None of these is a disaster on its own; together they are a constant leak, and because no one owns the URL lifecycle, no one is watching the tank empty.
What SEO Must Own
“A URL is an asset, and assets need an owner. When four teams can create and delete pages with no process, the site competes with itself, and no single person can even see it happening.”
Ram Kr Shukla, SEO and Growth Consultant
Setting Up the Governance
Governance sounds heavy, but it is really just a lightweight process and a clear owner. The aim is not to make SEO a bottleneck; it is to make sure every change to the URL set passes one checkpoint that thinks about search before it ships.
A simple SEO governance process:
- A single owner, SEO, for the URL lifecycle: creation, redirection, deletion, and sitemap inclusion
- A lightweight request step so any team creating an indexable page runs it past SEO first, to catch cannibalisation early
- A rule that deletions and redirects are executed or signed off by SEO, never by teams acting alone
- A shared, maintained redirect map, so no redirect is ever lost or duplicated
- A regular audit for orphaned pages, unexpected 404s, and campaign URLs competing with evergreen pages
- Clear documentation so the process survives people leaving and teams changing
This is the least glamorous work in SEO and often the highest leverage, because it stops the site from undoing its own progress. You can fix cannibalisation and pruning all day, but if the process that created them is still running, they come straight back. Governance is how you make the other fixes stick, and on a large, fast-moving store it is frequently the difference between growth that compounds and growth that leaks away as fast as you build it.
Related: keyword cannibalisation, pruning and redirecting URLs safely, and internal linking at scale. This is core to my enterprise SEO work.
Common Questions
What is SEO governance?
SEO governance is the process and ownership around who can create, change, delete, and redirect URLs on a site. It ensures every change to the URL set is reviewed with search in mind, so different teams do not publish competing pages, throw away link equity with careless deletions, or lose redirects that quietly cost traffic.
Why does SEO need to own URLs?
Because a URL is an asset with ranking value, and when multiple teams can create and delete pages freely, they unintentionally cannibalise each other, orphan pages, and lose redirects. A single owner for the URL lifecycle catches these problems before they are published, when they are cheap to prevent rather than expensive to fix.
How do I set up SEO governance without slowing teams down?
Keep it lightweight: one owner for the URL lifecycle, a quick review step for new indexable pages, a rule that deletions and redirects go through SEO, and a maintained redirect map. The goal is a single checkpoint that thinks about search, not a heavy approval chain that blocks everyone.
Is your site quietly competing with itself?
When several teams can create and delete pages with no process, SEO leaks faster than you can build it. I set up the governance that stops the chaos, so your fixes actually stick.
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