I recently spoke with an SEO who, along with his entire team, had just been laid off. The company was rapidly losing organic traffic , leadership was frustrated, and from their perspective, nothing was being done to fix it. The SEO saw it very differently. They had submitted more than 1,400 tickets over the previous 18 months, each documenting an issue and outlining the importance of what needed to be done. The backlog was extensive, detailed, and, in their mind, proof that the SEO team was working hard to reverse the decline. The problem was that none of the requested actions had been implemented. Engineering time had been consistently redirected to CEO initiatives, product launches, and other internal priorities that always seemed to matter more. From the SEO’s point of view, the work existed. From the business’s point of view, nothing had changed. Traffic declined, visibility dropped, and eventually a decision was made to eliminate this underperforming team. A backlog is not progress.…