You’ve worked out what’s wrong, and you’ve given your web development team a laundry list of requests: re-index these sites, repair this duplicate content, redirect these URLs, but how frequently are those fixes prioritized, and how much time do you spend pushing to get them done?
One of the wisest (and most sympathetic) things you can do as an SEO is cultivating a positive, productive connection with your web developers. They are, after all, your other half, the key to getting your work done efficiently and effectively. Britney Muller outlines six critical strategies to get your web dev on board with SEO in this Whiteboard Friday, from trying to understand their job better and offering assistance when you can to sharing your wins and asking for feedback on your collaboration.
- Establish a genuine relationship with developers and attempt to gain a deeper understanding of their roles.
Create a genuine relationship with the developers you deal with first and foremost. Gain a better understanding of their function and how they evaluate their performance. Find out what programming languages they use. Understanding their point of view on issues will help you build a stronger working relationship. Building trust is a big part of that.
I’ve built that trust by simply acknowledging when I don’t know how to perform a specific SEO remedy. Even if I believe I do, I prefer to inquire, “What do you think the best approach to go about doing this is? How would you go about implementing this change or optimization in the most efficient way possible?” Because they have that backend understanding of the website, they will almost always be able to perform these website improvements in a far more efficient manner.
Being humble and admitting that you don’t know everything is essential. It would be best to teach how to program pages or fix something; instead, it should be a conversation and information exchange on both sides.
- Learning from developers can help you improve your SEO skills.
I guarantee it. Working at Moz is one of my favorite things to do. I’ve learned a lot from the programmers here. However, some of the developers have picked up tips from myself and other SEOs that work here. Developers want to program sites and pages that perform well in search. Therefore this is a symbiotic working relationship.
I believe that expressing and communicating the potential worth of a well-crafted web page is part of your work. Demonstrate how much more powerful their code and piece can be if correctly configured or configured with JavaScript and Google crawling different portions of it in mind.
That is what makes it such a productive working relationship. Be willing to learn new things from your programmers.
- Defend the developers with whom you collaborate.
Recognize what they’re attempting to achieve. It’s a win-win situation if you can help support it or consider it in your work and the projects you’re working on.
- Establish a workflow/process for monitoring development changes and catching issues early.
Creating this workflow or procedure in which you can keep an eye on dev changes is something that many people inquire This can get cumbersome for huge websites. It might be challenging to keep track of changes that could have an impact on SEO.
But, can you have that dialogue with a developer team of developers on the best way to handle this? Can you link me to GitHub to see what’s Whatever it is? It can genuinely help you establish an environment where you can execute preventative SEO. You’re ensuring that nothing goes wrong in the future, and you’re making the situation more bearable in the long run.
- Tell your developers about your SEO successes, and praise them!
Share your SEO victories with the developers, mainly if they assisted you and maybe supplied better solutions. It would help if you thanked them, and what a fantastic opportunity to share in those victories while also developing your professional connection.