Get your SEO issues fixed faster with better developer collaboration
Join senior technical SEO pros from Lumar for this webinar session on how to implement new SEO workflows that will improve your relationships with developers — and help you get your SEO projects completed faster than ever.
In this session, we cover:
- Common pitfalls in managing SEO-developer collaboration
- How to break the cycle of poor relationships between SEOs and dev teams
- How to communicate SEO requirements for web developers
- How to bridge the knowledge gap between SEO and developer teams
- How to prioritize SEO tasks
- How to improve dev ticket creation to communicate the key information and task requirements
- Real-world examples of successful SEO-developer collaboration structures
- How to automate SEO QA checks on web page templates to prevent new SEO issues from being introduced to your live site
Watch the entire webinar (including audience Q&A session) on-demand above — or read on for our top takeaways. You can also browse our huge library of website optimization and SEO webinars here.
Meet the Webinar Speakers
- Matt Hill, Senior Solutions Engineer, Lumar
- Chris Spann, Senior Technical SEO, Lumar
Common SEO-developer relationship pitfalls
“There is an opportunity for both SEOs and devs to understand there doesn’t need to be consternation,” he says. “There doesn’t need to be frustration because there are common goals and alignment that naturally take place between these two parties.”
Developers want to write good quality code and be efficient in how they deploy content across a website (or multiple websites).
They want to do their job well. SEOs value this. Because the lighter the code frame, the better we are able to provide excellent UX and peak performance for customers. These both tie into the objectives that we’re trying to achieve for better website engagement and performance.
“So, it’s not that there’s a knowledge gap between devs and SEOs in terms of their work priorities,” Hill says. “Sometimes that needs to be talked through in a workspace.”
“Ultimately, this is the inherent mutual understanding that SEOs and devs have but may not sometimes always communicate with each other.”
For many organizations, these communications channels might not be there and this truly collaborative culture might not be a priority. But as Hill points out, it absolutely should be.
Hill has learned a lot from his experiences both on the vendor side and the agency side.
“The best way to come into a new working environment – a new team that you’re working with – is, of course, to not come in and demand and ask for things right away,” he says. “No one likes to be told how to do their job.”
He believes SEOs should adhere to these three strategies to improve their collaboration with dev teams:
- Establish rapport by asking questions about the current process.
- Be thorough in your communication.
- Make life as easy as possible.
He advises that we have humility and communicate how SEOs can help devs day-to-day.
Likewise, we shouldn’t wait for issues to be the excuse to have conversations. We should be talking about positive outcomes, too.
Chris Spann notes that when writing tickets for developers, we should take the time to explain what the outcome of an SEO fix will be. He calls this the “so that”.
For example, “We need the canonical tags fixed so that the 50% of our traffic coming via Google is getting to the right part of the site.”
When it comes to following up on work, email follow-ups with screenshots and impact updates (for example, showing that we did this work in December, but look at the positive impact it had in January) are really important for showing how positive tangible outcomes can be made together.
This will make future jobs easier.
Task Prioritization Grids for SEO Dev Work
Task Prioritization Grids can also help streamline work for both SEOs and devs.
According to Hill, these types of task prioritization grids can crystallize – for both teams – where things should come in their day-to-day priority. And the output. What’s the goal for each of those tasks?
Spann describes the four levels of SEO tasks:
- If it’s minimum effort: Do it now, do it yourself.
- If it’s slightly more effort but wouldn’t involve much/any dev involvement: See if it can be “squeezed in”. If the hoods open, may as well fix something. If you know someone is working on the page header, and that’s where your issue is, ask if they can take a look at it.
- If it’s more effort and more dev time: It’s time to write a ticket and get it on the board.
- If it’s low-effort but still requires dev involvement: Prioritize it internally (as a bigger job, but one that can be completed relatively simply).
So, how can devs implement changes of their own to make coming to them easier and more comfortable for SEOs? Hill advises that developers:
- Break the traditional silos in communication – bring SEOs into meetings, into the space.
- Continue to be ‘SEO curious’ – even if it’s not front of your mind.
- Continue the feedback loop for optimization – what works with your workflow, what doesn’t.
Tools for better SEO-developer collaboration
Lumar’s Protect app can help bring more alignment between SEO and engineering teams. Protect offers automated QA testing testing that can be done both in pre-production and live production environments.
An automated SEO QA testing tool not only provides alignment with the dev cycle but can also help prevent issues from going live on your site in the first place and having a negative impact on search rankings/visibility.
Lumar’s generative AI tool for dev ticket creation is another tool that can help SEO teams align better with their developers. SEO teams often encounter bottlenecks in resolving the SEO issues they uncover on their sites, starting with the first step following a site audit: writing and submitting developer tickets.
With Lumar’s new AI-Generated Ticket Content, the ticket-writing process has never been more streamlined and hassle-free.
Here’s how it works, in brief (see below for step-by-step guidance):
- Crawl your website to uncover technical SEO, site speed, or accessibility issues with Lumar’s market-leading website crawler.
- Review your crawl reports, find the issue for which you would like to create a dev ticket, and add a ‘task’ to your Lumar Task Manager.
- From Task Manager, select ‘Generate Delivery Ticket’ for the issue you want to add to your developers’ queue.
- Lumar’s AI (Lumi) then combines details about the technical issue uncovered in your crawl with our extensive guidance and the details entered into your Task Manager item to generate a first draft of your delivery ticket in seconds.
The dev ticket content is formatted into a consistent ticket structure, including:
- Title
- User Story
- Description (of the specific issue and any negative implications)
- How to Replicate (so developers can reproduce the issue)
- Requirements and How to Fix
- Acceptance Criteria (the criteria that need to be met to consider the ticket complete)
This information can then be reviewed and amended where necessary and then pasted into Jira or your ticket delivery system of choice.
Real-world examples of SEO/dev partnership success
Spann reflects on working on a brand website in the past, which was heavily dependent on JavaScript and had a number of issues – often delivering the wrong pages for the wrong keyphrases or not even loading content at all.
The first step was to ask the developers: Do you feel like what you’re presenting is as good as what your competitors are? This was followed by meetings to go over the finer details.
“A big thing I found with devs is don’t talk in SEO terms,” Spann says. “Don’t talk about equity. Don’t talk about links…our slightly vague metrics that we are forced to work with because Google doesn’t give us anything better.”
“The rest of the world, understandably, expects to be able to actually have definites to work in.”
He also suggests the following things for SEOs to remember:
- No questions are dumb.
- Go in with an open mind.
- Be willing to learn. And to accept when told this will be a big bit of work, actually.
- Be ready to help them: Hey, I’ve got a crawler. We can check every page now.
Working at a previous client, Spann also found – while checking his crawls one day – one of his sitemaps had disappeared.
In this instance, his first option was to write a ticket and ask for it to be fixed. But he did some research and found that a new price aggregation partner was handling some of the site’s URLs – including anything with “flight”. The flights sitemap was one such page.
It was useful for Spann to have a clear understanding of the issue and to be able to approach the devs with this information.
He also followed up the fix by renaming all the domain’s sitemap URLs to “sitemap-“ – minimizing the chances of this happening with another area in years to come.
Hill agrees that it’s really important to be able to use mishaps as learning opportunities.
He sums up by advising that we meet teams where they are.
“Not all organizations have that strong SEO group with multiple SEO stakeholders and multiple devs to work on it,” Hill says. “Sometimes you have an SEO-heavy organization with a limited dev environment.”
With this in mind, being able to do a simple single page fetch to be able to test URLs on the fly in the console environment (where devs prefer to work) is very helpful.
“It’s being adaptable,” he says. “Understanding the needs of different businesses as they grow.”
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