Does your web development team strategy work with prioritizing technical SEO issues? Does any of the following questions sound familiar to you?

“Why wasn’t this run by me first?”

“When they were doing this, did they even think of SEO?”

“Why are my requests not being prioritized?”

You’re definitely not alone, so breathe.

Do you remember how difficult it is to arrange a meeting for the research workshop? Now imagine doing that with a team of busy developers, adding requests to their busy days.

Developers are so busy!

When it comes to SEO, professionals are constantly planning content for re-optimization and production and the same goes for developers. They’re always on call if something should go wrong with a website, have weekly sprints and tech dept.

What we need to do is better understand how to communicate with our development teams, how to change the moving forward process, and how issues should be prioritized in order to better the experience of working together.

How To Teach Your Development Team All About SEO

In order to help your SEO strategy to be successful, there are a few things you can do that might help. What’s important is prioritizing the things you need to do first. It becomes a whole new challenge when you’re talking about technical SEO.

Teaching The Web Development The Basics On SEO

It’s very important for your development team to know exactly what SEO is in order to prioritize the technical issues, also educate them on the importance of SEO as a channel to the site.

The development team is not aware of a technical problem frustrating/obstructing SEO most of the time. They don’t create technical issues on purpose and can be very defensive when it comes to their work just like anybody else.

Show them how you can work together instead of having them think that you’re blaming them for the issues occurring.

Give Context To Your Request

While you create a technical document containing all the issues on the site, consider adding why it’s necessary to fix and what exactly the fix should be. The developers will have more information regarding the issue and the fix if you include a few educational resources for them to understand how it can benefit the website as well as why it’s so important.

If you fail to include this context on why it’s important to fix the issue will be adding more workload on both teams because the information must be searched for, thus the request won’t be a priority.

Regularly And Also Openly Share Your Knowledge

Breaking down the silos of the development and marketing teams is very important. In organizations where one department has an impact on the goals of another, communication is super important.

You might be interrupting the last week of their sprints when you submit a ticket telling the team to update a big amount of canonical tags. Another thing that might add more work to both teams along the line, would be if the development team 404s a few of your SEO pages that are valuable by accident.

It’s no fun adding a bunch of work to someone else’s load and no one wants to do that, but having sessions where you share each other’s knowledge can possibly make it easier to explain from an SEO perspective what matters most on a site so the development team looks at where and how it can be incorporated into their current line of waiting projects.

You can try to make these sessions fun and entertaining because face it, nobody enjoys internal meetings it’s understandable. Walk through an actual issue together or have a ‘hackathon’. When you collaborate on something that’s in fact a real issue that’s actionable, both teams can understand how each other works.

It’s important to discuss as a team and make sure you’re not just passing work to one another without explaining why it’s so important. SEO is an important step to having a healthy SEO organization and discussing as a team how each person’s role is interconnected is vital.