How to make change happen in your organisation by talking your devs language
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This document provides tips on how to improve communication between SEO and development teams to help ensure SEO recommendations are successfully implemented. It recommends delivering recommendations in-person with clear goals, context and prioritization. It also suggests setting up tools for collaboration, integrating SEO into the development workflow, and educating developers on how their work impacts SEO. The overall goal is to make SEO an ally and have recommendations implemented successfully and on time.
How to make change happen in your organisation by talking your devs language
- 1. How to make change happen in your organisation by talking your devs’ language Email: maria@builtvisible.com Twitter: @mariacamanes Slides: https://bit.ly/300QzGI
- 2. Developers are not your enemy! They should be your allies
- 3. But they didn’t become developers to do SEO
- 4. You’ll need to make an extra effort to make them understand why they should care about your recommendations… …so that they can dedicate the time to implementing them successfully.
- 5. Reasons behind the fractured relationship Bad experiences with each other Lack of education and awareness Lack of context • SEOs have faced pushback when requesting certain implementations • Developers have been put off by bad/inexperienced SEOs selling untrustworthy services • SEOs don’t know enough about development. Devs don’t know enough about SEO • Lack of knowledge of the fundamentals and priorities of the other side • Improved relationships & trust can only be built once an understanding has been established • When describing the requirements for a new feature / task to the dev. team • Aspects that might seem evident to you might not be as intuitive as you think • They may end up with a very different idea of what you are asking for
- 6. A good Dev & SEO relationship will ultimately help you to Make things happen Successfully implemented Implemented on time
- 7. How to improve communication 1. Delivering your SEO recommendations 2. Setting up the tools required to work together 3. Integration within the development workflow 4. Educating and empowering your dev team
- 8. Delivering your SEO recommendations The way in which you deliver SEO recommendations will determine how and when the developer implements them.
- 9. Provide context & set clear goals and expectations Give as many details as possible on your recommendations • Explain the context of your recommendations • Include the reasons why they are important • Highlight the impact or potential benefit you expect to get out of its implementation • Break down the requirements into small tasks – providing context is important, but you need to make sure it is structured clearly so that you can get every detail implemented successfully. To get developers on board, make sure your requests include: • What the problem is • Why fixing it is important • What is required • What is the end goal
- 10. Enrich your recommendations • Include illustrations of the issues • Provide developers with examples of how the code should look • Use wireframes and mock-ups to communicate UX requirements more effectively • Add screenshots from competitors for non-technical audiences
- 11. Help them understand what your users are experiencing
- 12. URL structure: webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=<Test 1 ID>,<Test 2 ID> Compare how users experience your site and your competitor’s
- 13. Give only one solution to the problem • Give only your preferred option and fight for that one to be implemented. • If you provide a few options, they’ll always go for the easiest one (which won’t necessarily be your preferred one). Tip: make sure you are familiar with the other alternatives too, in case the development team shoots that one solution down. In most cases, a single issue will have more than one solution. Don’t present all of them on your document.
- 14. Include a prioritised list of your SEO recommendations Rank them based on impact and difficulty of implementation.
- 15. Accompanying spreadsheet with data • Create one tab for each recommendation and order them in order of appearance in the document (from highest to lowest priority). • Reference tabs in the audit • Use the same name and code number
- 16. Use log files data when possible • Basing your recommendations on actual log file data will help you understand how Google interacts with your site and prioritise tasks accordingly • This will also increase your credibility and the trust of devs on your recs You can see exactly what resources search engines like Google are crawling on your site Useful log file analysis guide
- 17. Make sure your recommendations make it to the receiver. Don’t send an email and hope for the best. People are busy and chances are that your precious audit, which took you days to complete, ends up buried by other ‘more urgent’ emails. Face to face delivery • Schedule a face to face meeting (ideally) or call with the relevant stakeholders and developers and go through your document. • Make sure everyone knows what’s required from them and don’t leave the room until you get the buy-in from relevant stakeholders and developers. • Now is time to prepare your backup solutions in case your preferred choice is not shot down.
- 18. Setting up the tools required to work together Make sure you keep track of your recommendations to ensure they get implemented successfully.
- 19. Get logins and access to the ticketing system Make sure you have access to the ticketing system. This way, when they create the stories for your change requests, you’ll be able to check: • That they correspond to your requirements • That all your recommendations are in tickets Configure the system to get notifications when there is an update on one of your SEO tickets or when someone mentions you in a comment. This will help you track and monitor the day-to-day progress without having to ask the development team.
- 20. Implementations tracker sheet task • To keep track of all the recommendations provided. • Educate your dev. team and/or project manager to use it – things will go smoother. • Use the ‘Complete’ tab to report on performance on QBRs & monthly reports. Tip: making devs. aware of the success will enhance your relationship & their trust on your recs. Here is a link to an example of spreadsheet we use with our clients Priority order Project Description Impact Ticket # Status Dates (recommendation & implementation) Owner Difficulty
- 21. Build a business case Know what is important to the stakeholders so you can justify the effort for decision-makers. Applying figures to your SEO recs will add some pressure on the dev. team to get things done. E.g.: use Google’s impact calculator to calculate the potential revenue impact of implementing site speed recs. E.g.: Group recs together and provide combined value (e.g. page templates, site speed recs together, etc.) Tip: whilst this will help you prioritise tasks against each other, as well as get the buy-in from stakeholders, you should never guarantee these results; this is a forecast after all, so make sure you make this clear.
- 22. Integration within the development workflow Don’t expect developers to disrupt how they normally operate to accommodate an SEO recommendation. Understand their development methodology and accommodate as much as possible to them.
- 23. Get involved in regular meetings and roadmap planning so you can make changes ahead of time rather than after something has been shipped. Work with them to make a plan to keep you informed of any big site changes that might occur and offer them support. They don’t want to do their job twice. Getting you involved from the beginning will save everyone time.
- 24. Put your SEO recs into a format that they understand Use their language Have a better understanding of how they work and what is most important to them within their day-to-day job. • Find out what kind of project management methodology they use. E.g. agile, waterfall, etc. • Make sure you write tickets in the format they like them to be written in (e.g. very to the point with no context, more context, etc.) • Depending on their discipline, engineers will vary in their priorities and what they care about the most (e.g. front end? Back end?) E.g.: a front-end engineer will pay more attention to SEO issues that will provide a poor user experience
- 25. Maintenance is key Use the ticketing system on a regular basis • Respond to any comments and questions on SEO tickets made by developers • Make sure you closely follow updates on any of your stories • Check implementations once they are implemented in staging, before they are deployed • When pushed live, check the live environment again to make sure everything has been released successfully • QA by yourself before launch will help you ensure that all requirements were implemented without any bugs Use your tools! • Go through the top priority actions on your tracker on every call and get an update on how things are • This way, if there are any blockers, you’ll have time to act without causing major delays • Remember to update the spreadsheet to move any (successfully) completed actions to the ‘Completed’ tab (include the implementations date so that you can use to report on performance)
- 26. When you spend more time with developers you’ll learn from them, and they’ll learn from you. This is even more important when working agency-side. Embed yourself within your dev team Allocate one day where both sides have to spend time together to learn one another’s processes, priorities, and roadblocks • Isn’t enough to simply provide a list of SEO recommendations off the back of an audit and expect these to be actioned by the developers • There is a fair chance your suggestions will get lost amongst other priorities • Sitting with them 1 or 2 days a month will allow you to: o provide support o help with prioritisation o make things happen o better understand their priorities, challenges, and ways of working
- 27. Don’t be afraid to ask them if you see something strange! If you are unsure about something, ask them before you proceed to create recommendations. This will save you time!
- 28. Educate and empower your dev team
- 29. Explain to devs how their work impacts SEO & establish yourself as a trusted authority • One of the reasons why developers may not care about SEO is because they don’t think that it has anything to do with their day-to-day jobs • It is your responsibility to explain it to them so that they can buy in to the importance of SEO and understand what they can do to improve it • Make SEO an habit & integrate SEO work on the daily routine by promoting ongoing education on SEO topics Examples: • Organise regular SEO training sessions for developers • Weekly knowledge share sessions • Create an SEO best practice guide • Write documentation Make sure they are updated and train new starters! E.g.: tags that can remove pages from Google’s index, files that can slow down page load times, snippets that can break the HTML, etc.
- 30. Show them the data • Let developers know when one of their implementations have had a positive impact • Try to attribute performance changes directly to implementations made at the back of your recommendations • When this happens, make developers aware of the positive impact as well; they’ll be happy to know that their effort have paid back, and this will enhance your relationship with them, as well as their trust in the value of your recommendations Share with developers any success stories caused by their implementations Sitemaps upload
- 31. A few final thoughts…
- 32. Never throw an individual under the bus! As SEOs we need to be taking full responsibility. You can’t just delegate & not validate implementations.
- 33. Be flexible! Let devs teach you about the issues with your site, why certain recommendations can’t be done and allow them to come up with relevant alternatives.
- 34. Sometimes what will make the most impact isn’t technical SEO. It can be frustrating but your suggestions aren’t necessarily going to be the best thing for the website or business to do at that time.
- 35. • Developers are not your enemy, but your ally! • When interacting with developers, make sure you do so in a way that shows you value their work. • If they feel like you value their contribution, they’re more likely to put in extra effort to get work done on time. Remember...
- 36. Thank you. builtvisible.com Maria Camanes Fores Senior SEO Consultant Email: maria@builtvisible.com Twitter: @mariacamanes Slides: https://bit.ly/300QzGI