The author’s views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
This is part one of a three-part series with Helen Pollitt on how to work better with folks within your company.
SEOs and developers need to work better together. Understand how to communicate with each other in a way that fits into each other’s processes. By doing so, you can safeguard your organic traffic while also safeguarding your entire website.
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Video Transcription
Hi, I’m Helen, head of SEO at Car & Classic, and today we’re going to look at how SEOs and developers can work better together. Now, I’d spend some time explaining to you why developers and SEOs need to work better together, but it’s kind of obvious really. Developers have the opportunity to make our lives so much better by quickly implementing that fix to load speed or making our lives so much worse by accidentally rolling out some code that completely de-indexes the website.
But actually, we can really help developers as well because we have the opportunity to give them data into usability and accessibility. It’s actually quite important that we work well together. Now, you often hear people say that if you want to get on well with your developers, you need to bribe them with doughnuts, which is a little bit insulting and a lot expensive because who has that kind of doughnut money just hanging around?
But actually, we need to work out how we can form a really good working relationship with developers that doesn’t rely solely on baked goods. How do we do that?
Understand processes
Well, first off, we need to start by understanding their processes, because essentially if we’re asking them to do things for us, we need to make sure that we are communicating in a way that fits into their processes.
So learn how to brief in your requirements in a way that helps them to prioritize and plan your work. So what is it that they do at the moment? Do they have a ticketing system that they use that they put all of their requirements in, and it allows it to be monitored as it moves through the process? Or do they have some other way that they track the work that they’re doing? But make sure that you are putting in your requirements and your requests in the format that works for them.