SEOs and developers: Why they’re better together [Video]

Google’s Martin Splitt discusses his mission to provide both sides with the knowledge and vocabulary necessary to close the gap.

29 May 2020, 16:00 by George Nguyen

SEO teams are responsible for their organizations’ organic visibility, yet, as In-House SEO Advisor for Search Engine Land Jessica Bowman likes to phrase it, these teams directly move very few levers that will actually improve SEO, particularly at enterprise companies. In these larger organizations, product managers, writers, UX designers and developers are the ones whose work may consistently affect a site’s ability to rank highly. Oftentimes, this makes SEO teams only as efficient as their ability to communicate and cooperate with other teams.

During our crawling and indexing session of Live with Search Engine Land, Google’s Martin Splitt shared his mission to shatter the divide between SEOs and developers, as well as ways the two teams can benefit from one another.

“I am bridging two communities that intersect quite a bit, but don’t necessarily acknowledge this intersection,” said Splitt, pointing out that there can be an inertia that prevents both parties from working together to strategize content and improve user experience. “There is a lot of potential for collaboration and winning things together that is untapped, and I’m trying to bridge that by giving SEOs the vocabulary and the backing to actually talk to developers confidently,” he said.

“I think good developers and SEOs want websites to be fast, so oftentimes developers don’t necessarily convey this properly to the business side of things, whereas SEOs already have a really good rapport with the business side of most operations and organizations,” Splitt said, adding that this shared goal could be the basis for cooperation, but for some reason, typically isn’t.

On the other hand, SEOs that do not have a comprehensive knowledge of JavaScript, for example, may disparage certain techniques out of ignorance, hurting their own credibility with their developer counterparts. “I’m trying to give both sides enough information and insights into what the other side does so that they can work together,” Splitt said.

Why we care. Mutual understanding and respect between SEO and other teams, particularly development, enables open dialogue, which can be the difference between collaborating on upcoming site changes together, or one team putting in extra hours to perform damage control.

As Splitt said, there is also an opportunity to learn from other teams: SEOs can gain more insight into the technical side of the sites they work on, and developers can learn to view their work through a business lens. If you’re interested in bridging this connection, check out our SEO for Developers content.

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