Why should developers learn SEO?

Key Takeaways

don't developers want people to use what they build how do you prove your worth as an seo how would you measure your work's impact why don't seos listen to developers hello and welcome to another episode of seos and developers with me today is monica lent who is a developer turned entrepreneur building her own software as a service product and she's a seasoned blogger too all right and i'm here with martin who is a developer advocate at google search and a passionate underwater photographer monika i'm super super happy to have you here as my guest today um we met at a developer conference i think in austria the first time and i remember correctly back in the days when conferences were an actual thing and i remember we talked about so many different stuff like technical topics but also we talked a little bit about seo because you started building your own product and um as a developer turning into product management and building a product that must have been a super interesting challenge and i'm guessing one of the challenges has also to like pick up seo and digital marketing skills hasn't it yeah totally i mean when i started building the product like a lot of developers i started with the code and figuring out where to get customers uh was i wouldn't say a secondary thought but it was not something i realized it was going to be as hard as it actually was so seo definitely played into getting customers and building you know the kind of pipeline that we have today but it took so much longer than i was expecting i gotta say i'm not super surprised but i have been exactly that way until relatively recently coming from a developer background you're like oh you just you gotta get all your technical ducks lined up in a row and you'll be fine right but yeah it turns out to be a little trickier than that so this makes you the perfect interview candidate for the series where i try to bridge the gap between the seo world and the developer world and you know like there is this weird chasm that we somehow need to build a bridge over and i would love to hear your perspective on these things like what has been the biggest cliff that you fell off when it came to seo what has been a thing that you needed to learn and explore together what did you find hard coming from a developer's perspective into the seo world yeah i think one of the most challenging things especially for developers who are just getting started with seo is there is a lot of theory misinformation it's really hard to separate the you know the stuff that's proven and the facts from you know one-off observations and anecdotes and as a developer when you're used to working in code and concrete facts things that either work or don't coming into the world of seo it feels like you don't have those kind of more scientific tools or more fact-based tools that you can use to know for certain if i do a b and c you know this page is definitely going to rank so you're in this kind of you know nebulous space and i think coming from the developer perspective that's it's almost disarming or uh it feels unnatural because you're just not used to having so many variables at play which you can't control and can't even directly observe that's true that is true but then again sometimes in development you do have this like uncertainty too especially when you are charted uncharted when you are charting uncharted territory um and and i know what you mean because i as a developer used to be very comfortable in this world of api documentation that you just happen to follow and then the right things happen but i don't know what apis you have implemented or integrated in your in your developer life but oftentimes you have the same problem as developers because the api documentation says one thing and then you try that and it doesn't work and it turns out you actually need to do something slightly different to actually make the api work the way that you expected it to work so it's similar to seo i think because oftentimes as you say there's like a lot of lore a lot of anecdotal evidence out there and it's mis missing bits and pieces and it's also mixed with misinformation downright misinformation unfortunately yeah i see that that's a that's a tricky one how did you navigate that uncertainty i think ultimately i had to rely on my own experience at observation which unfortunately is the very slow path so if you're not just taking courses or listening to what other people say and you're kind of putting it into practice and you have to you know find out what's true for the topic that you're covering what's the space like what's the competition like all of those things are quite different in different spaces so at the end of the day even though when i talk to some people they may say oh i don't really believe that that made a difference but it's hard to it's hard to take that at face value when you say look i made just this one change and saw that impact so at the end of the day it was a lot of trial and error and doing it for a very long time and luckily before starting to build my product as you mentioned before i ran a blog and so that was kind of like baby steps i would say towards kind of understanding how to get search traffic but it changed quite a bit going from writing content for informational blog posts versus trying to get people to become customers and yeah there are just so many facets to kind of figure out along the way yeah it is it is not easy and it's a hard thing and i do hope that you did find and will find uh companions in the digital marketing space who are experienced enough to actually be able to kind of like kick-start this kind of journey or accelerate this kind of journey thanks to their experience but i i see that this is tricky because as you say it's different for every niche and finding an expert who is holistic enough and practical enough in the niche that you're in is not necessarily easy right that's a that's a bit of a tricky thing so did any resources pop up on your journey where you're like oh that was definitely helpful i ended up learning a lot from being in different seo communities so lots and lots of facebook groups and what i found most valuable about that is that instead of things like courses or blog posts where it's really like one person saying this is you know the facts on the ground this this is my observations you always had room for other people to contradict the advice or to offer different perspectives so no matter what you're learning about or what question you have i mean in seo you will always get you can get directly contradictory advice from two different people who swear that it's true but at the very least you're exposed to all of those different options and you can kind of reason through it yourself so that i think that's something that has been really helpful is like being in these seo communities as opposed to only consuming kind of unidirectional course material but it is a much less organized way to learn as opposed to doing a straight up course or something like that yeah but i think that's very important that's a very very important point because it is such a wide field and you can look at it from so many different perspectives and and focus on so many different aspects you might not necessarily get like singular truth or singular advice in the right direction and if you're being honest here the same is true for development courses or tutorials if you read a tutorial on whatever framework is the framework of choice today in the front-end world they'll be like oh yeah you can use this other framework but you know it sucks and it's going to be terrible and it's going to like ruin everything and you're going to have spaghetti code and and look at our beautiful code here and then that kind of keeps rolling and changing all the time as well so i think seeking out experience from as many perspectives as possible is a good idea that's not a bad idea how did you then evaluate what worked and what didn't i mean you said like you experimented and you made a change and you watched the impact how did you do that what kind of tools did you use where did you find out if your changes had a positive effect or had no effect at all or a negative one yeah i mean to be honest uh i wouldn't necessarily say i have a super scientific process you know there are definitely people who are running like in-depth seo experiments single variable testing and so forth but pretty much what i did is i i know that when you publish something or create something it takes time to rank so at that point you just have to kind of keep going and trust trust somehow that if you create something that is really good one day the algorithm will be good enough to reward that doesn't always happen off the bat but that's like something i at least i strive for or hope for that if i know what i create is better than anything else out there eventually eventually um it will be rewarded as such and sometimes that takes a long time but um i mean i as i learned what i really did is i would go back through the entire kind of corpus of content that i had written or published and regularly refresh it with the new lessons that i had learned you know whether that's making my title tags better hopefully google would use my new title tags um or you know maybe it's changing the structure making the article more complete or even the opposite taking out sections that were you know maybe not fitting the search intent so well and could be split out into their own articles and just kind of doing this iteratively and i could see that content that had previously never ranked at all would eventually start to rank once it kind of fit into those patterns that i had learned so anytime i had a piece of content that did really well especially really quickly i would just say okay what's different about this compared to all the other stuff that i have and try to take lowe's lessons and apply it to old content because it's so much more efficient than just only publishing stuff that's new and yeah it's it's not so scientific but uh yeah observations using for example google search console you know i am in there every single day and you know being able to see okay like something is starting to pick up impressions something is starting to pick up clicks or what are the terms that this is getting impressions for but i'm not really mentioning in the content you know what does that mean do i need to include it um or does it mean that i'm showing up for stuff that's kind of irrelevant and maybe i need to hone in the messaging so that i get get shown for the terms i really want people to find me with so all of those were kind of things that i used to take you know a library or backlog of content and iteratively upgrade it as i as i learned seo slowly but surely in practice it sounds like a really really interesting journey that you have been on coming from a developer's background looking more into the seo bits and pieces if you think back at the developers who are still working as part of a larger team and working in-house in a product company or in an agency would you say that you as a developer benefited from this journey despite maybe not having your own product to build with like if you were part of a larger team of developers would you benefit from this knowledge that you gathered now i think so i mean the thing about seo which i feel a lot of developers maybe get distanced from is just the business impact of your work because you can really see how you know certain kinds of rankings or showing up for certain terms means that you're i mean you're having a really direct impact on the the bottom line of the business um and ultimately the type of content that brings in customers you know it has a specific search intent it communicates specific information um that draws in you know the target customer you present a solution and so forth so kind of understanding how the product that you're spending so much time laboring over actually gets discovered by people i think is really rewarding because especially with my background as like a front-end developer as my technical focus the thing that drives me and people who work in similar fields to me is getting something i've created in the hands of users right and seo is one of the key ways that people can actually discover the thing that i'm creating um and i think yeah a lot of times engineering teams end up being kind of distanced from marketing because it seemed like we're building the product you find the people um and at the end of the day it doesn't quite work that way unless there is this kind of like seamless journey uh from discovery to activation and so forth and yeah i mean i think seo is a very valuable skill for developers to learn and i am trying to get as many people interested in it and picking up the basics um at the very least because it's it's just such a valuable skill uh when it comes to getting people to actually use the stuff that you're building absolutely and i never quite understood that because in the end i'm building my product the code i've write is for people to do something to accomplish something that i couldn't accomplish without or i couldn't accomplish as nicely with without my code being out there and if no one finds it and i i wonder like people to this day still think like oh i just build it and they'll come but that's not true if you just put a website online and do nothing else like no one will come no will will find it you have to make sure that that you can actually be found and how do people discover new content online and intuitively that's through a search engine right you just search for something yeah it's true i think uh at the same time a lot of people they may rely on these kind of one-off channels so well let's say i launch on product time or i launch on hacker news or something like that and you can get an incredible wave of traffic lots of people talking about you but at the same time it's that's not as important as having the same number of people visiting your site every month or having some kind of consistent flow yeah it's it's funny because as a as a front-end developer and i'm sure you've seen this as well like you learned so much about how websites work but the kinds of technical aspects of a website that you learn when you are doing seo is actually quite a bit different than what you learn when you're making a typical website going through a web development course or boot camp or learning to build front-end apps it's like a completely different side of web development and so you can talk to someone who is you know 10 years in the web development field and they might still say i don't really know what a canonical url is for and that doesn't mean that they are you know bad at their job it's just there is this entire parallel aspect to web development that you don't necessarily learn when you're learning to build apps or a typical website it just happens to not be part of the learning path like most tutorials are like okay we put in a title because you kind of need to put in a title but we don't touch it like it's it's just like demo app here we go like that's our title hello world is our title done meta description nah ignore that uh meta viewport maybe because you know mobile is actually a thing these days so fine we'll put in the meta viewport canonical url we don't need that not like none of this actually actually matters none of this is like the tooling is all there it's just you need to know that you need to use it because it's not part of the learning path so that's it keeps blowing my mind yeah totally i don't know what do you think is the solution to that i don't know i'm trying to do a little bit of developer education there so we did create a javascript seo video series on our youtube channel the same channel that you're probably watching this on um and and i explained the basics there because there are a lot of people who are using frameworks like angular or ujs or react and they've never even thought about it and then they they encounter these weird moments where an seo pops in and goes like are we using javascript and then the developers go like duh yeah of course we are using javascript and they're like oh my god if we're using javascript we can never be found in google search this is a huge problem we need to like switch like away from javascript and how can we do that and then they're like i mean i guess server-side rendering maybe but that's like a lot of work and they're like oh what we have to do this is a very important which is not exactly true and there's like an educational challenge on both sides because on one hand uh what this seo has said has been absolutely true let's say like five to ten years ago but it's no longer true in in today's world and um the developer not even being prepared for something like this and not knowing where this is coming from or whether this is a problem or how to solve this problem or how to even just just come back with an informed decision making is not necessarily like a thing that happens in in a lot of teams and uh so i'm trying to do that with documentation and education um trying to go where developers are to developer conferences talk about seo but oftentimes as you say like developers are like ah seo is like this hand wavy black magic thing that i absolutely don't care about i care about technical things and technical decisions and technical interesting stories and it's tricky but i hope that videos like this maybe help to to shed a different light on seo and shed a different light on development as well yeah definitely and i think there's there's also this aspect where a lot of times developers may not realize that a lot of seo or getting it right also has to do with technical setup and when i talk to developers about seo this is actually the part that they find most interesting they love the tools they love the analytics um they love you know basically how can you get a perfect score or how can you get make sure it's all dialed in correctly yeah and so there are aspects that really appeal to developers about seo the trouble is most of them don't don't realize that that's even out there but at the same time they can have a really big impact by fixing a lot of these problems that kind of tend to pile up over over the years especially when nobody's been paying attention to it's like the entropy of a website like if you don't look at it it's like css like css will naturally decay there is no like that's my opinion that's true it's true yeah and in some ways like the seo quote-unquote or at least the technical aspects of seo they often also tend to do that because unless somebody took the time to explain to the developers this is why we're doing that it will be forgotten and they'll be like oh i didn't know that was important um we upgraded our framework and didn't include that plugin that was generating the site map or we changed our styling system and we decided to update all the headings so that they looked right but now they are you know no longer ordered as you used to expect them and these are you know examples of things that have happened to me when working on uh in a tech company with an in-house seo and yeah it just repeats itself that if you don't explain the why developers don't want to do anything unless you can tell them why like yes that is that is in our nature yes and cause is not enough and and it's it's wild because both seo and development are such broad fields you might have someone who focuses explicitly on uh back-end development they might not touch the front-end side of things and that's perfectly fine and it's the same way with seo like people are like oh there's this seo that talks about content and content strategy and i'm not interested so i'm not interested in seo but that's ignoring that there's also the technical seo people who are as nerdy as geeky as us developers are and they're like oh i'm really excited i want to try to figure out how we can pre-render our shadow dom in a puppeteer instance which is something where developers are perking up their ears and going like that sounds like an interesting thing like how do you do this can't you just like serialize the dom and it's like no because the shadow dom is hidden behind the shadow dom border so and it's it's that's an seo concern for some search engines not necessarily google search but other search engines might struggle with so you might need to find a technical solution to to overcome this challenge and um and there are so many technical aspects and if no as you say like if no one cares about them specifically and your your seo might accidentally not care about them or don't know about them because they might not be in this specific niche of seo where they are looking at the technical things they might just use a tool that gives them a report and depending on how good the tool is you might get a complete or non-complete report and the incomplete report might actually give misleading information too because it might just be the wrong tool for the job and the problem there is that developers then tend to just downright dismiss everything that comes from the seo department or from the seo side of things instead of going like oh right um let's sit down and talk about our requirements from the technical side so that you can figure out what the requirements are or how we can fulfill the seo requirements with this technical setup that we have there are very very few people out there that actually do this and i would wish that developers would also look into this and pick it up and i spoke with bartosz i spoke with mike on previous episodes of this series um they are one of or like part of this group of people and and it's it's amazing to see how they work and it's unfortunate that from the developer's side it doesn't seem to be much picking up um on the seo tasks as you say seo naturally decays if you don't pay attention so yeah i don't know how how to make this more visible to developers or how to motivate developers more to look into these things any ideas it's it's tough i think uh because especially depending on the size of the company that you're at it's really hard to see sometimes how your individual efforts move the needle and that's not what motivates developers so i think on the one hand you know if there was a way that you could actually show reports to people and say all right so we spent this time working on the technical seo of our site and there is a tangible increase in the organic traffic like that's something that you can feel pretty good about um but on the other hand a lot of times those improvements might be slow to show up it's also really hard to attribute changes in rankings in traffic to one specific change on your website it's really difficult i mean unless you have a lot of patience and you're just going to change only one thing for potentially weeks or months or however long it takes it's it's not really practical in some ways to just say okay we're gonna make this one improvement and not touch the entire site um so it's it's always a bit of a mix um but i think getting developers to the point where they can see the impact and just actually explaining to them why it matters another thing that i think we've talked about before in some of our conversations is accessibility so a lot of times it's not so easy to convince a developer let's say oh we want to do this for seo reasons only right so usually when you cut when you come to a developer and you say we want to improve the seo and that's why we're doing this like this is like a non-starter right because they're like well i don't want to make things for machines like uh i want to make things for users or in the case of accessibility i want to make these things accessible to more people so i think appealing to users as the reason you're doing something as opposed to just search uh is a more pragmatic way to motivate people to get interested because at the end of the day that's what your focus should be on as somebody who is improving the seo of your site it should ultimately come down to users although we you know we all know that there are aspects that you have to do sometimes to appease the machine a bit but that's also just the way computers work they're not mind readers so i think it's that kind of balance of like explaining the why like this is how this is how google discovers indexes content serves it and ranks it and then on the other hand this is the impact it's having on users here's how we can make stuff work better for both search engines and users at the same time make it more accessible easier to understand cleaner dom more performant all of those interests are actually aligned between seo practitioners and developers it just doesn't usually get discussed and i think part of that also comes down to the fact that both devs and seos struggle sometimes to get prioritization for these tasks so at the end of the day you're more hot fixing stuff than you are working on strategic things together that's a challenge too true it's also that the departments are usually like there's an engineering organization and then there's like the business or marketing organization and bridging the gap is not like working proactively together is not always easy on an organizational level so that's also probably hindering this kind of conversations and collaborations to happen and yeah interesting i just realized i remember the way that i usually try to get developers hooked is also to just have them think about building their own search engine what would websites have to do to be friendly to these and like what kind of optimizations would you do as a search engine um where developers might choose a path that these optimizations cause problems and and that also sometimes works like trying to figure out like turning it around and going like okay so now you're solving the engineering problem here on this side on the website creator site but what would you be working on if you were on the engineering side of the search engine and then things like accessibility and having properly ordered uh your your headings and having a meta description having links being actual links with urls to point to so that you can crawl them it becomes an obvious choice which it is not when you don't think of the other side so that's that's my approach to this and um i i like your approach of saying like here's what you need to do and and what needs to be happening for the bot to be able to consume your content and this is the impact it's having i think i was missing the impact component a bit so that's that's really interesting that's really interesting and you say like measuring impact on ranking is so hard and it yeah naturally because the ranking also depends on what other people are doing so it never is single variable testing right yeah i mean you can try to make a test and then google decides well it's christmas let's have a core update okay i'm a little bit bitter right because we've had a lot of updates this summer but like you know you can try to change something and this has happened to myself it's happened to friends all right don't mean to call you out but you know like it's you you make up some changes and then it's like well you know now there's an update or or whatever it is and you're like well anything that i was trying to test is now suddenly even less stable in terms of being able to give me some reliable learnings um so yeah there are just so many factors that at the end of the day i i don't obsess over it that much i just try to keep making it better keep iterating on old content um until it ranks number one where and i stop touching it out of fear usually usually uh sometimes i have to you know to make sure it's still accurate but um i don't know i think at the end of the day uh it's a fluid situation and you have to treat it as such um but yeah yeah it's exactly that like focus on building the actual product and doing the right thing for the user and as you say eventually search engines usually reward good things um it just might take a while and yeah core updates are an unfortunate reality um but they're they're important to make sure that we keep adapting as the web keeps adapting and uh to improve our search results we need to change things around which unfortunately collides with everyone trying things out and testing sometimes but that's just an inherent feature of the reality there cool awesome so yeah in that case i am very very grateful for for the conversation i'm so so happy to see uh developers crossing into the seo sphere and um yeah it was great talking to you thanks a lot for your time and thanks to everyone watching this i hope you enjoyed it and learned something as well and um yeah stay tuned for more episodes and again thanks a lot monica for being here with me and all the best for your product and uh keep blogging i really like the blog thanks martin really appreciate you having me it's okay okey dokey i'm like okay [Music] you