A podcast that interviews SEOs who work in product and engineering teams to uncover actionable and practical advice on how to get things done.
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Areej AbuAli is the founder of Women in Technical SEO & an Independent SEO Consultant who has worked at companies like Zoopla and Papier.
Areej has a lot of experience working with tech teams, both agency and in-house. This conversation was so great because Areej has experience working in a marketing team at a large enterprise company and then moved into a Head of SEO role working inside a product team. We talked about her “night and day” experience of getting things done in both marketing and product teams.
In this podcast, we talked about:
How Areej started working in SEO
Getting Tech SEO Implemented using a bespoke framework
The experience with Terry the Product Manager
Getting tickets implemented in a marketing team with developers
How Areej learned to prioritise recommendations to tech teams ruthlessly
The reality of getting tech SEO implemented in an enterprise organisations
Getting buy-in at a large organisation
Working with tech teams to plan SEO recommendations
The move to Papier because the role was in a product team
The structure of the product team at Papier and how SEO sits in it
How SEO tickets were implemented and validated with the tech team
How to build trust in the team
How to add SEO recommendations to the product roadmap
The difficulty of needing work from marketing
Creating a team SEO slack channel for the whole team
Communicating the wins and shoutouts to the team
Being the only SEO in the product team
Planning, scoping and slicing SEO recommendations into tickets
Future-proofing websites and making them SEO-friendly
The power of retrospectives in tech teams
Why Tech SEOs should sit in the product and engineering team
Technical problems = people problems
80% of your recommendations won’t get implemented, so keep focused
The three top skills to work effectively in product and engineering teams
In this podcast, we talked about:
Listen now on Apple, and Spotify.
Areej’s recommended top three skills:
Keep recommendations concise - Make sure that anything you communicate to the development team is clear, simple and easy to digest (tickets, emails, documents, etc.)
Future-proof a website - Work with the tech team to build a functionality that solves problems at scale, not putting plasters on the website.
Fight to move SEO into tech - When working in-house, fight and get buy-in to move the SEO team into the tech team (product and engineering).
Where to find Areej
Website: https://www.crawlina.com/
Website: https://www.womenintechseo.com/
References
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Lessons from Zoopla and Papier | Areej AbuAli