I was invited by a local agency to speak at their fortnightly lunch and learn sessions. I was very excited to be involved with this as I feel as an SEO I have a lot of wisdom and advice to share.
I have been working on a project to help SEOs and developers work better together so felt this would be the perfect time to start sharing that.
You can watch my talk on “how to cultivate a great relationship with developers” or read the transcript below.
If you want to find out more about the Lunch and Learn sessions please check out Sheffield DM on their website or Twitter.
How to cultivate a great relationship with developers, the transcript:
Giorgio:
Good afternoon everybody and welcome back to another fabulous Sheffield DM, lunch and learn session. I hope you’ve all got your sandwiches ready because today is sure to be another corker. If you don’t know me yet, my name is Giorgio I’m your host for Sheffield DM and we’ve been absolutely loving these events so far.
We’ve done three so far this year. We’ve had James Marriott talking about podcasting, a really fabulous episode and then a couple of weeks ago we had Collete Evans come on and talk about everything photography for digital marketing campaigns.
If you haven’t watched those yet they are available on youtube so flick back through our recordings after this event and go check them out anyway.
This week we are joined by Billie Hyde, Billie is an account manager at The SEO works, who are a Sheffield based agency and coincidentally based just around the corner from us at Evoluted. Agency neighbours, if you will.
Today Billie’s going to be discussing how marketers and particularly SEO professionals can cultivate some great relationships with their developers and get work done better faster and stronger.
Welcome Billie, gonna bring you into the stream now. How are you?
Billie:
Hey, I’m good how are you fabulous thank you
Giorgio:
Thank you so much for joining us today, really looking forward to your talk. I’m gonna shut up and not talk too much more and let you introduce yourself and get straight into your slides, but for everybody watching if you’ve got any questions for Billie during the events you can chuck them into the live chat if you scroll down a little bit on youtube you’ll find that and also this recording will, as usual, be available after the event for you to check out and peruse at your own.
So Billie over to you and I will see you on the other side.
Billie:
Cool, hi, so.
Today I’m going to just be talking to you about how to cultivate a great relationship with your development team.
So just so you know a little bit more about me I’m Billie, I’m an account manager at The SEO Works. I’ve been doing SEO for a couple of years now and before that, I was a content writer.
I’ve worked both in-house and agency so I’ve got to work with developers at very different capacities so I’ve managed to develop this presentation to work both for people that are agency-based or in-house.
If you do want to follow me or say him you can find me on any social media under @billiegeena
social media.
In this talk we’re going to be looking at:
Why developers might dismiss your technical suggestions
Why your ideas might have been turned down in the past
And how to present your suggestions to them in an effective way
So first we’re going to look at why a developer has turned down your suggestions in the past
The first reason is that you may have oversimplified it
So these days there are lots of fantastic tools out there that can basically, crawl a site and list the issues for you so like Sitebulb and then it’ll make recommendations.
I asked a few developers I know, what they thought of the recommendations and they said that they thought these hints were:
Patronizing
Long-winded
And one said vague
The feedback, to me, was that these tools were using a lot of words to not say anything.
Another was that the explinations were pretty basic.
So if you do use tools like this I just advise you to not copy and paste the hints word for word.
No
Take some time to do a little research and just edit the hints to be site specific.
Another reason why a developer may not go for one of your ideas is that you’ve not provided enough examples
So it’s really all about the evidence for them
But don’t spend hours and hours trying to find as many examples of one issue sometimes a developer can just run a quick script and find all of the issues.
I just advise to to send across some examples but not hundreds I normally try and send to examples and that might just take me half an hour to put together rather than spending forever crawling a site.
The third reason is how you communicated to them wasn’t right.
Take time to research every issue before taking it to a developer it’s really important that you consider what platform the site is built on because not all of them have the same capabilities.
So what you might find on a wordpress site may not translate properly to a custom built a platform on something like C#.
Research how it’s built, make sure you let them know the implications if they don’t take your suggestion seriously and also let them know how vital it is.
Is it going to instantly damage the rankings or is it really holding you back or is it just something that is just kind of nice to have, but not essential?
Really consider these before taking them to a developer.
I like to use a plugin from whatruns.com which just tells me exactly what a site’s built on so even if it’s something where we’re in the pitching stage I can have a real clear idea of how the site is built and what its capabilities are.
There are a few other plugins like this but this one has been my favourite so i really recommend adding that.
How are you telling them?
You also really need to think about what you’re going to say.
Don’t just send a message to a developer saying the “page speed is slow and we need it to increase”, they’re just not going to anything with that.
But when you go to them and you should be really specific with what the issue is so say something like:
“I’d like to look at improving the site’s page speed I noticed on Google Developers Tool the site service response time is five seconds over a fast connection so that way”
You’ve told them what the issue is you’ve told them
- Where you’ve found the issue
- Where you can make the improvements
Then they’ve got a much bigger idea of what what you’re talking to them about like that’s really going to be the main point in this entire presentation is just as specific as possible.
You are going to be so bored with me when I finished because that really is the key. Be specific.
The next thing I really want to talk about is how I like to present my ideas to a developer.
So the first thing I always like to do is to take time to think about the developer I’m pitching to.
It’s really important to remember that they don’t work the same way as us.
Developers could work on a ticketing system or in scrums and have to do everything in sprints.
So you’ve got to think that they probably have a lot of tickets open and they will do the ones that are high priority first. What is high priority to a developer might not be the same as you and that’s okay.
Because it’s two different jobs with two different goals.
I also like to take time to think about why they could say no so when I’m taking anything to a developer.
I look at what the cost time and energy requirements are for that task is it something where they could code a quick script and just change everything really quickly.
I’ve seen that it done for meta titles so they can run a quick search in like python find all the ones that are too short and just add a little bit of text to the end.
That’s not really going to be time-consuming.
But other tasks like looking at site speed by minifying JS, HTML or CSS.
Those could take a long time and what is the return of investment going to be on that. Is it
going to vastly improve the site? Is it going to make massive improvements to the site speed or is it going to just improve it by maybe two or three milliseconds?
Like something that could take hours or days might not be worth the payoff.
Another reason why they could say no is from you not doing enough research.
Literally being as informed as you can about any issue you take to a developer will help you get the changes approved. Be informed and be specific.
Also like don’t be dramatic when you’re talking about the implications.
I’m very dramatic sometimes but it’s like a developer’s not going to take that on board. They know the capabilities of a website and what is realistic. So exaggerating isn’t going to get you anywhere.
So now we’ve kind of thought about the developer and we’re ready to pitch to them.
We now need to think about what we’re going to include. So I have a bit of a checklist, your technical suggestion must:
- Highlighting how urgent the issue is.
I do this with the traffic light system. Some people aren’t as visual, so use numbers or just right high priority. - Break it down into which area does the issue fall under so that like mobile usability, page speed or whatever it doesn’t need to be more advanced than that
- Take a sentence or two to explain what the issue is
- Give them the implications
- Give them advice or options of how it can be resolved
I like to link to external documents so there’s a bit of a educational factor to it - Link to your examples
Another thing I like to do is PEE all over the place…
So I don’t know if you remember this it was a very big thing in my school every English lesson where we had to write something. Our teachers talked about peeing all over the place.
I ending up, bringing this to SEO with me
So it’s Point, evidence and explain. Then there’s my bonus bit which is explain again
Really delve into what the issue is. I found since thinking about this acronym when
writing my pitches that they have been more cohesive and approved more frequently.
It’s really worked for me
Here’s an example of how I send issues to a developer by spreadsheets and so you can see
I’ve got my area of improvements here and the traffic lights. I’ve got the issues I’ve then got the implications I’ve got my resolutions and then I’ve got the links to my affected URLs.
Then I have this section at the end which I really just use for me. With it, I can just quickly see if it’s something that’s been started if it’s completed. Or if the clients like put any notes. i’ll put there’s any pushback, I keep everything on here so if it’s a group project everyone in the can quickly see where things are at
I just think this layout has really worked for me
Sometimes a developer will just still turn down your suggestion and the best thing you can do when this happens is ask why.
Asking why it gives you the ability to build on that relationship with the developer so you can understand how they prefer to be communicated with. So the may like the spreadsheet format, or prefer to be told by email or some might even prefer a phone call.
I’ve also found asking why has led to situations where the developer has been like “it doesn’t fit with how we’re currently working or what we’re working on”.
or they’re like “we’ve passed it on to our scrum master it’s something we’re going to look at in
a few months time”,
Don’t be afraid to try to insert yourself into that scrum process either, even at an agency. I’m not going to every single daily scrum they have but I’ve turned up to a scrum every two weeks or at the end of a sprint.
It’s meant I’ve been able to see the pipeline and also be aware of the changes they’re making. so I can speak to my main contacts and let them know i’m wanting to be involved in this.
I can make more impactful decisions, which will benefit us all.
Also asking why provides you with an option to push back. If you don’t agree with their reasoning you can then say okay but if can you factor this in or I can provide more examples.
Don’t be afraid to question those big decisions.
Sometimes it can be a little bit like “why are you interested?” but there’s just no harm in asking.
The key takeaways from this really are to just keep on giving examples, Don’t forget to tell them how the issue is going to affect the site, be clear and be informed and that’s going to get you
miles ahead.
Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. I read a study i can’t remember where I’ll find it and tweet in a bit. It basically said it takes saying something five times for somebody to take it in.
Ever since I’ve started repeating myself constantly, yes I’m sick of my own voice now, but I am listened to more effectively.
The biggest takeaway is to just question why if something does get turned down.
So that’s kind of it from me, again if you have any questions about this or
want to talk about anything, just get in touch. This is how you can find me.
Giorgio:
Amazing thank you, Billie, I know I’m sure everybody else is giving you a big
round of applause behind their screens, really. We enjoyed the talk and you made some really pertinent points.
Having worked with developers for a lot of my marketing career I’ve been through all of these pain points. As much as I do love working with them you do have to be specific and make sure that you just explain things and explain and hey explain again. Just to make sure that you’ve got everything through really clearly and the reasons why you’re asking for things to be done.
I’m just going to share I didn’t share this beforehand I didn’t want to make you nervous but actually to everybody that’s watching that was Billie’s first time delivering a public talk, is that right?
Billie:
Yeah, I’ve done it recorded before but never had an actual audience
Giorgio:
Amazing stuff you did absolutely brilliantly and i know you’ve delivered this internally at The SEO Works and I loved it. I really enjoyed it today as well I haven’t had any questions in the chat so assume that you’ve done a fabulous job of explaining everything there.
But i did want to dig into a little bit with you myself and actually talk about beyond understanding how to communicate and build relationships with your developers do you have any thoughts on other things that marketers or SEOs should learn to help them work more closely with developers?
Billie:
That’s a really good question, take the time to understand their workflow. The way developers work is just very different to how marketers and SEO’s work. Whenever i’m working on say a digital pr campaign it’s very go go go as soon as we have had a good idea. We’re wanting to get that out we’re wanting to publish it right away.
But that isn’t the way developers work they have very formulated plans and like
although they’ll have tickets that pop up whenever something breaks or there’s a major issue. Working reactively doesn’t actually fit into their process.
so i think to be honest if there is if you do have the opportunity to be involved with the developers like scrum process and meetings like even if even if it’s very loosely that’ll just give you so much understanding to their process.
I’ve found just trying to forward think especially if you do need like a big landing page or anything creating, to think about that in advance.
So if you’ve had that idea for a campaign that sounds fun but maybe it’ll probably work better by planning it for like a month, two months, three months down the line…
Giorgio:
Yeah if there’s anything that I’ve found developers hate is being told to drop tools and start working on something new by an SEO coming in being all dramatic and “saying oh my god the world is burning quick fix this”
Billie:
Yeah and basically once you’ve done that the developer will just always expect you to do that every time as well.
Giorgio:
Just understand taking that time to understand it just helps but unbelievable that’s a really nice segue actually into Sarah’s question that’s just come through and chat, thank you Sarah
Billie, do you think that tone of voice can sometimes have an impact on whether or not a developer will action your tasks?
Billie:
Definitely, it’s like with anything if you’re asking for someone for something if you just go give me that they’ll be like “No, why should I do that?”.
That’s why I like the spreadsheet format to send things across to those developers, to be honest
because it’s like there’s no ego or rudeness for that it’s very straight to the point.
Sometimes when i’ve sent an email they’ll interpret my message wrong.
Just be polite and straight to the point.
Giorgio:
it’s like with anything yeah I think if we’ve learned anything over the past year of moving to work from home, written communication is very easy to get wrong. I think we could all do with improving something that I always love to do with more complex development requests is to jump on a video call. Just to explain those things in more detail.
Going back to your explination point again, having that chat helps like from for me specifically gets past that tone of voice issue when I’m writing something because I can be quite brief and quite to the point with text.
Having that video chat lets you just get those nuances out, understanding in and then you can reuse ticketing system or an email or chat or whatever to put the specifics down in writing
Billie:
Definitely like i can’t agree more with that I’ve recently just had a situation where it was like the way I and a developer was emailing. We just weren’t communicating in a way that worked for both of us and was getting crossed wires.
I said look can I have a video call and then it was just like instead of them thinking i was attacking their ideas like being like “I’m just trying to understand some decisions that were made”. They were seen as me going like why are we doing this and then as soon as i
had the call it was fine it was everyone was chill again so
Giorgio:
Awesome, a great point from Carl just come through the chat as well repetition’s good but remember you’re probably at the end of a very long list of stakeholders with demands and establishing relationships with alternate stakeholders is useful to balance priorities
Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve kind of got this balance of demands of you needing something doing as an SEO and potentially someone else needs something doing that they deem just as urgent.
How can we balance that with a developer and understand which should be approached first?
Billie:
I guess that’s that it’s really delicate that because every company and every style of business is going to have a different process. Especially now, I’m working in an agency it’s much harder to learn and manage them.
In house is far easier as you could easily have that communication with the stakeholder, I think it’s going to be much easier to get buy-in from stakeholders.
But if everyone within a company when sending their requests through didn’t just send it over. Instead, they explain what they needed and why they needed it that would help a developer prioritise so much/
That feels like an impossible task though.
Giorgio:
As the requests get more complex that only gets worse right.
Billie:
Definitely, yeah but maybe just be an advocate for that kind of change and if we can start it as SEOs maybe it could transfer to other industries or management styles.
Giorgio:
Yeah, I love it lead by example make sure, we’re the ones setting the standard for people excellent.
There are no more questions that have come through so we’ll kind of start to wrap things up again.
Thank you ever so much Billie it a fabulous talk. I’m gonna make sure to leave your slides up there so people can go and follow you on Twitter or if they want and check out your blog, I highly recommend it. Billie writes some great articles on there and I’m looking forward to seeing this hosted up there too soon.
Thank you to all of you in the audience who’ve joined us today we really really appreciate you coming and supporting Sheffield DM as we continue to try new things and keep the events rolling fingers crossed.
We’re going to be ready for our big birthday bash in November this year really looking forward to we’re going to start the plans soon. Hopefully, nothing’s going to get in the way this time after this event.
So we won’t be back until the 1st of April when we’ve got our next event and then we’ve got another event two weeks later on the 15th of April. Nice and easy to squeeze into your lunch break, as usual, if you’ve enjoyed Sheffield DM, I’d love it if you could whack that thumbs up button just to say that you’ve enjoyed watching the stream today.
It’s going to be available online for you to watch afterwards as well to come back to review the excellent tips that Billie’s given and to share with your colleagues who need a bit of help on how to work with their developers too.
You can follow us on Twitter at @sheffielddm or you can head over to sheffielddm.co.uk and join the mailing list so that when those next events roll around you will get an email notifying you and you can stay up to date with everything else that’s coming up. We have a virtual conference again on the horizon and like I mentioned before our special third birthday party coming up later this year.
Last of all and then I’m gonna go and get some lunch because I’m flipping starving.
We are always looking for exciting new speakers to come and join at Sheffield DM so if you would like to have a go at taking the virtual stage.
If you know someone who would do a fabulous job of delivering a talk here at Sheffield DM, whether that’s a lightning talk or a 20 -minute session like Billie’s just done, or even a Q&A panel we’re up for anything so put them in touch with me on Twitter or they can email hello@sheffielddm.co.uk.
Beyond that, Billie thanks again. We’re going to call it there and thank you to everybody who’s watched we’ll see you next time
If you have enjoyed this post please check out my other blog posts about SEO:
Basic SEO Guide
SEO Glossary
Understanding Domain Authority
An Introduction to Meta Data
How to Write Meta titles and Descriptions