The Frustration That Every SEO Team Knows Too Well
Every SEO professional has been here. The audit is done—often using a semrush technical seo tool—and the list of technical issues is long and the fixes are clear. But the development team is flooded with other priorities, the queue is backed up for weeks, and nobody seems to have the time or the resources to work on SEO tickets. Technical debt continues to accumulate while search rankings sneakily go down. It is one of the most frustrating challenges in the industry, and it affects businesses of all sizes. The good news is that there are practical ways of getting meaningful work done even when we are lacking in developer support or direct dev support. It requires intelligent prioritisation, communication and a willingness to think outside the box of SEO and broader technical digital marketing.
The Invisible Weight Dragging Your Website Down
In the development world, technical debt is an existing problem on a website that has accumulated over a period of time as the result of quick fixes, poor management or shortcuts that were never properly addressed. In the context of technical seo, the term is used more specifically to describe code-based problems which are fundamentally holding back optimisation efforts. These may be a broken redirect chain, canonical tags missing, pages are crawled multiple times, a slow page loaded with bloaty Javascript, or layout shift issues that are damaging rankings and user experience.
The critical thing about technical SEO debt is that most of them cannot be fixed by the SEO team alone. It requires the involvement of front-end or back-end developers and those developers are almost always juggling to cater to the competing demands of the product teams, design teams, and other departments. When most of the work to improve SEO performance is offloaded to another team, determining how to get the most important jobs done becomes a strategic challenge, rather than a technical one.
Three Questions That Tell You What to Fix First
When the list of fixes is longer than the available resources, prioritisation is all. A practical approach is to consider each issue in terms of three dimensions – the risk and the reward – and the likelihood of implementation.
Risk poses the question of what will occur when this issue is not corrected. If the accidental no-index of a group of product pages results in the loss of a significant percentage of organic revenue, then that is a high risk item. If a Cumulative Layout Shift issue on key landing pages is hitting conversions and rankings at the same time, then that also scores high on risk. Each issue should be scored on a scale of one to five on how damaging it would be to leave it unresolved.
Reward
Look at the positive impact of completing the fix. Will it help increase the amount of revenue, increase conversion rates, customer satisfaction, or decrease the cost of servers? For example, removing a huge batch of duplicate pages bots regularly crawl unnecessarily can save actual money on hosting as well as making a crawl more efficient. Each task is awarded one to five reward points.
Implementation likelihood takes into account how realistic fixing it is that it will actually get done. Some requests that may seem simple on the surface are enormous projects behind the scenes. A content block that the SEO team thought would be a quick addition may turn out to need an entirely new section of the content management system developed. Talking with engineering stakeholders helps to understand the real extent of something and a score from one to five is how likely it will be implemented given the current resources.
Add the three scores for each item and you have a good ranking of priorities. The tasks that score the highest are the tasks that should be tackled first. This way, there is no guesswork, and it gives the SEO team a defensible, logical framework to give when it comes to requesting development time.
Speaking the Language That Developers Actually Respond To
Having a list of priorities is one thing. And getting developers to actually work on it is another. The biggest hurdle is usually communication. Development teams have their own goals, their own KPIs and their own pressures. Walking in with an agenda of SEO demands without understanding their world rarely goes well.
A better strategy is to have a face-to-face meeting with either the lead of the tech team or product manager and discuss how the proposed fixes fit into their goals. Development teams are frequently responsible for optimizing the performance of web sites and controlling the cost of servers. If an SEO request to clean up redirect chains can be placed in a context of reducing server load and hosting costs, it suddenly has some relevance to the development team’s goals as well.
Batching together a number of related fixes into one ticket also helps. Instead of having to submit three different requests on changing page titles, update header tags, and add bread crumbs across the same template, if they are grouped into one, developers can complete all of these changes in one session. This therefore reduces scheduling overheads and makes the work more attractive to fit into a sprint.
Turning Other Departments Into Your Biggest Supporters
SEO fixes often have benefit not just organic search. A landing page speed improvement helps the paid media team to get better quality scores. A cleaner site structure will be better for all visitors regardless of how they came to be there. When the SEO team can show that their proposed work is supporting multiple departments, it is much easier to build the cross functional support required to get technical fixes prioritised.
Getting buy-in from CRO specialists, paid advertising managers or even customer service teams who deal with user complaints about issues with websites adds weight to the request. A fix that is beneficial to three teams is much harder to ignore than one that matters only in the context of SEO.
Looking Outside When the Inside Cannot Keep Up
When internal developer resources are truly maxed out and things have stalled, looking outside of the organisation for support makes a lot of sense. SEO optimization companies and technical seo companies specialise in the diagnosis and resolution of technical issues in efficient ways. They bring with them dedicated expertise and bandwidth that, in most cases, is lacking within internal teams, particularly in cases where development resources are shared across a bunch of internal departments.
Similarly, guest blogging services provide a means of augmenting the off-site side of SEO when working through technical on-site issues. Creating quality content that is published on websites with a good reputation can help to build backlinks, boost your brand’s visibility and support domain authority. This kind of work requires no developer involvement whatsoever, making it a practical way of keeping the SEO momentum going even if time is spent for technical fixes in the queue.
Small Wins Today Beat a Perfect Plan That Never Happens
Managing technical SEO debt is never as simple as going through a checklist from top to bottom. Competing priorities will always emerge. Resources will always be stretched. But by considering risk and reward and implementation likelihood, by communicating in terms that resonate with development stakeholders and by looking to external support where necessary, through SEO teams can make meaningful progress even in the most resource-constrained environments.
The businesses that consider SEO a team effort, not an issue for one group, are the ones that are consistently topping their competitors in search. It takes patience, persistence, and a lot of smart communication but the results are always worth the effort.
