Getting a website ranked is no easy feat, especially as teams navigate every new algorithm and ranking factor Google concocts.
Page experience, one of Google’s latest updates, makes an SEO specialist’s demanding job even more demanding. But with this change, a growing issue is unearthed: SEOs often aren’t equipped in their current role to handle technically complex website performance requirements.
The reason for Google’s updates is to identify web pages that prioritize the user experience. This puts SEOs in a bind because their focus may sometimes prioritize more traditional, less technical search engine ranking factors. SEOs will now need to account for user experience during optimizations, but the code configurations that need to occur to supplement that are often out of their wheelhouse. However, there is a team that specializes in that area: web developers. Web developers make websites for human beings while also knowing how to fix technical problems that arise within a website’s code. Because SEOs and web developers bring valued skill sets to the website optimization table, it’s time for them to work together even more.
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Collaboration between these teams is crucial to enhancing website performance, which is a goal that all marketing teams can get behind. Here are some areas where they should align:
1. Page Speed
Page speed has become increasingly essential for ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) because it’s a necessary aspect of the user experience. When a site loads slowly, users are more likely to abandon it in favor of one that’s faster. Every marketing campaign will fall flat if prospects abandon a slow-moving website. Due to this, Google recognized its importance and tied it into the Core Web VitalsOpens a new window implementation, metrics that measure a web page’s health. Because of Core Web Vitals, SEOs are aware that websites need to account for page speed to rank.
Making a web page faster requires going deep into its code regularly, which SEO specialists often don’t have the technical background to do. This is where collaboration with web developers is vital. Web developers possess the know-how to improve code and make websites more efficient for users. By working together, SEOs can identify the culprits causing page speed issues and relay that information to web developers, who can then go in and fix said issues. For example, after performing an audit with an SEO tool for page speed, SEOs could discover that images are causing a web page to load slowly. They can then communicate this to web developers, who can compress images, submit an image site map or apply the SRCSET attribute (which allows multiple versions of an image for specified situations) to code to speed up the images’ load time.
2. Mobile Site
Because people use their phones for shopping, work, personal life and more, mobile sites have become as important as desktop sites. So much so that Google uses mobile-first indexing to determine a page’s relevance and ranking. This means content on the mobile version should be the same as its desktop counterpart since mobile is what Google crawls and indexes. Due to the significance of mobile sites in ranking, SEOs need to prioritize them getting built and being configured correctly. Web developers can assist SEOs in this area.
There are many ways web developers can configure mobile pages for optimized performance, with two being responsive design and accelerated mobile pages (AMPs). Responsive design, such as CSS, formats a website to the size of the device it’s on, allowing users to view content as it should be seen. This is impactful on keeping up a website’s quality on mobile. AMPs deliver content to mobile devices faster than usual, which helps with page speed — a ranking factor. Both these solutions serve to enhance the mobile experience for users. SEOs can guide web developers on changes that’ll ensure Google ranks mobile sites.
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Having a high-performing website takes time, effort and buy-in from multiple departments, but the collaboration of SEOs and web developers will make everyone more knowledgeable. For teams that need quick reminders on this topic and more, Moz has created a cheat sheetOpens a new window . Page speed and mobile sites are just two of the areas SEOs and web developers can align to enhance a website’s performance; there’s even more they can tackle together. When both groups are on the same page, sharing expertise — web developers providing technical fixes on the backend; SEOs identifying potential errors with their knowledge and SEO tools — they’ll be an unstoppable force for a marketing team looking to stand out as #1 both in the SERPs and their industry.