Why your SEO tickets get ignored
The friction between SEOs and developers is almost as fraught as the relationship between marketing and sales, but the good news is that this relationship can be fixed.
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If you have ever worked inside a large organization or consulted for one, you know the frustration when you make critical SEO recommendations, and the developers or product managers shelve your request for a later time. You found a burning problem, and now you are stuck, unable to fix the issues. You presented a beautiful, color-coded doc to your counterparts explaining how important all this work is, and they never even opened it.
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You send a soft check-in email and increase the priority in Jira. You might even ask your boss for help. And still crickets. The tickets sit in the backlog until they rot, and six months later, the issues are still broken. This could be a critical canonical tag or a chained redirect causing visibility issues, and you are stuck in the hot seat in standup after standup explaining why it’s still not fixed.
The friction between SEOs and developers is almost as fraught as the relationship between marketing and sales, but the good news is that this relationship can be fixed by mutual understanding. Many in SEO assume engineers (I will use developers and engineers interchangeably in this post to underscore the point I will make in the next section about adopting the right language) don’t care about traffic, or that they are being obstinate for fun. If you have read my book, you have heard my stories about that kind of developer, but in most cases, it is far more benign.
Speak the same language
The problem is a translation issue, not a priority one. Developers code algorithms, but don’t prioritize them over other algorithms (Google’s). (Tangential anecdote: I was once talking about the THE ALGORITHM, referring to Google, and my engineering counterpart said, “I don’t care. I work in algorithms all day.”)
Developers speak in terms of user experience, technical debt, and features, while the SEO team makes claims in language that the engineering partners don’t understand. When an SEO team says something will improve rankings, the engineer hears an unprovable assertion with no way to verify it, sometimes even after the work is done.
If you want your recommendations implemented, you have to stop submitting SEO “fixes” and start submitting product improvements. (Read this post on why SEO is a product, but this is the next best step.) This means SEO teams need to stop acting like external auditors and start thinking like Product Managers. PMs and developers operate on the same team with aligned goals; join that team.
Download this scorecard for analyzing and improving SEO tickets for engineering friendliness
Developers aren’t waiting for your work
In most organizations, engineering time is a finite resource measured in sprints and story points. Product Managers and Engineering leads play a zero-sum game with resource allocation. They have limited capital to spend and a mountain of requests to fund. There’s no organization in the world without tech debt of things that could be fixed with unlimited resources.
As they prioritize, in their minds, there are three types of work they need to allocate resources against. There are features, which are the shiny additions customers ask for and leadership loves to announce. These are the career-making projects that lead to promotions for engineers and PMs.
Second, there are bugs, which are things that are actively broken or costing the company money right now. (FYI: An SEO bug is not the same as a bug that causes Stripe billing to fail.) These get immediate attention because the pain is visible. Finally, there is maintenance, which is the cleanup work nobody wants to do but must be done to keep the lights on.
When you submit a ticket called “Fix broken links” or “Update XML Sitemap,” you are pretty much asking to be placed in the maintenance pile. You worded it to the developer like clean-up work,” and that’s what they think it is. No engineer gets promoted for cleaning up 301 redirects. To get prioritized, you must change how you frame your requests so they move from the maintenance pile to something way more important.
The issue is not obvious
The biggest mistake I see SEO make in communication is assuming that the value of an SEO task is obvious to an engineer. An engineer looks at a ticket labeled “Add Schema” and sees extra code to maintain for unclear benefit. They see a request that adds complexity without visibly changing the user interface.
Even worse, when the engineer asks, " Will this improve visibility?” the SEO team member shrugs. Or, if the developer doesn’t ask beforehand, they might ask about past similar work that was completed to see if it did what it was supposed to, and this time, too, the SEO manager shrugs. I have seen this happen after companies spend tens of thousands of dollars fixing an issue.
This lack of transparency trains developers to think these are not as critical as the ticket supposedly states. To fix this, you need to reframe the asks. It should be reframed as improving the product, and there should be an estimate of how it will do so. I have found it very helpful to use formats familiar to developers, like a PRD, so even if the PRD isn’t a great fit for a simple SEO fix, it’s much easier to use than to give them a different, unfamiliar doc template.
In the next few weeks, I will share a guide to writing an SEO PRD with a downloadable template. Subscribe now if you aren’t.
Change your request template
You don’t need a ten-page manifesto, but you do need to adopt the structure of a feature request rather than a bug report.
Suppose there is an issue with H1 tags, where they are not showing at all on the page. The standard SEO approach is to file a ticket titled “Fix H1 tags on category pages.” The description usually reads something like “The H1 tags on the category pages are currently just saying Blog. We need them to be optimized for the category name for SEO purposes. Please fix ASAP.”
This approach fails because it is demanding and lacks context. While it conveys urgency with words, it doesn’t actually convey a real need. “For SEO purposes” is a lazy justification that doesn’t explain the mechanism of success. It also likely triggers this engineer, who dropped important work in the past for “SEO purposes,” only to have it yield nothing meaningful.
Now consider the PRD approach. You title the ticket “Feature Request: Dynamic Headlines for Category Pages.” You explain the why from a human perspective: as a user navigating the site, you want the page headline to clearly indicate which product you are viewing so you can confirm you have landed on the right content. Currently, a user clicks on vacuum cleaners but lands on a page with a generic headline saying only “blog” as a placeholder or no headline at all. This confuses UX and hurts visibility in search for category-specific terms.
You then provide the fix suggestion. You explain that the main H1 headline on category archive pages should dynamically pull the name of the category being viewed, with an example that if the URL is category/vacuum-cleaners/, the H1 should read Vacuum Cleaners. You write the logic for them. This frames the SEO issue as a user experience issue. It provides a clear path to completion, with the developer knowing exactly when the job is done correctly.
When you submit the ticket, include a distinct narrative about the business impact of not doing the work. A bad impact statement is vague, like saying it will help our SEO. A strong impact statement is specific and painful. You need to say that if we do not implement this canonical tag logic, we will continue to cannibalize our own traffic.
You note that we are currently losing an estimated 2,000 conversions or sales per month to the wrong landing pages, and this ticket fixes that leak. You can attach a screenshot of the Search Console data to provide the PM with visual evidence and show your work on the conversion loss.
Put the ball in the engineering team’s court
When the engineering lead says we don’t have time for SEO tasks, the PM can counter that this isn’t just an SEO task; it is a fix for a verified traffic leak that costs us real revenue. On the flip side of this ask, you have now shifted the responsibility for the lost traffic or conversions to the engineering lead, because they know the cost and still declined to fix it. The cost isn’t just an SEO best practice but a revenue number.
The more you can quantify the user impact and business value, the more likely your work is to move from the bottom of the backlog to the top of the next sprint.
Think about this approach next time something is stuck in a perpetual backlog. Engineering/developers and product have decided to skip your request, and it is your job to figure out why. Make your work unskippable by speaking their language.
The goal isn’t to trick developers into doing your bidding; rather, it's to align. When you take the time to translate your SEO requirements into product specifications, you show respect for the engineering team’s time and process. You stop being the SEO person complaining about best practices and start being a strategic partner helping build a better product.
That is how you get out of the backlog.
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