Why SEO Knowledge Is Foundational For All Tech Professionals

It’s no secret that SEO is the backbone of web visibility and organic site traffic, but did you know that understanding even just the basics of SEO can support virtually all tech professionals involved in web development, including front end development? Learning SEO best practices can give you the insight and skills required to develop websites that are well-positioned for achieving the best possible results. And not just in terms of search engine visibility either, but to client or customer satisfaction and retention rates as well. 

If you were to ask a group of digital marketing professionals, they’d say that in an ideal world, anyone working in the tech industry would possess at least a foundational understanding of SEO and SEO best practices.

Why?

Well picture this: tech professionals with SEO knowledge teaming up with SEO specialists with SEO knowledge and their tech sector clients alike to deliver web experiences that not only get results, but also set a benchmark for their competitors. This level of potential excellence is what we mean when we say ‘more than marketing’. 

We’ve outlined six different tech industry roles that can benefit from getting to grips with SEO. Read on to help expand upon your perception of SEO and how this discipline integrates into the wider tech sector.SEO grounds web development tasks in real-world contexts

Of all the careers that exist within the tech sector, front end development and back end development are amongst some of the most technical pathways to follow. These development roles require candidates that are proficient with HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding languages, alongside possessing a firm understanding of the building blocks behind site design, servers, and hosting.

With all the technical knowledge that web developers are required to possess, it’s honestly a little surprising that the additional tiny step of engaging with SEO is rarely taken, especially considering how valuable SEO knowledge and an understanding of SEO strategies can be for front end developers in particular. Without foundational SEO knowledge, it can be all too easy for web developers to make tiny oversights that amount to major negative impacts on a site’s SEO performance. 

For instance, we’ve experienced countless instances where web developers have unknowingly left “noindex” metatags on web pages, resulting in those pages being virtually invisible to Google crawlers and thus, not appearing on search engine results pages. Alongside this, practicing good SEO can do a lot when it comes to actual site performance, including improving site loading speeds.

Simply put, if front end developers map out their web development projects with an optimisation mindset, they will be setting that website up to experience peak SEO performance and increased organic traffic from the get-go. This mindset can effectively allow any and all web development projects to exist in real-world contexts in order to deliver clear-cut real-world results. 

Improved SEO yields more accurate business data.

There are select SEO principles that work hand in hand with digital marketing campaigns and by extension, with business data analysis. This can be observed even in the most basic marketing campaigns where Google ads point back to an established landing page on your site that’s designed to further facilitate a desired customer journey. 

By using tools like Google Analytics and other web analytics tools alongside their own developed databases, business data analysts can gain interesting insights into the efficacy of particular campaigns and the keywords that those campaigns are centred on. PPC specialists can then use these insights to better optimise digital advertising campaigns, whether this means making changes to landing pages or even selecting newer keywords that boast a lower cost-per-click. 

As you can imagine, the findings presented by data analysts with regards to web optimisation can also greatly assist SEO specialists themselves in improving web pages, their on-page content and meta descriptions, and all other elements that can impact SEO. In other words, data analysts can provide holistic strategies for web optimisation that supports growth for both organic and paid traffic.

SEO to improve web and network security.

You may be wondering what the link is between SEO and cybersecurity. How could a practice that revolves around boosting your visibility online also play a role in keeping your company website safe from black-hat hackers? It’s all about using SEO best practices to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities in your site design and formatting. 

It’s common for hackers to gain access to a site in order to perform back-door SEO. This practice essentially involves third parties placing malicious external links or even adding whole other web pages to your site that may flag your site as not secure to Google crawlers. This perception of your site potentially possessing malicious content can then result in your site becoming blacklisted from appearing on SERPs. 

SSL & TLS certification also plays a role in boosting search rankings as well. SSL (or ‘Secure Socket Layer’) certificates basically authenticate website ownership, allowing site visitors peace of mind that any information produced by the interactions they have within your domain will stay with the site owners. SSL works alongside TLS (‘Transport Layer Security’) to ensure that private data that’s gathered upon a user entering and leaving a site stays within the site owner’s secure database rather than being perceptible to potentially malevolent third parties. 

But what’s the link between SSL and SEO? Search engines actually take SSL and TLS certification into consideration when crawling sites and gauging a domain’s authority and trustworthiness. A lack of SSL certification or the presence of potentially dubious external content or signs of black-hat SEO, can all prompt Google to keep your site pages firmly away from SERPs. In this sense, cybersecurity specialists with a good understanding of SEO are far more likely to be valuable assets to any eCommerce enterprise or virtually all other companies with digital platforms. 

Good SEO facilitates an improved user experience.

In a similar fashion to SEO being highly essential for front end developers in building domains, good SEO can also play a major role in perfecting the UI/UX of any designed website. UI (or ‘user interface’) design involves finetuning the layout of a site alongside its interactive visual elements in order to deliver the most optimal browsing experience for the user. Similarly, UX (or ‘user experience’) design is concerned with providing the structural components  behind all of the user-centric elements created by user interface designers. 

A website that has been designed by following SEO best practices has naturally considered user intent throughout its design. Considering user intent when mapping out the UX or user interface of a digital product, will effectively make that product more conducive to fulfilling a user’s expectations and facilitating all of the most common requests that that user is likely to have on that platform. 

As UI and UX play a vital role in boosting the usability of a website, these design disciplines already hold a lot in common with SEO. After all, the main objective of an SEO specialist is to ensure that the site they’re working on is positioned to be the definitive authority for its particular industry niche. Part of positioning yourself as an authority is having an intuitive, industry-leading user interface.

Strong SEO knowledge creates capable digital entrepreneurs.

Although no website that fulfils commercial purposes can ever be truly created alone, all eCommerce ventures or even just website concepts are generally conceptualised by one person: a digital entrepreneur. Digital entrepreneurs are behind virtually all the major modern tech companies and services that we use today, with the professional backgrounds of entrepreneurs often influencing the concepts they develop.

It goes without saying that a digital entrepreneur with a strong working knowledge of website design and development is likely to be better equipped to get their idea off the ground and exposed to a larger audience. This is where SEO knowledge can be a genuine gamechanger for digital entrepreneurs.

Digital entrepreneurs that are able to develop their own sites, social media profiles, and other digital offerings that rely on SEO best practices, are more likely to attract the attention of other tech professionals who may decide to make their own contributions to your startup, either in the form of coming onboard and joining your development team, or by potentially becoming an investor.

Simply put, any digital entrepreneur that can demonstrate an awareness and understanding of the basic principles of creating a digital business venture, will be more likely to experience positive growth quicker. SEO is unequivocally one of these basic principles, and as such, the digital entrepreneurs of today should take efforts to engage with SEO. 

Creating content specialists over content writers.

Having worked with in-house content specialists that possess an SEO foundation as well as freelance content writers of varied professional backgrounds, it becomes clear quite quickly the impact that SEO knowledge can hold on the quality of your on-page content and even your Digital marketing efforts. After all, any writer can churn out 800 words on topics like buying headphones, but it takes a content specialist to transform those 800 words into the definitive guide for buying headphones. 

Content writers who understand SEO best practices well enough to create dynamic content strategies are in actuality, just as much an asset to your team as technical SEO specialists themselves. In fact, as content specialists boast the supreme skill of communication, their voices can help bridge the gap between technical SEO strategies and the human target audience that SEO specialists are always seeking to reach. 

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The six tech sector roles that we’ve outlined above all use SEO knowledge in their own ways and to enhance their own produced work. Although these different roles may exist separately from one another, the end goal for all these individual efforts is universal: to create a web experience that stands head and shoulders above its competitors. 

In this regard, SEO is a holistic practice that requires many heads, both within and external to a digital marketing or SEO agency.