All business owners strive for an effective, stable, and robust online presence to help them conquer the current digital terrain. And SEO, or search engine optimization, is indispensable for achieving that strong and lucrative online visibility.
However, SEO covers dozens of techniques and tactics and requires thorough planning, surveillance, proper task delegation, and productive teamwork. A lack of these essentials can lead to ineffective SEO processes, irrelevant optimization strategies, and workplace conflicts and misunderstandings.
For this reason, business owners are gravitating toward DevOps’s principles and practices to maximize team performance and gain a polished, fully optimized, and SEO-friendly website with beneficial search rankings and a steady organic customer flow.
An SEO strategy enhanced with DevOps produces a fruitful collaboration between teams, improved website speed and performance, a better user experience and customer journey, and overall business success and development.
The primary objective of this article is to showcase the top principles and approaches of the DevOps methodology that will help you enhance your teams’ efficiency and boost your SEO outcomes.
Basics of DevOps
DevOps refers to a distinct methodology for integrating web development and IT operations in order to drive efficiency and ensure harmonious work processes at every stage of the development lifecycle. The essence of DevOps covers four pillars:
- Automation,
- Continuous integration and deployment,
- Collaboration,
- Monitoring and feedback.
The DevOps approach involves a clear collaboration between all company departments and crews to eliminate the silo mentality and foster balanced communications, shared commitments, and elucidated business goals.
It results in considerable benefits, such as improved teamwork, keeping up with project and software delivery deadlines and roadmaps, minimizing workflow letdowns and human error, saving time on automating repetitive tasks, and guaranteeing regular software releases and updates.
The DevOps methodology correlates with website development, impacting the entire web development process suite by facilitating collaboration and communication between company executives, designers, marketers, developers, and other specialists involved in the development process.
Moreover, DevOps principles also help to ensure ongoing website updates corresponding to market trends and search engine algorithms, automate various dev tasks related to configurations and code deployment, fine-tune teams’ negotiations and discussions, and improve website development across the board.
Basics of SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of refining online website performance in search results by means of multifaceted practices and techniques focused on keyword research, website and blog content, on-page optimization, technical adjustment, and off-page performance.
While epic content is pivotal for successful SEO optimization, it is only effective with relevant keywords that help users and search engines understand your pages and meet their search intent. Moreover, an SEO-friendly website requires other on-page tune-ups like proper titles and meta descriptions, the proper page structure with headers alignment, and off-page essentials such as authentic backlinks from authoritative websites.
Even though the balance of content and backlinks makes a good rule of thumb to boost a website’s relevance and credibility to user intent, successful SEO is impossible without technical adjustments that are paramount for maintaining lucrative search rankings and providing a decent user experience.
Technical optimization covers website sitemaps, URL structure, robots.txt file, site speed and responsiveness, URL canonicalization, appropriate website architecture, HTTPS protocol for data encryption, and seamless site crawling and indexing.
To ensure your website is free of any SEO issues and fully ready to achieve higher rankings, consider performing ongoing site monitoring to help you to understand the weak points in your SEO strategy, tackle any issues promptly, and improve your ranking potential. The site audit tool by SE Ranking can assist you with a comprehensive website checkup highlighting site crawling, security, speed, localization, and usability metrics in a straightforward yet informative report.
All in all, prosperous SEO efforts require wise planning, analysis, and execution. The SEO industry is constantly modernizing along with search algorithm updates and user experience trends. Therefore, you need to keep up with the times by implementing up-to-date SEO approaches and remaining flexible with your optimization strategy.
DevOps for SEO Teams Collaboration
Collaboration and communication challenges are top concerns when attempting to connect web dev and SEO teams for productive work on search engine optimization. Even though both teams strive to accomplish the same goal of improving the company website’s organic performance in search, different prerogatives and task management and completion approaches may interfere with the workflow and cooperation.
When it comes to particular methods and tools, the DevOps mindset comes in handy to overcome certain challenges and streamline optimization and development processes, making teams work as a whole unit. For starters, daily meetings and joint problem-solving can help bring SEO and development teams together, find common ground, and keep both teams on the same wavelength in the workflow.
Also, establish convenient communication channels through which teams can share task status updates and files, monitor project stages, and intercommunicate instantly. Furthermore, make sure all project and team roles and duties are clarified so that every team member knows their area of responsibility.
Additionally, hold workplace or online workshops to help SEO and development teams explore each other’s fields through cross-training, as it will help to boost a respectful attitude toward the work of each team. The following tools list will help you incorporate DevOps for SEO processes and address collaboration and communication problems.
- Project management tools: Trello, Jira, Asana, ClickUp;
- Communication tools: Discord, Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams;
- File and knowledge-sharing tools: Google Drive, Confluence, Dropbox, Notion;
- Whiteboarding tools: Microsoft Whiteboard, Conceptboard, Miro;
- Collaboration platforms: GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps.
Profound Process Automation
The mindset of DevOps for SEO teams and processes implies automation as a critical principle to boost the efficiency and productivity of search engine optimization. By incorporating automation into the SEO strategy, businesses can save plenty of time and resources on on-page optimization, keyword research, and issue reporting.
Cutting-edge software can advance the optimization workflow and help budget planning, preserving company assets and eliminating splurge. The weight is off your shoulders with tools aimed at SEO task automation, as they contribute to facilitating data analysis and processing, site performance investigation, and reports’ production and sharing.
Automation is also a significant aspect of CI/CD or Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment approaches, significantly impacting search engine optimization efforts.
Continuous integration stands for ensuring the smoothness of code updates so that both SEOs and developers can stay abreast of changes, watch the progress, and catch any possible issues. Meanwhile, continuous deployment means automating software releases, making them live and ready for further interactions, and allowing teams to seamlessly enhance the site’s visibility.
CI/CD provides that essential agility that helps teams shrink the development cycle, revive the website faster according to search algorithm updates and the latest SEO requirements, and undertake SEO strategies in a timely manner.
Such a flexible approach allows for improving the collaboration between SEO and development geeks, revving productivity, providing SEOs with a space to unwind to concentrate on strategic planning, and remaining competitive in the market.
Monitoring and Analytics
Monitoring and analytics are top-of-mind elements of DevOps for SEO. While monitoring allows SEOs to keep track of overall website performance and rankings, analytics helps to acquire a comprehensive website breakdown to leverage the efficacy of optimization activities and keyword selection and profoundly research user behavior. Both encourage teams to set the right task priority queue, promptly notice strategy gaps, and create a blueprint for further improvement.
Moreover, monitoring and analytics streamline continuous improvement and feedback loops, which is crucial for SEO optimization success. They also broaden decision-making by delivering superior data insights.
As a result, SEO teams can keep up with the dynamic ecosystem of search engine optimization trends, better understand user appetites, and get the most out of the crafted strategies and actions.
Key Points to Take Away
The DevOps approach is a game changer for search engine optimization teams and processes. It helps establish and fine-tune vital team collaboration and communication, aligning winning SEO techniques with a solid technical background.
It also contributes to automating time-consuming SEO tasks and refining website monitoring and analytics to foster organic growth, a one-of-a-kind user experience, and overall online success.
