Lessons from Zoopla and Papier | Areej AbuAli

This week I speak to Areej AbuAli the founder of Women in Technical SEO & an Independent SEO Consultant who has worked at companies like Zoopla and Papier.

In this podcast, we talked about:

• How Areej started working in SEO
• Getting Tech SEO Implemented using a bespoke framework
• The experience with Terry the Product Manager
• Getting tickets implemented in a marketing team with developers
• How Areej learned to prioritise recommendations to tech teams ruthlessly
• The reality of getting tech SEO implemented in an enterprise organisations
• Getting buy-in at a large organisation
• Working with tech teams to plan SEO recommendations
• The move to Papier because the role was in a product team
• The structure of the product team at Papier and how SEO sits in it
• How SEO tickets were implemented and validated with the tech team
• How to build trust in the team
• How to add SEO recommendations to the product roadmap
• The difficulty of needing work from marketing
• Creating a team SEO slack channel for the whole team
• Communicating the wins and shoutouts to the team
• Being the only SEO in the product team
• Planning, scoping and slicing SEO recommendations into tickets
• Future-proofing websites and making them SEO-friendly
• The power of retrospectives in tech teams
• Why Tech SEOs should sit in the product and engineering team
• Technical problems = people problems
• 80% of your recommendations won’t get implemented, so keep focused
• The three top skills to work effectively in product and engineering teams

Areej’s recommended top three skills:

1. Keep recommendations concise - Make sure that anything you communicate to the development team is clear, simple and easy to digest (tickets, emails, documents, etc.)
2. Future-proof a website - Work with the tech team to build a functionality that solves problems at scale, not putting plasters on the website.
3. Fight to move SEO into tech - When working in-house, fight and get buy-in to move the SEO team into the tech team (product and engineering).

Where to find Arrej

• Website: https://www.areejabuali.com/
• Website: https://www.womenintechseo.com/

References

• The RPI Framework
• Product Managers
• Retrospectives
• Writing tickets
• Sprints