The SEO Sprint Podcast

Lessons from Zoopla and Papier | Areej AbuAli

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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).

      4. Where to find Arrej

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

        • References

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


          • ...more
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          The SEO Sprint PodcastBy Adam Gent