Stop Killing Your SEO: The Product Mindset That Finally Gets Developers to Fix Your Tickets

The Product Mindset Revolution: Why Technical SEO Tickets Die on the Vine

For any seasoned SEO professional, the experience is painfully familiar: a critical technical issue identified, meticulously documented in a ticketing system, prioritized (or so one hopes), and then... silence. That ticket, vital for crawlability, indexation, or performance, seems to vanish into the digital ether, becoming another piece of unresolved technical debt slowing down the entire ecosystem. This universal frustration stems not from malice, but from a fundamental misalignment in priorities between the SEO function and the engineering teams responsible for implementation. SEOs are inherently focused on external factors—search engine bots, user journeys, and ranking signals—while development teams are generally oriented toward internal concerns: code stability, feature velocity, and immediate security patches.

The core problem lies precisely in this disconnect. SEOs see an unresolved rel=canonical issue as a ranking risk; developers see it as a low-priority background task competing against a looming product launch. How do we transform these often-ignored requests from the bottom of the backlog into prioritized, actively managed roadmap items? The answer, as explored by experts like Gus Pelogia, lies in adopting a radical shift: treating technical SEO fixes not as technical chores, but as essential product enhancements.

Bridging the Divide: From Tickets to Features

The concept of the "product mindset" offers the essential framework for reconciling these divergent views. In the context of technical SEO, this means re-framing every required fix as a valuable product enhancement that serves a distinct user or business need, rather than simply ticking off an SEO checklist item.

The traditional "ticket mentality" views SEO work as a collection of small, isolated requests: fix this header tag, adjust that redirect map, improve this one script load time. These small requests are easily swamped by the perceived urgency of larger feature development. Developers, and more importantly, Product Managers (PMs) who control the roadmap, operate based on defined business value and measurable impact. If an SEO ticket simply states "Fix slow Core Web Vitals score on 404 pages," it lacks the compelling narrative needed for immediate prioritization.

A product mentality demands that we answer the "why" with the language of business return.

When technical SEO is viewed through the lens of product value—be it risk mitigation, performance uplift, or direct revenue contribution—it earns its seat at the table alongside feature development.

Leveraging Agile: Integrating SEO into the Development Workflow

To truly embed SEO initiatives into the development lifecycle, SEO practitioners must actively participate in the systems developers already trust: Agile ceremonies. Simply throwing a completed ticket over the wall during a standup is insufficient; we must engage early and often within the engineering ritual.

The most critical intervention point is Sprint Planning. SEOs cannot afford to wait until sprints are finalized to lobby for neglected tickets. Instead, you must proactively present well-defined, value-articulated SEO needs during the planning process, allowing PMs and developers to estimate the effort required and slot the work directly into the committed capacity for the coming iteration.

This groundwork is often laid in Discovery Meetings. If a developer or PM is unaware of the technical constraints or the business implications of a missing schema element, they cannot prioritize it. The SEO’s role here is dual:

1. Contextual Clarity: Explain why the issue matters (e.g., "This missing canonical is causing us to cannibalize ranking authority across 500 product pages").
2. Technical Specification: Provide precise, actionable technical requirements so developers can estimate accurately and implement correctly the first time, avoiding costly rework.

Crucially, the impact must be communicated in terms developers understand. Latency reduction, database query efficiency, or improved conversion rates stemming from a better user experience are far more persuasive than abstract concepts like "crawl budget optimization." By embedding ourselves within the existing planning rituals, we transform from external auditors into internal, contributing partners.

The Power of Packaging: Bundling and Building MVPs

One of the primary reasons small SEO fixes languish is the perceived overhead required to deploy them. A five-hour fix requires the same cycle of ticketing, code review, QA, and deployment as a fifty-hour feature. To overcome this inertia, we must think like architects, not assemblers.

The practice of bundling small, related SEO fixes into cohesive, larger projects (Epics) is vital. Instead of submitting 20 tickets for 20 slightly different canonicalization errors across various site sections, bundle them into an "Automated Canonical Hygiene Epic." This structured packaging aligns perfectly with development sprints and makes the scope manageable and justifiable as a dedicated work stream.

Furthermore, leverage the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept. If your goal is to overhaul the title tag logic across 10,000 pages, seeking approval for the entire overhaul is daunting. Instead, identify the highest-leverage segment—perhaps the top 100 landing pages driving 60% of organic revenue—and build an MVP specifically for that group.

• Phase 1 (MVP): Implement the improved title logic on the top 100 pages.
• Measure: Quantify the immediate lift in CTR or keyword visibility for those 100 pages.
• Justify: Use the successful, measurable internal data generated by the MVP to argue for the full rollout—"The pilot on 100 pages resulted in a 15% CTR boost; scaling this across the full corpus is projected to yield X revenue."

This approach de-risks the development work for the engineering team and provides concrete evidence of ROI, making future prioritization significantly easier.

Measuring Success: Speaking the Language of Prioritization

If technical debt is to be paid down effectively, the repayment schedule must be built on metrics that management cares about—and those metrics are rarely "fewer warnings in Google Search Console."

To secure future resources, SEOs must translate their efforts into the universal languages of Product Management and Engineering: performance, risk, and return.

Metrics that resonate deeply include:

• Performance Improvements: Quantifiable reductions in Core Web Vitals scores (LCP, FID, CLS), specifically attributing the fix to the development work completed.
• Risk Mitigation: Documented reduction in crawl errors, incidence of duplicate content flags, or mitigation of potential Google penalties due to technical failures.
• Direct ROI: Linking implemented changes (like faster site speed or improved structured data rendering) directly to increases in conversion rates, bounce rate decreases, or organic revenue growth.

The ultimate shift required is moving away from asking for fixes based on external mandates and toward proposing prioritized, valuable product improvements that align with the business roadmap. When technical SEO is presented as strategically valuable product work—complete with clear success metrics and iterative MVPs—the backlog drains, the tickets get fixed, and SEO finally stops killing its own potential through poor integration.

Source: Inspired by insights shared by @moz on X/Twitter: https://x.com/moz/status/2018368915844337767