Full-Stack SEO

HgCNO2

HgCNO2

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The further I go into SEO, the more I want to do on the technical side. Basically devops for webdev. I'm finding that the skills to properly execute SEO are becoming more and more developmental. I'm digging into and learning more about server languages and programming languages. This is leading me to believe SEO is evolving into a full-stack SEO position.

Basically, a full-stack SEO would run in the same vein as a full-stack developer, except all the skills in the stack relate to SEO. Server stack with Linux/Apache, Windows/IIS/Azure, and nginx. Server-side languages like PHP, ReactJS, and NodeJS. Client-side markup and languages like HTML, CSS (those two are already requirements for almost all SEO positions), JavaScript, AngularJS, and JQuery. And of course, typical SEO skills like on-page optimizations and link building, which are skills learned in entry-level SEO positions.

The reason I was thinking about this is the career path for SEOs. There doesn't really seem to be a career path within SEO. It seems to go from SEO specialist, maybe to Sr. SEO specialist, then into management. I think the high end of SEO is missing a step before going into management or broad-scope positions like Digital Marketing Manager, and that's where I see Full-Stack SEO becoming a thing.

I wrote an article on it that explains in a little more detail why this position is inevitable and what it might entail if the position were to be created today. https://www.urteammarketing.com/blog/rise-of-full-stack-seo/

Let me know what you guys think about this concept. Have you seen it before or heard it called full-stack SEO? Are there other aspects I'm not including in this? What direction do you guys see SEO is going?
 
2009 called. They want their buzzword back.
 
What buzzwords? Full-stack?

Forget the name. I'm referring more to the concept than name. Most SEOs I talk to seem to lack skills related to servers or programming languages. And most SEO job listings I see rarely require high-level skills like those. It's either indicative of the hiring managers not knowing what goes into SEO, which is a huge industry problem, or it's indicative of the lack of SEOs that actually have those skills. They are arguably very important, though. Just look at the work Martin Splitt is putting out and how built-out developers.google.com is becoming. Don't you agree that SEO is taking more of a developmental direction? If you don't, great; I'd love to hear where you think SEO is headed. Isn't that the point of this forum?
 
Postmortis said:
Traffic leaking on a forum dedicated to traffic leaking.

Nice one champ.
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Uhhh, a group of SEOs isn't my target audience. I don't care if you visit the website or not. I just figured I'd include it instead of regurgitating everything in there into a forum post.

Does anybody actually want to discuss the direction SEO work is going or are we all just going to act like I'm a jerk for wanting to have a discussion with people in the industry?
 
I don't think SEO's are going to be expected to know all of that stuff. It's hardly necessary for even developers to know about a hundred different Javascript frameworks.

The current set up of SEO's knowing SEO stuff and then informing developers on what to implement is a perfectly fine and compartmentalized set up. I think that's working out well, currently.

I think it'd be more realistic for developers and everyone else to learn a little SEO so they can at least get the basics right in their own work (like on-page and speed optimization).

Where I do see SEO expanding is including for more Technical SEO, in addition to the current On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. That seems to be a way Google is going to determine what's quality or not, because it effects their bottom line (crawling and indexing mainly).
 
Ryuzaki said:
I don't think SEO's are going to be expected to know all of that stuff. It's hardly necessary for even developers to know about a hundred different Javascript frameworks.

The current set up of SEO's knowing SEO stuff and then informing developers on what to implement is a perfectly fine and compartmentalized set up. I think that's working out well, currently.

I think it'd be more realistic for developers and everyone else to learn a little SEO so they can at least get the basics right in their own work (like on-page and speed optimization).

Where I do see SEO expanding is including for more Technical SEO, in addition to the current On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. That seems to be a way Google is going to determine what's quality or not, because it effects their bottom line (crawling and indexing mainly).
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I don't think SEOs need to have as in-depth of knowledge of these languages, but at least familiarity to the point of being able to talk intelligently to developers about it and/or make minor adjustments on their own.

I've heard that with an understanding of JavaScript, the JS-based frameworks can be picked up fairly easily. Not sure now true that is. I'm poking around React right now to see if a challenge I'm encountering is something I could tackle on my own.

I certainly agree that developers learning more on the SEO side would be handy. I guess what I'm thinking is that in many cases SEOs and developers goals overlap. Using minimal resources and executing quickly is good for both. It's probably worth both positions to take a step toward one another. What do you think about freelance SEOs? Do you think they are a special case that might need to learn more of the developer skill set?

I also agree that the need Technical SEO is growing. That's kind of what put me in this mindset. I think what it will boil down to is giving Google what it needs in a way that can be easily digested by a machine while giving the user what it needs in a way that can be easily consumed by the user. To that point, I expect to see structured data expand because that's what it's for; simplifying the information the user sees into an easily-consumed set of data for the machine. To do that at scale will require more programming knowledge than most SEOs currently have.
 
HgCNO2 said:
What do you think about freelance SEOs? Do you think they are a special case that might need to learn more of the developer skill set?
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Yeah, because most of the time they're going to be working for people that can't afford in-house infrastructure, especially multiple teams or at least one person per department (SEO & Dev).

I started as an SEO and over the years became a fairly ferocious front-end developer (minus the JS frameworks) out of sheer need in my own operations. You encounter problems and you either learn to solve them yourself or you spend money over and over to get them solved. Before you know it, you have all the skills yourself. I think that goes for freelance SEO's too as clients will be asking for things out of their wheelhouse but closely related. Better to know it than not.
 
I think the SEO positions has become less technical, not more, but I also see content optimization as sort of becoming its own thing.

There are of course many cases in which the developer can make an SEO difference, mostly with larger webshops and the like, but for someone like me, I hardly use any technical skill and rank well enough.
 
bernard said:
I think the SEO positions has become less technical, not more, but I also see content optimization as sort of becoming its own thing.

There are of course many cases in which the developer can make an SEO difference, mostly with larger webshops and the like, but for someone like me, I hardly use any technical skill and rank well enough.
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Interesting perspective. I could see that. That's something I'm considering as I've been dabbling more into data visualization and considering a data science career path. Python has been touted as a must-know for data visualization, but it seems like the dataviz software is handling more on that end and you'll just need SQL to access the dataset. I'm not all that educated on the data science side of things, but from where I'm standing, it seems like the barrier to entry is getting less technical. Maybe SEO is going that way too.
 
I think you have to talk about the size of operations, and what you mean by career path.

In my experience, I don't think there's any overlap. Devs generally have zero to do with content - and by zero I really do mean zero, nothing, zilch. There's enough to do on the tech side that there's really no reason to have the tech team get involved on the content side. It's only when you work in very tiny operations that there's any overlap. Basically, engineering departments are generally responsible for providing tools to the content teams; engineering worries about how they're going to distribute the bits, and content worries about what bits are going out. Very different skillsets, usually.

But there's definitely a (large) space where people laugh out loud when they hear "engineering department" - the "department" is the person who spends 30% of their time writing code, plus the cat sleeping on the desk. There, sure, you want as many skills as you can get. It's tough to talk about a career path there though; it's more of an entrepreneurial journey.
 
As a client SEO, it can certainly give you an edge, for example by being able to call out bullshit from other Devs (especially prevalent with smaller businesses that outsource Dev work), but for most larger clients the code is version controlled, and deployed through a pipeline you will never get access to.
I have no experience of in-house SEO (apart from picking up the pieces from clients that have tried so save money and end up hiring badly), so there may be some benefit there.
 
A good SEO, in my experience, is a generalist with a wide array of skills.

The most important job of the SEO is to get everyone on the same page.

That means being able to talk to devs and UX people, content writers and marketing.

That's the real challenge, when you run a big operation. How do we make the devs understand the importance of not generating dupe content or slow pages. How do we make UX people understand that hero images are not optimal for SEO, how do we make marketing think about measuring backlinks as a metric.

So that's why there's usually not a single entry into SEO. My former boss studied mathematics, I studied economics, but I'm really more interested in history and such. I know several journalists, several people who never really studied anything, just went into online marketing when young.

As an SEO, you can largely define your role, which is good and bad. It's up to you how you define the role of the SEO, how integrated into other fields should it be.
 
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