At scale, SEO means redirects, templates, structured data and database updates. Marketing teams need access to technical skills.
SEO usually sits in the marketing department, even if the company website is largely maintained by the IT department or an external agency. But the truth is that a lot of SEO is not really marketing work, at least not once we move beyond writing a few better page titles.
At scale, SEO is a technical and data problem. When I researched a list of technical elements in SEO for this article, the answer included templates, redirects, crawl paths, structured data, internal linking, canonical tags, duplicate pages, broken URLs, page speed, XML sitemaps, server logs, tracking scripts and content stored in databases. Implementing changes to any of these at scale is not a job for a marketing specialist.
A marketing team can define how 250 product pages should have their title tags improved, but someone still has to implement that correctly. This is not a copywriting job, it’s a data manipulation job. Similarly, we may want to rewrite headings across a category or map thousands of old URLs to new ones. This won’t be manageable by hand or even within a CMS.
So we need both marketing and technical people working together to make meaningful SEO developments. For smaller businesses, this may mean outsourcing specific tasks – but not vague “SEO support” from marketing agencies, instead defined technical work from database experts. Otherwise all those SEO recommendations will stay as nice, unimplemented ideas.