In order to keep up with the continuous changes happening in testing and development, developers have to adapt themselves and add new tools to their process. One of them, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more and more vital for online businesses.
SEO is the process of enhancing the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO helps a website to rank better on search engines, thus, attracting more users. Being able to discover a website and navigate through it quickly and easily is crucial for the success of a business.
An important part of the traffic comes from organic search so if a website doesn’t have good SEO tools, it can have a negative impact on the company’s direct revenue and even, its brand reputation. Hence, it is necessary to include SEO in the QA testing strategy.
SEO tests cover a range of 404 errors, content, and complex custom extractions. By finding broken links early on, SEO tests help to save the company from having a negative impact on users. That is why it is vital that SEO teams and developers work and interact together.
Most development and QA teams haven’t yet included SEO in their strategy because they hadn’t fully realized the impact it can make on a business. However, it was noticed that fixing a bug during the production process is way less expensive than fixing it during the implementation stage.
SEO defect is not very easily identifiable as it doesn’t necessarily impact the overall functionality of a website. It needs time to be noticed and for search engines to reindex the site from the initial release. If the defect is not found and fixed as soon as possible, traffic is going to start dropping as is revenue growth. It is thus for the SEO teams and QA teams to figure out what happened. Even when the issue is fixed, the traffic will take time to get back to normal.
However, if SEO and QA teams work together, they wouldn’t have this problem and could use their time to build a strategy that would attract more customers and build new features. It is even more necessary for larger websites where content is always being updated or changes as search engines might be reindexing the website daily rather than every couple of weeks, giving the teams even less time to fix the issues.
With SEO tests, defects could be caught during production and no extra cost or time would be lost. Having good SEO QA can protect revenues and reduce defect fixing. Organizations will then be able to build successful testing strategies around all the tests which are required to be performed, thus avoiding potential issues.
In the near future, equipping QA teams with tools that enable SEO automation and provide full clarity about a defect and find new defects quickly will be imperative, especially for businesses that drive revenue through their websites.
Some automated SEO QA solution designed to avoid traffic and revenue loss can be integrated with a CI pipeline and perform 160 tests and more when a new code is released. Other solutions could be integrating SEO checks into CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) systems, testing code for SEO impact before releasing it into production, and making data-driven decisions based on SEO trends.
Having automated SEO QA will be vital as it will allow developers to release applications quicker and SEO teams won’t have to double-check everything that could affect the SEO program on the website. Implementing SEO into QA will in time save time and money to businesses and improve their revenue and traffic on their websites.
