A vital soft skill to succeed in SEO is… willingness to compromise!
Many SEOs are quick to say that everything is important. While small changes do add up for great SEO, specialists often “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
You must develop a sense of prioritization next to other business goals through experience.
For instance, tech limitations can make SEO recommendations hard to implement. These become very noticeable during a site redesign/migration.
Do you really need to remove those meta keywords? Is this worth being a hardass over?
Here are some examples where compromise makes sense:
- Canonical tags can help manage excessive URLs, which sometimes get duplicated by the web platform, and matter little for crawl budget on smaller sites anyway.
- SEOs may love to use H1s, but Google has said that multiple H1s are not an issue, and the use of headers & larger text in a more general way seems more important here.
- Headers should be copywritten & brand-friendly versus keyword-richness more suited for title tags. SEO may have more weight here though when optimizing for featured snippets.
- While “Learn More” is functional anchor text for a CTA button, why not suggest a keyword-rich link elsewhere in the copy?
- Instead of modifying the homepage to target a keyword, why not help create a pillar page for it? The homepage serves many purposes to many others, both inside & outside the company, so may not best target any keyword.
However, sometimes you “draw a line in the sand” to preserve authority earned through backlinks or major keyword rankings.
Yet as Google has become more sophisticated, websites now are rewarded for a holistic effort that considers users foremost instead of search engine optimization alone. Keep this in mind before you relentlessly go to battle over every little SEO change!