Today’s question cuts to the heart of resource management for SEO:
“How do you prioritize SEO fixes when technical debt keeps piling up and you can’t get dev resources?”
In this article, we’ll look at different prioritization methods and what you can do when you have more work than support to do it.
What Is Technical Debt?
Let’s first take a look at what we consider “technical debt” in SEO.
In development, this term refers to long-standing issues with the website that have grown due to poor management, or “quick-fixes” that have not stood the test of time.
In SEO, we tend to use it to signify any code-based issue that is fundamentally affecting optimization efforts. Typically, these are issues that cannot be fixed by the SEO function alone, but require the input of front or back-end development teams.
So, when the bulk of the work required to fix SEO technical debt falls to other teams, how do you make sure the most important work gets completed?
Prioritization Matrix
In order to prioritize the work, you should look at three core aspects. These are the associated risks of the work not being completed, the potential benefits if it is, and the likelihood of it being implemented.
You may even want to create a matrix that details the overall score of a technical item. Then, use that to prioritize them. Discuss each item with the stakeholders whose teams will need to be involved in its implementation.
Get a better idea of the full scope of the work. From there, you can assign a figure to each category of “risk”, “reward”, and “implementation likelihood.”
Example of a technical SEO prioritization matrix (Screenshot by author, August 2025)Risk
Start by calculating the risk to the business if this work isn’t carried out.
Consider aspects like financial risk, i.e., “If we don’t carry out this work then our product pages will be no-indexed. Currently X% of revenue from those product pages is generated by organic traffic and therefore by not completing this work we risk $Y of revenue each year.”
It could also be a risk to the website’s performance. For example, by not fixing a Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issue across a group of pages, you may risk conversions as well as rankings.
Get a better idea of the level of risk associated with not fixing that technical debt. Then, assign it a score from 1 (low risk) to 5 (high risk).
Reward
In a similar way, consider the positive implications of carrying out this work. Look at how implementing these fixes could affect revenue, conversion rate, customer satisfaction, or even how it could save money.
For example, “We know that we have a lot of duplicate pages that are not generating revenue but are repeatedly crawled by search bots. We know that every time a bot crawls a page, it costs us $X in server hosting costs; therefore, if we remove those pages we can save the company $Y each year.”
Look primarily at the financial benefits of carrying out the work, but consider also some secondary benefits.
For example, will this work help users complete their goals more easily? Will it aid them in discovering new products or perhaps enjoy a better user experience?
Consider whether the work will benefit other channels beyond organic search. Your technical debt fixes may improve the landing page experience for a group of pages that are used for paid advertising campaigns as well as organic traffic. The benefit of that work may be felt by the paid media team as well as the organic search team.
Assess each of your planned tasks and assign them a value between 1 (low reward) and 5 (high reward).
Implementation Likelihood
When what you are asking is actually an extremely involved, expensive project that the development team doesn’t have the capacity to do, then it won’t get done. This might sound obvious, but often when we are trying to prioritize our technical requests, we think about their impact on our key performance indicators (KPIs), not their strain on the development queue.
Through talking with engineering stakeholders, you may realize that some of your tasks are more complicated than you originally thought. For example, a simple editable content block being added to a page might actually require a whole content management system (CMS) to be built.
Discuss your activities with stakeholders who understand the true requirements of the work, from the teams involved to the hours of work it will take.
From there, you will have a greater understanding of how easy or quick this work will be. Then, you can assign it a score from 1 to 5 of its likelihood of being implemented (1 being highly unlikely and 5 being highly likely).
Prioritization Method
Once you have assigned a score under each of the three categories for all of the technical debt fixes that you want to have carried out, you can prioritize the work based on the sum of all three categories’ scores. The higher the score, the higher a priority that work is.
Additional Ways To Get Dev Resources
Now, just because you have prioritized your fixes, it does not mean your development team will be keen to implement them. There may still be reasons why they are unable to carry out your requests.
Here are some additional suggestions to help you collaborate more closely with your technical team.
Discuss The Work With The Team Leader/Product Manager
The biggest hurdle you may need to overcome is usually sorted through communication. Help your development team understand your request and the benefits of carrying out these technical fixes.
Meet with the tech team lead or product/project manager to discuss the work and how it might fit into their workload.
There may be better ways for you to brief your technical team on the work that saves them “discovery” time and therefore gives more opportunity to work on your other requests.
Invest more time with the development team upfront in creating a brief for them that goes into all of the necessary detail.
Batch Issues In One Ticket
A tip for getting more of your work through the development queue is batching requests into one ticket. If you group together items that need to be worked on across the same group of pages, or template, it will mean developers can make multiple changes at once.
For example, if you want hard-coded page titles changed on your product pages, as well as their header tags and breadcrumbs added, put them all into one ticket. Instead of three separate requests for the development team to schedule in, they now have one larger ticket that can be worked on.
Show The Value Of Your Work To The Development Stakeholders
Show the value of your work to the stakeholders’ goals. So, in the instance of the development team, think about how your suggested fixes might benefit them. Find out what their KPIs or goals are and try to position your work to show the benefits to them.
For example, development teams are often tasked with monitoring and improving the performance of webpages. Part of this may be managing the budget for the server. You may be asking for a group of redirect chains to be removed, but the work isn’t getting prioritized by your development team. Demonstrate the value of removing redirect hops in reducing the load on the server, and therefore server costs.
If you can demonstrate how reducing the technical debt benefits both the SEO team and the development team, it is much more likely to get implemented.
Get Buy-In From Other Teams
On that note, look at getting buy-in from other teams for your work. When the activity you have proposed will not just benefit SEO, but also CRO, or PPC, then it may generate enough support to have it prioritized with the development team.
Show the value of your work beyond just its SEO implications. This can add weight to your request for prioritization.
Summary: Managing Technical Debt Is More Than A To-Do List
Managing technical SEO debt is never as simple as keeping a to-do list and working through it in order. Internal resources are often limited, competing priorities will arise, and most likely, you need the help of teams with very different goals. By weighing risk, reward, and implementation likelihood, you can make more informed decisions about which fixes will have the most impact.
Just as important is how you communicate those priorities. When you position SEO requests in terms of broader business value, you increase the chances of securing development time and cross-team support.
More Resources:
- Key Elements Of Technical SEO For Large Companies
- Internal Silos Are An Overlooked Problem That Can Hurt Search Performance
- Advanced Technical SEO: A Complete Guide
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
