When compared to social media, paid marketing, and other avenues that steer visitors to websites, organic search definitely leads the pack.
A crucial component of an omnichannel marketing strategy is optimizing your website to ensure that you are easily found by consumers — and that you appear above your competitors — on search engine results pages. If you aren't currently using a website platform that makes it simple to implement search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, now is the time to do so.
A headless content management system (CMS) is a platform with architectural and business qualities that enable and boost your SEO efforts.
This post for marketing decision-makers will explain why a headless CMS is an ideal solution for firms with significant SEO goals, what features to look for when selecting a provider, and best practices for utilizing your headless CMS for SEO.
Table of Content
What Makes Headless CMS SEO Better?
Look for These 8 SEO-Boosting Headless CMS Features
API Connectivity
Metadata Access
Built-in Marketing Professional Features
Simple Content Modeling Fields
URL Variations
Tagging Canonical
Using a CDN
Easy-to-Edit Markup
Use These 4 Headless CMS SEO Best Practices to Improve Your Results
The Golden Rule: Always Produce New, High-Value Content:
Optimize Your Non-Content Data:
Speak with your IT team about Schema Markup or Structured Data:
Maintain Current Knowledge to Achieve Speed Across Experiences:
Make the Switch to a Headless CMS for Better SEO
What Makes Headless CMS SEO Better?
It all starts with the unique design of headless CMS, which makes it a distinctive website platform for organizations that prioritize SEO. The name "headless CMS" derives from the fact that the front-end display layer (the "head") and the back-end content repository (the "body") work independently of one another.
Marketers can simply generate, categorize, and store content in modules that exist in the repository, while developers and designers work in the presentation layer to create innovative experiences for delivering material to consumers.
API technology enables each headless component to collaborate so that material may be identified, (re)optimized, and (re)delivered to each new front-end experience over and over again.
When content and functionality work independently yet in tandem with a headless CMS, marketing and development teams can create search-engine-optimized content experiences. The front end and back end — or functionality and content — are inherently interwoven in typical CMS platforms.
That implies that if your company wants to develop a new content-based experience, the content and functions that support it must be produced from scratch rather than simply reassembled.
To publish or update content, marketing teams must go via development teams.
In today's fast-paced business world, taking away marketers' authority and turning engineers into obstacles is not a good method to maintain content experiences fresh and optimized. A headless CMS's structure and the ease with which teams may utilize it to develop new content make it superior for how search engines rank results now.
Not long ago, search engines favored website pages that were densely packed with terms that matched the phrase a search engine user had entered in.
It takes more than keyword stuffing to reach the top of search engine results pages these days.
When search engine algorithms "crawl" — or read — website pages, they consider factors such as keyword context, overall content quality, content age, page load times, the performance of the page and its content across different experiences (devices, channels, etc.), user-friendliness of the page, and others. Headless CMS is the only CMS on the market that enables organizations to develop large-scale, high-quality content experiences that work seamlessly across all channels.
Look for These 8 SEO-Boosting Headless CMS Features
Are you looking for a website platform that will allow your marketing and development teams to collaborate on efficient SEO strategies? Here are the qualities we recommend searching for in a headless CMS to ensure that it can support your SEO efforts from every viewpoint.
Read more: What is headless CMS and Its benefits?
API Connectivity
APIs are technical components that enable computer applications to communicate with one another.
They are required for headless CMSes to preserve the flexibility and integration that underpin SEO.
Some content management systems claim that a single, content-specific API renders them headless, although this is not the case.
A true headless platform offers APIs for a wide range of operations, from content creation to channel delivery.
When determining which APIs you require and which companies have them, we recommend enlisting technical assistance. Read our article "Having an API Doesn't Make Your CMS Headless" for more information on recognizing deceptive advertising and avoiding phony headless CMSes that won't get you where you need to go.
Metadata Access
Metadata is information that describes the intricacies of another piece of data.
For example, if the data on your website is a photograph of a cat, the metadata associated with that picture will comprise information such as the kind of item (photo), the name of the item (cat photo.jpeg), the size of the thing (2MB), the description of the item (photo of cat), and so on.
Metadata is crucial in the SEO industry because it provides extra information that search engine algorithms may use to evaluate the content and context of a page — and rank it against other sites accordingly. While some headless CMS platforms do not make it simple for business users to view and change information, others that focus on marketing functions generally do.
Look for a headless CMS that allows you to customize metadata for items like page titles, page descriptions, content module descriptions, and more.
You want your descriptions to tell search engines exactly what each piece is and how it pertains to the keyword(s) for which you want to rank.
Related Articles: 6 SEO hacks to revive your Website
Built-in Marketing Professional Features
Aside from the ability to build custom metadata, headless CMS solutions can contain a variety of capabilities that simplify content management for marketers.
You don't have to become a coding expert to understand and utilize your headless CMS, contrary to what some suppliers would have you believe.
There are alternatives on the market that make managing content with a headless CMS as simple as it was with a regular CMS.
If you value the simplicity of use for marketers, look for a headless CMS provider that has features such as drag-and-drop content modules, rich text editing and previewing screens, commenting versioning, audit logs, one-click publishing, and rules and permissions that preserve content quality.
Simple Content Modeling Fields
Content models establish your content kinds by outlining them, describing them, and defining how they connect to one another.
A content model for a blog page, for example, might show that the page's content types are articles and authors, describe the key elements of articles (title, body, etc.), and authors (first name, profile photo, etc.), and define their relationship as each page having one article content type and one author content type attached to it.
Marketers may use content modelling to determine how the flexible content modules inside a headless CMS should be grouped and distributed based on the channel and consumer.
To allow APIs and marketers to easily discover the modules they need, your headless CMS should attach easy-to-edit labels, or fields, to each content module.
More significantly, they generate information to assist search engines in better comprehending content aspects.
A headless CMS provides the same usability as a regular CMS that depends on plugin fields for search engine optimization by allowing marketing people to update content module fields and generate correct content models.
URL Variations
While we all know that keywords are no longer the be-all and end-all of outstanding SEO, they are still vital — especially when applied to your website's URLs.
Don't use a headless CMS that doesn't make it simple to generate and alter URLs to include the keyword(s) for which you want to rank.
Tagging Canonical
Canonical tags are bits of code that inform a search engine which version of a URL to crawl and show on results pages.
They help search engines grasp your website pages more easily and quickly.
Choose a headless CMS that allows your developers to alter HTML in your website's header tag to perform canonical tagging.
Using a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of remote servers that collaborate to provide material as rapidly as possible.
CDNs are critical to website loading speed and performance; thus, pick a provider who works with CDNs for the quickest possible content delivery.
Easy-to-Edit Markup
Markup is a coding language that developers use to separate text from code on website pages.
Markup may get complicated and slow download speed as developers and features come and go.
The good news is that it can be simplified, resulting in speedier load times and easy crawling for search engines.
Because the front end and back end are separated, developers may delve into a website built on a headless CMS and make changes, such as updating the markup, without fear of damaging any consumer-facing experiences.
Cleaning up the markup keeps things basic, which is what search engines seek in high-ranking material.
Use These 4 Headless CMS SEO Best Practices to Improve Your Results
Once you've chosen the ideal headless CMS, here are some modifications to ensure you're getting the most out of your SEO efforts.
- The Golden Rule: Always Produce New, High-Value Content: Creating outstanding content is the greatest approach to improving your rating on any search engine results page. Content that is regularly refreshed and focused on delivering value to the reader will be clicked on, shared, linked to, and read repeatedly. That type of activity is gold for your business as well as search engines, which use interaction to determine which content climbs to the top.
- Optimize Your Non-Content Data: It's not simply articles that need to be kept up-to-date and optimized. Metadata should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that it is still relevant to the material it describes and employs the most recent and valuable keywords (s).
- Speak with your IT team about Schema Markup or Structured Data: Schema markup, often known as structured data, is a coding language that assists search engines in comprehending the material. Developers may utilize Schema.org to learn this language and apply it in HTML to offer more context for search engines. The better and faster search engines comprehend your website, the more probable it is that it will be served first to searchers. Because the vocabulary around schema markup/structured data is always evolving, it's a good idea for developers to hunt for new vocabulary phrases to add to your website code on a regular basis.
- Maintain Current Knowledge to Achieve Speed Across Experiences: Many of the headless CMS features and best practices discussed in this article have to do with speed. Because customers are more likely to stay on pages that load quickly and deliver the information they want, fast load times are a distinguishing feature of pages that rank toward the top of search results pages. While Google hasn't specified what it deems an "excellent" loading speed, the experts at SEMrush recommend a 1 to 2-second page load time. To offer content-based experiences regularly at this rate, you need a cutting-edge platform and tools to power your content. For developers using headless CMS, keeping software up to date and changing out old for new is quite simple. It is simple to upgrade, decommission, and add new functionality due to its separate front end and back end.
Read more: How to Become Better with Headless SEO?
Make the Switch to a Headless CMS for Better SEO
SEO is an essential component of every multichannel marketing plan.
Your marketing and development teams may use a headless CMS to produce strong metadata, personalized URLs, intelligent canonical tags, and precise markup, and swiftly launch fresh content campaigns.
What is the core concept of headless CMS?
A headless CMS makes content available through an API for display on any device that lacks a front-end or presentation layer. The phrase "headless" refers to the idea of slicing the "head" (the front end) off the "body" (the back end).Is a headless CMS nothing more than a database?
A headless CMS is just a basic database that your developers may access through any channel. Developers may then construct solutions using their own frameworks, rather than relying on a CMS framework. Everything is up to the developer, depending on whether you're creating a native app, a rich web application, or anything else.
Is Shopify a CMS without a head?
Shopify is an ecommerce software that works well with a headless configuration. Third-party applications may be used by merchants to develop the front-end display layer and extract data from Shopify via the GraphQL Storefront API.
Is a headless CMS preferable?
While headless CMS is advantageous for developers, particularly in terms of user experience, it may not be necessary for tiny websites with a few pages. Using a standard CMS for smaller projects is more efficient and effective. Non-web content publication entails not running a website at all.
