Following the presentation, Tom will be answering your SERP feature questions in a live Q&A you won’t want to miss, so come prepared.
You will learn tips for improving your website’s technical health, including crawlability, indexability, site speed, accessibility, and more.
This strategy guide is the first step towards attracting high-quality leads and revolutionizing how you think about lead generation.
Join us as we explore a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
Join us as we explore a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
Following the presentation, Tom will be answering your SERP feature questions in a live Q&A you won’t want to miss, so come prepared.
Ensure your content shines in a headless CMS environment. Follow our 8 steps for top-notch headless SEO.
Headless content management systems (CMS) are on the rise, quickly being adopted by huge brands like IKEA, Nike, and National Geographic.
There are tons of options out there, and it’s more likely than not that, as an SEO pro, you’ll have to work with one in the future.
This comes with some advantages, like being able to integrate with third-party technologies more easily or being able to reuse content across channels to meet users’ new search behaviors.
But SEO pros are used to working with traditional CMS, and adapting to this new way of thinking about content might take some work.
Headless SEO refers to the unique processes required to optimize content for search using a headless CMS.
Fundamentally, a headless CMS detaches content from its presentation.
In traditional CMS like WordPress, content and presentation are intertwined. You create pages rather than content.
In the headless world, instead of pages, you create content units that contain different fields. This content can then be displayed across different surfaces.
Some of these surfaces are quite basic, like a website or an app, but you can take it beyond this and integrate it with social media, digital signage, or marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon.
So, headless SEO is less about creating content and building links and more focused on grasping the nuances of a decoupled system.
There is a specific challenge that comes with working with a headless CMS. In traditional CMS, the fact that content and presentation are strictly tied together has allowed us to create very good out-of-the-box websites.
In a headless set-up, we don’t have these out-of-the-box guardrails, and we need to be a lot more specific with our technical implementation.
When doing SEO in a headless CMS, you need to worry about two very different things from a technical perspective:
Let’s put the guardrails back on in your headless CMS so you can focus on growing your site instead.
This checklist will help you communicate your technical SEO requirements to your development team and diagnose the main issues that can come up in this setup.
While these are usually in the remit of front-end developers, they will impact your SEO performance, so it’s key to audit them as part of your launch.
While there are many different ones, here are the basics for a sound headless SEO implementation:
You can manage whether you allow search engines to index your page through the meta robots tag, as we covered above, or you can do it through the x-robots-tag on the HTTP header response.
The x-robots-tag is best for PDFs and other files, but for page management, the robots meta tag is easier to manage and diagnose.
You will want to have a field within your CMS that allows you to control indexation on a page-by-page basis. A toggle with a clear description of what it means to allow search engines to index the page is the best solution.
When building on a headless CMS, you must collaborate with your development team to decide the best approach to indexing management.
There might be conflicting priorities or complex integrations that keep you from getting the setup you want. You need to review these with your development team to find a happy solution.
Without direct input from your SEO team, you might end up with a CMS implementation that uses random strings of numbers and letters as URLs or a copy of the title.
Ensure your development team includes an editable field for your URL slug for the right pages.
Because keeping a stable URL structure is essential, you might not want to give everyone editing permissions on the URL slug.
You can tailor your CMS only to allow editing URLs after a page is published by a member of the SEO team. You can even build an automation that creates a redirect automatically when the URL is changed.
Canonical URLs indicate to search engines what’s the main version of the content and help you manage potential duplicate content issues.
Here are some basic instructions to share with your development team and keep in mind during your audit:
Ecommerce sites have some extra layers of complexity when it comes to canonicalization, as they often have to manage larger duplicate content issues relating to categories and filters.
In this case, it’s best to work with your development team to find the best way to define canonicalization rules for your business.
While this is obvious for any SEO, sitemaps are dynamic files, and they need to be updated at specific intervals or when triggered by some action. It’s important to agree on how your sitemap will be updated with your development team.
Your sitemap should contain only indexable canonical URLs with a 200 HTTP response code.
It should live in the root directory of your site, but if for any reason that’s not possible, you can indicate it in your robots.txt file like this:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Depending on the specific needs of your site, you have to consider if you’d like to split your sitemap by content type and if you want to have a sitemap for images, videos, or news articles.
Schema markup offers search engines a richer understanding of your content.
Without SEO plugins doing the heavy lifting for you, you’ll have to request the right markup for your type of content and site. This should be added to the HTML head as a script. The code will look something like this:
<script type="application/ld+json">
In a headless setup, you can take advantage of the way content is structured to enhance and automate schema markup.
You can use the different fields in your author profile pages to enhance their Author Schema or automatically identify headings that end in a question mark and the paragraph below as questions and answers for your FAQ Schema.
You could even request a free-form field to write your own JSON-LD in the CMS so that you can experiment with different types of optimization.
Headings help users skim your content to find what they need faster, but they’re also essential for visually impaired users who are accessing your content in screen readers.
Maintaining a correct heading hierarchy is basic for accessibility, not just for SEO.
Because of the decoupling of content and presentation that comes with a headless CMS, keeping a straight hierarchy throughout your site can become complicated.
If you’re building your site using modular content, the reuse of content modules can easily break the headings hierarchy. This is not an easy problem to solve.
You can try to have heading hierarchy errors prevented through some development magic in the front-end implementation, request content modules that have editable heading tags, or be very careful with how you plan any content reuse.
Headless CMSs are often reliant on Jamstack frameworks. The Jamstack is a type of web architecture that relies heavily on JavaScript, which means that, often, your headless CMS site will be very JavaScript-heavy.
As with any JavaScript-heavy site, you must perform a parity audit to ensure you’re showing search engines exactly what you want.
Remember that Google doesn’t scroll or click, so all your key content and links should be present in the rendered source.
You should be checking for any disparities between your rendered and unrendered site, especially when it comes to meta tags, canonicals, and content.
Since headless CMSes are on the rise, it’s quite likely that SEOs will need to flex their technical muscles a lot more often and start thinking about content from a different perspective.
Ensuring a solid technical SEO setup on the front end is vital, but headless also offers the possibility of making changes to the CMS to improve workflows.
Following the 8-step checklist should help you put the guardrails back on to your SEO set-up.
The future of SEO is up to the industry’s creativity and how we choose to use the decoupling of content from presentation to our advantage.
With the current shift in search behavior and shopping habits across the world, changing how we think about content can be our biggest competitive advantage.
More resources:
Featured Image: Ashan Randika/Shutterstock
Lidia Infante is an SEO consultant and speaker. She has been working in SEO for nearly a decade, helping businesses …
Conquer your day with daily search marketing news.
Join Our Newsletter.
Get your daily dose of search know-how.
In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.
Copyright © 2024 Search Engine Journal. All rights reserved. Published by Alpha Brand Media.

source