Headless Content Management Systems (CMS) are gaining popularity, with major brands such as Adidas, Nike, IKEA, and National Geographic quickly adopting them.
Given the numerous options available, it’s increasingly probable that as an SEO professional, you’ll encounter and work with a headless CMS in the future.
While there are advantages, such as enhanced integration with third-party technologies and the ability to reuse content across channels to align with evolving user search behaviors, SEO professionals accustomed to traditional CMS may find the transition requires some adjustment.
What Is Headless SEO?
Headless SEO refers to the practice of optimizing websites that use a headless content management system (CMS). In a traditional CMS, the front end (the “head”) and the back end (where content is managed) are tightly coupled. However, in a headless CMS, these two components are decoupled, allowing for greater flexibility and versatility.
In a headless CMS, content is stored and managed separately from its presentation layer. This means that content can be delivered to various platforms and devices through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), enabling a more seamless and adaptable user experience.
Headless SEO involves implementing search engine optimization strategies specifically tailored to websites using a headless CMS. This may include optimizing content structure, ensuring proper metadata implementation, and addressing any unique challenges or opportunities presented by the decoupled nature of the system.
Overall, headless SEO allows for a more agile and dynamic approach to content delivery, catering to the diverse ways users access and interact with information across different devices and platforms. In other words, a headless CMS separates content from its presentation. In contrast to traditional CMS platforms like WordPress, where content and presentation are interlinked, a headless CMS allows for the creation of content independent of its display structure.
In the realm of headless systems, rather than generating pages, you create content units with distinct fields. This content can subsequently be presented across various platforms.
While some of these platforms are simple, such as a website or an app, the flexibility extends to integration with social media, digital signage, or marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon.
Thus, headless SEO changes the emphasis from content creation and link building to a more nuanced understanding of a decoupled system.
The Challenge on the Technical Front
Working with a headless CMS introduces a distinct challenge. The traditional CMS model, where content and presentation are closely linked, has enabled the creation of highly effective out-of-the-box websites. However, in a headless configuration, these predefined constraints are absent, requiring a more precise approach to technical implementation.
When conducting SEO in a headless CMS, there are two distinct technical concerns to address:
The Front-end: Evaluating how content appears to both users and search engines is a routine aspect of technical SEO, familiar to most SEO professionals.
The CMS aspect: Headless CMS provides the flexibility to include or exclude editable fields in your content. SEO experts working within a headless CMS must comprehend the interconnections between each field and its impact on the front-end presentation. This involves ensuring the availability of essential fields like editable title tags, slugs, or meta descriptions. Additionally, it includes confirming the feasibility of incorporating internal links and images within the content.
Technical Steps to Follow in Setting Up Headless SEO
Restore the guardrails on your headless CMS, allowing you to concentrate on the expansion of your site. Use this checklist to effectively convey your technical SEO needs to your development team and identify the key challenges that may arise in this configuration.
Inspect Meta Tags
Typically within the domain of front-end developers, these elements significantly influence your SEO performance, making it crucial to assess them during your site’s launch. While various elements exist, here are the fundamentals for a robust headless SEO implementation:
- Title: Evaluate how titles are generated site-wide. Some pages may require a specific CMS field for direct editing, while others, like categories or tags, benefit from automated generation rules. Implement validation rules in your CMS to ensure adherence to character limits.
- Meta Description: Similar to titles, integrate a CMS field for direct editing on most pages. For others, establish rules for auto-generation. Some headless CMSs allow AI integration for assistance. Enforce validation rules within the CMS to limit meta descriptions to 150 characters.
- Meta Robots: Depending on your chosen indexation method, verify the presence and correct behavior of the meta robots tag in your HTML head.
- Viewport: Confirm the correct implementation of the viewport meta tag, vital for responsive design. Verify that the site is mobile-friendly according to Google’s standards.
- Content-Type: Use the content type meta tag to inform browsers about the page’s content type, character set, and encoding. Particularly crucial in international contexts, the use of validation rules to ensure compliance with ISO standards.
- Language Tag: Declare the language using the language meta tag. In international setups, validate consistency across all pages for accurate hreflang markup, querying the lang attribute of each document. Establish rules to keep this tag ISO-compliant.
- Open Graph Tags: Though not directly SEO-related, open graph tags play a significant role. Ensure correct implementation of basic tags (og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url). While most pull content from other fields, consider creating unique rules or a CMS field for overriding descriptions and images.
Indexing Management
You can dictate whether search engines index your page using the meta robots tag, or opt for the x-robots-tag in the HTTP header response, which is more suitable for PDFs and other files. However, for effective page management, the robots meta tag proves simpler to oversee and troubleshoot.
It’s advisable to integrate a CMS field enabling you to regulate indexation on a per-page basis. A toggle accompanied by a clear description, outlining the implications of permitting search engines to index the page, offers the optimal solution.
When working with a headless CMS, collaboration with your development team is essential to determine the most effective indexing management approach. Potential conflicting priorities or intricate integrations may hinder achieving the desired setup, requiring a comprehensive review with your development team to reach a satisfactory resolution.
Ensure That URL Slugs Can Be Edited
In the absence of direct input from your SEO team, your CMS implementation might generate URLs with arbitrary combinations of numbers and letters, or simply duplicate the title.
To address this, make certain that your development team integrates an editable field specifically for the URL slug on relevant pages.
Given the importance of maintaining a consistent URL structure, it may be prudent to restrict editing permissions for the URL slug. Consider configuring your CMS to permit URL edits only after a page has been published by an SEO team member. Additionally, you have the option to implement automation that automatically generates redirects when the URL is modified.
Use Canonical URL Rules
Canonical URLs play a crucial role in signaling to search engines the primary version of content and are instrumental in mitigating potential issues arising from duplicate content.
Here are fundamental guidelines to convey to your development team and consider during your audit:
- Specify canonicals either in the head of the page or the HTTP header.
- Use absolute URLs, consisting of the protocol and subdomain, such as https://www.google.com.
- Assign only one canonical per page.
- Pages intended for indexing should be self-canonicalized, meaning they should reference their URL within the canonical tag.
Ecommerce websites, dealing with more intricate duplicate content challenges concerning categories and filters, introduce additional layers of complexity to canonicalization.
In such instances, it’s advisable to collaborate closely with your development team to determine the most effective approach for defining canonicalization rules tailored to your business needs.
Use Schema Markup
Schema markup provides search engines with a more comprehensive comprehension of your content.
In the absence of SEO plugins streamlining the process, you must specifically request the appropriate markup for your content type and site. This markup is then incorporated into the HTML head as a script, resembling the following code:
html
<script type=”application/ld+json”>
In a headless configuration, you can leverage the structured nature of your content to refine and automate schema markup. Use the various fields in your author profile pages to enhance the Author Schema or automatically identify headings ending in a question mark, designating the subsequent paragraph as questions and answers for your FAQ Schema.
Additionally, consider requesting a free-form field within your CMS to input your own JSON-LD, enabling experimentation with diverse optimization approaches.
Setup XML Sitemap
While the importance of sitemaps is evident to any SEO professional, it’s crucial to recognize that sitemaps are dynamic files requiring periodic updates or triggered actions. Collaborate with your development team to establish an agreement on the frequency and method of updating your sitemap.
Ensure that your sitemap exclusively features indexable canonical URLs accompanied by a 200 HTTP response code. Ideally, it should reside in the root directory of your site. If this isn’t feasible, you can specify its location in your robots.txt file, as illustrated below:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Tailor the structure of your sitemap to the specific requirements of your site. Consider whether you prefer segmenting your sitemap by content type and if separate sitemaps for images, videos, or news articles are necessary.
Maintain an Organized Heading Structure
Headings serve the dual purpose of assisting users in quickly navigating your content and providing important support for visually impaired individuals using screen readers. Ensuring an accurate heading hierarchy is fundamental for accessibility, extending beyond just SEO considerations.
The separation of content and presentation inherent in a headless CMS introduces complexity in maintaining a consistent hierarchy throughout your site. When constructing your site with modular content, reusing content modules can potentially disrupt the heading hierarchy, posing a challenging issue to resolve.
Possible solutions include employing front-end development strategies to preempt heading hierarchy errors, requesting content modules with editable heading tags, or meticulously planning content reuse to avoid complications.
Conduct a Pre-Launch JavaScript Parity Review
Headless CMSs frequently leverage Jamstack frameworks, which are a type of web architecture heavily reliant on JavaScript. Consequently, your headless CMS site is likely to be JavaScript-intensive. Similar to any site with substantial JavaScript components, it is imperative to conduct a parity audit to guarantee precise representation to search engines.
It’s important to note that Google doesn’t scroll or click, underscoring the importance of ensuring that all key content and links are readily available in the rendered source. A diligent check for inconsistencies between the rendered and unrendered site is essential, particularly concerning elements like meta tags, canonicals, and content.
Technical Steps to Follow in Setting Up Headless SEO
Given the increasing prevalence of headless CMSes, it’s highly probable that SEOs will find themselves needing to enhance their technical expertise and adopt a different perspective on content. While establishing a robust technical SEO foundation on the front end remains crucial, the headless approach also opens up opportunities for optimizing CMS workflows.
Adhering to the implementation above can help reestablish a secure framework for your SEO setup. The future of SEO lies in the industry’s creativity and our ability to leverage the separation of content from presentation to our advantage.
Amid the current changes in global search behavior and shopping patterns, redefining our approach to content can emerge as our most significant competitive advantage.
Would you like to read more about “Technical Steps to Follow in Setting Up Headless SEO” related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
Use our Internet marketing service to help you rank on the first page of SERP.
