A headless content management system (CMS) is a modern platform designed to support and enhance your SEO efforts. In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, consumers expect seamless experiences across multiple devices and platforms. Headless CMSes streamline this process by allowing marketers to focus on creating content without worrying about how it will appear on different devices. Instead, a central repository manages all the content and distributes it via APIs to various presentation layers.

Migrating from a traditional monolithic CMS to a headless CMS offers several advantages, particularly for businesses with substantial SEO goals. However, it's essential to choose the right vendor and understand the key features to look for when evaluating headless CMS options. To achieve optimal results, it's also important to adopt best practices for using your headless CMS for search engine optimization.

If you're unfamiliar with headless technology, it's simply a new approach to content management that separates the front-end and back-end of an application. This allows for greater flexibility and customization when it comes to designing the user experience. By adopting a headless CMS, businesses can enhance their technical SEO and keep pace with the latest trends in digital marketing.

What Is headless CMS

Headless CMS got its name because the front-end presentation layer (the “head”) and the back-end content repository (the “body”) operate independently of each other. Marketers easily create, label, and store content in modules that live in the repository while developers and designers work in the presentation layer to create cutting-edge experiences to deliver content to consumers. Application programming interface (API) technology enables each headless component to work together so that content can be found, (re)optimized, and (re)delivered repeatedly to each new front-end experience. When content and functionality perform separately but in synch using a headless CMS, so do marketing and development teams creating search engine-optimized content experiences.

With traditional (monolithic) CMS platforms, the front-end and back-end — or the functionality and content — are structurally intertwined. That means every time your business wants to create a new content-based experience, the content and the functionality that power it must be created from scratch instead of simply reassembled. This requires marketing teams to go through development teams to publish or update content. Taking autonomy away from marketers and turning developers into roadblocks is not a great way to keep content experiences fresh and optimized in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Boosting technical SEO with a headless CMS and Technology

For enhancing the technical SEO, we must consider two aspects. One is having a good Google Core Web Vitals Score and other is the maintaining the parameters to meet better SEO standards.

Let’s talk about the Google Core web Vitals and Lighthouse Metrics since it is quite well articulated in the SEO community that Google Core Web Vitals (CrUX) data plays a significant role to enhance the technical SEO. Among the google core web vitals metrics First Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Meaningful Paint (FMP), Time to Interactive (TTI) are the parameters where Headless technology comes with handy to enhance these scores.

Let’s see Headless Technology can be utilized individually for these factors

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is improved with Headless technology because it is not dependent on page builders. Developers have more flexibility in optimizing the DOM size of the web page using JavaScript-based presentation layer for the front-end, resulting in lower time to render the DOM elements and eventually better FCP.

First Meaningful Paint (FMP) is improved with server-side rendering and static site generation using technologies such as Gatsby.Js, Nuxt.Js, Next.Js, and SVELT. This helps avoid high loading times, resulting in a better FMP score.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a crucial factor for better UX, and Headless technology can help improve it. JavaScript-based libraries and frameworks are effective for handling CLS with the concept of virtual DOM, provided that they are implemented by competent developers.

Time to Interactive (TTI) can be optimized with Headless technology because it provides a lot of control over the front-end.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Media file optimization is key to enhancing the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Prismic has a great solution to optimize media files with Imgix. Images can also be optimized through resizing, creating alternate versions for different devices, file compression, blur-up with an SVG placeholder, and lazy loading. The Gatsby Image Plugin automates all these best practices, resulting in an enhanced LCP.

Headless Built CMS has better manageability in terms of meeting the SEO standards

Meta Tag Optimization

Meta tags are important for your website's SEO strategy as they impact how your site appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) and can influence click-through rates. Although some meta tags may not have a direct effect on rankings, they can affect how your site is presented within the digital ecosystem, including non-traditional search results like Knowledge Graph, Google image search, and voice search. Therefore, it is crucial not to overlook them when creating content for your website.

There are some game-changing HTML meta tags that can contribute to improving your site's SEO. These include the Title tag, Meta Description, Canonical Tag, Alternative Text Tag, and Robots Meta Tags. Many plugins like Rank Math, Yoast SEO, and SEOPress generate these tags, but the generated tags may not always be in a customized form preferred by website administrators. In such cases, SEO experts can write better meta tags to improve the website's SEO, which can lead to better positioning in SERPs.

In Headless built websites, SEO experts can write their own meta tags according to their specific requirements for better SEO. This feature also allows the creation of custom plugins with the help of AI to enforce all meta tags with validation for ensuring the best SEO parameters. This feature can relieve SEO experts from the task of reading the entire content to write appropriate meta tags.

Moreover, the content manager can impose a requirement for standard Meta Tags which should be followed to submit the page. It is quite useful for an agency where several content uploaders exist. This feature will make them unable to submit a page with predefined below standard Meta Tags. This will ensure always standard content for better SEO.

In addition to that there are several features of Gatsby.Js which can help to optimize Robot Meta tags. In Gatsby, Gatsby robots txt plugin can be used to generate the robot.txt file automatically. Once installed, add the plugin to gatsby-config.js and specify the host of your site and the location of your sitemap (which you can generate automatically using Gatsby Sitemap plugin).

Media optimization

Media optimization is crucial for maintaining website performance, and Prismic offers a great solution to optimize media files with Imgix. Imgix dynamically compresses and optimizes images, making it quick and easy to optimize your site.

There are several best practices for optimizing images, such as resizing, creating alternate versions for different devices, file compression, blur-up with an SVG placeholder, and lazy loading. These practices have a direct impact on the SEO of your website, but they can be time-consuming and require resources to apply. Fortunately, Gatsby Image Plugin takes care of all of these techniques automatically, making media optimization much simpler.

Maintenance of URL

When migrating from a traditional CMS to a headless setup, it's important to preserve as much of the URL structure as possible from the old build. Doing so can prevent a drop in SEO rankings because search engine crawlers won't have to re-index all of the pages.

Links vs onclick

When using a headless CMS, the front-end stack is typically written in JavaScript. However, unlike HTML, JavaScript can present some challenges for search engine crawlers. For instance, Google may struggle to understand certain principles such as "Onclick." This was demonstrated in a case where a client used Onclick for their international selector, which prevented Google from replicating a click like a user can, thereby hindering its ability to find internal links and crawl the international websites.

404 Handling

When users enter an incorrect URL or follow a broken link in modern web apps, they may see a "page not found" message, but the accompanying HTTP status code will still be 200 (success). This is because the URL has been translated into an API route, and as long as the API responds successfully and serves a page, it will return a 200 status code.

However, from an SEO perspective, this can be problematic. Search engine bots crawl pages and check the status code to determine if there's a real page at each URL. When a success status is returned, the page is treated as a normal page, ranked based on the sparse "page not found" content and potentially listed in search results. To ensure that the page is treated as the error you intended and not ranked in search results, you need to return a 4xx status.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a headless CMS coupled with a headless website offers a customized solution for clients seeking to optimize their website's SEO. When utilized effectively, a headless CMS can provide several advantages that traditional monolithic CMS solutions may lack. By maximizing the potential of the headless CMS, there is a higher probability of achieving better SEO performance than any other traditional CMS.

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