Effective and Easy-to-Use SEO Best Practices for Headless CMS
If you are a business owner, marketer, or e-Commerce site owner then you will most likely spend a lot of time thinking about your business' website. Producing content becomes a necessity to attract more traffic online and potential clients.
Naturally for a business owner, marketer, or e-Commerce site owner, discerning about your business' website as well as its content management would be your top priority to establish an authoritative, trustworthy, and engaging online presence.
Coming across content management systems, such as traditional and headless CMS, becomes normal. On top of that, you will be concerned about search engine optimization as well.
For those of you who want to improve your website or create a new one, going the headless CMS route is highly recommended. To make it even easier for you to achieve your marketing goals, this comprehensive guide provides headless CMS SEO best practices. Implementing these guidelines will make your site perform so much better on search engines and smooth out content management processes as well.
Ultimately, if you want to improve your website or create a new one, going the headless CMS route is highly recommended.
Quick Tip: Switch to Headless CMS Today
What makes the headless CMS perfect for e-Commerce is its “decoupled” setup.
In a headless CMS setup, the back-end and the front-end of the website or e-Commerce store are "decoupled". This means that they work independently. In other words, product information and other data (e.g. product listing descriptions, prices, and other information that the customer searches for and sees on your site) are treated as separate from the commerce management and business logic side.
System-facing concerns and server-side matters are separate from customer-facing concerns.
By the way, headless CMS may also be called static site generators. A website using this technology can also be called a static site or a decoupled site.
There are many benefits of a headless content management setup. That includes:
- easier personalization
- faster loading speeds
- more secure pages and servers
- extensibility
- search-engine friendly
- cross-platform flexibility
To know more about the advantages of using a headless CMS and why we recommend it, you might want to check out this article: Why Content Marketers Should Consider a Headless CMS.
This technology will benefit your business website strongly as well as your SEO efforts.
Headless CMS and SEO: The Advantage of Structured Content
Headless CMS is designed to deploy structured content.
What this means is that you can create large content topics. Then, under that, you can have content chunks that can cover the specifics of the topics in more detail. All of these will then be arranged and rendered in a logical structure for you via APIs. As a result, your content team can focus on writing and publishing well-thought-out content without trouble.
Structured content is one of the main features that make headless CMS distinctive. Managing your content models becomes a breeze and your content chunks can be moved around freely to wherever you need them.
Because of this setup, search engines will be able to crawl your website so much faster and much more effectively. Those search engine bots will find it super easy to identify what your website is all about. That can help your pages achieve prominent positions on the results.
As a whole, the structured and organized nature of headless CMS gives a website that much-needed edge to overcome the competition on search results. Imagine surpassing your competition on the searches and gaining more visibility. Awesome, right?
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When it comes to headless CMS and headache-free website building and content management, we proudly introduce to you the Webriq Studio!
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Webriq Studio is a page builder that is transforming the web. It is a fully-fledged one-stop-shop for creatives looking to build on a future proof stack. With endless customization possibilities, you have everything at your fingertips to design and launch your project - from landing pages to eCommerce sites.
Webriq Studio is the new rage in microsite creators. It's intelligent, intuitive and idiot-proof for marketers to set up landing pages that convert like mad.
This is basically the future of website design!
SEO Best Practices for Headless CMS
If you have decided that a headless CMS setup is for you, then once it is set up, marketing your website properly online can be considered the next step.
To help you with this, here are some of the accepted best practices for static sites or headless CMS websites.
API Calls and Static URLs
Using a headless CMS means a heavy reliance on API calls. Discuss this with your web development team and ensure that your site's URL is static rather than dynamic. This is important for every page that you wish to rank high on Google.
This may sound too technical for marketing heads and top-level business owners focused on the overall aspects of the business, so it is best to coordinate with the web dev team regarding matters connected to SEO-friendly URLs. When not done right, these may not be crawled and that can impact the visibility of your content.
If you are migrating from a traditional or monolithic CMS (e.g. WordPress) to a headless CMS, it is best to maintain the same URLs for product listings and categories. These have most likely been indexed by Google already and will benefit your new site without you having to go through so much effort. Again, discuss with your web technicians regarding the creation and maintenance of these SEO-friendly URLs for the best results.
Remember That This Is a Bespoke Build
Pre-built or pre-generated sites (e.g. sites using free and paid WordPress themes) often come with a planned SEO structure already. However, if you are using a headless CMS, the site will go down the bespoke route.
In this case, it is important to lay down a plan for the SEO essentials first before building out the website. The web development team, designers, and SEO team should coordinate well to outline these basics in order to make the website perform well on search engines quickly after launch.
The SEO essentials we are talking about here is on the back-end side, which covers mainly the codes used to build the website from scratch. Javascript and HTML codes will be deployed and they need to be coded properly with search engines in mind.
Keyword Research
To help search engines find your website quickly, it is important to do proper keyword research. This can be done by the content team in coordination with your marketing people. There are many tools that can be used for this, such as Google's Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. By figuring out which keywords are best for your business products and services, you can position your website to rank high in search engines.
Identify both short- and long-tail keywords to drive your online marketing efforts. Since a headless CMS makes it really easy to update your site's content, it will be even more convenient if you have a solid list of keywords to help with content creation.
High-Quality Original Content
One of the best SEO practices that you and any content team should go by is the creation of top-notch quality content for human readers and search engines. It will be a pity to have the full convenience provided by CMS platforms, only to waste that in publishing low-quality content.
Make sure that the articles you produce on your website are informative, useful, easy to read, engaging, and can connect with your target audience. You may be asking what this has got to do with search engine robots? Do they really care about these matters?
The answer is: YES. Currently, search engines deploy highly sophisticated crawling and website analysis technologies. They are now much better at determining if a site is truly helpful to a human user or not.
So, don't be tempted to just stuffing your keywords or using SEO practices that are considered black-hat or deceptive. Have your content team strive to create and publish content that will satisfy your human readers. Ultimately, this is one of the best SEO practices that will elevate your business.
Regular Content Production
Aside from the creation of quality content, regular publishing of content is also among one of the key SEO priorities for your marketing team. The goal is to achieve consistency and also to gradually grow your website in terms of pages.
Regular publishing of content signals search engines that your site is active and up-to-date. This will have a positive impact on website performance among search results. With the use of headless CMS platforms, publishing is made easier so this should not pose too much of a burden.
Metadata
While metadata isn't an overly weighty optimization factor, it is still an important part of any website, especially for marketing purposes. After all, the meta tags, page titles, and meta descriptions help your website stand out among the search results and help grab your audience's attention.
Follow the updated technical best practices for metadata. These changes from time to time so have your content team check Google's guidelines as well as recommendations from industry leaders.
With the right static site generator, one can easily add page titles and other metadata so the back-end process shouldn't be too difficult. Focus on the creation of these page titles, meta tags, and descriptions and make sure to grab your target audience's attention!
Optimize Headings and Subheadings
This is another job for your content team or whoever is in charge of publishing the articles on your site. Headings and subheadings are equally as beneficial to SEO and content marketing as meta tags and descriptions.
Not only do they improve website performance in terms of SEO, but they also improve the readability of your content. They can assist in marketing your products and services as well. With catchy headings, you can grab attention and engage your audience. You can generate curiosity or encourage them to fulfil a transaction with your business.
Take your meta tags and keywords into consideration, and make sure you incorporate them into your headings as well.
Social Media Buzz
Creating social media buzz is yet another important SEO technical best practice. This is applicable to all websites, not just for those using headless CMS.
The main goal is to have working links to your business social media accounts prominently displayed on your website. Also, actively promote your site pages on your socials. Doing this will create a synergistic process of domain authority social sharing. You are basically leveraging social media traffic to signal search engines that there are good things on your domain since plenty of people are heading to it via your socials. This can definitely create more SEO success.
On top of that, you will be engaging more with your followers and open up more business opportunities.
Headless CMS and SEO
Headless CMS provides so many benefits to website owners, marketers, and e-commerce stores. By paying attention to all of these headless CMS SEO best practices, you can take your online visibility to the next level as well as streamline the management of your whole website.
Why not experience all of these advantages today?
Get the most reliable services for headless CMS, static websites, and SEO best practices with WebriQ. Get in touch with us here. You can also check out our WebriQ Webriq Studio, or test it out for yourself to know more about its features and what it can do for you.
WebriQ offers a trusted Website as a Service solution that fits your needs. Have a business website that ranks, engages and converts! Reach out!