8 key steps for technical implementation

Headless content management systems (CMS) are on the rise and are quickly being adopted by huge brands like IKEA, Nike, and National Geographic.

There are a lot of options out there, and as an SEO professional, there's a good chance you'll need to use one of them in the future.

This has several benefits, including easier integration with third-party technologies and the ability to reuse content across channels to match new user search behaviors.

However, SEO professionals are used to using traditional CMSs, and it may take some work to adapt to this new way of thinking about content.

What is headless SEO?

Headless SEO refers to the unique process required to optimize content for search using a headless CMS.

Basically, a headless CMS separates the content from the presentation.

In a traditional CMS like WordPress, content and presentation are intertwined. Create pages, not content.

Image from Sanity.io, November 2023

In a headless world, instead of pages, you create content units that contain various fields. This content can be displayed across many different sides.

Some of these surfaces are very basic, like websites and apps, but they can go beyond this and integrate with social media, digital signage, or marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon .

Headless SEO is therefore less about content creation and link building and more about figuring out the nuances of a separate system.

technical challenges

Using a headless CMS presents unique challenges. Traditional CMSs tightly tie content and presentation together, allowing you to create great websites out of the box.

Headless setups don't have these out-of-the-box guardrails, so the technical implementation needs to be more specific.

When performing SEO on a headless CMS, there are two very different things to consider from a technical perspective.

• front end: Auditing how your content appears to users and search engines is a standard part of technical SEO and is nothing new to most SEO professionals.
• CMS: A headless CMS allows you to add or remove editable fields from your content. SEO professionals working on a headless CMS will need to know all the fields they need to do their job well, including how each field connects to the front-end presentation, editable title tags, slugs, and meta descriptions. You need to understand whether you are – Or even if your content allows you to add internal links and images.

8 Step Headless SEO Checklist

Put guardrails back on 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 may arise with this setup.

1. Check all important meta tags

These are typically in the purview of the front-end developer, but they impact SEO performance, so it's important to audit them as part of your launch.

Image from Sanity.io, November 2023

There are many ways to do this, but the basics of a healthy headless SEO implementation are:

• title – See how it is generated across your site. Some pages may require specific fields in your CMS to edit them. For other pages such as categories, tags, and archives, you will need to implement rules on how to auto-generate these. You can also implement validation rules within your CMS to force you to stay within certain character limits.
• meta description – Similar to the title, most pages will need a field in the CMS that can be edited directly. In some cases, you need to implement rules to automatically generate them. Some headless CMSs can integrate AI features to help with this. You can also incorporate validation rules into your CMS to keep meta descriptions under 160 characters.
• meta robot – Depending on the index management method you choose, you need to check whether this tag is present in the HTML head and is working correctly. We'll discuss index management in a little more detail later in this article.
• content type – This meta tag is used to tell the browser what kind of content is on the page and what character set and encoding is used. This is especially important when working in an international context and helps ensure that special characters such as accents and umlauts are displayed correctly. Again, you can include validation rules to ensure that the content of this meta tag always matches the required ISO standard.
• Viewport – The viewport tag tells the browser how to manage the size of the page. the It is essential for responsive design. According to Google, your job here is to make sure your meta tags are implemented correctly and make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
• language tag – This meta tag is used to declare the language in which the content is used. In an international setting, you need to ensure that this is correct across all pages so that you can create the correct hreflang markup by querying the lang attribute of each page. document. Again, you can set validation rules to keep this tag ISO compliant.
• Open graph tag – These are not SEO related, but over time we have become a kind of guardian of these tags. All the basic stuff (og:title, og:type, og:imageand og:url) is implemented correctly. Most of these simply take their content from other fields, so you don't always need fields in your CMS to change them, but you can create your own title rules or override descriptions and images. You may need to create fields.

2. Index management

As explained above, you can control whether search engines are allowed to index your page using the meta robots tag or x-robots-tag in the HTTP header response.

The x-robots-tag works best for PDFs and other files, but for page management, the robots meta tag is easier to manage and diagnose.

You may need a field within your CMS that allows you to control indexing on a per-page basis. The best solution is to use a toggle that clearly explains what it means to allow search engines to index your page.

When building a headless CMS, you should work with your development team to determine the best approach to index management.

Conflicting priorities or complex integrations may prevent you from getting the settings you want. You should discuss these with your development team to find a satisfactory solution.

3. Make sure the URL slug is editable

Without direct input from your SEO team, you could end up with a CMS implementation that uses a random string of numbers and letters as the URL or title copy.

Make sure your development team includes an editable field for the appropriate page URL slug.

Because maintaining a stable URL structure is essential, you may not want to give everyone editing permissions to the URL slug.

You can adjust your CMS to only allow URL editing after a page has been published by a member of your SEO team. You can also build automations that automatically create redirects when a URL changes.

4. Establish canonical URL rules

Canonical URLs indicate the main version of your content to search engines and help manage potential duplicate content issues.

Here are some basic steps to share with your development team and keep in mind during audits.

• Define canonical at the top of the page or in the HTTP header..
• Use absolute URLs. Includes protocols and subdomains such as https://www.google.com.
• Define only one regular per page.
• Pages to be indexed must be self-normalized. This means you need to point to your own URL within the canonical tag.

E-commerce sites often have to manage large-scale duplicate content issues related to categories and filters, so there are a few more layers of complexity when it comes to normalization.

In this case, it's best to work with your development team to find a way to define the normalization rules that best suit your business.

5. Define XML sitemap settings

This is obvious for SEO, but sitemaps are dynamic files and must be updated at specific intervals or when triggered by some action. It's important to agree with your development team how to update your sitemap.

Your sitemap should only contain indexable canonical URLs with a 200 HTTP response code.

This must be in your site's root directory, but if for some 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 your site's specific needs, you should consider whether to split your sitemap by content type and whether to use an image, video, or news article sitemap.

6. Request schema markup

Schema markup allows search engines to better understand your content.

If your SEO plugin doesn't do the heavy lifting, you should request the appropriate markup depending on your content and site type. You need to add this as a script to your HTML head. The code should look like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">

Headless configurations take advantage of the way content is structured to enhance and automate schema markup.

You can use various fields on the author profile page to enhance your author schema and automatically identify headings and paragraphs that end with question marks as FAQ schema questions and answers.

You can also request a free-form field in your CMS to write your own JSON-LD to experiment with different types of optimizations.

7. Maintain a structured heading hierarchy

Headings help users skim through your content and quickly find what they need, but they're also essential for visually impaired users who access your content with a screen reader.

Maintaining correct heading hierarchy is fundamental not only for SEO but also for accessibility.

Headless CMSs separate content and presentation, which can make it complicated to maintain a straight hierarchy throughout your site.

If you're building your site using modular content, your heading hierarchy can easily break when you reuse content modules. This is not an easy problem to solve.

Use some development magic in your front-end implementation to prevent heading hierarchy errors, require content modules with editable heading tags, or pay close attention to how you plan for content reuse. I can.

8. Conduct a JavaScript parity audit before launch

Headless CMS often rely on the Jamstack framework. Jamstack is a type of web architecture that relies heavily on JavaScript. This means that headless CMS sites often use a lot of JavaScript.

As with any JavaScript-heavy site, you should perform a parity audit to ensure search engines are seeing what you want.

Keep in mind that Google doesn't scroll or click, so all primary content and links must be present in the rendered source.

You should check for differences between rendered and non-rendered sites, especially regarding meta tags, canonicals, and content.

Navigating a headless future

With headless CMS on the rise, it's very likely that SEOs will need to flex their technical muscles more often and start thinking about content from a different perspective.

Ensuring a solid technical SEO setup on the front end is essential, but headless also offers the possibility to make changes to your CMS to improve your workflow.

Following our 8-step checklist will help you put guardrails back on your SEO settings.

The future of SEO depends on the creativity of the industry and how it chooses to separate content from presentation and use it to its advantage.

As search and shopping habits around the world change, changing the way we think about content could be our biggest competitive advantage.

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Featured Image: Ashan Randika/Shutterstock