Headless Doesn’t Have to Destroy Your SEO

Headless CMS empowers you to create web content that revolves around your goals and target users, rather than the demands of one specific platform or delivery channel. This greater level of control and customizability has implications not only for your content management but also for your SEO strategy.

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Fortunately, the complexities of headless SEO need not intimidate you when you have the benefit of elk’s search optimization genius on your side.

Understanding Headless CMS and SEO

To start, let’s talk about what we are talking about when we call a content management system headless. Headless content management systems separate the content itself from the interface used to publish it. Headless CMS lets the content be created and stored in a central place that can then deliver that content to any platform. This is what makes headless content management so powerful in a constantly changing and diversifying online world.

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Headless CMS incorporates a central content storage solution -- applications that allow the content to be accessed and updated. They also utilize APIs that serve the content to users wherever they may be. These API "go-betweens" allow the creation and storage of the content to be independent of the presentation of content.

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So-called "decoupled" CMS is a bit different, in that it typically still involves incorporating the constraints of certain end uses or platforms into the content system. When you see a CMS described as decoupled, just know that these solutions are not truly as independent of the frontend interface as a headless solution is.

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Your headless CMS solution may be provided in a couple of different ways. The simplest option is when you contract with a vendor to provide a web-based content management service. This is the fastest way to access headless content management, as your CMS is a pre-built solution that lives on the vendor's servers. On the other hand, you have less control and customizability.

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At the opposite end of the spectrum, you can have a headless system custom-built and maintained in-house. This is the most bespoke CMS you can get, obviously, but it comes with a big investment of time, labor, and resources. You have optimal control over how your CMS is designed and functions, but you also have all the responsibility and technical headaches.

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Some CMS solution providers offer an out-of-the-box solution that offers a more customized product without the effort and investment of starting from scratch, which you can then host on your own servers. Choosing a headless CMS like this can save time in the initial implementation, but only you can decide if the tradeoffs are worth it.

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By now you have a sense of the potential agility and flexibility of using a headless CMS. So let’s talk in more concrete terms about why headless has rapidly become the preferred way of managing your online content. What are the real benefits?

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For one thing, using a headless CMS streamlines content management. The reason is simple: your content does not have to be created and then recreated for each discrete platform or interface. Headless frees your content team from the time-wasting drudgery of having to rework the same piece of content over and over again for different channels.

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Of course, headless architecture benefits your end users as well as your creators and developers. Why? First and foremost, your audience benefits when your team’s focus is on creating informative and engaging content for them rather than wrestling with various platforms. The limitations and requirements of each channel are no longer in the driver’s seat when it comes to content creation; the needs of your target users are.

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Here are just a few examples of tasks headless CMS may perform better than traditional content management:

• Collaborating with a distributed workforce located in far-flung locations and using varying equipment setups.
• Personalizing and updating web content that changes frequently based on trends or current events.
• Targeting different audiences or sales prospects on different online platforms.
• Updating product offerings in your online store.

In addition to all this, headless content management helps to future-proof your online marketing by making it easier for you to extend your reach to emerging online platforms and interfaces as soon as they appear. The more new and different ways there are for users to be served your content, the more beneficial it is for that content to be created and stored independently of any one platform.

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So what does going headless mean for your efforts at search optimization? Just as with traditional SEO, the goal of headless SEO is to optimize your headless content to rank higher on search engines, particularly Google. Most of the same SEO elements still come into play, but deploying them in a headless environment looks a little different.

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Is headless search optimization better or worse than SEO for conventionally produced content? Ideally, SEO for headless content will make the most of the benefits of using a headless CMS, but it also comes with its own unique challenges.

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As mentioned earlier, headless CMS removes a lot of interface-based constraints so that creators and developers can focus on creating high-quality, useful content that is more easily localized and customized. Right off the bat, this is an SEO win. The content creation benefits of headless can make your site more valuable to users. Content that is more useful to humans is thus more highly valued by Google.

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In some ways, headless SEO is far better than the SEO options for traditional content management systems. After all, you get the benefit of being able to create, optimize, and update valuable content once, and then push it out to various uses and platforms. Arguably, some types of SEO, such as URL optimization, can be even better with a headless architecture than with a traditional CMS. Also, you have the opportunity to maximize how JavaScript is handled when delivering your content to users versus search engine crawlers, potentially improving your page load time compared to a conventional CMS.

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As with everything else about managing content in a headless CMS, search optimization across different platforms can ultimately be customized and controlled in ways traditional page-based SEO cannot. On the other hand, there’s no denying that optimizing your content for search within a headless framework often entails a lot of work.

The SEO Challenges of Going Headless

Any solution that is more flexible and offers more options almost always entails more complexity, and you’ll find headless content creation and optimization live up to that expectation. Headless streamlines some parts of the content management process, but it also necessitates making more choices and doing more work on the technical side to make seamless content creation possible. The same is true in headless search engine optimization.

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The single biggest change to your conception of SEO in a headless versus conventional content environment revolves around content modeling. Within a headless architecture, content optimization is done at a more granular level, with the important content organized as discrete units to be manipulated and served up to users and search spiders alike. Your keyword research and understanding of your target audience are just as important as in traditional SEO, but in this case, they are helping you design how you build your content model, not just a web page or post.

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Your content model optimally delivers your content based on how you've categorized each piece of content, as well as the relationships you create between each element. Appropriately tagging your important SEO elements in the CMS and relating them to one another is crucial to ensuring that APIs can deliver them to the frontend interface as information that search engine crawlers will find and recognize.

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While the headless style of content modeling is a powerful way of handling SEO, no doubt building this out on the backend takes time, knowledge, and effort. Headless architecture also opens up a greater potential to optimize your URLs, your JavaScript rendering, your schema markup, and many other elements. All of these improved optimization opportunities also bring with them a learning curve and a certain amount of additional effort if headless content management is new to you.

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Don’t be intimidated by the extra layer of complexity involved in optimizing your headless content via content modeling. Breaking your content free of the frontend interface makes organizing your site structure more flexible, and this flexibility brings more options for SEO, which is a strength, not a weakness.

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Although greater technical SEO skills may be required with your headless CMS, that does not spell doom for your SEO strategy. Remember that one of the greatest potential benefits of headless - the ability of your creative team to focus on making great content - automatically gives you an SEO advantage.

How elk Addresses These Challenges

When it comes to achieving your digital marketing goals, elk meets the unique demands of headless SEO by deploying their uniquely powerful Growth SEO™ strategy. Recall that the cornerstone of preparing your headless content for SEO depends on the quality of your content modeling. The quality of that content model, in turn, is only as good as your keyword and linking strategy.

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So how does Growth SEO™ help you build that robust content model that’s SEO-ready? First, elk performs an unmatched level of specialized keyword research that prioritizes the search terms that are most likely to move the need on your search engine visibility. Additionally, elk will audit the technical side of your site to ensure that you’re delivering your content in a way that makes the most of the flexibility of headless architecture. 

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Ultimately, elk delivers a content map and linking strategy that leverages time-tested principles of SEO to be optimally effective in the ever-changing world of search and digital marketing.

Best Practices for Maintaining SEO with a Headless CMS

Since we’ve covered a lot of information in this article, let’s review some important points that can guide your SEO efforts:

• Create a detailed content model so that you can ensure that each element of your content is optimized for both your end users and search engine bots.
• Don’t overlook the value of JavaScript rendering for improving your performance. A better JavaScript option can get you faster page loading times than a standard CMS solution would.
• Make the most of your headless CMS’s ability to customize your URL structure, sitemap, and schemas so that they are optimized for search engine crawlers.
• Most importantly, make sure you are still mastering the fundamentals of SEO, especially when it comes to locking down the right keyword and link-building strategies.

Case Studies and Success Stories

Online retailer Lunya specializes in indulgent loungewear and affordable luxury basics in superior materials like washable silk. With their brand emphasis on quality, Lunya needed a content and SEO strategy that matched their garments' quality and accessibility. elk focused on the essentials of Growth SEO, including a superior content plan, on-page SEO, and strategic backlinking. The result was an 83% rise in Lunya's search rankings.

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Reliable Fishing sells fish storage bags, kayak bags, and other fishing and water sports accessories and apparel. In a highly competitive online market, Reliable turned to elk for help in climbing the search rankings. Built around a central pillar of creating and publishing high-value content, elk's plan for Reliable also utilized onsite SEO and link building to add the relevance and authority that would push them up the rankings. Ultimately, Reliable saw their overall search traffic value explode by more than 400 percent!

Final Thoughts

Although using a headless CMS can entail some extra work and complexity on the backend, implementing headless SEO within this content framework doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. Headless search optimization still relies on tried and true SEO principles applied to excellent, people-focused content.

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When you have access to a team that can take those SEO fundamentals to the next level, your headless content is not just freed from presentation layer constraints. It’s also liberated from the doldrums of search engine anonymity. With their obsessive focus on keyword and content strategies tailored to your company, elk offers you just that expertise. Contact elk today to find out how we can help blow the ceiling off your search engine ranking.