What Is Headless SEO? – Whiteboard Friday

In this Whiteboard Friday, learn about headless CMSs, the advantages of using them, and the differences in your approach to SEO.

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about headless SEO. Headless SEO is the set of specific techniques when you're doing SEO on a headless CMS.

So, first of all, let's talk about what is a headless CMS? We're gonna define it in comparison with a traditional CMS. That is, your typical WordPress, for example.

Traditional CMS

A traditional CMS is made up of three parts that are tightly coupled together. We've got the database, we've got the admin layer. This is where you edit your content and add images or change your titles. And then we've got the presentation. In traditional CMSs, this is typically a website, which is great, but user behavior has been evolving and now we are searching for content and consuming content across different devices and channels.

Headless CMS

So the need for a headless CMS arises. It is similar to a traditional CMS in the sense that you also have a database and an admin layer that are tightly coupled together. But you have the option of having many different presentation layers at the same time. So you could have an app for a smartwatch, you could deploy your content onto a marketplace, you could have your very own mobile app, or you could, again, work on your website.

I often get asked if headless CMSs are better for SEO. And the truth is that it depends.

I think headless CMSs can be an advantage if you do a lot of content reuse. If you are working with systems that are very interconnected and need to work together in real time, the API capabilities of a headless CMS allow you to manage, for example, a volatile inventory for e-commerce much better. Or if you're working on an international SEO project.

Now, what are the specific differences when you're doing SEO at a headless CMS?

1. Content Modeling

The first one, and to me, the one that's a little harder to understand, it's that you are not building pages.

You are building content that's agnostic of the channel that it's going to go on. So you are going to start taking a step back when looking at your content, and you're gonna start doing content modeling. We all have a content model in our heads, but often we've not made it explicit.

So let's take a look at an example. Imagine you have a music venue. As a music venue, you are going to have a set of artists that come to your venue on a specific date and time for a performance. You are going to want to sell tickets for that performance, and those tickets are going to have a price and a seat number assigned.

On occasion, you might be selling merchandise in collaboration with the artists. That is your content model and the content types that you're working with, and you can see how they relate to each other. Using the attributes and the content types that you're working with, you can imagine how to create and deploy content for your music venue across all of the channels that we have discussed.

2. Omnichannel content re-use

We've touched upon it, but omnichannel content we use is absolutely key and to satisfy user intent in this day and age, right? So users are no longer only searching on Google. They're searching on TikTok, they're searching on Instagram, and you want to be everywhere that your audience is at. With a headless CMS, you are working with channel-agnostic content.

So you have to be really careful about how you're going to deploy your content to those channels where you can find your audience.

3. Limited plugins

And last but not least, you have a limited amount of plugins. I believe we've all been very heavily working away on our work sites using Yoast or similar plugins that did a lot of the heavy lifting for us. Now with headless SEO, we are not working with plugins that are supposed to add capabilities that the CMS didn't have already.

We're working with systems that connect to each other. So instead of adding that capability to a CMS with a plugin, you would connect to a system that gives you that capability. Now that's not as easy as just installing a WordPress plugin. You are going to need development resources for that.

I hope this was helpful. My name is Lidia Infante, and I'm the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity, a modern headless CMS. You can follow me at LidiaInfanteM on most social media or find some content on my website, Lidia-Infante.com.