Headless SEO and What it Means to Your Business

Table of contents

1. The Pros and Cons of Content Management
2. Where CMSes Can Become Counterproductive
3. Going From Bloated to Boring
4. Decoupling: The Evolution of The CMS
5. What is a Headless CMS?
6. Does a Headless CMS Affect Rankings?
7. Other Javascript SEO Considerations
8. So Then, What is Headless SEO?
9. Don’t Lose Your Head Over It

Traditional web sites are evolving. Not solely are they changing into extra dynamic, however the way in which we develop and optimize web sites is changing into more and more dynamic, too. The motive for that is easy: because the world is shifting to cellular, the demand for extra dynamic content material, companies, and experiences will develop together with it.

Digital transformation has been an accepted enterprise observe since 2013. Even The Wall Street Journal in 2018 declared that every company is now a tech company. The world was poised for fairly a while to transition to a distant workforce.

Obviously, the latest viral outbreak has accelerated this transformation. Some corporations have lately embraced a distant work coverage, even closing their bodily workplaces completely. Others have adopted a mobile-driven, remote-first, or hybrid-work mannequin.

For instance, seoplus+ is an award-winning digital advertising company in Ottawa, Canada. We serve purchasers all throughout Canada and from all over the world. Many of our purchasers have seen main progress on-line, notably after COVID hit. Some have develop into totally distant as properly.

So it made logical sense when, in June 2021, seoplus+ has develop into a work-from-anywhere firm. Many massive enterprise-level companies are main the way in which, too. Firms switching to distant work in entire or partially embrace Amazon, Capital One, Facebook, Ford, Google, Hubspot, Microsoft, Shopify, Verizon, and many others. And the checklist retains rising.

In quick, gone are the times of being caught at some centralized head workplace or headquarters. In truth, you’ll be able to say that companies and their practices have gotten extra and extra “headless.” (The pun is kind of intentional. You’ll quickly perceive why.)

The Pros and Cons of Content Management

When a rising variety of conventional, brick-and-mortar corporations are adopting a cellular method, we are able to safely say it’s not some mere pattern. More importantly, watching the place they’re going can be an excellent indicator of the place digital advertising is heading, too.

For this motive, the web sites we develop, the instruments we use to develop these web sites, and the practices we have interaction in to promote these web sites, should adapt and evolve as properly.

Web growth and digital advertising have gotten more and more cellular, decentralized, and dynamic. Think of the expansion in cloud computing, software program as a service (SaaS), advertising automation, and above all, content material administration.

When I began on-line within the late 80s, I hardcoded all my pages in HTML. They have been easy black textual content on white backgrounds with just a few blue hyperlinks. Simple to make however tedious. By the mid-90s, I began utilizing server-side contains (SSI). This course of allowed me to reuse frequent elements of the web site with out having to recode repeated sections each time.

Then, the introduction of client-side scripting languages like Javascript made it simpler for me to create pages. It additionally made them quicker and just a little extra dynamic, too. Some early browsers referred to as it dynamic HTML or DHTML to differentiate them from customary HTML.

A number of years later, the introduction of the content material administration system (CMS) vastly improved web site deployment not to mention enjoyment. With the rise in velocity, effectivity, and efficiency, it’s no marvel there’s hypergrowth in using CMSes. WordPress, the world’s main CMS, operates 40% of all web sites as we speak and 65% of all CMSes.

The actual worth of a CMS comes from the power to handle the content material, therefore the identify. But one other key profit is that it additionally manages the output of that content material with out the necessity to code it. Using a WYSIWYG interface, we’re able to designing and not simply growing web sites.

But this additional benefit creates its personal set of issues.

Where CMSes Can Become Counterproductive

The output, typically referred to because the “presentation layer,” is comprised of a mix of three elements: server-side static belongings (information), database content material, and client-side scripts. As CMSes develop (and the demand for content material and higher experiences develop), every of those three elements will inevitably develop as properly, thus including extra to that layer.

The result’s a heavier payload and, consequently, a slower web site.

When somebody visits a website, their browser downloads all of the information and pulls all the info from the database. It then assembles them, parses them, renders them, and paints the penultimate doc. (There’s much more occurring, after all. But for the sake of simplicity, these are the final steps.)

I stated penultimate as a result of any client-side scripts can modify any of the doc’s objects (or DOM) to make the web page or elements of it dynamic and interactive. This step is normally the quickest as a result of, after loading the assets from the supply server, the remaining may be executed on the consumer’s aspect and shouldn’t be depending on bandwidth.

(Some information load sequentially or synchronously, others load collectively or asynchronously. Either method, scripts can’t execute till the supposed assets are loaded.)

But as we add extra and extra information and information, issues can decelerate and negatively have an effect on the way in which customers get to load and expertise the online web page.

So in an effort to enhance efficiency and velocity, the penultimate doc, assembled as a complete or partially, is cached at varied factors across the net. This method, a person’s browser will pull up the closest cached model as an alternative of downloading new copies of the information and reassembling every thing with each go to.

It works. But it, too, has its limitations.

In many instances, it can even make issues worse.

Going From Bloated to Boring

Mobile units have develop into the chief technique of shopping the Internet. Almost 60% of the traffic on the Internet is thru cellphones — and over 75% in the event you contemplate different cellular units equivalent to tablets, handheld consoles, digital cameras, and good units.

Influenced largely by the explosive progress of cellular utilization, Google launched new algorithms this yr that can rank your website primarily based on a wide range of further components associated to the location’s person expertise.

Google’s web page expertise algorithm measures a set of performance metrics, which encompass velocity, stability, and interactability (i.e., how lengthy it takes the web page to load, cease shifting round, and ready to be interacted with). Google calls these Core Web Vitals. Other net vitals embrace safety, security, responsiveness, and accessibility (i.e., no intrusive interstitials).

Ultimately, what it means is that your pages will rank just a little higher if their user experience is better than these of your rivals. The problem is that, apart from enhancing server processing energy and caching, we have now reached some extent the place there are solely so many technical velocity optimizations we are able to do.

So the one answer left at this level is to reduce.

We scale back, minify, take away, compress. Rinse and repeat.

The subject is that this course of can attain some extent of diminishing returns. While many net designers and builders have adopted a minimalist approach, if we hold lowering pages extra and extra, the result’s the sluggish return to these easy white pages with black textual content and blue hyperlinks. In an effort to enhance person expertise, we hinder it.

So what’s a greater answer?

Decoupling: The Evolution of The CMS

Fueled by the rise in digital transformation, distant work, and cellular utilization, the demand for velocity and efficiency is rising at a fast tempo. For instance, cloud as-a-service choices are projected to attain $927.51 billion by 2027.

Subsequently, the demand for quicker and higher-performing digital experiences will push the necessity for higher web sites. But how do you create quick web sites which are nonetheless useful? How do you create dynamic content material that’s not stripped down, overoptimized, or bland?

Enter headless content material administration.

A standard CMS is a monolithic system that dictates the complete web site’s performance, from the backend to the frontend. Each finish is inextricably tied to the opposite. One small change within the backend reveals up within the frontend.

The frontend known as the “head.” It’s the place the content material is rendered and skilled by the person. The backend is the place the content material is created, saved, and managed. That’s the “physique”. In conventional CMSes, the physique and the top are linked or “coupled,” so to converse.

Now, the time period “headless” comes from the method of “decoupling” the 2 ends. In different phrases, the backend (i.e., the content material together with all its needed elements) is separate from the frontend (i.e., the rendering of these elements within the person’s browser).

The content material is accessible however doesn’t include a built-in frontend or presentation layer. It is (virtually fully) impartial from the person’s system, working system, bandwidth velocity, display dimension, and geographic location.

The CMS turns into much less of an all-in-one content material publishing software and extra of a database — a content-driven repository the place you’ll be able to create, edit, retailer, and handle content material. And that’s it.

What is a Headless CMS?

By rendering the content material on the person’s finish in a separate course of, the result’s a vastly quicker load time and higher web page expertise. The CMS turns into a real CMS, if you’ll, as a result of it solely manages the content material and not how it’s printed or introduced.

The greatest method to consider it is like an software. An API (software programming interface) provides information (on this case, to an software on a person’s system, even when it’s an online web page), which is rendered individually and independently.

This decoupled CMS or “headless CMS” is gaining recognition as a result of it provides far higher flexibility not to mention velocity. By treating the content material like information, it provides simpler collaboration, higher scalability, and quicker growth occasions.

There’s no want to accommodate totally different browsers, working programs, cellular units, connection speeds, and so on. Instead, it unifies information in a single place, simplifies (and hastens) the creation of content material, and makes it quicker to deploy.

Plus, it’s safer because the content material is totally separate from the presentation layer. By eradicating the numerous entry factors between the server and the consumer, it reduces the variety of alternatives for hackers to exploit.

Does that imply that the standard CMS is useless?

Not any time quickly, after all. Traditional CMSes nonetheless energy nearly all of the Internet, and lots of them are ample for simplest, standalone web sites. But for web sites that require velocity, agility, interactivity, and scalability, headlessness is a viable answer.

Moreover, many headless environments additionally use conventional CMSes as their backend. In the case of WordPress, for instance, one can nonetheless entry the backend to write and handle content material. But the entrance finish is, fairly merely, ineffective.

Instead of the CMS’ frontend, a separate client-side frontend pulls content material from the CMS. This entrance is coded (typically manually) utilizing a framework — most of that are primarily based on Javascript. There are fairly just a few of them:

---