Decoded Headless CMS & SEO

Key Takeaways

hi everyone this is lauren baker with search engine journal and today i'm privileged to have lydia infante on the show uh lydia you you were just at mozcon i was it was a blast it was incredible nice nice and um you're at uh sanity now so um welcome to the sdj show it's a pleasure to have you hi thank you so much i'm so excited to be here and to like have the opportunity to nerd out with you about like old stuff headless seo and just yeah nice nice so before we get started talking about headless seo because i'm really interested in this has been a trend for a while especially headless e-commerce and then everything that has to do with that um how about if you take a moment to kind of introduce yourself talk about your background to our audience so they get a chance to know you better yes i am terrible at introducing myself and considering i've done like quite a fair bit of podcast i should have nailed a pitch but i haven't so bear with me my name is olivia i was born in barcelona i've been in seo for about eight years now and next week it's going to be on monday next week it's going to be my 10 year anniversary in the marketing industry which is wild to me because i'm 29 so like i started when i was 19. um and then two years after that i got into seo i was i was getting my degree in psychology i've got a bachelor of science in psychology and i just wanted like a quick night summer job like pouring pines in some pop or whatever um so i went you know like sending cds around and i went to my favorite pub and it was closed it was supposed to be open and i was very annoyed with that so i um crumbled my cv into a little bowl a paper bowl and i threw it and threw it into the pop through the window and and i did not expect to be called for that job at all um so the next day i have an email from their head of communications it was a chain of pubs that was linked to a pretty big real estate chain for hotels and stuff in ibiza so it was like bigger than just the pop that i knew and she's like oh i see your background in psychology i would love to have you for an interview or position that i've got in the clemson pr department so i showed up for the interview it's one of my first jobs ever and this lady has my crumpled cv just flattened on the table the actual paper that i threw through a window um and we started talking about ideas and pr and events and communication and marketing and i got incredibly excited and she said that she told me that her father was a professor of marketing in a psychology university which is why she thought that i would be a very good fit for the role because of the length of psychology and marketing which at the time i did not appreciate like i i thought i was going to be a neuroscientist i was going to be researching brains and here we are talking headless seo instead um so yeah that's that's how it started and the moment that i got into marketing um i started taking some responsibilities on digital and being able to see the numbers move depending on what i did is absolutely addictive um so i started on social media and pr and like seeing our brand awareness shoot through the roof um the chain of pubs was getting like full and full and it was amazing um but then my job moved to visa without me and i had to find another job i knew i was addicted to uh the rush of digital marketing so i decided to move on to ppc and i worked for an e-commerce and international e-commerce for clothing personalization that was really interesting for a couple of years um and i was working there with their international markets managing all types of ppc budgets which is a dark secret of mine but yeah it really has helped me in my career and it's it's laid the foundations for what i do in international seo for keyword research for topic analysis and um it's taught me to have the cultural awareness that you need to do international so that's that's been really really an amazing experience and while i was doing that because of course i can't stand still for like half a second um i decided to create a feminist website i was like oh i'd like to say my stuff talk about man online as one does and um i started building it and it got big i am telling you it got huge we went from zero to two hundred 000 followers on facebook in less than a year we were national trending topic three times i was on tv i was on radio stations um the stuff that i was writing and that our users were writing went viral and we went from like zero to almost a million page views a month um from organic and this caught the attention yeah it was it was good i think it's sad because it was like many years ago but it might be the highlight of my career what was the site oh i don't think i can say it because firstly i get like i gave it away it doesn't exist anymore secondly it's an extremely rude name okay this was never a professional endeavor it means can i say it can i swear on your podcast um mildly then no okay all right okay we'll get it we'll get offline then okay so yeah it was it was literally never meant to be um professionally never but one of our readers was the head of um the editorial director at rba which is spain's biggest magazine publisher um with the likes of like national geographic right oh wow yes yes she was a huge fan of my work she tweeted at me and she was like oh i want to come over for a chat and i left that chat their chief digital editor and i think i was 22. um shocking i i spent two years with the most impostor syndrome the biggest case of imposter syndrome that the world has ever seen um but it was amazing and i learned a lot about um seo for publishing right for publishing teams for news outlet outlets um i collaborated with the national geographic team and like a very small tax project that we did ended up delivering seven million monthly organic sessions a very tiny tweak to our tax yes i got absolutely hugged but then and i know i was completely spoiled i i didn't know what i had at the time because i was like oh i have access to all of these subject matter experts i have no problem creating and publishing content all the time and i publish it and it ranks and i've got brand awareness so everyone's linking to us this is too easy so i decided to move on to sas um it's a business model yeah i know i know i knew nothing okay i was at this point i was 24 right there were some questionable decisions being made um so yeah i moved on to the sas business and the business model was different right because when you're working in publishing not so much anymore um now the industry has changed a lot but essentially you're monetizing through ads um then you monitor affiliates and then later on it came like the whole paywall stuff but um it was only about volume and that was not fun i had i had i felt like i had mastered it at the time so i moved to a sas platform a british company but i was still working in spain and it required for me to be very strategic about cannibalization and positioning because we had three brands um and the search volume for our terms in the spanish market was tiny tiny so every click mattered um and that was yeah an interesting experience after that i decided that i wanted even more crazy that was not crazy enough for me um and i moved on to an agency in the uk called ryzen 7 to continue with my pattern of being absolutely bonkers i moved to sheffield which is a tiny city in the uk in the north it's cold and it's windy it's very green and beautiful without ever having been there before like my first time in that city i had all of my suitcases with me i had a rental agreement signed i had a cat that i flew from barcelona and had to have a layover in heathrow and yeah i moved there i thought the pandemic was over obviously it wasn't so i spent four months locked by myself in that studio apartment which really meant i had to focus entirely on doing my job and seo and owning my craft and talking to stakeholders learning how to sit in meetings with uh cmos and ceos of publicly trading american household names um which i think removed any kind of like sensitivity or nerve nerves of public speaking which then led me to yeah do a lot of public speaking i worked at becomers for a short while enabling the teams to deliver good international seo and content best practices across the board for 18 different websites and that all of the challenges that we were facing for localization and recycling content and being able to create the content once but then use it a thousand times made me look into headless cmss um and that made me run into this job offer at sanity and i was like yes this is what i want to do next this is my next crazy adventure so i joined sanity last month well let's get in the headless cmss first what exactly is it now does it work right so right before right before this chat between you and me i have been thinking how on earth do i explain what a headless cms is without saying it's the opposite of a traditional cms right like we do tend to define headless cms in opposition to a traditional cms um but the most important thing that i can say about it is that the content is separated from the presentation when you are building your content on let's say wordpress you've got your text editor and you're typing typing away you're saying your things you're talking about your product you're talking about this subject you press publish and that content belongs to that url and that url alone but when you're doing headless and when you're when you're working with structured content it's super different so what you do is you identify your distinct entities wait this is going to be crazy if i explain it like this i'm going to use an example let's say i'm the e-commerce manager at apple and i've got several iphones a few macbooks different products to sell and a very nice brand to represent if i am in a traditional cms i'm going to have to create a page for the iphone 13 write the title write the product uh description a longer blurb explain all of the characteristics of each iphone so we're talking um display dimensions we're talking storage solutions color options everything under the sun um and then i write it and then i write it for the next product then i write it for the next product and then if i want to build it in an app i need to write it all again and then if i want a mobile website i need to edit it all again but if i was doing this on a headless cms i would identify my entities my entities is iphone iphone type we've got a type of iphone um and these entities have some common characteristics to them they've got a name they've got attack line they've got a price they've got a series of available colors they've got a series of display sizes um processor power yeah everything under the sun right so i build this schema and empty an empty schema of content that says phone with space for all of these characteristics and then i go on to it again and i say product name iphone 13 price whatever outrageous a little blurb of content summary in here these are all of my pictures of the iphone this is what the iphone looks like these are the dimensions etc and i do this for all of the products for all of the iphones that i do is for all the macbooks for everything and it sits on like a database like a little pool of content an absolutely humongous uh excel right a huge mental spreadsheet of my key entities and all their characteristics and then i go on to my developers and i say listen i want to build a product page and i want the product page to follow this template product name tagline prices because we're on desktop i want a longer description and then i'm going to provide the audience with five um five images and then i'm going to show the top three characteristics that people care most about um color processor and storage and then if they click on view more they can see all the other ones and at the bottom some related products and the option to compare i tell my developers to build this this template this page and with one click they pull all of the content from this this massive database that i have created onto the page for all of my products at the same time so this produces a level of scale that you can have anywhere else then i go and i say well do i want my mobile version to be different so i go to my developers and say my mobile version is going to have um we're going to remove the compare option at the bottom we're going to produce the summary instead of the whole description and we're going to use three pictures instead of five and they click and it is deployed i don't have to build every page i create the content in a core database a central source of truth and then i deploy it following a template so if anyone listening has worked on enterprise seo you know that working with seo with templates for pages and optimizing templates is a really good way to scale your seo efforts essentially what i'm trying to tell you is like this is the difference between headless cms and coupled or traditional cms um the content sits here and the presentation sits here and the presentation rules are pulling from the structured content that you have created does that make sense gotcha yeah it does and it also makes sense one thing we were talking about before you jumped on was i was mentioning how i was working on a couple of different headless um i don't know i should go into well gatsby so i was working on a couple uh i was working on a couple of uh projects that utilize gatsby and the first thing and one of them one of them utilizes uh wordpress built on wp engine as its database that is pulling everything from right so i'm looking at the wp engine environment and i'm looking at the gatsby front end and they're not the same there's things that are missing there's things that obviously be part of a wordpress build like self referring canonical right and on gatsby the canonical set for a default page or whatever and i noticed this on various different gatsby builds actually had a couple of companies that had reached out to me asking for seo help and i saw that they were on gatsby and i looked in their chronicles and if your canonicals are messed up then google may not even honor any other command on your site if your canonicals don't don't work right so um i was a little bit shocked to see that right and then you were telling me a little bit previously how spoiled everyone's become utilizing work using wordpress or cms's that are built with seo in mind whereas in with a headless environment sometimes you have to build that from scratch and so can you get into that a little bit yeah absolutely um and like before you start doing seo with headless you take so many steps ahead of that like you need to take a step back what i was telling you with the example without apple and do some content modeling right you need to understand what are your entities phone laptop ipad whatever and what are the characteristics of those entities to then be able to build pages but when you're building pages at the very i think my favorite moment in this process of doing headless seo is the page build and the template build when you're designing how the content is going to be deployed to your different channels [Music] you take a step back you think about the user experience you think about the user intent you build this beautiful request for your dev team but if you haven't worked with headless before you might take for granted that you're going to have a title and a meta description that you're going to have canonicals at all that you're going to have open graph data that you're going to have space for hr plan or that you're going to have um you know robots metaroad stacks um so you really need to sit down and strategize how you want this to happen so you tell your developers um i want for every page to have a space for a title i'm gonna name it a description i want every canonical to be self-referencing um what happens when you've got a parameterized url i wanted to reference to the url without parameters i want this to be towards the trailing slash or non-trailing slash version depending on on where your content actually sits but you need to be super explicit with what you need and you need to talk to your devs to make sure that it happens you're going to have to do some qa and some assurance but a beautiful thing in my opinion is that you can um integrate some validation rules into this process right so i could come in and say um i want all of my titles meta titles to be different from all of my h1s so if a content editor inputs the same title in the same h1 it cannot be published an error is going to pop up i want all of my titles to be under 65 characters and all of my meta descriptions to be under 155 um if it doesn't happen like it can't go live um or i want to be respecting the guarantee the cherokee of um headings or no duplicate headings that's all of the validation rules that you can integrate because when you're working in a website that has several stakeholders and several people can publish on it or even when you have user generated content creating creating editorial experiences that are conducive to high quality seo content is going to be one of your quickest wins got you got you and besides uh there's another one that excites me so much about this um [Music] in there you could integrate um for example i i i haven't been a product side for other headless cmss but i can tell you that um sanity is on based on the jam stack which is a javascript api and schema stack so you could connect you could potentially connect some sections of your um website to an ai content generator right so you plug in a product with a product image with some contents around the product and you have this ai content generator that writes the meta description for you every time right you could you could upload an image and have a visual ai create a perfect old text for you every time so the possibilities of scale are huge and don't even get me started on internationalization because that is what got me into headless seo before we get into internationalization let's talk a little bit about performance and other benefits so do you find that most headless seo or headless cmss are quicker um or is it the opposite is that a misconception um what have you found with the projects that you've worked on and that sanity so they're definitely they have the ability to be quicker but in order for you to make them quicker you need to know how to right if you don't have the knowledge or the skill set to work with headless cmss you might find that creating new landing pages is clunky it's a clunky process where you need to ask your developers every time you need to make a change in that case someone who's got experience in headless seo or what i would recommend is you need to talk to your developers for them to make you a template that you can fill out easily to be deploying um to be deploying landing pages or content but maybe you meant um quicker as in uh web performance or do you mean yeah with web performance as well yeah right with my performance you've got full control about how stuff is deployed from scratch you don't need to go into wordpress and add lines of code and make changes to the core of how wordpress works to be able to say i want things to lazy load in this way or this other way i'm going to impact um core web vitals by changing the way that these different requests interact with each other um so yeah definitely you have the chance to make it faster but headless cmss come also with a lot of ownership and responsibility over what you're doing you've got infinite potential of what you can do but if you don't know what you're doing you're a lot less you're a lot more likely to mess it up than you'd be with wordpress yes um i've noticed that too which scares me right because right now it seems to be the trend and i have what messing it up or well yeah i'm messing it up because i i have had the ability to talk to people that are looking at new cms systems they're not happy with what they're on for some reason or another or maybe like a consultant has come in and said oh you have to go headless because it's faster for google which for some reason uh google lighthouse and the ability to have scores have swayed c-suites to make that decision oh we have to have a bigger number we we have to get closer to 100 30 is not good enough 40 is not good enough which isn't the case right your your site speed is only as relevant as your competitive set when it comes to google ranking at the end of the day so yes yeah if you're if you're a 20 and you're on if you're on page one and you're number three and you're a 20 and everybody else is a 15 you're really in first place from a speed perspective it's other things that you have to do better especially with e-commerce because there's no sites i mean most of what you typically find in an e-commerce environment is that the site is incredibly fast until you add on all of the tracking mechanisms to make an e-commerce deployment successful when it comes to things like charging and this and that and yeah um so anyway besides besides more so my point that i'm trying to get to is i think there's a little bit of a misconception with headless a lot of a lot of people out there the conversations i'm having with people that are not tech seos is they feel that just just utilizing a hellish something called headless means that it's automatically going to be faster quicker and a better experience but you're saying that all that has to be implemented from day one or from ground zero as you're building that up in order to get that benefit right yeah what are some other um what are some other seo related uh i guess seo related optimizations not to be two um that can be looked out for in a headless environment and we're trying to choose a headless cms solution so let me touch on a quick thing on web performance optimization before we move on to that because i have a lot to say about that as well surprise surprise um when it comes to optimization for web performance um it your headless cms can guide you a little bit more and different headless cms are going to have are going to facilitate for you to achieve amazing core with bios in different ways um i don't know if i can save it but one of the google engineers that's working on chrome with vitals actually has his personal website with sanity and he's got like perfect cool vile scores obviously because that's his job but sanity offers out of the box perfect core with vitals um that's like a marketing prompt i'm not exactly sure how we make that work but my developers have absolutely sworn that um if you don't mess it up too badly you can expect like amazing web performance with sunny tape but in terms of seo and other stuff that you can do um the main i think the main pain point that headless solves is content velocity right not just because you have like all your content on one side and you can pull it in different ways in different pages which is like it's not a small feed you also have your content team taking care of only one core source of truth instead of having to look at and update 30 pages every time the price of one product changes right or if we want to change the tagline for the iphone we just change the tagline on our database and it's going to get pulled on all of its pages no matter how many right you can create category pages in a million different ways and you can integrate ai writing or accessibility improvements through different services and in different ways so it really empowers creators when it comes to content velocity which is one of the main pain points we see and i have definitely experienced in the seo industry both in like traditional seo and international seo the the level of content velocity that you can achieve by working this way is absolutely huge that's awesome that's awesome yeah sorry it fixes also it's like tiny little problems in other ways right um as i was telling you earlier we've partnered with shopify and shopify has notoriously so so i'm sure they can't say that sorry um notoriously like notoriously not amazing um category pages right so with sanity you can pull up your all of your shopify information all of your shopify modules and say i want to have i want to be pulling in this product description in here or this category description in there and you can make it as long as you want as short as you want uh show it up here or here or or essentially the world is your oyster right so you could overcome some different tech limitations by using headless interesting i didn't i didn't realize that you could do that much utilizing sanity and shopify oh yeah it is a it's a superstar combination okay cool um where is that on the site is that santa fe connect for shopify um it's sanity.io shopify okay we are struggling to get that page to rank shame on me you're calling me out in public easy enough that's okay there's there's lots of uh apps and development pages and stuff like that about shopify on the site as well been there done that so interesting yeah because one of my my one of my biggest shopify pet peeves is the lack of customization and then the lack of also i mean there's more customization on the pdp they typically do better sometimes in the collection pages so it looks like you've gotten a lot of that out of the way with templates and everything else cool well if you want a free sanity plan hit me up i'll set you up with our our good stuff well dude can can you can you offer that to the audience as well absolutely yeah um so i'll have i'll have the team draw up um a special landing page for you all to be able to access it in but um yeah i i can offer that can i send it to you later yeah yeah we'll do a follow-up yeah um if not you can always go to sanity.io slash moscon oh oh look oh a little bit of a brand uh flash monster i'll drop that why not all right we'll make one for you though we'll make one for search engine journal so anyone who's on right now who would like to check out sanity you can go to sanity.io mozcon which i'm currently dropping in the comments and then um and then uh in the future we'll do a standalone tracking page for sdj for a free account or trial or whatever it may be so we've talked about um we've talked about um basically uh content velocity the ability to scale content and pages we've talked about um platform specific uh templates and targeted pages right the ability to set up your core template they're utilizing for desktop versus um mobile and everything else from a responsive standpoint just powering all that off the database we've talked about um the improvements on overall performance whether it be speed etc in a headless environment and we've talked about the importance of working with your developers to make sure that there's a basic seo needs are obviously integrated into what's one other core benefit of utilizing a headless cms system i think headless cms i've seen amazing websites of programmatic content made with headless cms one of our clients um they're that i believe they're dangler.com um no um it's it's another domain but the name of the brand is tangler they have an affiliate website that is incredibly good they are pulling in from all of the shopify merchants who are currently selling um materials for fishing right so we're talking like rods and lines and bait they pull it all in into their sanity implementation and then they decide how this is going to be displayed across their pages again they make a category page and all of the products are being pulled in and what does the product listing page gonna look like what does the product category page gonna look like um they automate that the main the main thing that they do that they work on manually is uh descriptions for the categories but they're just they've chosen a series of providers and they're just pulling in their stock their prices their images um if i was to do a similar project i would probably try and automate product descriptions with some gpt based ai but it's it's just brilliant you can if you're smart and you're creative and i really admire the work that they have done um you can absolutely do a lot with not a lot of resources it's generally very impressive are those are those feeds are those feeds leading the user over to the third party to make the purchase or is it all purchasable within the one shop i believe they are oh yeah it's dangler.com the code.uk i believe they're leading them to the merchant no actually you can you can directly shop with them that is so good but it's being fulfilled by the merchant uh yes yeah like they blow me away all the time we've got such amazing smart people doing incredible things with our platform yeah when i had kevin indig on here from shopify oh my gosh almost a year ago now one of the big things that he had told me was that people tend to overlook shopify's both its platform and its fulfillment components when producing stores and i was like what do you mean he's like well you know you can have you can have utilizing some shopify uh merchants you can have pick up and you can do a pickup in store for shopify merchant that utilizes shopify's point of purchase to pick up something from another merchant they'll send it to that store and i was like what it's like yeah or you can utilize you can go through the process of maybe utilizing a third party cart to make that purchase which then gets sent to multiple different merchants and fulfilled separately which is kind of interesting as well i would wonder how that that works from a customer service standpoint after you make the purchase to get emails from all these texts from all these different merchants or whatever or if it's all sent at once and consolidated as a shipment utilizing their shop technology right so there's a lot there's a lot there um [Music] how how well does ai content typically rank have some questions that have come in um when ai content is utilized uh in a headless environment how well would you specifically rank i would say never use ai for anything that's mission critical we're not there yet if you want to build that leadership it's not going to be written by ai um and this is like a theory of me of mine the fact that ai works right now it's because most of the text that it's pulling from and learning from has been created by humans but if we muddle this um this pool of of of learning for the ai with more and more ai produced content it's not necessarily going to make more human looking human sounding content for you ai content is a good way to shortcut and scale different aspects of your site when you're not mission critical if they are mission critical i think you need a human writer or at the very very very least a human editor um i'm not sure if this is like something that google has officially said but i'm sure that they can definitely figure out whether something has been written by ai or not it's technically something that they don't recommend and it's gonna miss it's gonna lose any tone of voice and any uniqueness to your brand and your person when you're using it like that yeah i think um in terms of i don't know the term ai is thrown around almost as much as headlesses um but i think from an ai perspective uh where i see it as like tools like um like phrase um and other like other like editorial template oriented tools right yeah hey let's let's look at the competitive set and see you know what how this term is being used make recommendations for h1s titles things like that h2s outline and then have someone write around that as well um that's hard to scale though so yeah yeah you could plug it in through an api for non-mission critical stuff with sanity but yeah um i have used ai writers to like get me out of a writing red right like i i'm uninspired for it for a title um phrase hq has some um free tools that you can use and like they'll provide a title or an outline for you or a meta description and sometimes it surfaced stuff that i had not thought about or titles that are really good and i tweak them and use them and yeah that's it's good sometimes and it's definitely going a long way that's actually an interesting point like i know a lot of people sometimes including myself where i can't think of an idea but then if i see someone's crappy writing i'll tear it apart you can fit into something new right yeah so yeah maybe that's a good use of it no more blank page panic yeah ai page panic now and i agree uh written ai based upon ai content is kind of scary it's kind of like the whole uh star wars component right like first the clones were made from jango fett but then after times they ran out of people to make the clones from so they made clones from clones which became stormtroopers and they just got worse over time right so i could that's why they can as a yeah well yes um very inefficient i can't shoot if there's a jedi around if it's jawas they can shoot him pretty easily but um a little plot hole but yeah it kind of makes sense right from an ai perspective uh where do you see headless going um in the next uh four to five years um i think the most exciting thing is i have no idea really okay what is coming because because our clients surprise us every time like this dangler client i'm i'm really impressed i had a chat with their i believe it was um their cmo recently and he had just so many ideas it was so lovely um you can do a ton of stuff and i from what i'm seeing like the trend that i'm seeing of how people search uh for us and how people use us i think we could expect to see somewhat of a rise of of neat channel content deployment um i was having a chat with one of our developers on the product side and i was well we were workshopping a concept okay um we were workshopping how would we sell sanity to marta steward you know like the the recipe maker content mogul super human and i was thinking well what if you could optimize her entire social media off the back of the performance of her current articles and the new articles and i was telling this developer i was like in my head doing my marketer thing just streaming i was like what if for every new article we could publish automatically onto their stories using the title as like in this font and in here and then the core image in here using ai recognition of the image to make sure that it's like readable and then do some reposting based on last month's [Music] blog post with more um with more visits but user rule that doesn't resurface anything that we've reposted in the last three months and he was like yeah yeah we can do that with sanity now it's like what how um essentially like everything is doable as long as there's an api you can do anything you want interesting interesting so would you recommend that uh people definitely experiment with headless and tools like sanity solutions like sanity and things like that at the end of the day yeah it's fun and and as seos the industry we like like affiliate size and like really quick wins so you you can you can take a page out of danglers book and make an affiliate site yourself just by pulling in from some shopify merchants or any other providers that you that you'd like to work with right that's the thing like um seeing a lot of comments actually right now while we're talking about ai like who's using what a high tool and stuff like that the thing is it's great but if it's not really your own site like uh when it makes a little bit harder when you're working with clients you know you're not going to want to experiment on their site with pulling ai without at least without letting them know but um the ability to use yeah imagine you were doing drop shipping right and you are selling this product but i don't want to go again with the iphone um you're selling a shiny fanny pack for going to festivals right and this product is advertised on aliexpress on 30 different merchants and also on like little niche sites you could feed all of that content that someone else has written for you and automatically generate unique descriptions for your product yep nice the real estate world like the first thing that comes to mind to me is real estate as well like so many different real estate well there's less and less there's less and less i guess us-based real estate sites now because most most real estate sites that appear in google are owned by the same two or three companies but um the ability to take uh what is it mms the real estate uh feed of houses for sale and all their information and repackage that um into a little bit more of an original thing by bringing in uh bringing in api data from third parties that those other sites aren't using it's kind of interesting as well so if you've got a computer you can describe uh you can talk about facebook as a company to work for in by pulling in all the many ways that facebook talks about itself or other the way that other careers career sites talk about facebook interesting interesting um at what point do you suggest someone look into um a headless cms solution even i mean if they're if they're happy with what they have or if they're getting i mean would you would you suggest this for someone that's a smaller e-commerce company or someone is growing enterprise mid-level what are your suggestions a minute so i think any any e-commerce merchant can probably benefit from using a headless solution just because you've got more and more because of the way that the whole ecosystem is evolving right you've got more and more ways to surface your products across different platforms you could um i know you can do this insanity i don't know if this is common with headless but you could click add a picture that you have of 10 of your products and say in this section of the picture it's this product which links to this page and you can easily deploy that to instagram shopping or or pinterest shopping um without really that much more development or that much more content work so definitely for most e-commerce sites i would recommend um going with a headless solution especially if you're a direct to consumer side that has a big brand so i think i think nike for example would be like an amazing use case for it we don't have them as a client that i know of um but we have some like similar brands um anyone can buy night shoes for ev from every retailer right you can buy them from walmart i don't know if walmart sells that i'm not american um but you can buy them on amazon finder on zolando you can buy you can find anywhere um so dtc brands need to make sure that the experience that they provide on their website it's not the typical e-commerce experience of title product picture price description um and it's more similar to the the experience that they can actually provide in a shop right so you go to the shop and the vive of your specific favorite brand is going to be going back to apple you're going to an apple store and it feels sleek and it's organized and you've got your your um areas of products on the sides of the of the room that almost look like the navigation from their website right and the experience that you get from the website the experience you get from the shop they are communicating the same brand values of design and excellence but if you went on the on the prada e-commerce you're not going to get the experience of of going to a predator shop right so if you go to chanel or to any high-end um boutiques you're gonna be like welcome and it's gonna have a specific smell and it's gonna be playing homing music and it's gonna be absolutely gorgeous and stunning and you have this um some people i've seen this on tiktok i don't buy these places but some people have relationships with the shop the shoppers the shop assistants that are on the on the store and they know like oh we've got this bag that i know you're gonna love because it's based on the three last purchases you made we know you will love you um as a d2c brand if you wanna conserve the uniqueness of your brand and you want to sell direct because direct is where you're going to find your biggest margins and you're going to be able to own your audience and the audience later you need to provide something that your competitors can't is the brand experience which is why yeah most e-commerce websites can benefit from it especially lifestyle type of e-commerce definitely anything d2c and then most publishers should probably actually think really long and hard about going headless um i remember when i was at rba the publisher that i mentioned earlier on today's session um pinterest was starting to do pinterest shopping and product tagging and so on and i wanted to deploy that for one of our lifestyles and home lifestyle and home decor brands um but it took such a tremendous amount of development effort that even if we had exceeded our traffic forecast by tenfold it was not going to deliver roi right but if if it's already baked in into your content structure you can deploy that content anywhere omni channel and get all the roi that you could possibly like get from the content that you've already invested in so it's essentially like by being clever you you're just getting profit instead of having to throw more money at it and i think that's a very smart way to go i have one more question for you about headless and seo and we have some questions in the comments about it how important is javascript site optimization knowledge when working with the headless cms solution uh specifically the ability to tell between what server side and client side from a rendering perspective i i i'll let you go and then i'll tell you a little bit about my story i think you don't need to be a developer but you definitely need to be able to debug javascript issues when it comes to technical seo or have someone in your team who can do it and put some measures in place to safeguard the integrity of your seo efforts and not like like be eroded by a javascript change here and there um so quality assurance and someone on the team who knows javascript seo but no you don't need to be a developer to do javascript that's not yeah there's a there's a really nice tool that um onely has it's called what would javascript do right and i think there's a number of tools out there but you can you basically look at the the rendered versus non-rendered you know java versus non-java component of the page and it was really useful for me for working on one of my first gatsby oriented projects because of the difference on the client side versus the server side from a rendering perspective and it was actually where a lot of the inconsistencies were being picked up um because you know basically everything from a crawl or whatever was happening on the server side but then on the clients that were seeing something completely different that google was picking up right so google was picking that up and reporting it within search console whereas all of our crawlers were not picking it up at all so i was like oh search console is reporting this yeah crawler is reporting that of course you can adjust your crawlers afterwards to make sure that they're picking it up accordingly but it became incredibly important just like with updating and identifying some issues with the canonical rewriting and stuff like that on once it hits a client side component to it so any tools that uh any tools that compare client side versus server side it's definitely going to be a must in the headless world yeah and like make a point to audit for those issues to look for those issues on a regular basis yes um it's been a pleasure having you today lydia i think we're at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to headless understanding it more i think we can definitely uh work on an introduction the headless seo out of what we talked about today on the call and even maybe put together that checklist that we had talked about beforehand where can everyone find yeah where can everyone find you online so i'm quite active on twitter at lydia infante m um that's actually my handle everywhere else and sometimes i write stuff on my own website which is lydia infante.com which ranks number one for seo newsletter yes it does yes it does it's a really good article what can i say yeah awesome so i'm gonna drop your twitter handle in here um as well as you have a link tree right yeah i'll put a link tree in here that way everyone can check out uh find you wherever you are thank you again for sharing your experience uh your insights everything that you've learned um in your 10 years your decade in digital uh marketing and seo and especially coming from a background at big commerce as well because i'm very familiar with the way that big commerce works from a rendering perspective sometimes so um it's like once you get introduced to that whole world of uh you just know what to look for right like second hand so it's it's it's kind of awesome and especially with e-commerce um is there anything you'd like to share before we sign off for today because we're almost the hour mark oh um every thursday i share the best content created by women in the industry on my twitter with the hashtag seo women and in fact a lot of women from the search engine journal author rooster feature there regularly so check it out great well thank you so much um i'm gonna go ahead and share this seo newsletter uh ranking as well um which is kind of cool so if you like to check out lydia's site just go to google search for seo newsletter and you should find her in the number one position so again it's your snippet sometimes yeah some sometimes that right yeah sometimes maybe a little bit less now than previously but uh yeah thank you so much thank you for everybody that uh tuned in today uh to watch live and thank you to all of our listeners just to let you know we will be uh following up with the audio version of this uh next week we'll drop that in our scj show podcast uh stream on apple google um spotify reviews in the podcast and also um lydia and sanity are going to be sending over a url so you can uh try out give sanity headless cms a spin um with uh scj specific landing page uh for all of your uh for for a little presence for tuning in today so thank you so much lydia uh just let everyone know we'll be wrapping this up on the blog so we'll have a transcript of a lot of the discussion today around headless um cmss and seo and i wish you a great rest of your what time is it where where you're in manchester right so it's nine p.m it's pretty late isn't it i know it's not too bad i want to have a meeting to join in a minute so oh okay perfect so we kept you up are you ready for your meeting yeah i am i'm pumped yes all right thank you so much and again thanks to everyone who could tune in today for today's episode of the scj show with lydia infante all about uh infante sorry all about the headless cms have a good one thank you thank you thank you for joining us this week on the search engine journal show if you liked this episode subscribe to our channel for so much more and click the notification bell so you don't miss a thing