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- [00:00]
Ben Shapp
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth.
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Tyson Stockton
And monetization solutions that transform your words into profit.
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Ben Shapp
Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for.
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Tyson Stockton
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
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Ben Shapp
Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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Jonathan Ames
Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson from Previsible IO, and joining me today is Jonathan Ames, who is the director of Marketing at ButterCMS. ButterCMS is a platform that offers a headless content management system, a powerful tool for developers to build and manage dynamic websites. Easily built for developers, it provides a flexible and scalable solution for content management needs. Yesterday, Jonathan and I talked about the impact of a CMS on SEO, and today we're continuing the conversation by discussing improving a headless CMS with that. Here's my conversation with Jonathan Ames, Director of Marketing at ButterCMS. Jonathan, welcome back.
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Ben Shapp
Hey, thanks for having me on again. Great episode yesterday and look forward to talking more today.
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Jonathan Ames
And yesterday we were kind of fighting the battle for a better cms. We were talking about kind of the intersection points, the impact points, the value adds from an SEO perspective. And today we're going to dive a little bit deeper into a headless cms. And I know we touched on it yesterday, but just in case anyone missed yesterday's episode and maybe they're a little bit newer to SEO, can you first kind of like just breakdown for everyone what a headless CMS is, how it differs from maybe a more traditional cms, but kind of let's level the playing field on what we mean by a headless cms.
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Ben Shapp
Yeah, absolutely. So a headless cms, the word came out maybe like five, six years ago, and the idea was that the head of a website is the front end. It's what's the visual layer that people see? It's the code that actually creates the visuals. So the CMS is then the back end and the front end is your head. And a headless CMS simply cuts the back end where you put the content in for your website from the front end. And what this really allows you to do is create a faster, more functional front end that can be swapped out easily with another front end without making any problems on the back end. Of things. So you keep those two parts separate. A traditional CMS combines those two, which is easier in the beginning because basically you put in your content on the backend of your CMS and it spits out front end code for you, which is really nice because you are able to preview your site, you build it right, then it's right in front of you. It's much faster to get started with a traditional cms. As far as the benefits, why people have started switching over to Headless, there's a couple of reasons, but one is for more control of that front end your developers want to build, maybe in their own framework. They want to have less code bloat. So a CMS is software building code. It's going to be a little bit bloated with things that are unnecessary, it's going to slow down your page load speed. So for that reason, headless is a good option there. Another reason is because the back end content is separated from the front end. You can have various front ends that connect to that back end. So you could have a website here, you could have a blog there, you could have a mobile app over here, you could send information via Headless to your social media, whatever you want. Your headless CMS can be the backend controlling spot for all that stuff. You have multiple websites, super easy to do in a headless cms. It can just point to every domain you want and run all that multiple languages. All that's really easy to do in Headless.
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Jonathan Ames
Got it. So essentially, rather than going for the one size fits all, we're being a little more specialized. So it's making that, like you said, the break between the front end and kind of like the back end of it. And I obviously totally see where this would reduce some of that code bloat. It also allows maybe future iterations of the website a little more kind of plug and play on it within the kind of category of headless cms. Understand there's not going to be kind of again, one size fits all, where they're all the same or they're all equals. What would make one headless CMS be stronger or weaker than another? Like what type of differentiating elements exist within that category of a headless cms.
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Ben Shapp
Yeah, so one is for your developers, what they're going to care about is what front end frameworks can I build in? And some headless CMSs have a limited number of frameworks that they're compatible with and others will allow you to connect with anything. And so as long as your preferred front End of choice is supported by your headless, then you're good. It's nice to have more of a variety because let's say you swap out your lead developer and they don't like that first front end framework, they want to go to another one. One of the beauties of a headless CMS is all the content in the back end can remain right there and you can simply swap out the front end in a single day because you know all the connectors and so you simply reroute those connectors to this new front end and boom, you're done. And so maybe it was built in Django and now it's built in Nuxt, you know, so it's, it's easy to switch. So that's one thing, it's a benefit. Another thing that makes for a good headless CMS is that it should be really easy to use. Remember, your day to day users are not developers typically they're your content creators and your marketers and your SEOs. So you want something that they can easily learn. There's not a large learning curve. You want something that doesn't take a whole lot of clicks to do common routine tasks. Different headless CMSs have different philosophies of what they're trying to be. So some headless CMSs try to be good at many different things and others, for instance, Butter tries to be really good at just the CMS part. And it's part of a microservices philosophy. So microservices is the idea that rather than have one piece of software that tries to do everything well, what you get is best of breed for each of these things. So for instance, in butter CMS, butterCMS is entry of data into pages or content into a digital format. It's super easy, super fast, and you can do forms in butter. But we also know people like to use their favorite form builder. So maybe they like formstack or Jotform. Great, you can integrate those via an API to Butter. And now Form Builder is your form creation. Whereas, you know, maybe a closed end system that's monolithic. You have to use their form builder and if you don't like it, it's really hard to connect anything else. But a good headless CMS will allow you to connect via their API to these different microservices and take advantage of those. So maybe you like Typeform better and you're like, I want Typeform to be natively integrating, creating my forms, right? You can do that easily via connection via API. And so That's a really big benefit to be able to have something easy to use swap out. Like, hey, we used Jotform, it was great. But now we're going to use this other one that's brand new on the market and has all these shiny bells and whistles. Super easy to swap it out because it's just an API connection. So you don't have to wait for necessarily a native integration to be built. The API connection will do that.
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Jonathan Ames
So it sounds like within the two I do this, but I'm kind of oversimplifying a lot here. But essentially by putting more of the focus on that narrower specialization, it's then allowing for that greater flexibility. Whether it's flexibility for the current needs or fast forward to five, however many years in the future where there's unforeseen elements, maybe the business takes a pivot into somewhere else, personnel change, whatever it is. But it seems like a lot of the value add in this sense is beyond just the capability of it, but more in that specialization. So you're not pigeonholed in into one ecosystem or one framework per se.
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Ben Shapp
Absolutely. I think the only people that a headless CMS really wouldn't be good for is someone who doesn't either doesn't need or doesn't have developers at all working on their site. So if you're just working on a site that you're like, I don't envision needing developers to be able to make it functional and work, then probably a headless is going to be extra work for you that you don't need. But if you are working with developers, then I think a headless CMS really is a better way to go.
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Jonathan Ames
And I would assume that, yeah, that transition probably happens after maybe there's one, two, three developers kind of being brought in to an organization with making a transition. What things would an SEO need to be aware of? So let's say scenario is you're an SEO, you're working for a company that's using one of the more traditional CMSs. The business has been growing, developing development team has grown, they've decided to make a switch as like an SEO and you're going through that transitions. What things would you call out for kind of awareness or to pay attention on?
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Ben Shapp
Those are good questions. So the biggest one that's going to be in everyone's mind is how can we guard our rankings during this transition. We don't want to lose rankings by switching over. So as an SEO, you're going to have a really key role in that Transition, it's showing that you can guard your rankings. And there was a story that I told in yesterday's episode about when I came on as a marketing director, we needed to make a switch in cms. My SEO came to me and said, hey, these are some problems we have. And she was really critical in making that transition, making sure that everything transitioned over. So she was actually a part of deciding which CMS we switched to. So you bring yourself into that role and, and make a point for those things that are going to help you not only guard ranking, but actually improve ranking. Because when we came out of that CMS switch, our rankings went way up and she looked really good because she had been a part of the selection process for the cms. She was looking at what things would not only guard her rankings, but help them go up. Blockers that she'd been up against for years and now suddenly could change. And so yeah, look for those opportunities to promote it as not only regarding it, but we're gonna, we can actually have some improvements here or if nothing else surprise them by showing a big improvement instead of the expected drop.
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Jonathan Ames
And I think similar to that point and this came up in conversations with one of our client is as they were making a change in the back end and a fair amount of the actual code framework was being updated. But there was. And we actually went through two iterations. One where we didn't have pretty much any on page elements that were changed. It was like the user would see an identical experience. And then another one where we made the same backend change and we just made a couple of minor on page enhancements. The performance between the two were completely different and it was almost like the search engines seen that amount of variation in the code to change but then not seeing anything on the other kind of had a little bit of a limiting where just by being like, okay, let's tighten up these couple of elements. And I mean these were very basic elements too. We're talking H1S page titles, a few interaction points of like what the user could do on the page. Huge difference in how the search engine like responded to that change.
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Ben Shapp
Absolutely. I think one of the big things too is you can be a part of that structuring of the cms. So if you are moving to a headless CMS or you're advocating for that, well, pretty much any CMS really, you have to set it up right. And you can be and you should be a part of setting up what your new CMS is going to look like because now you're going to have to work within that setup for the next months or years that you're there with that company. So be a part of that. Think of the structure of the site. What are the fields that your content creators are going to need, that they're going to remind them to put in the appropriate SEO tags and elements, fill those in before they publish a page. Very simple at the beginning to bring that kind of stuff up, explain the rationale for it, and everyone's going to be nodding their heads and say, yeah, let's do that very hard after you have a CMS that's been existing forever, to get everyone to rip it out and change it. But everyone's very flexible at the beginning when you're doing a migration. So really think about, in my perfect world, what fields do I want? And let's get the dev team to put those in.
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Jonathan Ames
Absolutely. And that's such a. I think a critical element for how effective SEOs can be is their ability to take advantages of those moments where there's a transition happening. With the cms, there already are these initiatives and these changes taking place, and to be able to draft off those can be such a good way to get those headwinds from the resource challenge and things like that. I also know from conversations I have with SEO, a lot of time there's SEOs that might struggle or challenge to get that seat at the table. And there's some organizations where SEO is at the center of it. They have a seat at the table, they have a voice, they might even be driving the conversation in some regard. But I think it's also very common for the SEOs to have an opinion on these matters. They might have a preference from a headless cms, but they're struggling to kind of get that spot at the table. Would you have any recommendations for those SEOs? That's like I want to say, and I want to jump in on the conversation. Like, how would you. What advice would you give them to kind of earn their seat?
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Ben Shapp
Yeah. First of all, go to the ones who are doing the planning for that, firmly put your arm around their head. Why are you not letting me be in the beginning? No. So part of it is timing. And if you have someone new coming into a role in your IT or your marketing department, chances are they feel a certain pressure to make an impact within the first 90 days or something. And so that's a great time to reach out to those people and tell them about some of the ways that SEO can help them make that impact. So in the case of a migration for cms, you know, you can talk about how that is one way that they could get one of those boosts started. You know, people in executive love to see action on big projects that they feel like is going to make a difference on business effects. And most of the time those will resonate better than hey, we want to change these tags or the schema that goes right over their head. It becomes jargon. It's hard for them to understand that, but they do understand. All right, we're refreshing the website. We're moving to a new cms and this is going to get this better rankings for us. Higher organic traffic, higher conversion rates. Those things tie to business results. So find those people. If there are new people coming into the organization, make them your advocates, help them make a big splash that makes them look good, positively, and they can help you have a seat at that table in the beginning.
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Jonathan Ames
Love it. So it's calling out and putting that emphasis of finding those areas of a mutual benefit. You're not just selling them on why it's good for you in organic search, but you're also kind of helping them in building their potential, how they're kind of personally motivated on making an impact.
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Ben Shapp
Yeah, I mean, and the part about, you know, making a CMS switch, you know, your development teams, if you see your development team is constantly overworked, you know, switching to a headless CMS is one of the main reasons why people come to better cms. They're mainly IT leaders who are like, we're just overworked. We're spending too much time and we're constantly over budget on making all these website changes. We want to offload that. So that's a really easy sell. And then once you've made that suggestion to them how that could help them, you know, they're definitely going to invite you to the table when it comes time to come up with the structure for the site. And you know, from a marketing perspective, it's the opposite. It's like things are moving too slow. We're not able to make changes, we're not making our marketing goals. When you see that happening on their side, that's a great time to bring up that, hey, you know what if we put in place CMS that made it easier for your team to publish things faster, you know, to get content done quicker without having to go to dev. That's an easy sell. And then once again, they're going to want to invite you to that table. Certain industries, like we already talked about, E commerce With E Commerce, being able to increase your page load speed is a direct correlation with conversion rates. Faster page load speeds, higher conversion rates. You can look at the data. There's lots of data data on it, how a second's worth of time makes, you know, 3 to 7% difference in conversion rate. So go and show numbers like that to whoever's in charge. If it's a E commerce manager, they could be on board with you and then they're going to invite you to the beginning of that consultation on how we do this migration.
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Jonathan Ames
Absolutely. And I feel like those pieces of advice too, you could, you know, some of the elements that we're touching on here can also be applied in other scenarios and stuff like finding that mutual alignment on like initiatives and benefits and the piece with E commerce and tapping into conversion rate, being able to extrapolate that same like how do I position this? Rather than just as like an SEO front can be such a, I think important tool to learn as like the SEO professional.
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Ben Shapp
Yeah.
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Jonathan Ames
Well, with that. That wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Jonathan Ames from Buttercms for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Jonathan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or go on over and check out his company's website@buttercms.com and also be sure to check out his podcast at Cutting Edge Web Content Development. And we'll see you next time on the Voice of Search.
- [20:06]
Tyson Stockton
Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscription subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.