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- [00:00]
Tyson Stockton
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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Ben Jschapp
And monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice.
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Tyson Stockton
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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Ben Jschapp
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
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Tyson Stockton
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 I.O. 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. Today, Jonathan and I are going to be discussing the impact of a CMS on SEO. So with that, here's my conversation with Jonathan Ames, the director of Marketing at ButterCMS. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.
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Tyson Stockton
Tyson, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
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Jonathan Ames
So I got a fellow veteran in podcast. We can kind of hit on that a little bit later. But you're also, you know, you also have your own podcast, so cutting edge web development. And today, you know, we're going to be diving into the topic of CMS. I feel like a lot of SEOs kind of out there feel like it's just one of those you inherit what you inherit type mentality, and there's maybe not enough reflection or kind of like dissection into whether or not it's the right kind of CMS or how it can impact things. So maybe to set the stage for the listeners from kind of like a broad perspective, how would you characterize or explain what the impact the cms has on SEO?
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, good question here. So for most SEOs out there, you don't get to pick your CMS. So yes, it's difficult yet to deal with what you've got. But if you understand the effect of a CMS on SEO, you might find the right timing where either a development team or a marketing team is running up against certain pain points with their current cms. And they're like, man, we gotta solve these. And they may come in and even ask you, hey, we want to improve our SEO. What are some of the things holding us back? And then you can point out some of these things that a CMS could affect and could help them with. So that's from a high level how.
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Jonathan Ames
You could do that and what are, what are some of those elements that from your experience, like what is the intersection of a CMS's impact? Like, I mean there's, there's a few obvious ones, but I'm assuming, you know, there's quite more under the hood.
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Tyson Stockton
All right, well the first thing that I'll tell you from my own perspective as a marketing director, a few years back I came into a new position where we had an existing CMS that I won't name, but let's just say that its initials are W and P. And when I started into this CMS situation I realized that there were certain downsides to it. But like most people who are new coming in, it's like, ah, it's a lot of work to lift and shift to a new cms. Maybe we can find ways to work around it. But I had a SEO working for me at that time who came to me and said, hey, these are some of these really hard problems I can't solve within the context of our current CMS solution. So one of those problems was page speed. We've got a lot of code. Bloat is what your developers will recognize. It basically means your CMS is creating more HTML or more code than is necessary. And so it kind of slows down the page responsiveness, especially if you're mobile first or you're an E commerce company. That page speed really makes a difference. And so that's kind of a hard thing to change as a developer when your marketer comes to you and says, hey, make this faster so that our page loads quick. Well, developer can't go in usually and change the front end because it's dictated by your cms. So that's where a headless CMS really comes in is a headless is divorced from the front end. So your developers can build in the framework of their choice and the CMS just connects to it in the back end. So PageSpeed is the first one. Another one is just the manual work of doing SEO. You know, so affecting your tags, you know, putting in schema, URL structure, redirects. Who can do that? If it's only a few select people, then it's going to really slow down your process. You're going to have bottlenecks. Problem that we had in that same situation I was telling you before about was that all of our changes had to be done by our development department. Our marketers simply would not touch the site because it was, it was a site that dealt with money and it was precariously balanced on a few themes and plugins that if anything changed, could break the whole thing. And then if it's down for even a few hours, that's costing, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. So because of that, things didn't get done very fast. So can those fields be gotten to by multiple people? Is it easy to get in there, make changes and edits? So those fields is probably the second part after page speed. The third part would be faster production speed. So once you're in there, can you quickly make changes? Does it take you a lot of time to publish those changes? Especially if you're doing tests around CRO because, you know, conversion rates do affect your rankings. If it's slow to do those tests and maybe it's, you know, every month you can launch one. Well, that's going to be a very different result than if you can run a test every few days. So those are the three big things I think a CMS can affect from a high level. And I can go into more detail on those for SEO.
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Jonathan Ames
Absolutely. And maybe two to dive a little deeper on those. The first one you mentioned was code bloat. And I think, you know, a lot of times that could come in the form of just trying to create the one size fits all. And so you have all these scenarios that may not even be firing or relevant to it. How can we kind of attack that? How would, you know, potentially like a headless CMS, like what can we do as SEOs to try to fight this battle around CMS?
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Tyson Stockton
Sure, that's a tough one because usually code bloat falls on your development team. And it just depends if they have the ability to fix that. I mean, one, do they have the time to put in, try to clean up the code? Two, do they have a system that allows them to create clean code in the first place? So this is really part of the reason why a headless CMS was developed is developers, when they got to this point, they're like, man, these CMSs that marketing is using, just they're creating this crap code or it's forcing me to work in a framework that I don't know very well. So a headless CMS basically says, all right, we're going to not have the CMS create any front end code. Instead what's going to happen is you developers, you can build in whatever framework you want. Let's say you want React or Django or Astro. Great build in those frameworks, they can be super lightweight. If the coder knows that framework really well, of course they're going to be able to create cleaner code, cleaner code, lighter loads, faster. So that's the first thing. Headless cms, any headless CMS really offers the promise of being able to separate your code from the cms. The cms, what it does is it connects into connection points in the front end. So the CMS might say, all right, any H1 tag, you know, go back to this field in the CMS and basically put in whatever's in there into this styling that's already been built in a front end. And that's basically how it works. So as far as page speed, the cms, really, a headless CMS really doesn't make for faster page load times. What it does is it gives you the option to build in a framework where you can build it fast. So that's the first thing to understand is headless CMSs don't make faster page load speeds, but they do give you access to it. Whereas if you're building in a CMS that already creates the front end, well, your developers really don't have much control over creating lighter, faster code.
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Jonathan Ames
Yeah, it's more of you're taking what you want by having those reference points rather than you're getting everything on the buffet, regardless if you want it or not.
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Tyson Stockton
Yes.
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Jonathan Ames
So you're being more selective in what you're calling in. You also kind of touched in like, pace, and I think this is something that hits home with a lot of SEOs out there, where more often than not you hear SEOs complaining about resources, ability to act on some of their ideas or initiatives. Tell us a little more about kind of how pace and testing plays into like, where's the intersection with the CMS in that sense?
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah. So one of the things that a headless CMS does differently is that it allows if, especially if you're working on a site where you simply have a stack of technology, it's not just like, hey, this is a static site, you know, some text and images, maybe you're tying into some databases, you have dynamic content, maybe you have a custom widget that you've built in there. So it's not really going to work well with like a standard cms. A headless will allow you to put content into those custom coded pieces and not have to go to your developers for it, because your developers have basically built a box and said, here's this box, a component, let's say. And in this component goes a certain type of content or types of content, and I'll style it the way you want it, maybe within your brand guidelines. And now it connects to the cms. And in the cms, your content editors can go in and they can put in the text, they can put in the images and know that it's going to be styled in a way, it's not going to break the template, not going to affect security or the functionality of the widget, but they can change that in and out in seconds without having to go to dev and saying, hey, could you go change this for me? So that kind of pacing makes it really, it's beautiful. Both for the devs who really don't want to get, you know, 100 requests to change a paragraph or put in a piece of media. They want to be working on stuff that's more complex. So they'd love to offload that to marketing and say, hey, yeah, you guys go do what you want. And it's great for marketing because they don't have to go to Devin and try to explain, hey, could you try this or that? Could you test this for me? They can just go in there and test it themselves, publish it, it's live on the site, they can look at it, great, looks good, and then they can leave it running in a test, like if you're doing a AB test of something, really simple. Example, all right, I want to change this headline or I want to change this color or this image. Really simple, pop something in there. And now I want to go back within a day or two or a week, depending on your traffic, and see how it worked. Now, if you had to go to devs, it might be a week just to get that process done, whereas you can have that done and have the test completed in the time it normally take your devs to get it back to you and you proved it and published it.
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Jonathan Ames
And I think in that same vein, I would much rather be pushing or kind of getting the time or support from dev on some of those other elements to the site rather than some of these basic pieces, like if I'm having to pick and choose my battles or what I'm fighting for from a resourcing perspective on the devs, I'm going to want to save that for those other higher kind of impact areas than some of these kind of areas that you'd want to just be able to move quickly, test, adapt, scale and have that kind of freedom and flexibility.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I know one of the good examples of that is there was a Realty brokerage company that we worked with where they had a really SEO friendly dev team, they understood the value of it and they were all about trying to build in dynamic functionality to improve their search engine rankings for their listings. And so they were doing really complex stuff where they were basically saying based on this search, create this dynamic page that is pulled from databases of all of our listings and map data and these drawn out coordinates within zip codes and then put it all together. And they were making things that are really beautiful that you know, as, honestly as a content creator or marketer, you just wouldn't even think of that. And so yeah, you want your devs working on that kind of project. Not, you know, can you change, you know, the title tag for me?
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Jonathan Ames
Absolutely. As far as areas and we've touched on like some of these, like other areas maybe of concern and like if, if you're talking to SEOs, like what are some potential kind of lesser known areas, whether it's limitations or opportunities in SEO that has this intersection with cmss.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I'll give you a good example. A typical content creator or marketer working in a CMS only knows what they have available to them in fields. So if you're working within most CMSs, you have a set of fields, you input your data. There's, and especially around SEO, it's whatever your CMS gives you access to or whatever the plugin you know, if you're using something like a Yoast gives you access to. Now there's other fields out there, you know, maybe that are either newer or that simply weren't included in that CMS's set of fields then. Now your content team is totally blind to them. A good example of this is schema markup. So schema markup is great for SEO, but most of your marketers have no idea what it is and they have no place to put it if they did know what it was. So that's something that you purely have to go to devs and you have to explain what it is put them in. Now a good CMS will allow you to customize the fields that show up for your content creators. And so one of the agencies we work with recognize this, they're working for Liberty Tax, which is a the second largest tax preparer in the US and they were putting into butter these custom fields and they actually made it into a component that's on our site now. But one of these fields was simply so that the content creators would have a field for schema markup and they could then copy and Paste the schema markup right into the page, adjust the things they needed, publish it. And so the fact that that field was there now, their content creators had access to that, they could learn how it worked, they could try different things around it. But really it's just a question of what fields show up for your content creators. And so if you offer things like, you know, the ability to put in these custom SEO fields, schema markup's one of them. They're going to use it and you can train them to use it. It'll go faster and you'll get better.
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Jonathan Ames
Results, which I think there's a lot of SEOs probably listening to this that are getting, their interest is getting sparked with that because again, that's typically something that you're putting in the dev Q, you're fighting to get a couple points on the next sprint to enable. So having direct lines and access to that I think goes back to that previous point of pace on this. Any other elements like in that, in that same vein, that may not be like an on page component. So it's schema markup. It's, you know, it's going on the individual pages, but it's not necessarily going to be visual on the page. And I think when most people, you know, I guess broadly speaking, when a lot of people think of CMS is they're thinking of body content, H1S page titles, those kind of things.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah.
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Jonathan Ames
What other elements should people be aware of that also has the potential to overlap with cms?
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, another one that's really common out there, but like you said, it doesn't really show up on page is like your redirects. So the ability to put in, you know, from a content creator standpoint, your redirects like a 302 especially, you know, something that's just a temporary redirect. Maybe you're running this for a certain amount of time, you're doing a B test or something and you want a 302 redirect there. Well, now you can easily make something if you have the field access to it in your cms, where your content creators could put that in and then turn it off. It's a huge time saver, you know, for something like that. Another one is, you know, the URL structure. So a lot of times content teams have gotten into the mindset from SEOs to working in these content pillars. So, all right, I know I've got this keyword here and this is my pillar and then these are all these supporting articles, but when they're Creating new pages. If they have access to like what the actual URL structure is, they can put in human friendly keywords in there that relate back to whatever that pillar is. So that when someone's either looking at breadcrumbs or, or they're looking at the URL and the serps, they can see, oh, okay, this is part of this broader topic and this looks really interesting. And I can go back. Yeah, that's another good example. It doesn't show up really on the page. I mean it is in the little bar there. But yeah, Redirects and the URLs.
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Jonathan Ames
And with having that functionality on the redirects, I assume there's also things like canonical tags, hreflang, like are those elements also that can be played around with.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, absolutely. Basically anything that is a part of the code on the front end can be linked to a field in a headless CMS on the back end. And now it's just a question of training your team. In fact, here's a great strategy if you have a content team that you want to make responsible for some kind of SEO elements. Let's say every content team, before you publish your page, you got to make sure you have alt tags for all your images. You could actually set a rule in the CMS saying you can't publish the page unless there's an alt tag for every image. You could do that with any other tag too. So in this way you could almost enforce the reminder to people, oh yeah, I forgot to put in my alt tags. Well, great. You can't publish it until you put those in. So you put them in and then poof, you publish it. So yeah, those are little efficiency items that, you know, your content team is in there day to day working on this stuff and, and it is actually not too hard to train them with a field to say, hey, in this field goes this thing. This is what you want to look for. Either go to this document or ask this person or find something. You know, go to Semrush and see what a good keyword would be to put into this that's based on your pillar. So you could train them on those kind of things without them having to be either an SEO or a developer.
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Jonathan Ames
Excellent. Maybe kind of in wrapping up the episode. Is there anything else that you would want to kind of like advocate for that SEOs should know about CMS?
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I think as far as CMS goes, you don't have to just be on the sidelines either. You can advocate for a CMS switch from the perspective of the benefit that will give to the website as far as business results or you can be responsive and have some answers and your own preferences of what you'd like to work in. When somebody comes to you and says, hey yeah, we're thinking about switching to another cms, what would you recommend so you can play a part in that? Because there really is a business value to each of these things we just talked about in the episode. And I'll give you an example from E Commerce. You can look at studies that have been done on just page speed and the effect of 1 second faster page load speed on conversion rates for E commerce and it's huge. I mean if you could just, you know, flip a switch and get a 7% improvement in conversions in E commerce, you'd be everybody's favorite add to your business. So that's one thing that you know, faster page speed can do. And so you could actually advocate now on the side, you're also like, also, this is going to help me because I got all these fields in here. I can get my content team working on some of these SEO projects and I always have to go to dev. But there's a real business value to these things. So you can advocate for that. That's what I'd say.
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Jonathan Ames
Excellent. And that's one of the tips that I oftentimes give the SEOs in E commerce too is yeah, to stop trying to position PageSpeed as an SEO play. And if like you're just trying to promote it from a hey, we have this opportunity to increase our rankings on improving it that you can most often get a lot more attention if you just position as a conversion rate play that happens to help SEO rather than for SEO.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, it's a double play there. It's a win win.
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Jonathan Ames
Excellent. Well with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Jonathan Ames from ButterCMS for joining us in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow. Jonathan and I are going to continue the conversation by discussing a little bit bit more about headless CMS and approach into the topic of improving them. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about 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, Cutting Edge Web Content Development. And we'll see you next time on the Voice of Search.
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Ben Jschapp
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 us, 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 Ben Jschapp 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 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.