How Does Contentful Help With SEO?

Implementing SEO best practices and making sure they scale as your website does is a consistent challenge faced by large content platforms.

So many SEO elements fall through the cracks when using a traditional CMS or developer-managed website:

• Images with no alt text

• Non-semantic HTML

• Pages with inconsistent slug structures

SEO specialists can't possibly manage every word, slug, image, or website page that goes out into the world. But they can inform a governance model that ensures there are guard rails around content and the way it gets deployed.

Here are a few ways Contentful can improve SEO:

1. Enforce alt-text for all website images in your content model

One key point of the argument I make to SEO people for using Contentful is the granular level of control they can have over how SEO elements should exist on your site. For example, you can wrap all of the images on your site in a Contentful component that has a required alt text field.

That's a big win! You can then localize the alt text, get a birds-eye view of it for tone of voice, or make adjustments without coding.

2. Bake slug pattern validation into your content model, so pages get published to the correct place in your site hierarchy

If you have a blog, for example, you can specify in your blog post content model that blog posts should only published to the /blog directory. You can go even further with this and mandate that blog posts have a category, and that category will automatically be chained to the slug after /blog.

3. Semantic HTML

Writing and publishing semantic HTML for your website pages is one of the most important ways to be compliant with SEO and accessibility best practices.

As you create pages with Contentful and build out a library of reusable components to power your site, you can structure component HTML based on where they appear in a page hierarchy. You can also put rules around more free-form rich text fields to make sure the right HTML tags are being used.

Top-tier SEO is a powerful tool for your business, brand, and content. The combination of Contentful with a thoughtful, intelligent content model makes it easy to leverage SEO best practices at scale.