SEO with SEOmatic

SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing the search engine visibility, and ranking of a website. When it comes to SEO, there’s many aspects to consider, like

• on-page SEO
• off-page SEO (think backlinks from other websites, etc.)
• technical SEO

We’ll focus on the technical SEO and on-page SEO, where the technical part involves amongst other things, having the necessary meta tags and metadata about the content on the current page, and including the proper structured data.

The on-page part involves creating good content, with good structure, using keywords and other strategies to increase your ranking and the chance of people clicking your link in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

SEOmatic is a plugin for Craft CMS, that is built for handling technical SEO on every page it’s used.

SEOmatic allows us to add a SEO field on every CMS entry, to finetune what the crawlers read (imagine a spider crawling all the webs content), and optimizing it for them, to increase the websites visibility and ranking.

A good SEO is vital for most businesses, and will increase your

• website traffic (more visible equals more traffic)
• cost-effectiveness (organic traffic is free)
• credibility and trust (higher ranking websites equals better trustworthiness in the users eyes)
• better UX (faster pages equals better UX)
• and of course the competitive advantage of being on top in the SERP.

Google (and Bing, Yahoo, ++) use complex algorithms to find the relevant and quality information for your searches.

They use crawlers/bots to scan new and updated content on the web. That data is then indexed (structured and stored in the search engine’s database).

When a user performs a search, the search engine tries to find the most relevant information from the index and ranks the results based on many different factors like

• relevance (keywords, content quality)
• UX (page speed, mobile friendliness, site structure)
• authority and trust (backlinks, domain authority, and brand presence across the web)
• search intent (informational, navigational, transactional)
• and more

When we implement SEOmatic in our projects, we add a separate tab called SEO on all our entries (that requires it). That makes it clear where you can work and fine-tune the SEO on each entry.

We usually set it up in a way that uses content from the entry itself by default, to make it look good by default, and be customizable if needed.

For example, we often have hero sections on our sites, with a title, image and text. All these would be defined as default values for the meta tags.

In the SEO tab you can overwrite it to gain more control on what’s displayed in the SERP and when sharing on Social media.

Structured data are small snippets of code that is added to the HTML, that Search engines read to help understand the content of the page even better.

Some of the benefits are “rich results” which is an added richness to the search result items. For example, a website can be displayed in a more visually appealing way with interactive elements, or just more information.

Some rich results include carousels, FAQ accordions, and Questions and answers.

With SEOmatic the global structured data (site name, entity information, organization information) can be edited from the admin panel. If there’s any other structured data we want on any entry, we can add this in programmatically.

When working with SEO, it's always good to visually see the changes you’ve made. You can always review the previews of the entries on the right hand side on each entry:

A more technical thing about the plugin, is that it works with a both coupled and headless setup, which means we can run SEOmatic on our websites that utilizes both Craft CMS and Next.JS as the frontend technology, as well as only Craft CMS with a simpler Twig frontend.

SEOmatic also handles Sitemaps, which is important for the search engines to locate all your content.

In SEOmatic you can opt to hide an entry from Search engines (using the noindex setting), which of course will hide the entry from the sitemap as well.

All in all, SEOmatic is a great alternative to handle SEO on your website!