Is Headless Shopify better for SEO?

While this is a pertinent question, it would be misleading to just say yes.

• Directly, headless builds can't magically "improve SEO" in-and-of-themelves. Furthermore, even if specific technical metrics are improved by a headless build, this does not mean that search engines will decide to rank the store's products/content higher.
• Indirectly, the benefits of having a faster site, potentially cleaner URL structures, and better technical SEO implementation are all achievable within a headless Shopify build.

It's these indirect improvements that make headless Shopify a good choice for brands who value SEO as a key part of their marketing strategy.

Modern Javascript frameworks (such as are used for headless Shopify builds) include rich tool-suites that enable development teams to build a stronger foundation for a site's organic search performance, through the use of technical best practices and heightened possibilities for strategies such as programmatic SEO (as long as it's above board!).

Ultimately, we think it's the flexibility of headless Shopify builds that provide the most gain. The newfound frontend flexibility will allow you to implement and execute an SEO strategy that might otherwise prove challenging on the native Shopify platform.

Custom URL structures

With Shopify headless, you can implement completely custom URL structures and patterns, instead of being confined by Shopify's native URL structure. Especially if your store is content-heavy, this can potentially give you a leg-up from an SEO standpoint, allowing you to clean up your URL structure and implement clearer content siloing, pillaring, and "content hub" strategies.

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Site Performance

With a strong implementation, headless builds can far exceed what's possible with Shopify Liquid themes in terms of frontend performance. Modern frontend frameworks use a combination of progressive techniques to minimize frontend bloat, such as:

• A mix of rendering techniques (including pre-rendering, client-side rendering and server-side rendering), each deployed specifically where most effective (AKA hybrid rendering);
• Code splitting and suspenseful loading;
• Complex image transformation & compression;
• Aggressive source bundling;
• The ability to be deployed to edge networks or high-performance cloud platforms.

When combined, these techniques can improve page speed and reduce response times. 

Google, and other search engines, have publicized the importance of page speed, and provide tools such as Page Speed Insights/Lighthouse to help webmasters grain better insights into site performance. While page speed isn’t the be-all-end-all for SERP ranking, it can definitely contribute.

However, site speed can potentially have a two fold impact on search engine rankings. Google’s proprietary NavBoost system rewards pages with good user engagement signals, which page speed can impact quite substantially.

From that point of view, there’s quite possibly a quantitative SEO gain from delivering fast response times—something headless Shopify builds can do well. 

Asset & Image Optimization

Each JavaScript framework has a distinct approach to image and asset optimisation. While they’re all slightly different, this built-in tooling makes optimisation of assets easier, more accessible, and a de facto procedure as part of any headless Shopify build.  For example, Next.js’ built-in Image component is able to optimize and resize both local and remote images, and caching headers can additionally be set to reduce unnecessary requests from the same device.

By ensuring that images are resized and compressed (sometimes at build time, and other times on the fly), and that other assets are optimize and aggressively minified, headless Shopify builds have the potential to offer further improved performance, which is a positive factor for SEO. 

Programmatic SEO

Headless Shopify builds are very much data-first, due to the way that they leverage APIs for data sourcing and mapping of content. Using the same technique, it becomes significantly easier to leverage this data to power a programmatic SEO strategy, in which you target a broader number of terms and long tail queries. During the CI build process, your headless Shopify store iterates over all products, collections, and pages to create what’s known as a “route”. 

Each route represents an individual page on your headless store. By mapping over other data points that you have, such as Dealers, Locations, or product facets (options, variants, metafields), you can easily leverage your data to build out a programmatic SEO strategy that deploys numerous, highly-targeted pages that utilize your preexisting data. 

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Scalability

Leading on the improved ability to leverage programmatic SEO techniques, headless Shopify builds benefit from additional scalability potential through their heavily integrated, API-first architecture. This allows you to scale up your store in terms of unique page volume at a greater rate than manual creation of pages, as you might be inclined with a themed Shopify store.

Custom Meta Tags & Complex Schema

It's far easier to implement technical SEO improvements to headless storefronts on a large scale, again due to their ability to map over large quantities of data at build time and generate programmatic pages optimized using strong schema markup. This ensures that all page types are capable of exhibiting the appropriate meta tags and schema markup; something that's easier to do in a programmatic, hands-free way with headless builds.