You’ve built a beautiful, fast website using Prismic, leveraging its powerful content modeling and headless architecture. But a stunning site is only half the battle. To drive traffic and dominate search results, you need to make sure Google’s crawlers can find, understand, and index your content efficiently—and appropriately identify your target keywords.
Here is your essential checklist for preparing your Prismic-powered site for superior crawling and keyword relevance.
🛠️ Step 1: Technical SEO Fundamentals (Crawling)
The goal of technical SEO is to make it easy for Google to access and navigate every important page on your site. As a headless CMS, Prismic gives you a huge advantage here, especially regarding speed and performance (two massive ranking factors!).
1. Configure Your robots.txt File
This file lives in the root directory of your website and tells search engine bots which parts of your site they can and can’t crawl.
- Allow Crawling: Make sure you are not accidentally blocking Googlebot from crawling pages you want indexed.
- Specify Sitemap: Include a line that directs crawlers to your sitemap (see below).
Example:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
2. Generate and Submit an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a map of your site, guiding search engines directly to all the pages you want them to index. Since Prismic is headless, you’ll typically need to dynamically generate this file using your front-end framework (like Next.js or Nuxt.js) by querying the Prismic API for all published documents.
- Dynamic Generation: Use Prismic’s API to fetch the URLs of all relevant document types (e.g., blog posts, pages).
- Include Last Modified Date: Leverage Prismic’s built-in
last_publication_dateto tell Google when the page was last updated, encouraging recrawling. - Submit to Google Search Console (GSC): Once generated and accessible at a URL like
/sitemap.xml, submit it via GSC to notify Google immediately.
3. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness and Speed
Prismic’s headless approach, when paired with modern frameworks, naturally promotes a faster site—a critical factor for SEO.
- Core Web Vitals: Ensure your site scores well on metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).
- Image Optimization: Leverage Prismic’s integration with services like Imgix (or a similar tool) to dynamically compress and optimize images, serving them in next-gen formats like WebP.
✍️ Step 2: Content Optimization (Keyword Relevance)
This is where you tell Google what your content is actually about, ensuring it associates your pages with the correct keywords. Prismic is excellent for this because its Custom Types and Slices allow you to create structured, keyword-rich content fields.
1. Optimize SEO Metadata Fields
Prismic allows you to create dedicated fields for SEO in your Custom Types (Page Types). Make sure your content team consistently uses them.
- Title Tags: Include your primary keyword near the beginning. This is one of the most important on-page SEO factors.
- Meta Descriptions: Write a concise, compelling summary (around 150-160 characters) that includes your keywords and encourages a click-through.
- Canonical Tags: If you have pages with identical or very similar content, use a canonical URL to tell Google which one is the definitive version, preventing duplicate content issues.
2. Structure Content with Headers (H1-H6)
Use your headers to organize your content logically, which helps both users and search engines understand the hierarchy and main topics.
- H1: Use only one per page, containing your primary keyword.
- H2, H3, etc.: Use these for subheadings, incorporating related and long-tail keywords naturally.
3. Implement Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Structured data (like Schema.org markup, often implemented via JSON-LD) is a standardized format that provides search engines with context about the content on your page. This makes you eligible for rich results (like star ratings, FAQs, or recipes) in the SERPs.
- Prismic Integration: In your Prismic Slices, create custom fields for structured data, allowing content editors to manage this without touching code. You then output this data in the
<head>of your page’s HTML.
4. Optimize Image Alt Text
When uploading images to your Prismic Media Library, make sure to add descriptive Alt Text.
- Purpose: It helps visually impaired users and tells Google what the image is about, which aids in keyword identification and image search rankings.
đź”— Step 3: Link Building and Promotion
Google uses links to discover pages, evaluate relevance, and gauge authority.
- Internal Linking: Use Prismic’s content linking capabilities to strategically link related articles and pages within your site. This helps crawlers discover new content and passes authority between pages.
- External Links: Don’t be afraid to link out to high-quality, relevant external resources.
- Submit to GSC: Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool to manually request a crawl for critical new or updated pages.
By focusing on these Prismic-specific technical steps and content best practices, you’ll ensure Google’s crawlers can effectively process your site, resulting in better indexing and accurate keyword matching for your fantastic content.
