Lidia Infante 🤔 What is Headless SEO?

Lidia Infante is an SEO consultant and speaker.
 
She has worked in SEO for nearly a decade, helping businesses in SaaS, media, and e-commerce grow online.
 
She has a BSC in Psychology and a Master's in Digital Business.
 
She is a regular speaker at top-tier SEO events such as MozCon, BrightonSEO, UnGagged, and WTSFest.

She is a contributing author to the SEO in 2023 book.
 
Please welcome the Senior SEO Manager at Sanity, Lidia Infante.

Watch the full episode: https://youtube.com/live/lURnrkVhSs8

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Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the SEO Knowledge Bomb podcast! I'm your host Paul Andre and today I had the pleasure of chatting with Lidia Infante, an experienced SEO consultant and speaker.

Lidia has been in the SEO industry for about a decade now, helping companies rank better and drive more organic traffic. She's worked with all types of businesses from media companies to ecommerce.

I started off by asking Lidia to explain her approach to SEO in a nutshell. She boiled it down to researching competitors, figuring out how to do things better than them through content, links and tech improvements. Makes sense right? SEO is always about outranking others in those coveted top spots.

We then took a trip down memory lane to Lidia's early days in SEO. She actually stumbled into it while working at a PPC agency and running a feminist magazine on the side. When Facebook changed its algorithm, her site's traffic tanked so she turned to SEO to get it back up. And man did it work! In less than a year, she took the site from almost no organic traffic to 750,000 monthly visits. Talk about explosive growth!

Soon after, Lidia was hired by a major publisher in Spain to lead their digital SEO. This involved optimizing multiple country-specific sites, which helped her gain invaluable international SEO skills.

As her interest in the technical side of SEO grew, she moved into working for SaaS companies. A major turning point was being asked to do a technical audit on 3 massive sites, despite having zero prior audit experience. Lidia crammed like crazy, acing the audit and positioning herself as an expert. This shows the power of stretching yourself and just going for it, even if you're not 100% ready.

Jumping to today, we dug into the emerging practice of headless SEO. For those unfamiliar, headless CMSs separate content from presentation, allowing for greater flexibility in where that content appears e.g. web, apps, voice assistants.

Lidia explained how headless SEO requires a shift in mindset from pages to fields of content. You also lose some of the convenience of templates and plugins handling optimization for you. But the payoff is way more control over how content is modeled, tagged and distributed omnichannel.

Some key headless SEO tips from Lidia:

• Request metadata fields like title, description, canonicals etc. Don't assume they'll be added automatically
• Check viewport, document type and other technical settings are properly configured
• Create validation rules to prevent issues like duplicate URLs and incorrect language tags
• Take full advantage of structured data capabilities like dynamically generated schemas
• Optimize for core web vitals since you control the front-end code

So in summary, headless offers tons of flexibility but requires upfront planning between marketing and dev teams.

Shifting gears, we discussed Lidia's excellent presentation on competitor analysis and SEO audits. She stressed the importance of identifying who your REAL competitors are, not just who your CEO thinks. Look at keyword and traffic overlaps to find sites truly competing for the same searches and users.

Once you've identified key competitors, Lidia recommends auditing 4 key areas:

Technical - page speed, core web vitals, site indexing

Content - volume, topics, traffic, optimization

Links - quantity, quality, type

Brand - messaging, titles, meta data

This SWOT analysis reveals both vulnerabilities to improve and strengths to emulate. The end goal is developing an informed SEO strategy for closing any gaps versus the competition.

Lidia also touched on an advanced tactic - hyper-targeted competitor audits for ranking individual pages. By scrutinizing the internal linking and optimization of competitors’ top ranking pages, you can replicate their success on your own site.

Wrapping up, I asked Lidia for her #1 piece of advice for aspiring SEOs. She stressed the critical skill of understanding how the business makes money. Connecting SEO KPIs like traffic and conversions to revenue is key in getting buy-in and budget.

Well that summarizes the meat of my conversation with Lidia! She shared so many gems about technical SEO, headless CMSs, competitor research and more. Definitely go watch the full interview on YouTube to get all the details.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe and leave a review. Until next time, keep rockin’ that SEO knowledge!