Looking for sponsorship: SEO power tools
We’re looking for feature sponsors for new SEO capabilities. Here’s what we’re planning so far.
Ever wondered how well your content works with search engines? A lot of Wagtail users do, as SEO has a direct impact on their success. There’s a plethora of excellent tools in this space. But options become more limited (and pricey) when it comes to evaluating content while it’s being authored, or evaluating the entire site, or keeping tabs on metrics over time. Instead of having to invest into and learn completely separate tools, what if we could integrate SEO features directly into your CMS?
This isn’t a new idea! Plenty of other Content Management Systems do it already. And Wagtail has excellent plugins in this space such as wagtail-seo. But we think there are plenty of those capabilities that could make it into the core Wagtail experience – and we need your help to make it happen, via a feature sponsorship for new SEO capabilities.
What we want to build
Here are the features we think would be a good fit for Wagtail:
- QA tools for SEO power users: Meta previews, site-wide metadata report.
- Automated checks for everyone: Meta validation, page content metrics.
- Generative content capabilities: keywords suggestions, key phrases rewordings, cross-linking recommendations.
- Reporting: Site-wide metrics, Analytics integration, Search Console integration.
We’ve been exploring those concepts for a while, and are now ready to share some of the direction. Starting with a demo video!
QA tools for SEO power users
We want to create a new preview within Wagtail, for all pages, displaying how they’d appear on search & socials. As those meta tags aren’t visually on pages otherwise, this preview will help editors check their work, and save them time by avoiding having to check with external tools.
It would work just like other previews, displaying the contents of what’s actually rendered on the page no matter whether the meta content comes from a dedicated field, or is automatically extracted from other page content.
Combined with this direct feedback when working on a page, we’re also interested in site-wide reports – which would streamline review work for large sites.
Automated checks for everyone
Following our work on automated accessibility checks, it feels very natural to provide automated checks for SEO as well!
This would help larger teams make sure all page content meets minimum guidelines. With predefined rules built into Wagtail, but also support for organisation-specific ones where needed. Looking at online data about common SEO checks, such as the HTTP Archive SEO report, it’s clear there is room for improvement. All of those checks could be built into the CMS, as part of content editing:
There is also space for those checks to support automated fixes: rather than telling you the meta descriptions need work, the CMS can also provide suggestions!
Generative content capabilities
We’re interested in adding thoughtful AI capabilities to Wagtail, building upon our existing Wagtail AI package for writers. In the realm of SEO, there is a clear opportunity to leverage vector search technology within the CMS, to make it easier for editors to create content that works better for search engines and users alike.
One of our fav concepts is automating the selection of related pages to feature within a blog post – with clear control for content writers to decide whether they want to go ahead with those suggestions, or pick different pages altogether:
With those AI capabilities, there is a lot of room to find a middle ground between unstructured sites where internal linking can be very laborious, and fully automated systems with rigid taxonomies where there isn’t as much room to diverge from the default setup.
Making this happen
There are a lot of interesting ideas here, and we’ve spent time refining those concepts as they’re very relevant to a lot of organizations adopting Wagtail. We’re now looking for a sponsor to accelerate this work. With your help, we’d love to put those SEO capabilities on the Wagtail roadmap, make them happen for your organization and for the benefit of the wider Wagtail community as well. Check out our guidance for feature sponsors and reach out to discuss your needs.
