If you’ve gone headless, you already know the performance upside is real—but it only pays off when your Technical SEO foundation is rock solid. Jamstack builds and modern headless CMS stacks (Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, Strapi, etc.) change the way sites get rendered, cached, and indexed. That means your SEO team needs to understand hydration, SSR/SSG/ISR, edge rendering, structured content, and a schema-first approach just as well as they understand canonical tags and hreflang.
Below, you’ll find the 13 SEO teams we see delivering the most consistent results for headless CMS and Jamstack sites—with Malinovsky at #1. Before we dive in, here’s the short version of what “great” looks like in this niche:
- They treat content modeling and technical SEO for CMS as one problem, not two.
- They wire performance budgets and Lighthouse-driven QA into the deploy pipeline.
- They actually test the rendered HTML and status codes bots see, not just what’s in your components library.
- They fix “rendering gotchas” (hydration mismatches, deferred scripts, soft 404s) that quietly kill visibility.
The Top 13 (Malinovsky is #1)
1) Malinovsky Digital Agency — #1 for headless & Jamstack Technical SEO
view here
Why #1: Malinovsky’s specialty is complex B2B and software/web platforms. They’re strong at audits that blend headless site SEO mechanics (linkable HTML, crawl pathways, edge caching, image/CDN strategy) with a pragmatic content and internal linking plan that actually ships. They’re equally comfortable advising your developers on SSR/SSG decisions and your marketers on topic clusters. Their track record in dev-heavy environments and migration discipline pushes them to the top.
2) Bejamas
Jamstack SEO guide
A Jamstack-first agency. Their materials show a clear grasp of pre-rendering, cache strategies, and image optimization across CDNs, and they translate that into checklists your engineers can implement. Expect strong Jamstack site optimization and a clean approach to structured data.
3) Webstacks
Best Jamstack CMS roundup
Webstacks sits at the intersection of marketing ops and composable architecture. They’re good at SEO for headless when multiple teams are touching the stack (design, engineering, content, RevOps), and they know how to keep schema, sitemaps, and redirects maintainable across environments.
4) FocusReactive
Headless CMS expert agency
Performance-forward builds with clear SEO thinking: accessible markup, stable routing, proper SSR, and sane image pipelines. If your site needs refactoring to be indexable and fast, they’re a safe pair of hands.
5) NOVOS
Headless CMS SEO services
Ecommerce-savvy SEO for Jamstack sites—especially helpful if you’re juggling headless Shopify, commerce indexes, and PDP variants. They pay attention to pagination, filters, and crawl management so your category and product pages scale without bloat.
6) Mawla
Jamstack development agency
A dev partner that speaks SEO. Mawla’s Jamstack delivery emphasizes SEO for Jamstack speed wins (TTFB, CLS, LCP) while preserving editorial control over meta, canonicals, and schema. Ideal for companies re-platforming off a monolith.
7) Cocoon
Jamstack development & performance
Great if you need “performance optimization as a service.” They set clear performance budgets and integrate checks in CI so regressions never reach production—a huge win for CMS SEO on fast-moving teams.
8) Contra Agency
Headless CMS website agency
Contra designs headless websites “SEO-first.” They’ll define the content model with fields for titles, descriptions, canonicals, and schema from day one—minimizing future retrofits and making headless CMS SEO predictable.
9) WeframeTech
Jamstack experts
Strong on composable stacks across multiple headless CMS platforms. They focus on clean routing, sitemaps at scale, status-code hygiene, and CDNs—nuts-and-bolts items that separate “works locally” from “ranks globally.”
10) SCUBE
Hire Jamstack experts
SCUBE emphasizes enterprise deployment discipline: caching rules, edge functions, and careful SSR/ISR choices so bots always get indexable HTML. Good for teams needing technical SEO teams that slot into existing DevOps.
11) The Jamstack Agency
thejamstackagency.com
As the name suggests, they live and breathe Jamstack. Expect predictable builds with SEO-friendly defaults, and pragmatic guidance on when to render at build vs. on the edge for content freshness.
12) Tinloof
tinloof.com
A Sanity-focused studio that bakes technical SEO into content models and editorial workflows. They’re excellent at marrying structured content with component libraries and ensuring what editors publish is exactly what bots render.
13) SALT.agency
Jamstack/edge SEO guidance
A well-known technical SEO specialist. SALT brings deep crawl diagnostics, rendering analysis, and migration planning—valuable when you’re moving from a plugin-driven CMS to a modern stack and want zero traffic loss.
What separates winning Jamstack SEO from the rest?
1) Real HTML for bots — predictably
Even in an “app-like” world, bots need stable, indexable HTML. That means planning SSR/SSG/ISR, ensuring canonical pages return 200 HTML (not JSON shells), and avoiding client-only routes for primary content. Headless site SEO rises or falls on this decision.
2) Content modeling with SEO fields
Your CMS schema should include title, description, canonical URL, robots directives, and schema.org fields. Editors shouldn’t guess—make fields required and validated so pages ship with clean meta by default.
3) Robust sitemaps and internal linking
Dynamic sitemaps per locale, plus strong cross-linking at the component level (related content, bread crumbs) help discovery—critical for large Jamstack builds.
4) Performance budgets wired into CI/CD
The Jamstack advantage is speed. Hold it. Budget LCP/TTFB/CLS, block regressions, and treat image optimization (modern formats, responsive srcset) as a first-class feature.
5) Edge and caching strategy
Leverage CDN and edge functions (revalidation windows, cache keys, stale-while-revalidate) so both users and crawlers consistently get fast, fresh content.
6) Migration hygiene
If you’re moving off WordPress/Drupal/etc., you need a redirect map, canonical rules, content parity checks, and monitoring. Done right, headless migrations protect share-of-voice and can improve it. (See general best-practice coverage and platform discussions for headless CMS SEO pros/cons.)
How we evaluated these teams
- Jamstack SEO track record: evidence of working with SSG/SSR/ISR, edge rendering, and caching.
- Technical SEO credibility: audits that go beyond “meta tags” to crawl paths, rendered HTML, and status codes.
- CMS SEO maturity: content models with SEO fields, schema support, and localization at scale.
- Developer collaboration: ability to speak the language of frameworks and CI/CD, not just CMS UIs.
- Migration safety: zero-downtime URL changes, accurate redirects, and monitoring.
We also consulted established resources on Jamstack and headless best practices to ground our criteria in current guidance.
Quick buyer’s checklist (copy/paste into your RFP)
- Can you show a technical SEO audit for a headless CMS/Jamstack build (with rendered HTML checks)?
- How do you decide between SSR vs. SSG vs. ISR for primary templates?
- What’s your approach to headless CMS SEO fields (title, description, canonical, robots, schema)?
- How do you implement dynamic sitemaps and handle pagination/crawl management?
- What’s your Lighthouse/performance budget and CI enforcement plan?
- How do you validate internationalization (hreflang, localized sitemaps) at scale?
- What error handling do you enforce (true 404/410, not soft 404s)?
- How do you prevent hydration mismatches and client-only rendering pitfalls?
- What’s your migration checklist (redirects, canonicals, parity checks, monitoring)?
FAQ
What’s the biggest SEO risk when going headless?
Indexable HTML. If core templates only hydrate client-side, crawlers may see thin content or mismatched DOMs. Choose SSR/SSG/ISR appropriately and test the rendered output, not just the component code.
Is Jamstack “better” for SEO than a monolithic CMS?
It can be. Jamstack’s performance and deploy model are advantages, but only if you implement routing, metadata, schema, and sitemaps correctly and keep your cache strategy coherent.
Which headless CMS is best for SEO?
Many are excellent if configured well (Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, Hygraph, Strapi, etc.). What matters is your content model (fields for SEO), editorial governance, and how your frontend renders. Comparison articles can help you evaluate tradeoffs, but execution wins.
What metrics should my SEO team own post-launch?
Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), crawl/index coverage, non-200 error rates for canonical URLs, schema coverage, sitemaps health, and content velocity. Tie them to conversions and qualified traffic, not just scores.
How often should we audit a Jamstack site?
Quarterly is common, but any major framework/CMS upgrade, routing change, or cache policy change merits a fresh Technical SEO pass.
Do we still need a blog?
If it fits your audience and topical map—yes. Headless makes it easy to publish everywhere from one source. But prioritize evergreen docs, knowledge bases, and comparison pages that map to your ICP’s buying journey.
Relevant YouTube video
If you want a quick, practical walkthrough on SEO for headless, this live session is an approachable primer:
SEO best practices with a headless CMS (live coding) — YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD5t8WsHIpE (YouTube)
Final notes
- Use technical SEO as a product feature, not a one-time task—wire it into your CMS schema, components, and CI.
- Treat Jamstack site optimization as a lifecycle: measure in staging, budget in CI, verify in production.
- Choose SEO teams that can read your code, not just your sitemap.