Friday, January 17, 2025
The Complete Guide to Sanity CMS SEO: Best Practices & Implementation
You've migrated to Sanity CMS—now your SEO feels broken. Meta tags aren't rendering. Sitemaps aren't updating. Your marketing team is filing Jira tickets for every title change. Sound familiar?
Here's the truth: Sanity doesn't handle SEO the way WordPress does—and that's actually a good thing.
Unlike traditional platforms that bundle SEO features automatically, Sanity's headless architecture requires intentional setup. This trips up many B2B SaaS teams who expect plug-and-play functionality. But once configured correctly, Sanity delivers something WordPress can't: a system where marketing teams independently control 60-70% of ongoing SEO tasks while developers focus on building, not babysitting metadata fields.
The results speak for themselves. Companies implementing Sanity SEO properly report 76% site speed improvements and 19% traffic increases. The key word is properly.
This guide gives you the complete roadmap—from schema setup to marketing independence—whether you're hands-on with implementation or communicating requirements to your development team.
What Sanity Provides for SEO
Sanity does not include built-in SEO features out of the box. According to Sanity's official SEO documentation, the platform provides a flexible schema system where developers must create custom SEO objects and fields. This represents a key difference from traditional CMSs and is the most important concept for marketing leaders to understand.
What marketing teams can manage after setup:
- Title tags and meta descriptions with character count warnings
- URL slug management with validation preventing duplicates
- Meta robots directives (noindex/nofollow toggles)
- Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata
- Image alt text and optimization
What Sanity does not include:
- Automatic meta tag rendering (must be configured in frontend framework)
- Built-in canonical URL management (must be configured in Next.js or frontend)
- Native redirect handling (configured at hosting platform like Vercel or Netlify)
- Automatic sitemap generation (must be configured in frontend or serverless layer)
- Direct structured data output (JSON-LD must be generated by frontend code)
The division of responsibilities is clear: Sanity handles content storage and editing, while your frontend framework handles SEO output. Understanding this separation is essential before moving to schema setup. To bridge the gap between content and rendering, request your developers implement generateMetadata functions in Next.js 13+ App Router that fetch Sanity SEO data and render it properly.
Building Your SEO Schema
The foundation of SEO in Sanity is creating a reusable SEO object schema. Request your developers build this once, then manage all metadata independently.
Core Fields for Your SEO Schema:
- metaTitle: 50-65 character limit with validation warnings
- metaDescription: 150-160 character limit to prevent search result truncation
- canonicalUrl: For preventing duplicate content issues across product variations
- openGraphImage: 1200x630px dimensions with hotspot support for social sharing
- noIndex/noFollow: Boolean toggles for search engine crawling control
According to Sanity's Headless SEO 101, validation warnings at these limits (not hard errors) allow marketing flexibility while maintaining best practices.
Beyond these foundational metadata fields, B2B SaaS websites benefit significantly from structured data implementation. While meta tags help search engines understand page content, structured data takes this further by enabling rich snippets and enhanced search result displays. B2B SaaS websites should prioritize four schema types:
- Organization — Establishes company identity and improves brand knowledge panel appearance in search results
- SoftwareApplication — Provides structured product information with applicationCategory, operatingSystem, offers and aggregateRating properties
- BreadcrumbList — Generates breadcrumb trails in search results and helps search engines understand site hierarchy
- FAQPage — Enables expanded FAQ displays in search results and increases visibility for B2B educational content
This collaborative workflow reflects Sanity's core philosophy: marketing teams define which schema types align with your content strategy, developers then implement the technical structure to support those requirements, and once configured, marketing teams independently populate the content fields in Sanity Studio.
URL and Content Hierarchy Management
Proper slug management prevents duplicate content issues and maintains URL stability. According to Sanity's slug type documentation, the platform provides a dedicated slug field with automatic generation from title fields and manual editing capabilities.
Best practices for URL slugs:
- Keep slugs short, descriptive and keyword-relevant
- Avoid dates or numbers to maintain evergreen content value
- Maintain URL stability after publication. Changing slugs compromises long-term SEO performance
- Request parent-scoped uniqueness for multi-product sites (allowing same slug in different categories while enforcing uniqueness within parent documents)
To prevent unintended URL changes, request developers implement slug validation and documentation of when slug changes are appropriate. For post-publication slug editing, establish clear marketing guidelines about when changes are necessary and implement duplicate slug prevention validation across your site.
Canonical URL strategy prevents duplicate content penalties. According to Sanity's SEO guide, an optional canonicalUrl field in your SEO schema allows marketing teams to override the default self-referencing canonical when needed. Marketing teams should use this for product variations pointing to main product pages, parameter-heavy URLs and cross-domain content syndication scenarios. Note that the actual canonical tag rendering occurs at the frontend framework level, not within Sanity.
For content hierarchy, Sanity's hierarchies guide recommends parent-child reference patterns to establish clear site architecture for search engines. Link case studies to industries and products. Connect features to product pages. Organize documentation hierarchically. This hierarchical structure enables automatic breadcrumb generation and improves crawlability while preventing orphaned content that lacks internal links.
Performance Optimization and Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals directly impact rankings. According to Google's documentation, these metrics are active ranking signals with clear targets: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200ms and CLS under 0.1.
Sanity's image optimization features support performance improvements that benefit Largest Contentful Paint. According to Sanity's image URL documentation, the platform provides automatic WebP/AVIF format selection, dynamic resizing for each device, intelligent cropping with hotspot support and quality control for payload optimization.
What marketing teams control:
- Define hotspot areas for smart cropping of Open Graph and social sharing images in Studio
- Set image alt text for SEO and accessibility, using descriptive language rather than generic placeholders
- Choose appropriate quality settings per image type, balancing file size with visual quality while leveraging Sanity's automatic CDN optimization
Format selection and responsive image delivery happen automatically through Sanity's image URL API, which serves WebP, AVIF or fallback formats based on browser support and delivers appropriately sized images to each device using dynamic resizing parameters.
For CDN configuration, use Sanity's dedicated API CDN endpoints (apicdn.sanity.io) with stale-while-revalidate caching strategies. When deployed on Vercel, Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) enables automatic sitemap revalidation at specified intervals or through webhook-triggered on-demand regeneration when you publish content in Sanity.
Avoiding Common SEO Pitfalls
Even with proper schema setup, teams migrating from traditional CMS platforms often stumble on Sanity-specific SEO challenges. The following four issues account for most indexing failures and ranking drops—address them proactively to protect your organic search performance.
Missing SEO Metadata Schema
This is the primary mistake teams make when migrating from traditional platforms. Unlike WordPress with Yoast, Sanity requires intentional setup.
Request developers create a reusable SEO object schema with:
- Title tag with validated character limits
- Meta description with character count warnings
- Canonical URL field
- Open Graph tags
- Twitter cards
- Robots meta directives with noindex/nofollow toggle capabilities
Client-Side Rendering Over-Reliance
Excessive client-side rendering (CSR) causes indexing failures because search engines receive incomplete content—the HTML lacks fully-rendered page content. According to Sanity's SEO guidance, this is particularly problematic for B2B SaaS sites where organic search is often the primary lead source.
How to address this:
- Ask your developers: "Are we using server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG)?"
- Request implementation with Next.js SSR/SSG or Gatsby to ensure fully-rendered HTML reaches search engines
- Verify by using "View Page Source" in your browser—if you see actual content rather than primarily JavaScript code, the implementation is correct
Image SEO Neglect
While Sanity's CDN handles technical image optimization automatically, marketing teams manage critical content aspects:
- Descriptive alt text for every image
- Meaningful file names before upload
- Hotspot areas for smart cropping
Sitemap Configuration Mistakes
Incomplete sitemaps that don't update with content changes are a common issue.
Best practices:
- Request "dynamic sitemaps that regenerate automatically when content changes, not static files"
- Verify submission to Google Search Console
- Monitor for blocked pages in coverage reports
SEO Plugins for Marketing Teams
While Sanity's core platform requires custom schema development, community-maintained plugins can accelerate your SEO workflow and reduce implementation time. These three plugins offer the most value for marketing teams managing day-to-day SEO tasks.
Sanity SEO Fields Plugin
This community-maintained plugin is most suitable for marketing teams. According to the official plugin listing, it offers:
- Meta titles and descriptions directly in Studio
- Open Graph tag configuration for social platforms
- No coding required for daily operations
Schema Markup Plugin
This plugin handles structured data for rich snippets. According to documentation, the @operationnation/sanity-plugin-schema-markup provides:
- Schema.org JSON-LD structured data generation within Studio
- Note: Frontend implementation remains a developer responsibility
SEO Pane Plugin
The SEO Pane plugin provides real-time previews before publishing:
- Google search results appearance
- Facebook Open Graph preview
- Twitter Card preview
Important: All SEO plugins are community-maintained rather than officially developed by Sanity, meaning long-term support depends on community developers.
Implementation Roadmap
A successful Sanity SEO implementation typically takes 4-5 weeks, moving from initial planning through developer setup to full marketing independence. Here's how to structure the rollout for your team.
Weeks 1-2: Planning
- Document current SEO requirements
- Define content types needing SEO management
- Create a prioritized feature list
Weeks 3-4: Developer Setup
- Implement foundational SEO schemas with validation rules
- Configure rendering strategy with server-side or static generation
- Set up dynamic sitemap generation with webhook-triggered regeneration
Week 5+: Marketing Independence
At this stage, marketing teams can independently manage 60-70% of ongoing SEO tasks:
- Manage metadata for all content types
- Control indexing through noindex/nofollow toggles
- Monitor performance in Google Search Console
- Coordinate with developers only for schema changes
Key Metrics to Track
- Organic traffic growth
- Core Web Vitals scores
- Page indexing status
- SEO-related developer requests (this metric should decrease to near-zero as your team gains confidence)
Building SEO Infrastructure That Scales
The gap between Sanity's flexibility and SEO success isn't technical—it's strategic. Teams that treat SEO setup as a one-time developer task end up back where they started: filing tickets for every meta description update while competitors capture their organic traffic.
The real opportunity here is operational. Get your schema architecture right in weeks 3-4, and you unlock something most B2B SaaS marketing teams don't have: the ability to respond to search trends, optimize underperforming pages, and launch new content without waiting in the dev queue. That 60-70% independence metric isn't aspirational—it's the baseline for teams who implement properly.
Every week you delay is another week your marketing team remains bottlenecked on basic SEO tasks while your site speed, indexing, and organic visibility fall behind competitors who've already made the switch.
Ready to stop treating SEO as a developer dependency? Work with Webstacks to build a Sanity architecture that gives your marketing team full control from day one.
