Sanity SEO Checklist
Headless SEO for Sanity-powered sites: schema design, structured data, and performance.
A complete SEO reference for Sanity-powered sites. Headless setups need different SEO patterns than visual builders, so this checklist focuses on what actually matters: schema design, server-rendered meta, structured data, and Core Web Vitals at the framework layer.
The Checklist
14 items across 4 phases
Schema & Content Modeling
Design your Sanity schema with SEO in mind: fields, slugs, and metadata.
Headless SEO
Rendering, canonical URLs, and meta tag injection in headless Sanity setups.
Performance
Image CDN, ISR, and performance optimizations for Sanity-powered sites.
Structured Data
Schema.org JSON-LD implementation for Sanity-powered content types.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sanity is a headless CMS, so SEO depends entirely on how you build the frontend. With server-rendered meta tags, canonical URLs, structured data, and the Image CDN configured, Sanity-powered sites can hit excellent SEO results.
Meta tags have to be rendered server-side in your frontend framework (Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit). Store the meta fields in your Sanity schema and inject them into the page's <head> at render time, never client-side, so search engines read them correctly.
Use a GROQ query to fetch every published document with a slug, then generate sitemap.xml in your framework's server routes. Tools like next-sitemap (for Next.js) can automate this. Submit the sitemap URL to Google Search Console after deploy.
Define the schema data in Sanity Studio (or compute it from existing fields) and pass it to your frontend via the GROQ query. Render it as a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag inside the page's <head> at server render time so search engines can read it.
Yes. Sanity's built-in Image CDN (cdn.sanity.io) serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF with automatic resizing. Correctly sized, compressed images cut page weight, improve Core Web Vitals, and lift Google rankings.