How to select a CMS that powers SEO, personalization and growth

As the customer journey becomes increasingly complex in 2025, organizations need a best-in-class martech suite to deliver a seamless, data-driven experience across multiple channels.

A critical component of this set is content management system (CMS)which must respond to the key challenges facing companies today:

• Achieving visibility in multimodal search.
• Establishing a presence in large language models (LLM).
• Total cost of ownership management.
• Harnessing the power of AI.

Why is the right CMS a key building block for laying a solid foundation?

A CMS is key in creating personalized experiences and connecting customer touchpoints across all channels. It “enables organizations to collaboratively manage the creation, aggregation, orchestration and delivery of content across multichannel touchpoints,” according to Forrester.

An ideal CMS should effortlessly manage discovery, experience, engagement and conversions, ensuring your digital presence remains optimized for AI-driven search progress. It should automate website health troubleshooting, reducing the need for constant technical SEO work.

Let’s explore the key considerations when choosing or upgrading your CMS, focusing on four key stages of the marketing journey:

• Discovery.
• Experience.
• Conversion.
• Performance.

Discovery

Content discovery and SERP saturation

Content discovery and visibility across different search results are major challenges for organizations. With content spread across multiple platforms, it’s difficult to maintain consistent visibility. Many brands rely on paid ads to compensate for poor organic exposure, even though consumers trust organic content more.

Your CMS should support content discovery through:

• Effectively manage indexing budgets to ensure all high-quality content is indexed, indexed and served.
• Allows easy addition and editing of schemas based on content architecture.
• The key to automation SEO tasks such as redirects, URL updates, sitemaps, site paths and page speed optimization – especially during site edits, migrations or deletions.

A CMS with built-in discovery features is even better. It should support protocols like IndexNow to notify search engines of changes to page content.

Prioritizing SERP saturation and discovery features is critical for any brand.

Dig deeper: Why 2025 is the year of martech optimization, not expansion

Optimizing your digital assets for improved discovery

Search is now multimodal, with consumers engaging through images, video, text and audio. To stay ahead, centralize, optimize and distribute your assets across all channels.

Experience

Once your content is discovered, the next focus is user experience. Personalization and A/B testing shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Your CMS should offer an easy-to-deploy solution backed by a framework that improves experience and drives conversions.

Multichannel experiences

In 2025, the customer journey will be more complex as customers communicate through different channels, such as images, videos, LLM, social platforms, text and voice. Web traffic from traditional search engines could drop by 25%, Gartner predicts.

To ensure a seamless journey:

• Use a CMS that supports automated, personalized workflows for different audiences.
• Establish a centralized information hub with a separate data layer for flexibility.
• Automate serving and publishing based on specific channels and audience needs.

Dig deeper: Headless transition CMS: Best of MarTechBot

Personalization

Traffic from traditional search engines is declining, especially among younger generations. Generation Z is increasingly turning to platforms like TikTok and Instagram for discovery, and nearly 40% are bypassing search engines.

Brands that provide personalized, data-driven responses better engage customers, driving loyalty and conversions. Effective personalization relies on:

• Use of customer data.
• Connecting the customer journey.
• Streamlining your content workflow.

Personalization includes location-, channel- and behavior-based approaches, with artificial intelligence enhancing visitor segmentation, journey prediction and content creation.

Dig deeper: How to increase your organic reach with the help of behavioral analytics insights

Prefab architecture

The customer journey is increasingly complex and requires flexible, scalable solutions. A “best-of-breed” architecture built on cloud-composable SaaS and microservices aligns with MACH principles and promotes growth.

This approach improves user experience, shortens development time, reduces costs, and makes systems scalable and robust, unlike rigid, monolithic systems. A CMS should offer:

• API-driven integrations for efficient data entry and transfer.
• High availability, scalability and consistency.
• A strong partner ecosystem.
• Support for headless or hybrid configurations.

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Conversion

After discovery and experience, focus on conversions. Key elements include:

• Landing page optimization.
• Conversion optimization and A/B testing.
• Limited time offers and coupons.
• Return of income.
• Widgets tailored to specific industries for engagement and conversions (eg online travel agencies or OTAs, for hospitality).

To ensure seamless performance across all channels, your CMS must go beyond content management to enable scaling and consistency.

A centralized hub of resources and knowledge

Content creation in CMS has evolved. Companies need enterprise-wide taxonomies and metadata to align content with brand voice. A centralized hub breaks down silos, enabling shared resources, better collaboration and faster content production.

Vertically specific applications

Does your CMS support industry-specific tools such as travel apps, mortgage calculators, event calendars, or marketplace integrations?

Explore developer communities and application verticals to ensure the CMS meets your business needs.

Performance

A robust CMS should integrate site and campaign performance analytics, providing real-time insights across all channels.

Infrastructure, compliance and security

This became the basis for building a resilient and adaptable technology set.

Secure cloud hosting with micro-container architecture is essential for high availability, disaster recovery and backups. A good CDN ensures fast website performance.

Multi-layered security with firewalls, intrusion detection, secure code and DDoS protection provides a robust defense. Compliance with GDPR, CCPA and ADA increases trust and customer experience. Google offered best practices for developers to ensure that the user experience of the website is secure and offers a safe browsing experience.

Artificial intelligence workflow

AI automates content creation, manages site migrations, and solves technical SEO issues. A CMS with built-in business insight, segmentation and A/B testing streamlines workflow and optimizes results.

CMS-enabled AI agents can play a significant role in providing content to various AI agents (ie, chat agents and search agents). This will:

• Improve user experience.
• Maximize conversions.
• Provide easy access to relevant information.
• Ensure faster resolution of queries.

Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What you need to know

Total cost of ownership

When evaluating systems, focus on tools that provide a seamless user experience. A CMS is critical to marketing success, connecting workflows and all stages of the customer journey.

Optimize your digital presence by choosing the right CMS

A good CMS should minimize time and cost with features like editable pages, reusable components, templates, built-in analytics, and AI-driven automation. Developer support is just as critical.

Ensure CMS provides comprehensive documentation and scalability for easy adoption, faster time-to-market and long-term business growth.

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