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

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

A critical component of this stack is the CMS, which must address key challenges businesses face today: 

• Achieving visibility in multimodal search.
• Establishing a presence in large language models (LLMs).
• Managing total cost of ownership.
• Leveraging AI opportunities.

Why is the right CMS a critical building block for establishing a solid foundation? 

A CMS is vital 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 to omnichannel 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 advancements. It should automate fixing website health issues, reducing the need for ongoing technical SEO work.

Let’s explore key considerations when selecting or upgrading your CMS, focusing on the four pivotal 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 hard to maintain consistent visibility. Many brands rely on paid ads to make up for poor organic discovery, even though consumers trust organic content more.

Your CMS should support content discovery by:

• Managing crawl budgets efficiently to ensure indexing, crawling, and rendering of all high-quality content.
• Allowing easy addition and editing of schemas based on content architecture.
• Automating key SEO tasks like redirects, URL updates, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and page speed optimizations – especially during site edits, migrations, or deletions.

A CMS with built-in discovery features is even better. It should support protocols like IndexNow for notifying search engines of site content changes. 

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

Dig deeper: Future-proof your SERP presence: 6 areas to focus on

Optimizing your digital assets for enhanced discovery

Search is now multimodal, with consumers engaging via images, videos, 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 afterthoughts. 

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

Omnichannel experiences

In 2025, the customer journey will be more complex as users interact across various channels, such as images, videos, LLMs, social platforms, text, and voice. Web traffic from traditional search engines may 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 rendering and publishing based on specific channels and audience needs.

Dig deeper: Future-proofing digital experience in AI-first semantic search

Personalization

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

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

• Using customer data.
• Connecting the customer journey.
• Streamlining content workflows.

Personalization includes location-based, channel-based, and behavioral approaches, with AI enhancing visitor segmentation, journey prediction, and content creation.

Dig deeper: How to boost your marketing revenue with personalization, connectivity and data 

Composable architecture

Customer journeys are increasingly complex, requiring flexible, scalable solutions. A “best of breed” architecture, built on composable, cloud-native SaaS and microservices, aligns with MACH principles and promotes growth. 

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

• API-driven integrations for efficient data ingestion and egestion.
• High availability, scalability, and consistency.
• A robust partner ecosystem.
• Support for headless or hybrid configurations.

Conversion

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

• Landing page optimizations.
• Conversion optimization and A/B testing.
• Limited time offers and coupons.
• Revenue recovery.
• Widgets tailored to specific industries for engagement and conversions (e.g., online travel agencies, or OTAs, for hospitality).

To ensure seamless execution across all channels, your CMS needs to go beyond content management and allow for scaling and consistency.

Centralized assets and knowledge hub

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

Vertical-specific applications

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

Research developer communities and vertical applications to ensure the CMS meets your business needs.

Performance

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

Infrastructure, compliance, and security

This has become the foundation for building a resilient and adaptable tech stack.

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, secured code, and DDoS protection provides robust defense. GDPR, CCPA compliance, and ADA conformance enhance user trust and experience. Google has offered best practices for developers to ensure website users’ experience is secure and offers a safe browsing experience.  

AI workflows

AI automates content creation, handles site migrations, and resolves technical SEO issues. A CMS with built-in business insights, segmentation, and A/B testing streamlines workflows and optimizes results.

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

• Improve user experience.
• Maximize conversions.
• Enable easy access to relevant information.
• Ensure faster query resolution.

Dig deeper: How AI agents are revolutionizing digital marketing

Total cost of ownership

When evaluating systems, focus on tools that deliver a seamless customer experience. A CMS is central 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 costs with features like editable pages, reusable components, templates, built-in analytics, and AI-driven automation. Developer support is equally critical.

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