Building a website is not the end, but the beginning of your journey towards your goals.
Today, if you want to reach your audience, you cannot wait to be found. You have to be out there right at the top of the search results.
This, in essence, means that you need SEO-friendly website building platforms. Over and above their affordability, ease of operation, and customization options, builders also need to have features that can help your SEO efforts.
So, what are the best platforms for SEO?
Before we find what the most popular builders have to offer, we need to understand what we are looking for.
While the Internet is full of SEO-friendly tips and tweaks, here are the top 5 features that are a must-have. If a website builder has these features, you can easily scale your SEO efforts.
- Meta Title and Description
The title and description that is shown in search results. This helps viewers and search engine crawlers identify and understand what that particular page is all about.
- Alt Tags
Pictures speak louder than words. But not in SEO. Crawlers need text to understand the context of your images. Adding the right Alternative texts to images helps you rank higher in image searches as well.
- Site speed and mobile responsiveness
How fast the website loads and how is the display on mobile screens depends on the templates that the website offers. And these factors have a major impact on SEO.
- Structured data (Schema Markup)
Your website’s schema markup is a great formatting code that can help crawlers better identify and understand your website and its pages.
- Canonical, Robots, and Sitemaps
Small changes to your website in the right way can have a multiplier effect on your organic reach and rankings. Avoiding duplication and proper indexing is an important aspect that website builders should offer.
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WordPress.org
WordPress powers 30.3% of the top 1000 websites and over 35% of the entire web.
Now, this is enough to prove that WordPress.org is, in fact, a great website builder and CMS platform for SEO optimization.
- WordPress has mobile-responsive themes that are a great advantage when it comes to SEO.
- It autogenerated robots.txt files and makes it super easy to add apt Alt tags to all your images through the media library.
- What WordPress doesn’t offer in-built is easily covered up with the help of its 54,000+ plugins.
- You can use Yoast for adding meta title and description and canonical tags to all pages. Some other SEO-boosting plugins include Monster Insights (for Google Analytics), All in One SEO Pack (for Google Search Console), All in One Schema Rich Snippets, WP3 Cache, Smush (for image optimization), and File Manager (to upload your HTML, XML, and text sitemaps).
The best platform for businesses that want to depend on organic search and SEO for reaching the audience.
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Squarespace
Squarespace powers over 1.8 million websites. It is needless to say that Squarespace is among the top website building platforms.
While Squarespace does deliver better than other platforms on several grounds, there are some shortcomings too.
- Squarespace allows users to add meta titles, meta descriptions, and heading tags (H1 to H3) on all pages.
- The XML sitemap is generated automatically, and you can easily upload your robots.txt files.
- Alt tags cannot always be edited and can hamper SEO with inapt auto generated tags.
- Users have to code the canonical tags, which can be time-consuming.
- While most templated are responsive, the intuitive does come in the ways of creating sites that look good on mobile.
- GA, GSC can be integrated, but the slow page load speed is an issue for most users, and there isn’t an easy way to add schema markups to your site.
Good for websites that need only basic SEO. Not the best pick for businesses that was to drive high organic traffic.
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Shopify
Shopify is the top platform for building eCommerce websites. And when it comes to SEO-friendliness, then too, it is among the best SEO-friendly website builders.
Websites built on Shopify are online stores and hardly have much content to boost their SEO efforts. But still, Shopify does offer great features that can be used to augment your SEO strategy.
- Shopify offers you in-built options to add meta title, meta description, and alt tags on all pages and images.
- You can also add H1 to H6 tags, which are great for white hat SEO. You also get to create custom URLs that further help boost SEO.
- Adding canonical tags, schema markups, and doing other changes in the template is tough. It is because it requires you to edit the theme.liquid code. However, you can use plugins like Smart SEO for schema markups.
- Shopify auto generates the XML sitemaps and robots.txt file. But gives you no scope to add HTML or text sitemap (aka URL list)
- Shopify websites are mobile-optimized and usually have a high uptime with high page load speed as well.
- The platform also offers decent enough social media integration options too.
If you are using Shopify for your eCommerce store, it won’t disappoint you in the SEO segment. (Almost) everything that you need to rank your website is available on this platform.
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Wix
Wix is another popular website builder that is among the top choices for DIYers. And even in the SEO segment, it helps users carry out the basics & advanced optimizations without the need for plugins or third-party tools.
- The Wix dashboard has in-built SEO features, and this makes it possible to carry out SEO without having to code.
- Wix lets you add everything from meta title and description to alt tags, canonical tags, and even heading tags with ease.
- Adding structured data or the schema markup, however, can be tricky. It is best to use plugins for this.
- Wix also doesn’t offer much help when it comes to sitemaps, and you need to do it yourself.
- Wix has mobile-friendly sites and a 99% uptime, which is great for SEO purposes.
- Social media integrations and linking your website to Google Analytics and Search Console is easy with Wix.
Wix is a neat option for blogs, small businesses, and personal websites. For advanced SEO needs, you should be looking elsewhere.
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Weebly
Weebly is definitely among the best website platforms for SEO for beginners. If you don’t have a large website to manage, Weebly would be good for both creating the website and ranking it higher in SERPs.
- Adding Title and meta description is easy. However, it can sometimes get confusing whether you should add site metadata or for each page. No matter what you do, ensure you avoid duplication.
- You can use plenty of Weebly resources to add alt tags, headings, canonical tags, schema markup, and sitemaps to your website.
- A lot of SEO-friendly plugins are also available.
- There are a lot of customization options available in Weebly, which means it has a lot of javascript in the header, which can result in low page load speed.
- You cannot index your Weebly website with the free plan and would need to upgrade to a paid plan for search engine indexing.
Weebly isn’t the choice for big businesses, but small businesses looking for ways to start their SEO efforts can make use of Weebly’s offerings.
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Magento
Magento is another online store-centric website builder with its fair share of SEO capabilities.
- Magento allows users to add title and meta descriptions to both category and product pages. However, on the product pages, the meta title often replaces the title on the page, which can be an unwanted change.
- You can add heading tags on pages and alt tags to images with ease, but you’ll have to spend considerable time figuring out how to add canonical tags.
- Sitemaps and robots files can be added to your website. Though you should keep updating the XML sitemap as and when your products change.
- Magento offers decent enough caching and clearing options that can be used to affect your site’s load time.
- You can use responsive Magento themes and use Magento mobile extensions to create mobile-responsive websites.
Magento is a decent enough option for eCommerce websites, and its SEO services are at par with the requirements of online store owners, in most cases.
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BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another trusted name when it comes to SEO-friendly website builders. It has a lot of in-built features that you can use for ranking higher in search results.
- You have complete control over your URL structure, metadata, headings, and alt tags.
- You can select SEO-friendly templates from the marketplace and build your website on an optimized base for SEO.
- Bigcommerce has schema microdata built right into it. This helps you rank higher and on relevant search queries with rich text results.
- You can code the canonical tag in the head section of your webpage.
- BigCommerce uses sitemap.php instead of the usual sitemap.xml. And while it hardly makes a difference, it is better to list your sitemap URL in your robots.txt file.
BigCommerce doesn’t stand out of the crowd when it comes to SEO-friendliness. But, if you have the time and expertise at hand, you can use the builder to build high ranking websites.
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Webnode
WebNode isn’t the most easily optimizable builder for SEO purposes. It does have a couple of basic SEO features, but for most ambitious users, it is often found lacking.
- Title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and even URLs are editable in WebNode.
- Webnode offers a decent selection of mobile-responsive templates for you to choose from.
- However, you should know that some templates do not use SEO-friendly headings.
- Also, WebNode doesn’t have an option to add canonical tags or structures data with ease. Even searching high and low in their resource base won’t give you a clear idea about this.
- You can add your sitemaps, mainly the XML sitemap using Search Console.
- Social media integration options are also available for your WebNode website.
If you have paid marketing campaigns running, you can supplement it using the WebNode SEO features. But, they are not entirely sufficient for businesses that focus primarily on organic ranking.
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GoDaddy
If you want to make a website quickly, you can trust GoDaddy. It promises to help get your website up and running in minutes. Now, that’s great, but when it comes to SEO, it often gets a little restrictive as the GoCentral builder kind of takes everything in its own hands.
- You can update your title and meta description, but that has to strictly be according to the GoDaddy rules. This can get frustrating as well as detrimental to SEO.
- GoDaddy has mobile-optimized websites, and responsiveness isn’t something that you need to worry about
- Schema markups and canonical tags can be added, and you can use the available resources to know how.
- Robots.txt files are auto generated and non-editable. The first part is great, but in some situations, it can get a little disappointing that you cannot edit the file. The XML sitemap is also auto generated and gets automatically updated as and when your website changes.
For new businessmen, who have no idea about SEO, GoDaddy has decent SEO-friendly tools. But, if you know your SEO, GoDaddy would be limiting your efforts.
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Jimdo
Jimbo is known for its AI builder Dolphin. And when it comes to SEO, both Dolphin and the manual builder Creator offer fair enough options.
- Both Dolphin and Creator can help you add meta titles and descriptions, alt tags, headings, and more on every page.
- The websites are mobile optimized.
- Robots.txt and sitemap files are auto generated and regularly updated.
- You can add schema markups and canonical tags on your pages.
- Integrating your website with Google Analytics and Search Console is easy. Social media integration options are available.
If you are looking for a website that handles the major chunk of SEO on its own, Jimdo can be your pick. But don’t expect out-of-the-box features and complete search engine optimization.
While all these top SEO-friendly platforms are good for different types of business owners, WordPress offers the most wholesome SEO services. For eCommerce stores, Shopify is the best SEO pick.
Make use of your website builder’s SEO capabilities and climb the rank ladder to reach your audience in the best way!
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