What is SEO and How Does a Web-Builder Affect SEO

An overview of how you can affect the SEO of your business and how your choice of web builder can affect your SEO.

What you do (the biggest part of SEO)

These are actions a business owner controls, no matter what website builder they use. Doing all of these actions will help maximize SEO but don’t overwhelm yourself, even choosing just a few of these tasks will still help!

  • Identify and target specific unique keywords that your potential customers type into google.

  • Use clear, descriptive page titles that match what people are searching for.

  • Describing your products/services in normal human language, so try to avoid jargon.

  • Adding alt text to photos so screen readers and google can understand what the photo is.

  • Have a FAQ; answer customer questions on your site.

  • Keeping your info accurate and up to date everywhere.

  • Getting good reviews and local citations (anywhere your business name, address, and phone number appear online in a consistent, public way. Ex: Yelp, Maps, local news articles). So google can see your business is probably real.

  • Create helpful content people search for (guides, blogs, FAQs), and make sure to include your chosen keywords.

  • Update your content regularly such as by having a blog, “Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy” https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/websites/seo/

  • Have a website that other websites want to link to, this is also called “backlinks”. This also includes linking your socials and google business page to your website.

  • Fine tune your SEO with the resources the website builder (or its app store) offers you.

  • If you are choosing where to host your website (such as with wordpress.org), choose a host provider that has faster servers.

What the website builder does

Through the web builder itself

  • Making your site load fast, through better server hosting and clean code (or at least clean enough that your page will load in under 2 seconds)
  • Mobile-friendly layouts (though with some builders like Wix, you may still need to adjust the mobile version manually).
  • Clean, readable URLs. Some allow you to edit this.
    • Bad: example.com/index.php?page=services&id=123
    • Good: example.com/services
  • Easy access to add/edit meta descriptions.
  • Connecting with Google Search Console/ analytics to better understand your site’s performance and visitor behavior.
  • Auto-generated sitemaps (or the ability to submit/customize one).

Through the web builder’s app store (usually)

  • Image optimization tools, often through apps. (Large images slow downyour site, hurting SEO).
  • Convert images to lighter image formats such as WebP and AVIF. (Webflow however does this automatically.)
  • Access to apps that make it easier to do:
    • Keyword research & competitor analysis
    • Performance tracking
    • Finding broken links
    • Make your content more compact and readable
    • Though all of this will only give you information, you’d still need to act on it.
  • Tools to let you scan for potential SEO issues
  • Advanced SEO features (for users who need full control):
    • Custom canonical URLs
    • Custom robots.txt
    • Custom schema markup (structured data)
    • URL structure control
    • CDN settings
    • Lazy loading

SEO guides

I listed multiple guides or overviews of SEO so you can see which appeals best to you. Also, you do not have to do all of these tips at once, you can choose what’s most managemable for you and as you grow, add more SEO techniques.

Website Builder Guide

Website Guide

It’s a comprehensive guide to help you choose the right website builder for your business.

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