SEO Guide for Using Webflow: Is Webflow Good for SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the crucial factors for the success of your website and, consequently, your business. It should never be taken out of the equation when building and maintaining a website, as neglecting SEO will likely put you out of the competition in a short time.

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So, what is SEO exactly? SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank for relevant keywords that relate to their business in search engines, such as Google or Bing. SEO experts create a strategy to help your website improve its ranking on search engines, helping you attract more visitors and, ultimately, more customers.

Webflow is developed with SEO in mind. It fares better than older website builders and CMSs. So, the answer to the topic question is:

Yes, Webflow is good for SEO!

It’s not only good — it’s much better compared to its main competitors. It’s not a question of “if” but of “how” Webflow is better, and here’s a quick overview:

• Creating user-friendly and attractively-designed pages is easy, thanks to an intuitive UX provided by Webflow.
• Webflow sites are typically fast and pass core web vitals by default.
• Editing metadata and other relevant SEO aspects is easy and code-free.
• SEO friendly URLs.
• Ability to choose between subfolders and subdomains.

Webflow is equipped to help you implement more complex SEO features, including:

• Adding custom schema data — Schema markup helps search engines understand your site better. Think of it as a language for search engines, and Webflow lets you speak it to describe your site better to Google in a few simple steps.
• Adding hreflangs — Hreflang is an HTML attribute used for language specification and geo-targeting of a webpage. It’s used when there are several versions of one page, and Webflow streamlined the implementation of this attribute.
• Adding canonical tags — Canonical tags indicate which version of a page is the main one, which is helpful when you have duplicate or similar content on your site. By marking the “canonical” page, you instruct that these pages are similar and avoid having competing pages in search engines.

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Webflow vs. Other CMS Systems

Webflow is more than a CMS system. It’s a comprehensive website development toolbox with a visual approach to building online experiences, and Webflow CMS is just one tool in its tools that can assist you with assembling search-engine-optimized websites. 

The fact that you can do it all with no coding knowledge and basic HTML and CSS just comes as icing on the cake. The cherry on top is hosting. Here’s why.

The quality of the hosting solution could affect your overall SEO ranking. No matter how well-optimized your site is for search engines, that doesn’t matter much if your hosting is poor.  Webflow solved that by offering its hosting options, which are tried and true, ensuring fast loading regardless of the website speed. Your hosting is delivered by Fastly Network and stored securely on Amazon Web Servers. Moreover, Webflow’s CDN (content distribution network) distributes your data across data centers around the globe and loads it from the center that’s closest to you, which ensures great website speed.

In short, the team at Webflow didn’t want to leave anything up to chance regarding SEO, tackling every possible nuisance of this activity.

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Webflow SEO Opportunities

Webflow is suitable for beginners and professionals alike, thanks to the visual approach to website building. The same can be said for SEO. Thanks to the intuitive environment, Webflow can help you easily create, edit, and manage various on-page elements, including:

• URLs
• Indexing
• Meta title and descriptions
• Heading tags
• 301 redirects
• Image alt-texts
• Page structure

Anything you need to adjust to improve your site in search engines' eyes is a few clicks away.

Search engines have become almost sentient, with powerful crawlers (small robots entering your website to read its content) and AI. 

But, Webflow is well prepared for it, mainly because its unique approach to development also includes clean code, which is mostly written by itself as you edit the visual elements with Webflow Designer. 

Moreover, animations and layouts are powerful yet easy to load when built on Webflow, paving the way for your site to rank as high as possible on Google.

Then there’s responsiveness — the ability of a website to adapt to mobile devices, tablets, and other screen sizes. It has been a growing factor in the SEO world due to the increasing number of mobile website visitors. Remember: the number of visitors and how long they stay on your site is one of the primary metrics in the SEO, and they will surely leave in a second if they fail to load your website properly on their mobile device.

Webflow’s solution? Take responsiveness into account whenever possible during the building process. Webflow Designer can let you quickly switch different screen sizes and set your website for mobile screens in an instant.

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Webflow Audit Tool

Webflow has a built-in audit tool that scans your website's content and provides immediate feedback about its overall impact on SEO. Most elements mentioned in the previous section are accessed by the audit tool, and users can quickly improve the SEO score by resolving all noticed issues.

Imagine publishing a well-optimized blog post with the aim of improving your SEO rating. The writer added all keywords and came up with effective meta descriptions. However, they forgot to organize headings properly (H1, H2, H3, etc). The audit tool will notice the improper heading structure and immediately notify you about this so that you can avoid possible penalties by search engines.

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SEO Guide for Using Webflow

Making a site optimized for search engines requires understanding different practices that are part of SEO. Once you master the theoretical aspect, putting it to practice in Webflow is simple and straightforward.

Write Unique Title Tag, Meta Descriptions, and Content

To access the option to edit meta titles and descriptions, you need to:

1. Go to Webflow Designer.
2. Select Pages (upper left corner).
3. Go to Edit Page Settings (the icon of a cog next to page name).

You’ll notice two fields: Title Tag and Meta Description, which are the places for entering your metas. The rest is up to you: research the relevant keywords for the page at hand and use creativity to come up with a catchy title and description.

As for the content, it’s distributed throughout the page, but you have to make it organized with headings properly distributed. Ideally, relevant keywords should be included in your content and in your headings. 

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Optimize Your Title Tag for SEO

A title tag is the title of your page, and it’s often the first thing someone sees when seeing your web page in a search engine. In the previous section, we’ve shown you how to get to the title page. Here, we’ll shortly overview the basic tips for optimizing a title tag. 

• Put relevant keywords first.
• Pay attention to the length of your title (50-60 characters). 
• Moz has a great testing tool.‍
• Seize the branding opportunity if possible.
• Give a unique and relevant title to every page.
• Write a captivating title that will attract visitors.

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Optimize Your Site Loading Speed

Your website should be able to load within three seconds (two for ecommerce). Slow sites will be punished by Google and other search engines. Moreover, visitors don’t have the patience to wait for a long time.

Every page element can affect its speed, including:

• HTML code
• CSS used for styling page elements
• JavaScript files
• Images
• Videos
• Other multimedia

Recently, Google has been focusing on Core Web Vitals (CWV), which determine how long it takes before a page is visible to the visitor, how long it takes before a user can interact with the page, and how stable are the elements on the page.

Here’s how Webflow solved some ongoing speed hindrances.

• All images are set to lazy load by default, meaning they won’t load right away but only when you scroll to them on a web page. 
• Webflow offers a wide array of font loading options to help you load it faster and optimize your page.
• Prefetch and prerendering options let you prepare the pages that visitors are likely to load next in the background. That way, visitors don’t have to wait for another page to load, as it was loaded while they were surfing the previous page.

Of course, speed optimization goes well beyond that, as you’re given various other options to optimize the loading speed and have better SEO rankings. The best part is that Webflow doesn’t need external plugins for optimizing speed, as those are often counterproductive. Instead, every optimization can be performed using the existing tools that are part of Webflow.

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Optimize Images by Adding the Keyword to Image Alt Descriptions

Apart from making your website more accessible, alt texts for images is an inevitable part of many SEO strategies.

To set alt text to individual images, you need to:

1. Open the Assets panel in Webflow Designer.
2. Hover to the image you want to optimize and click the cog icon to access Asset details.
3. Type the alt text into the designated field.

If possible, make the text as descriptive as possible and insert a keyword.

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Use Internal Linking

Help visitors quickly get to other pages on your website by interlinking them. In other words, you should insert links to other pages whenever possible, as both visitors and crawlers like that. In the eyes of Google, a well-interlinked site is easy to navigate and helpful for visitors.

Interlinking is easy: pick the word or a phrase while editing content, highlight it, and add the hyperlink to another page. Here are essential tips for good interlinking.

• Use a descriptive anchor that contains a keyword.
• Don’t forget about the nofollow option for interlinks you don’t wish to be crawled by Google.
• Link older blogs in every newly-published blog post.
• Monitor and repair broken hyperlinks.

Connects to Google Analytics and Google Search Console Seamlessly

SEO ranking of a Website depends on how users interact with your content, how long they stay on your website, how many pages they view, and more. All of these things are visible via Google Analytics, which remains one of the most powerful website analytics tools in the world. You can easily connect your Webflow site to analytics and set up the relevant metrics that you should follow closely and act if some of them negatively affect your SEO score.

The process of adding your website to Google Search Console is also streamlined. Once you get your verification ID from the search console, you just need to go to your Webflow project, find the SEO tab and paste the ID in the Google Site Verification section. After that, you need to go back to the Search Console and submit your entry. 

Create User-Centered Content

The technical aspect of SEO is easy to adjust and make it optimal with Webflow. However, you still need creativity to create unique content matching users' interests. After all, humans will interact with your content, and Google is smart enough to notice when your visitors are happy. 

Therefore, whenever you create content, make it valuable and engaging for the visitor. This will help you attract more organic traffic and boost your overall visibility. Make a free Webflow account to start exploring available SEO options or get in touch with Flow Ninja if you want your website built by professional designers and developers who do everything with search engines in mind.