Are you creating a website with Webflow and are you wondering about your SEO performance with this CMS? Were you seduced by the design and the intuitive nature of the Webflow no-code CMS, but are you disappointed by the results in terms of the visibility of your site on search engines? Do not panic, it is quite possible to obtain a much better natural referencing of your Webflow site by respecting several steps on your site. how improve SEO of a site designed with the Webflow CMS?
Explore solutions by getting familiar with Webflow's SEO features. Then get familiar with the technical and content optimizations allowed by this CMS. Finally, take it up a gear and discover our tips for scaling the SEO of a Webflow site.
The Webflow site creation tool has continued to gain popularity since its release on the market in 2013. This no-code solution is particularly popular with a number of fast-growing startups in France, but it also has a high penetration rate among rapidly expanding American companies (Discord, Dell, Slack, Slack, Michael Kors, Michael Kors, Jasper.ai, etc.).
Since 2023, it has been part of the Top 10 CMS the most used around the world. This success owes, of course, a lot to its numerous customization possibilities, but also to its ever more advanced SEO performances, and which fully justifiesuse Webflow as a CMS for your site.
To be clear, yes, Webflow is among the solutions for creating the most SEO-friendly websites available on the market, since it is both lighter than other CMS and has a lot of native features that reduce the field of possible bugs. We know that the responsiveness of a site is one of the criteria favorable to its good referencing.
But, in order to be completely transparent, the Webflow CMS is not always naturally good for SEO. Indeed, it is possible to make a certain number of mistakes when designing a Webflow site that can impact performance. Thus, to take full advantage of Webflow's good preprovisions for natural referencing, it is necessary to develop a site by respecting a series of best practices.
As a reminder, get SEO results Requires working three levers : the content of a site, its technical performance, as well as its popularity. In this article, we will focus mainly on the first two axes, the popularity of a site does not depend on the choice of CMS, but rather on your ability to develop a netlinking strategy with other sites attesting to your reputation.
So it's time for us to explore the specificities of technical SEO and SEO content with Webflow.
Good news, a Webflow website integrates natively two key elements for SEO : a security certificate for the domain (SSL certificate) and excellent ergonomics for use on mobile.
The presence of a valid SSL certificate (which is based on the presence in the URL of an HTTPS instead of an HTTP) is essential for a well-referenced site. Indeed, the Google search engine seeks to offer Internet users the best possible user experience. As a result, its algorithms prioritize secure sites that guarantee the confidentiality of exchanges with your website thanks to a data encryption system.
As for mobile ergonomics, Google values mobile-friendly sites, since in France in particular, more than 75% of Internet connections are made through a smartphone.
Fortunately, with Webflow, you have the power to create responsive design pages easily and thus allow your site to adapt to all screens. An asset that is all the more important since the preference granted by theGoogle algorithm to mobile-first indexing.
Even if these two parameters will have a small impact on your SEO, they are mandatory for the future. In fact, you must be sure to configure other elements to ensure that your site fully meets the basic expectations of SEO. So it is naturally in theSEO tab of the dashboard of your Webflow site that you will have to make certain configurations.
In order to improve the SEO referencing of your Webflow site, it is already necessary to ensure that search engine algorithms (Google, Bing & co) can scan your content in order to be able to highlight your site on the key queries that they will consider relevant.
To do this, as on most CMS, a manipulation is necessary: modify the parameters of your Webflow site to allow search engine indexing robots (robots.txt) to explore the pages of your site.
To make this change in the settings, go to your dashboard in the “All Projects” section, then click on the “Settings”, “SEO”, “Indexing” tabs. There, you will be able to:
Some additional elements help search engine robots to reference a website, including: the sitemap file, canonical tags and the integration of a tracking code to associate the domain with indexing monitoring.
Again, Webflow meets the expectations of SEO professionals in this area since you can perform all these actions in the settings very simply and quickly.
From the SEO tab, Webflow allows you to generate a sitemap.xml file to facilitate the referencing of your pages by search engines. Once created, the link to this sitemap can be easily integrated into your Google Search Console interface (this is an action that you must perform outside of Webflow).
This file is automatically updated when new content is added, but can also be updated manually to precisely choose which pages to insert. We strongly recommend that you automate it since it is now possible to control the pages in the sitemap directly in the designer (which is magical in use).
Specifying a canonical URL for each page is one of the others. Precautions to be taken to facilitate its correct indexing and avoid duplicate content problems. This setting is done again in the SEO tab in a dedicated box, taking care not to place/at the end of the URL of the page concerned.
As for the integration of indexing or tracking tools on a Webflow site (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, etc.), Webflow has everything planned to add these codes easily.
We strongly recommend that you install a Tag Manager in the global custom code of the site settings to add multiple tracking codes, and optimize the performance of your site through the combined loading of scripts.
The loading time of a site is one of the many parameters that impact the SEO performance of a site. Again, search engines value sites with fast loading times to improve the user experience.
Webflow gives site designers control over multiple parameters to optimize loading time: cropping images to reduce their weight, delayed loading, checking HTML, JavaScript or CSS code, and more.
We recommend that you activate all the settings to optimize performance in a very simple way. Exceptions may apply, but you are normally at an advanced level if you decide to control these aspects.
Different elements contribute to the framework of a website: the tree structure of a site, the choice of design and structure of the pages.
Having a strong impact on the user experience and the accessibility of a site, the architecture of a site must place great emphasis on the use of relevant keywords to promote the referencing of site content on search engines.
Webflow provides numerous templates that allow you to easily use an existing design and to design pleasant pages. However, some of these templates have an advantage that should not be underestimated: they are sometimes optimized for SEO.
However, if you want to do without a template and create your own design, your visibility should not suffer, quite the opposite. Indeed, the Webflow page builder makes it possible to structure each page in an optimal way to meet the expectations of Internet users, and therefore of Google.
Many Webflow features make it possible to optimize the content of each page precisely and therefore actively contribute to improving the SEO of a Webflow site in its entirety.
Properly referencing pages or blog articles requires creating quality content using keywords and a semantic cocoon in perfect harmony with the subject being addressed. But these keywords should not be placed just anywhere. It is important to set up an SEO strategy and to structure the pages correctly, and to create a website using these keywords carefully, in:
In the “SEO settings” section of its dashboard, Webflow makes it easy to customize the URL and these tags for each page, which actively contributes to their ranking by search engines among the results in your field of activity.
Note: in addition, the creation of effective internal links between content (or internal networking) makes it possible to highlight certain keywords while making navigation on a site more fluid. These are two elements that are particularly appreciated by search engines.
The links between social networks and your web pages are not trivial in terms of the visibility of your site. Indeed, the number of clicks coming from the various social media platforms sends search engines signs of relevance and authority to your domain. It is therefore important to control the information that is displayed on the various networks once you share it to encourage clicks.
The Webflow CMS contributes to the proper display of your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok... by allowing you to customize the Open Graph tags corresponding to each of your pages for each of your publications.
It often happens that a website is redesigned, migrated or restructured its URLs. To avoid losing traffic or positions on search engine results, it is important to redirect traffic from the old URL to the new one. This is called a 301 redirect. They inform search engines that the modified page has changed address.
Webflow makes, of course, this maneuver easily possible from your site's dashboard, by following the “Project Settings”, “Hosting” tabs, then “301 Redirects” tabs.
Recently, you have been able to import a file with as many URLs as you want, which is a considerable time saver.
The addition of structured data actively contributes to the performance of a site's natural referencing. They help Google and other search engines better understand the content of your site and can allow it to reach position 0.
But how do you integrate this structured data into a Webflow site? The CMS helps to integrate the schema.org tags necessary for the appearance of rich snippets on Google's search results page (SERP) in particular.
To do this, go to the settings of the page to be implemented (see the “Edit Page Settings” nut), then to the “Custom Code” section to paste the data that you have structured beforehand.
Note that it is entirely possible to use data from the CMS when it comes to a collection. You can use this feature for articles on your blog for example.
As we have just seen, Webflow offers a lot of SEO-friendly features to optimize your pages. However, obtaining a good SEO result cannot be improvised and requires both technical skills and good SEO knowledge to perfect the site.
Do you want to know what is blocking the referencing of your site? We support you for audit the code of your Webflow site in order to identify the factors blocking your good visibility. We will detect for you the parts of your site that require optimizations, that limit conversions and that hinder your positioning in the SERP.
We will thus be able to intervene, if necessary, from a technical point of view to lighten the weight of your site by slowing down its loading speed and will be able to Improve your Core Web Vitals score (CWV), i.e. the results concerning the metrics that Google ranks among the most important for a quality user experience (including total blocking time, speed index or interaction time) and which therefore have a strong impact on the SEO of a site.
With nearly +8 years of experience in supporting our customers in their SEO strategies, we have developed recognized agility to solve visibility problems on the internet and improve the SEO of a Webflow site.
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