Webflow SEO Best Practices to Take Your Online Business Further
Webflow has quickly become the go-to option for any and all budding and experienced web designers looking for a platform outside of the usual WordPress ecosystem. In fact, it has even been endorsed by some of the key SEO payers in the market, including the highly respected and well-informed Authority Hacker Duo.
However, if you’re new to this platform and have been using other CMS options throughout your development career, change can be scary, particularly when it comes to implementing the incredibly fickle factor of SEO into the mix. In this post, we’re taking a look at a few best practices relevant to Webflow, specifically that anyone can use to increase the organic traffic flowing onto their pages.
Make Sure Your Design Is On Point
SEO has gone through a funny few years. It used to be that you could create any kind of website, and as long as you threw enough random links at it, you would win over your competition. Then, once that was washed away by the big G like some detritus chucked overboard, there was a need to create intricate websites that utilized better content and links.
However, that didn’t change significantly; the speed of your website had a far more profound impact on whether our Google overlords deemed your site was worthy or not, and so many webmasters went down the path of pairing things down to the bare bones so that their sites would meet the somewhat confusing page speed metrics that made a difference.
Nowadays, we’ve come somewhat full circle. While low-quality content and links are still a thing of the past, users demand a far more streamlined and good-looking website that they’re able to navigate through with ease while still maintaining the speed requirements that they’ve become accustomed to.
Legacy platforms like WordPress and Elementor have become overly bloated and unable to offer beautiful designs without sacrificing speed, leaving an option like Webflow as the most obvious successor.
According to Paddle Creative, a UK-based developer specializing in Webflow website design and development, the data-driven design could improve your ROI. And, while great design at fast speeds won’t help to push your website to the top of the search results alone, they go a long way in creating the foundation on which other techniques can build.
Implement Structured Data For Rich Snippets
A great SEO tactic that improves website exposure and click-through rates is using structured data for rich snippets. This enhanced appearance distinguishes listings and raises the possibility of user clicks, therefore generating more traffic.
By allowing context regarding website content and better categorizing and indexing, structured data also helps search engine knowledge. More successful matching of search query results may improve target keyword ranks. Rich snippets have a clear benefit over other websites in your industry as they draw more attention and help to establish brand trust.
Moreover, organized data maximizes material for voice search, so it guarantees a reliable information supply by voice assistants (and possibly AI-based search, which is becoming more and more common). Although not a direct ranking consideration, better exposure, and click-through rates help support higher ranks indirectly.
Above all, structured data enhances rather than substitutes excellent content. Webflow has options that allow you to add these data directly to the <head> section of each page where it makes sense to do so.
Enable Webflow’s Technical SEO Features
Webflwo has been built from the ground up to be a highly customizable platform that can be used by those looking to create websites that rank and, as such, have a range of built-in settings that need to be turned on to make the most of them. According to Webflwo themselves in a blog post, these include:
- Native controls for adding meta titles, descriptions, image alt texts, and custom permalink structures.
- Easily interpretable with Google’s search suite (more on that later).
- A fantastic editor where you can add heading tags, contextual links, and other rich text elements that have an impact on rankings.
- Tools to set up a seamless navigation structure that enables search bots and humans to roam freely.
These options, combined with the most up-to-date SEO practices, should ensure that your site can be parsed easily, understand what it’s about, and be placed in the most relevant search queries.
Prevent Search Engines From Indexing Your Staging Domain
We’ve all been there. You’re setting up a brand new website on a staging domain, only to find out far too late into the process that you have allowed Google to crawl the unfinished skeleton and ultimately deem it a load of rubbish unworthy of further attention.
This is an easy mistake to make, but one that is also easy to avoid by stopping search engines from crawling the site until you’re ready for them to have at it…which also happens to be something you can do using the Webflow platform.
Connect Google Search Console And Google Analytics
You can level plenty of hate at Google if you’re so inclined, but one thing that’s true is that they offer a vast range of services that help you make sense of data and use it to improve your website. Do they also farm this data for their own nefarious purposes?
Yes, probably, but when you’re also making money, you could call it a symbiotic relationship if you want to feel better about yourself! The point here is that Webflow enables you to seamlessly connect your website to both Google Analytics and Console, whereby you’ll be presented with a treasure trove of information you can use to figure out how you’re being found, on which devices, and what you might want to do to optimize your site more effectively.
While the latest GA4 does take some time to get used to, you will gain a pretty incredible amount of information that was previously unavailable in previous iterations.
Optimize Your Content And Images
This might not be a specific Webflow advantage, but they certainly make it far more manageable to deal with vast amounts of content and images compared with other options. By optimizing your content, whether that be written word, video, or picture, you can speed up your site and ensure it falls within the most relevant search queries that your customers are searching for.
Webflow is a fantastic platform and the natural successor to other CMSs for the modern Internet age. By implementing the many SEO practices mentioned throughout this post, you will further boost its advantages and get your website in front of the people most likely to become a customer.
