Craft CMS is a powerful tool for building websites, but does it stack up for SEO? The answer is a resounding yes. In this article and others, I’ll break down why Craft is an outstanding choice for achieving high search engine rankings.
What are the benefits of SEO?
SEO is all about driving targeted traffic to your website via search engines like Google. Whilst you are interrupting people with marketing channels such as social media, people on Google want something specific. Search engines drive users to your sites, and these users want information, to research, or to buy. This is very different from social media, and SEO drives fantastic conversion rates because of the searcher's intent.
NOTE: As Google has a whopping 92% of the search engine market in the UK, I will use Google and search engine interchangeably throughout this article and its supporting articles.
SEO has many benefits, such as
- Driving a mountain of traffic to your website
- Cost-effective marketing - compared to other channels
- Beating competitors - You want to be where your competition is, and they're likely showing strongly in search.
- Enhancing user experience—Google considers this in its algorithm and rewards sites designed for users with better rankings.
- Brand awareness - Good content found on search engines can increase your brand presence.
- Reputation management – Customers may search for negative news about you on search engines; protect your business from this.
What Google wants
Over the last few years, Google has moved toward evaluating user experience and rewarding sites that deliver a good experience with higher rankings. This is now very much built into the algorithm.
There are 3 other pillars of SEO that are important:
- Content - The quality and structure of your content are vital pieces of the SEO puzzle. Craft’s flexibility lets you create content however you want, maximising the potential of each page on your site.
- Technical – There are many important features of your site to get right, such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, and proper metadata. Using a few Craft plugins, we can optimise these elements to help search engines rank your site more effectively.
- Backlinks - External sites that link to you are critical for SEO. Craft’s features help create content others want to link to.
Is SEO Right for you?
SEO is a long-term play; if you are looking for a quick fix to your marketing problems, then SEO probably isn't it. Google rewards quality content, and producing quality content takes time. Google can also take a bit of time to crawl a new site and process new content. You may be better suited to PPC than to SEO. Craft makes it easy, either way, to create independent landing pages for PPC and any content needed for an SEO campaign.
10 blue links have gone
In the good old days of SEO, say, a decade ago, we had just 10 blue links and some ads. Now, the search results landscape is different, with maps, videos, featured snippets, and AI panels. SEO is still a viable option for many businesses, but whatever you choose, Craft CMS won't restrict you from being successful in any marketing campaign you choose.
Why is Craft so good for SEO?
Craft doesn't use templates, so you're starting with a blank canvas. This gives you full control over every line of code on your site. While you may reuse code from existing projects, it's easy to customise for each site. This tailored approach gives every Craft CMS the best chance to rank highly in search engines.
Craft offers a powerful plugin, CK Editor, which is highly customizable for precise SEO tags. You can control every tag in your content for quick, effective SEO edits. Craft has extensive custom field options to tailor content for each site.
As Craft is a self-hosted CMS, you can choose any hosting environment. We often select DigitalOcean for its strong performance, which ensures fast page loads. Google rewards sites with efficient web performance, improving user experience. Slow-loading pages frustrate users, who may go to competitors. Search engines notice this, so a speedy site benefits your ranking.
SEO Cores concepts align with Craft
Craft has always focused on content; creating and publishing are at its core. This aligns with Google's goal of providing users with content they want and find useful. On these fronts, Craft CMS and Google work well together. Google wants unique, useful, easy-to-use, and easy-to-consume content. Craft delivers.
Crawling, indexing, and ranking
When you do a Google search, it doesn't evaluate your site in real time. Google has to crawl your site first. Once it’s crawled and your site passes a few quality control checks, it should be added to the search index. From there, your ranking is determined. This is usually done days/weeks in advance of your site being ready to show in the Google results. Craft’s great web performance is a useful indicator to tell Google your site can be crawled easily.
Content guidelines
It’s not just a case of slapping any old content up on a Craft site. It must be planned and thoroughly thought out for maximum SEO benefit.
Search Intent
Search intent is central to Google’s ethos: provide users with what they’re seeking.
There are 4 kinds of search intent, and you need to know them.
- Informational - you are looking for a certain bit of information and are likely to find an answer to a certain question or problem.
- Commercial investigation: you are either looking for a range of products to choose from or seeking information before purchasing a product (as in our trainer example above).
- Transactional - you are looking to purchase a specific product.
- Navigational - You are looking for a specific page or service. Such as logging in to pay taxes.
If you are not in sync with search intent, you will NOT rank well, even if at all.
Originality with your content
You don’t want your content copied by competitors. Google can easily detect this with its resources. You want unique, well-formatted content. Craft makes content publishing easy and intuitive.
When in doubt with your content...
When writing for search engines, remember: if you’re unsure whether to optimize for search or prioritize the user, always choose the user. Does it sound natural out loud? Would you say it to a friend? Stick to this rule and your SEO content will be effective.
On-page seo
Craft excels at on-page SEO. Precise control over tags and content improves rankings. Plugins handle title tags, meta descriptions, and canonical URLs, and output schema tags and unique page data.
Craft's blank canvas gives you full control for a successful SEO campaign.
Craft CMS and Web Performance
Let's see what slow websites tend to experience:
- Higher bounce rates: a visitor views only a single page. This can be down to slow-loading pages.
- Lower engagement - If a site is slow, then it discourages people from interacting and browsing further features and pages
- Reduced time on site - as an unperformant site is frustrating, people won’t spend as long on it.
- Fewer conversions - Slow pages have been proven to lower conversions - so fewer sales, fewer people signing up, and less income for you.
Web performance and Google are down to user experience; slow sites = bad user experience. Google has metrics for measuring slow-loading and slow-to-interact websites. The majority of it is usually down to JavaScript within each user's control, but Craft certainly delivers a fast-performing website out of the box.
Is there a Craft CMS SEO plugin?
The most popular Craft CMS plugin is SEOmatic, which I use at Media Surgery on most builds. It covers all the essentials: title tags, meta tags, schema, canonicals, and more. You can handle all of this yourself in Craft thanks to its flexible templates and custom fields, but it takes time.
SEOmatic gives you peace of mind, as it’s used on thousands of websites of all sizes, and all tags are correctly installed and set up for maximum SEO success.
Internal links and Craft
Craft lets you control every internal link—body links managed by CK Editor and all others, like navigation and footers. You have full control and flexibility.
Internal links are the most overlooked part of SEO, but internal links can give a massive boost to the pages of your choice. When people think of “links” and SEO, they immediately think of backlinks, which I'll cover next. Don't, however, overlook internal links in your SEO campaigns; they are a powerful tool when you know how to use them.
Backlinks
A discussion of SEO would be incomplete without mentioning backlinks. Backlinks (different from internal links) have been a huge part of Google’s algorithm since its inception. Each backlink to your site is seen as a vote. You generally want as many backlinks as possible, but not all links are seen as equal. Google frontman John Mueller has said that 1 single backlink from a popular, trusted website can be worth a million backlinks from spammy, low-quality websites. That proves that not all links are equal. You also want links not to contain the rel=nofollow attribute. This is seen from Google's point of view as “a link not to the trusted”
Anchor text
The anchor text of a link is the part you see and click. There's one huge takeaway when getting backlinks: vary the anchor text. Too many links with exact anchor text with the same keywords can be seen as spammy from the search engine's point of view. The important thing here is to make it look natural. Even starting some links with “Click here” and “see more” makes them look like they've been organically placed, which is what you want.
Conclusion
So is Craft CMS any good for SEO? Yes, it's very good for SEO. You need a bit of experience with SEO and to have built a number of Craft sites. Craft’s blank slate forces you to create things from scratch, and this is a good thing. You get precise control over the on-page seo, and with some sites, you get to know the ins and outs of web performance. There is a good bit of learning to get up to speed with Craft, but SEO isn't rocket science. Craft and SEO are a great fit.
Written by John Macpherson