If search engine optimization, or SEO, was easy everybody and their auntie would have a top-ranked digital presence. As it stands, you've got to put in a lot of work to keep your pages in front of audiences. Your choice of content management system, or CMS, plays a big role in how difficult that ordeal turns out to be, particularly when you're redesigning your website. Fortunately, tools like Webflow can make the task a lot easier.

Why is Webflow such an impactful choice for an SEO-ready content management strategy? Here's what we've learned about this awesome CMS and how to use it wisely.

Webflow Basics

Webflow is a content management system that aims to offer a comprehensive solution to design, deployment, and hosting. Unlike many alternatives, it doesn't ask you to constrain your creative vision: You work with the most basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript elements to build your portal, shopping cart, blog, or other sites from the ground up.

Webflow also includes web hosting via Amazon Cloudfront and the Fastly content delivery network. You can go from a concept to a live deployment in the span of a single click, yet you never have to deal with tweaking an AWS server or securing extra cloud resources to deal with visitor surges.

So what makes this different from simply designing everything in a vanilla text editor and finding a good hosting service? The most noteworthy distinction is that Webflow delivers a specialized tool that lets you drag and drop components. This seemingly simple feature makes it easy to start building even if you don't know anything about coding. As we'll explore, it also improves your odds of constructing a well-optimized site.

Webflow's SEO-Oriented Controls

Webflow is unique among CMS offerings in that it doesn't make you do much extra work to add SEO. Instead, SEO has been a part of the platform from the get-go: This has always been a responsive-design-capable, semantically aware tool.

What's more, you don't have to settle for just one type of SEO strategy. The Webflow platform lets you adopt a multi-pronged approach that incorporates:

• Image alt tag management tools that let you index more content with Google and meet the needs of users who depend on screen readers and similar assistive technologies,
• Sitemap and indexing auto-generation tools that intelligently update your site's directories when you add new pages and content,
• Meta titles and meta descriptions that you can define automatically using a unified, category- or field-based workflow,
• Schema markup that clues search engines and web crawlers in on what your content means and who ought to see it, and
• Redirect management that ensures your site's structure keeps up with any changes you make, avoiding the perils of dead pages or missing links.
  

None of these are novel ideas – they're pretty much the standard best practices as far as optimization goes. The thing that makes Webflow so useful is that it ensures these features are immediately accessible. You don't have to depend on unvetted plugins, expensive premium features, or finicky hacks to use them.

Even if you primarily use the drag-and-drop editor instead of tweaking the code by hand, the dashboard includes widgets that make it easy to apply changes across the board. When you're managing a growing or otherwise evolving site, this is a definite bonus for keeping your workflow as simple as it can be.

Leveraging Webflow's Implicit SEO Benefits

Of course, not all SEO is about making specific changes to a site's content or structure. For instance, Google considers many other factors besides meta tags and sitemaps when deciding which pages to show at the top of a search results list. Factors of interest include how quickly your pages load and how well they match up with other known content, such as business listings on Google Maps.

A Comprehensive Hosting Solution That's a Bit More Manageable

Webflow's one-stop approach delivers a decided SEO edge. Unlike some CMSes, you get to take advantage of comprehensive hosting backed by the proven AWS ecosystem. When you want to scale up to meet demand, everything comes together automatically thanks to the underlying data center network and server topology.

Why is this so vital to good SEO? On top of making Google display your pages closer to the top of the list, keeping your content as convenient to use as possible might just help you earn better consumer reviews – and customer reviews have an indirect impact on how your pages get ranked.

Secure by Default

Another important SEO advantage lies in Webflow's security offerings. All sites come with SSL certificates by default. Unlike working directly with a hosting company, you don't need to budget extra for security credentials or periodically spend time keeping them up to date.

SSL certificates let users visit your site securely via an HTTPS connection: They increase trust by telling visitors you transmit and manage their personal, browsing, financial, and other information securely by using industry-standard encryption. What you might be unaware of is that Google and other search engines use SSL certificates to determine organic rankings, favoring sites that put in the additional effort to help users browse safely.

Again, the SEO benefits of secure site technology are nothing revolutionary, and web admins have long understood this. Webflow, however, makes it easier to manage these essential factors with minimal familiarity. It's a highly convenient way to ensure you don't self-sabotage your SEO by changing things you don't understand.

Standards-compliant, Flexible Code

As any good programmer will tell you, there's usually more than one way to solve a given problem. Each method has its pros and cons, and your chosen solution ought to meet your stated objectives without costing too much learning effort or requiring advanced tweaks.

Webflow makes this easier to achieve by generating code that matches the standards from the start. The results you get from dragging and dropping widgets onto your page are usually identical to textbook examples of how to create common site elements, such as lists, tables, and context-aware navigation features.

Remember that humans aren't the only ones who need to understand your code. Search engines rely on code structure to determine what a site's content means and where to rank it on a results page. This CMS system gives you the power to include custom fields, import content from CSVs, and implement meaning-aware layouts that maintain your intended site structure even if you change how things look as your strategy matures.

Code consistency matters because SEO changes over time. Every year, Google announces modifications to its algorithm, and site maintainers who want to stay ranked have to adjust the content frameworks they've already published. Staying updated requires far less effort when you don't have to decipher complicated code just to implement basic changes.

Since you're competing with a host of other sites for search-engine dominance, being able to shift gears and redeploy rapidly is vital to capturing consumer attention and keeping it. Webflow's anyone-can-design approach is also particularly helpful here because you don't have to open up support tickets for your team to make changes, even if you've got multiple stakeholders working on the same project.

Transparency

One aspect of Webflow that makes it particularly appropriate for SEO strategies is that it actually pulls back the curtain on what you can expect. Similar to the way it sheds light on how your visual layout choices result in different forms of underlying web code, the platform's enterprise offerings keep you in the know with SLAs, or service-level agreements, detailing precisely what types of hosting capacity you'll receive. The SLAs even include uptime guarantees, so you don't have to spend as much time worrying about getting caught off-guard by service outages.

Customer Support

Many CMSes offer some form of help or customer assistance. Webflow isn't unique in this area, but it does seem to be a bit more invested in helping you avoid missteps.

When you sign up, you'll get a dedicated case manager who can guide you through optimization problems. You can also connect with technical specialists who'll do the same. SEO is a lot easier when you can make changes without fear that they'll brick your site, and it doesn't hurt that Webflow offers several training videos and articles to keep you moving in the right direction.

Webflow and SEO Are a Near-perfect Match

Web design is as fluid as SEO, and picking the right toolkit helps when you're trying to broaden your outreach. Webflow is an effective option for any level of technical expertise, making it equally suitable for independent creators as well as those who work with external designers, engineers, marketers, and other stakeholders. Since it's easy to jump in and get moving, you're far less likely to lose sight of the goal – consistently higher page rankings - because you got lost in the woods en route.

Although it may not be the perfect solution for every single use case, Webflow is a great fit when you want to redesign your website in pursuit of better search engine optimization. This is especially true if you need to ensure your presence stays maintainable even as your branding strategy heads off in new directions.