Are you building or migrating your company website? Then one of the decisions you must make is what content management system (CMS) for search engine optimization (SEO) you will use. This choice determines how your site looks and works, and how easy it is to manage it on your own. Today we will discuss the options from another important point of view. We will show you what to look for in the best CMS for SEO.
Not All Site Builders Are SEO Friendly
It may come as a surprise, but you cannot be too careful when selecting a CMS for your site. Some of them are not completely user friendly. Or their developers did not adapt to the latest Google ranking requirements.
Thus, no matter how hard you try, your site will never reach its full potential in terms of SEO ranking because the site builder itself is hampering your efforts. This is why you have to make the right choice from the very beginning and build your site on a SEO-friendly content management system.
Content Management System for SEO Ranking: Key Features to Look For
At its core, a CMS is a tool that helps users manage content, including text, images, videos, and other media types. With a CMS, users can create, edit, and organise content in a way that is easy to understand and navigate. One of the benefits of using a CMS is that it typically provides a more intuitive user experience than traditional web development tools. Users can often accomplish tasks by dragging and dropping content onto a page rather than writing code or working with complex design software.
What makes a CMS the right choice for your SEO efforts? These are some of the SEO features you must look for when comparing various platforms:
1. Customisation Options
One of the most important features you will find in all CMS for SEO is the ability to customise your site. The ability to customise must be available at all levels:
- Layout
- URL structure
- Page elements
- Off-page SEO sections: title, heading, meta tags, meta description, photo title and ALT text.
You must remember that your site will evolve to match the new brand image and market position of your business. Thus, you must be able to change it, add more pages, new sections and even redesign the layout completely.
2. SEO Tools
Whether embedded or third party plugins compatible with the platform – and curated by its developers – SEO tools are essential for any website. In most of the cases, you will be doing your own SEO.
Big brands afford to hire several SEO specialists, and they still make sure that they use content management systems that are best for SEO. Thus, you must think: can I do SEO on this platform easily? Does it offer any widget or tool telling me if a page is properly SEO optimized or not?
3. Internal Linking Tool
You don’t have time to link manually (by typing code) when you post new blog posts or product pages. For this reason, the best CMS for SEO offer a helpful tool to add internal or external links.
A good tool must let you add a link simply by clicking on it and pasting the URL you want to add to the anchor text. It should be so intuitive, that even someone with no experience can figure out how to add a link to a piece of text.
4. SSL Certification
Content management systems that are best for SEO procure and maintain SSL certification. You should not have to purchase it separately and worry about the moment when it expires and you have to renew it
We cannot stress enough the importance of this security certificate. Your site will never appear on the first page of Google search results if it is not safe for users. The search engine checks the validity of the SSL certificate and automatically excludes sites that don’t have it from its selection for a user’s query.
5. Analytics Tools
A SEO friendly CMS will offer an analytics panel with information on the most important metrics you monitor, such as:
- Organic traffic
- Indexed pages
- Keyword performance
- New leads
- Inbound links (other sites linking to your web pages).
6. 301 Redirects
You will make changes to your company site in the future. But this does not mean that you will lose the SEO value of existing content. You will be able to preserve SEO equity if you make sure that visitors are automatically redirected to the new URL containing the content they were looking for.
Setting up 301 redirects manually for each page that changed would take you a lot of time (and it requires coding knowledge, as well). For this reason, content management systems that are best for SEO offer a simple way of doing it, in a few clicks using a special tool.
These Are the Best Content Management Systems for SEO
After these clarifications, let us look at the CMS platforms we recommend:
1. WordPress
You cannot go wrong if you choose WordPress. Highly customisable, offering a large selection of mobile friendly templates and many curated plugins – the most useful being YOAST SEO – WordPress is the number one CMS in the world.
Many of these plugins are free to use, at least at the basic level, but with full functionality. Thus, it is an ideal choice for small and medium sized companies looking for an affordable but efficient content management system for SEO.
2. HubSpot
To be fair, HubSpot is more than a content management system. It is an all-in-one platform containing tools for:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Services.
This platform also has its own built-in SEO tools, with no need to install third-party plugins. The downside is that there are still few developers familiar with the proprietary language used by these tools.
3. Magento
Magento is the number one CMS for online stores. It is not just one of the best CMS for SEO, it also offers some of the best tools for managing inventories, adding and deleting products, changing prices, applying discounts and so on.
However, you will have to buy SEO tools and extensions, as well as install the blog functionality.
4. Joomla
The second most popular CMS after WordPress, Joomla offers a lot of in-house codeless SEO tools. It is also considered one of the best platforms to create fast loading web pages – one of the most important Google ranking factors. Finally, all the templates you will find in the library are mobile responsive by default.
Unfortunately, Joomla does not offer a SSL certificate and you will also have to install a plugin to generate and submit the XML sitemap.
5. Drupal
Open source CMS, offering a lot of SEO tools and analytics and reporting modules, Drupal is one of the best CMS for SEO for tech-savvy business owners.
All customisations and important changes require coding. If this is not a problem, you will find it a stable, useful and very robust CMS for your company website.