Hello, this is John Locke from Lockedown Design.
Today I want to talk with you for just a minute about what platform you should develop your
site on for SEO.
There are a lot of options out there and especially in the world of manufacturing and small business
that I see people taking.
There are a couple options that I'm not a fan of at all and I'll get into why.
The first one is GoDaddy Website Builder.
I'm not a fan of this option at all for a couple of reasons.
Generally speaking, these sites are not as attractive as some of the higher end sites
that are out there.
The way that your brand is perceived really does play a factor in SEO and especially when
people come to your site.
Are there sites on GoDaddy Website Builder that are okay?
Sure, but generally speaking, one characteristic that I see on these sites is they don't usually
have a lot of pages.
Most of the GoDaddy Website Builder pages only have maybe 10 pages or less and from
an SEO standpoint this is not really optimal.
You want to be able to publish pages, a wide variety of pages as much as you possibly can
with the greatest amount of ease.
For that you're going to want a CMS and not a ten-dollar a month website builder.
Wix is another one that I'm not a fan of.
I don't believe that people that are serious about SEO should be building on top of Wix.
The markup that it outputs is generally not very good for SEO.
There's a lot of extra stuff in the markup of the actual pages that makes it difficult
for Googlebot to crawl and for the most part I'm not seeing a lot of sites that are built
on top of Wix that actually rank.
Again, you're going to want to go with a full-fledged CMS.
My main choice would be something like WordPress for a couple of reasons.
There are a lot of people that develop on top of WordPress.
It's going to be relatively easy to find someone who has expertise in WordPress that can help
you change your site if your current web developer or agency goes out of business or gets hit
by a bus you can find somebody else to pick up the baton and help you with that site.
The other thing is there's a lot of Plugins on WordPress that will help you with your
SEO, in particular, Yoast, WordPress for SEO and there's one made by Phil Singleton's team
out of Kansas City good for product, schema markup and all.
I'll link that in the notes below.
For whatever flaws it may have WordPress is pretty ubiquitous.
You can do a lot with it.
It's very flexible.
There are many, many things you can do with it.
It's a mature platform and it's easy to find someone that can develop on top of it.
There are other platforms that are fine.
Drupal is good.
Joomla, that's not going to hurt you or anything like that.
It's going to be a little bit harder to find someone to develop on top of that.
There's many others like Craft CMS, Concrete 5, Perch, the HubSpot platform is fine.
Generally speaking, that's probably going to cost you a lot to have somebody develop
on top of that.
There are other ones out there that I don't think are super great.
Weebly and Wix and other ones like that, they're just not very robust when it comes to actual
SEO.
Drupal's fine, Yoast makes a Plugin for Drupal as well so it injects a lot of the schema
markup that you're going to want for the Google knowledge graph.
One thing I want to address too, schema markup by itself is not really a ranking factor in
the way that people think it is.
It helps search engines understand the profile of a entity, like a corporation, a company,
a person, a product.
It helps search engines understand what that is.
It's not really something that's going to make you rank all by itself.
Squarespace is fine.
It's more like a hosted website solution.
It's kind of part page builder.
I wouldn't really call it a full-fledged CMS.
There are a lot of things you can do with it and for the most part I see Squarespace
sites ranking just fine.
I would say that if you're a company I would prefer to have a self-hosted solution so something
like WordPress or Drupal would be the direction I would lean.
When it comes to SEO you just have more control.
If you were going to use a hosted solution I would probably use something like Squarespace,
or Shopify if you're doing eCommerce.
I would avoid at all costs GoDaddy Website Builder, avoid Wix, not really a big fan of
Weebly.
The other thing I would say avoid getting locked into a custom type CMS.
I've seen this happen with web agencies before where the developer that they subcontract
with is on some exotic content management system and very few other people are going
to be able to work on it.
Don't get locked into a situation like that.
So if you have any follow up questions go ahead and hit me up, John@Lockdowndesign.com.
You can find me at my website which is Lockedowndesign.com.