7 Best SEO Practices for Your Webflow Website in 2022

When people build or transfer their websites to Webflow, they claim it’s because they want to enjoy the SEO advantages Webflow offers. And yet there are still plenty of example of Webflow sites not ranking well on the SERP. Strange, huh?

Many users don’t observe the best Webflow SEO practices.

I can’t help but wonder, why use Webflow if you won’t leverage the SEO edge it gives you? That’s like subscribing to Netflix and not watching the latest movies.

If you’re sick and tired of watching your site occupy low positions on the SERPs, follow these Webflow best practices.

1. Optimize your Title Tags, and Meta Description

Title tags and meta descriptions help search engines understand the context of a web page. Through your choice of words, search engines can understand for whom your page is best suited.

As you can imagine, the Webflow builder has a special provision for optimizing website title pages and meta descriptions. There's a space for optimizing title tags and meta descriptions in the 'page options' section of a Webflow account.

It looks like this:

Three things are essential when optimizing your Webflow site title tags and meta descriptions.

• Choice of keywords: Use your primary keywords in your title tags. Your primary keyword is the main keyword you’re targeting for that page. You can also use it in your meta description, but it’s not compulsory.
• Placement of keywords: Add your keyword at the beginning of the title tag. Mayor may not add keywords within your meta description.
• Search intent: Make sure your meta description answers the kind of question your target audience might be thinking about when they come to Google.

See an example reflecting all these:

The searcher wants to know how to get backlinks to his site.

Look at the title of one of the top results, and see where the primary keyword is placed?

See any keyword in the meta description? No.

Finally, see how the meta description answered some of the top questions on the searcher’s mind. He’s asking how to get backlinks. The meta description says he can get them editorially from authoritative sites, but he mustn’t buy them.

That’s how you optimize your Webflow website title tags and meta descriptions. You can use best seo tools to optimize your webflow site SEO so you can get easy tracking of your website metrics.  

2. Optimize Image Alt Text

Another advantage Webflow users enjoy is that the platform gives room for image alt text descriptions.

For every image you add to your Webflow site, you get a chance to write a short description for it. Also, Webflow allows you to write an alt text for every image collection you create. These help explain how the images relate to a web page's content.

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Google loves alt text because they make its world more accessible. Sites with well-written alternative texts tend to rank better than those without.

Remember Google has the 'All,' 'Images,' 'News,' 'Videos,' and 'Maps' sections at the top of its search results. Alt-text is how an image makes it into the image section. When an image makes it there, the post from which that image has been extracted is usually rewarded with a higher ranking.

Alt text optimization is pretty easy, mind you. It simply involves an accurate description of the image and the correct use of keywords. Note that LSI keywords are also advised in alt text descriptions.

3. SEO-optimized URLs

URLs are important to both search engines and users. From Google's point of view, your site's URL needs to tell what a page is about explicitly; otherwise, it will be hard to rank you.

Look at the URL below. Can you tell what this blog is about by looking at this URL?

[www.blog.com/post-123-6567.html]

No, you can't. The URL reads "post 123-8567.” Nobody knows what that means. If humans can't understand your site URL, how will search engines?

In contrast, look at this URL below:

[www.blog.com/hair-salon-tips.html]

By looking at this URL, users and search engines can tell the page is about from a mile away.

The excellent news is that Webflow has a provision for URL optimization. Be it your homepage, blog page, service/product page, landing page, or contact page; the Webflow builder allows you to modify your URLs the way you like.

To optimize your URLs, follow these practices:

• Avoid the use of capital letters
• Find a way to include your target keyword
• Canonicalize your URLs
• Do 301 redirect for broken URLs
• Use hyphens instead of underscores
• Add mobile URLs to a sitemap
• Add a favicon (this aids brand visibility and further boosts recognition, which might, in turn, impact SEO).

4. Stick with Webflow’s Templates if you’re not Good with Web Design

Many web design factors can affect a site’s ultimate SEO results.

For instance, a site with heavy page designs will likely load slowly, impacting its SEO. A place with complex structures will probably give users difficulty getting around, causing a high bounce rate that quickly affects SEO.

As you can see, a site's web design plays a crucial role in getting it up the SERPs. Get it right, and your site will rank highly. Get it wrong, and oof… that’s it.

The excellent news is that Webflow has ready-made SEO-friendly design templates and themes with which you can build a website.

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As stated on the Webflow website, templates are the way to go unless you have experience in web design. These templates give you a basic framework to build upon. However, if you must design your site on a blank canvas (from scratch), make sure you hire the services of a pro web designer.

5. Optimize your Header Tags

In the way title tags are like book titles, we love to think of header tags as book chapters. They help readers understand where a previous section ends and where a new one begins.

From a search engine perspective, header tags give structure to a web page as they break up page content into sections. Generally speaking, header tags can be categorized into the main headline, <h1>, followed by the subheadings <h2>, <h3>, and so on.

In your Webflow account, you can modify a page’s header tags to reflect the content structure, giving search engines clarity when they crawl the site. You have many styling and design options for modifying header tags.

A good practice is adding keywords to your headings. You can use primary keywords in <h1> and secondary keywords for the subheadings. There's no fixed format. The point is to add relevant keywords to the headings.

Instead of using generic page headings like ‘Service’ or ‘Homepage,’ try optimizing these headings for SEO by using keywords to state the kind of service or page they represent.

6. Connect your Webflow Site to Google Search Console

In the last tip above, we spoke about search engines coming to crawl a site. Before that can happen, you must first inform them that the site exists.

Once you finish creating and publishing your Webflow website, the next thing is to create an XML sitemap and then add the Google Search Console features to the site. If you’ve never done that before, here’s a simple guide on doing it, as provided by Webflow itself.

1. Go to the Google Search Console [↗] and log into your Google account
2. Add a new property [↗] from the property dropdown
3. Choose “URL prefix” and type in your domain with the HTTPS:// protocol (ex. https://www.domain.com)
4. Choose the “HTML tag” option under other verification methods
5. Copy the Verification ID (string of numbers and letters in between the quotations that appear after `content=”`)
6. Paste it into your SEO settings under the Verification tab
7. Save and click “Publish.”
8. Go back to the Search Console main dashboard and click “Verify.”

Google will send you a report after that detailing the condition of your site from an SEO standpoint. It will also know to index your site from that point on.

7. Optimize your Blog Contents for SEO

Every point we've made in this post should be implemented for every blog post published on your site.

A site can rank on the SERPs for its blog posts. However, such blog posts have to be optimized for SEO for that to happen. Its images have to be optimized with alt text included, its title tags and meta description have to be SEO-friendly, and its URL and page design must be in line with the best SEO practices.

Besides all that, there are a few other blog post optimization practices. These include:

• Creating high-quality blog posts that deliver useful, informative, and engaging. Google loves posts with word counts above 2000 words.
• Keeping the content structured with lists, headers, and bulleted points
• Using keywords for easy context identification

Last words

Webflow is different from many builders in that it has pre-built SEO-friendly features. As a user, the onus is on you to leverage these features to get your site ranking highly on the SERPs. With the tips we’ve provided here, we hope you can change the condition of your website starting from now.