An SEO-friendly CMS is like that friend who always knows the best spots for concerts.
Even if you already have a way to get into the SERPs, choosing a solution that includes SEO features increases your chances of ranking higher. In other words, it puts you front and center, ready to attract the attention of your star prospects!
But with so many platforms on the market, which one should you choose? Which CMS boosts your SEO? We answer those questions in this article…
Factors to consider when choosing an SEO-friendly CMS
Your CMS is the bridge between search engines and your content. In short, it needs to be solid! A CMS lacking essential SEO features can hinder search engines (and thus your prospects) from discovering your pages.
Before choosing a solution, here are the elements a truly SEO-friendly CMS must include:
An intuitive user interface
A user-friendly interface is important for the user experience. Keep that in mind, your team will need to use the CMS almost every day. They will need an ergonomic tool that requires little technical know-how or training.
The goal is to be able to easily apply SEO best practices day-to-day while making it easier to drive traffic to your website.
To that end, choose a system that allows your developers to code in their preferred programming language, or pick a turnkey solution if your colleagues don’t know HTML.
The scalability of the SEO CMS
Google and its algorithms… it’s a whole story! For decades, the Mountain View company has been evolving its artificial intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of its results.
Website managers must constantly adapt to new rules. So choose a flexible CMS that lets you keep up with SEO trends.
You should also prepare for new formats. Today you need to think about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and smart speakers. Make sure to choose a CMS that can support these emerging channels.
Synchronization with your third-party applications
When we talk about an SEO CMS, we mean a tool that can easily integrate with your marketing applications! Your marketing automation platform, your email tool, your competitive intelligence solution, Google Analytics, your CRM… For effective SEO, you must connect your various applications.
Choose a CMS that has either powerful plugins or APIs enabling synchronization and connection with all your tools.
On-page SEO features
The On-page SEO lets you control your page content and structure it to optimize how it appears in search results. When these elements aren't explicitly defined, search engines fill in the gaps — and that's not always very relevant!
Out of the box or via plugins, make sure the selected CMS offers the ability to:
- Edit the title and metadata.
- Customize the title tags.
- Optimize image and media SEO.
- Create your own URLs.
- Manage redirects.
Handling crawling and website indexing
Your website surely contains pages you don't want appearing in search results. These might be past event landing pages or internal resources. An SEO-friendly CMS should give you the power to control what is available for crawling and indexing.
Before choosing your tool, look for options such as:
- Automatic sitemap generation.
- A noindex directive for pages.
- Canonical tags to control duplicate content.
- Managing 301 redirects and other status codes.
Like on-page SEO criteria, these features can be native or added via an extension.
Support for Schema Markup
Schema markup, better known as “structured data,” is code placed on a web page to summarize the main points of the content. These additional tags help search engines better understand the topic. With structured data, your content becomes eligible for enhanced snippets or Google’s position zero, which improves your visibility and click-through rate.
An SEO-friendly CMS makes implementing schema markup easier. Also check that it offers this feature on every page and that the code is correctly placed in the head tag, especially when data is auto-filled.
An analytics tool… or the ability to integrate your own
CMSs provide built-in analytics tools that let you regularly measure the performance of your SEO efforts. The most complete platforms will allow you to track:
- Organic traffic.
- Keyword performance.
- Page performance.
- Leads.
- Bounce rates.
- Inbound links.
- Content duplication.
Otherwise, you should be able to install your preferred analytics tools as additional plugins.
Fast page loading
You probably know: your page speed affects your ranking in search engines. A CMS with poorly written code or unoptimized images can slow down content loading and harm your rankings.
Make sure the chosen solution allows you to take measures to streamline rendering processes and properly manage your site's speed.
Navigation optimization
The more you can customize your website, the more you can optimize the visitor experience. Visit duration and number of pages viewed influence your SEO. These metrics, which are part of Google's Core Web Vitals, are essential to getting you into pole position.
The same goes for mobile display! An SEO-friendly CMS adapts perfectly to smartphones and helps you optimize navigation on smaller screens.
6 SEO-friendly CMS to explore
Now that you know what you are looking for, here are 6 CMSs suited for SEO:
1. Magento, a powerful CMS
Let's start with one of the most powerful CMSs on the market: Magento. Used by very large companies like Nike, Christian Louboutin, Coca-Cola, Jaguar, Zadig & Voltaire, Burger King, Pierre Fabre and Seat, this open-source solution is 100% customizable, flexible and scalable. Everything you need to improve your organic search ranking and quickly climb the search engine results.
Among the strong features of this pro-SEO CMS, you will find:
- Easy addition of meta descriptions to all your product pages.
- Optimizing alt text for product images.
- Automatic creation of a well-structured (but editable) sitemap.
- Customizable navigation menus for effective on-page SEO and a better customer experience.
- Creating canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
- Auto-filling structured data.
- Complete and detailed configuration of your order, account, cart and admin pages (with the option to set them as "nofollow").
- The ability to create product recommendation carousels and other content designed to keep visitors engaged (an important SEO factor).
- Automatic addition of an SSL certificate for pages containing personal data and sensitive information.
2. Joomla, the SEO-friendly CMS for everyone
Joomla is one of the most popular CMSs for its performance in terms of speed and user experience. Without needing to install extensions, you can:
- Writing meta descriptions and titles.
- Enable gzip compression.
- Change how your URLs are generated.
- Structure your content for Google snippets.
- Create an XML sitemap.
- Implement redirects.
- Cache pages of your site to improve performance.
- Designate canonical URLs to help search engines find the most relevant version of a page.
Joomla is a go-to SEO-friendly CMS!
3. Shopify, a turnkey CMS to get started
Turnkey platform aimed at beginners, Shopify is aimed at professionals who want to launch an e-commerce site with few products. In terms of SEO features, this CMS lets you:
- Target keywords.
- Add alt text to media.
- Optimize your website's structure.
- Create redirects and XML sitemaps.
- Manage canonical URLs.
Moreover, Shopify has a partnership with CDN provider Cloudflare to improve page load times. And if you want to go beyond the native SEO options, there are many plugins to enhance your sitemap, fix bugs, strengthen structured data, optimize local SEO, etc.
4. Drupal, the SEO CMS for experts
If you have coding experience, Drupal is the SEO CMS you need! Even more so because it is fully customizable, allowing you to optimize all Core Web Vitals elements and structure it according to your keyword strategy.
Another advantage of Drupal: the loading speed of your pages! All elements are automatically cached, which improves the time it takes for content to display.
Finally, this CMS offers numerous extensions to optimize your SEO and:
- Generate reports analyzing your rankings.
- Add rich data to your content.
- Customize your URLs.
- Manage redirects.
- Create well-structured sitemaps.
- Optimize image and media SEO.
5. WordPress, the well-known CMS
WordPress remains the best-known CMS on the market right now. Whether you have a blog, a brochure site, or an e-commerce site, this solution is completely SEO friendly.
Out of the box, WordPress has many options to:
- Edit your URLs.
- Generate XML sitemaps.
- Boost page load speed.
- Reduce image sizes.
- Generate reports analyzing your SEO strategy.
- Create one or more sitemaps with a single click.
- Improve the readability of your content.
- Customize the robots.txt and, more generally, all site files.
But you can add plugins to go even further! To get support, hire a freelance WordPress developer on Codeur.com!
6. Prestashop, the French SEO CMS
Dedicated specifically to e-commerce sites, Prestashop is a 100% French, SEO-friendly CMS.
While you can configure your basic SEO elements directly via the interface, you can go further thanks to plugins like SEO Manager.
This plugin automatically generates meta data for product, supplier, brand and category pages. It also inserts your keywords into general tags. A real time-saver for those managing an online store with hundreds of SKUs.
Our tip for choosing the best SEO CMS
Choosing an SEO-friendly CMS alone is not enough to improve your rankings. Once the technical side is in place, also consider your content strategy, from creation to distribution, to ensure optimal visibility.
If you need help installing a CMS or with your SEO strategy, hire a freelance CMS developer by posting your ad on Codeur.com !
