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Comparing the Best SEO-Friendly Website Builders

Chris Scalise
SEO-friendly Website BUilders
The process of designing your own website is not a simple one. You have to think about your product, understand your target audience, create the right kind of engaging content, and then find the ideal design to neatly incorporate all these aspects together.

On top of all that, you need to consider how to best market your site. How will people hear about it? 

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.

The Fundamentals of SEO

SEO is the process of ensuring that your website ranks as highly as possible for relevant search terms.

For instance, if you sell tennis rackets online, you want your website to appear near the top of the list whenever someone googles the term “tennis rackets.” An SEO-friendly website builder will help you to assemble your site in a way that’s attractive to search engines.

Search engine algorithms are made up of many factors, and your site landing on the first page is a function of your site’s relevance in accordance with the search engine’s algorithm. Some aspects of SEO are easy to control on your end. For instance, by writing engaging content with the right keywords, you can draw in traffic and appeal to the search engine spiders that crawl your website in search of relevance.

However, many other aspects of SEO are buried within the meta content and hidden within the site’s code.

These include:

  • Your XML sitemap
  • Your HTML sitemap
  • Your robots.txt file
  • Your meta tags for pages and images
  • Your URL structure
  • Your microformats
  • Your breadcrumb navigation
  • Your site’s mobile friendliness
  • SSL certificates

When you use an SEO-friendly website builder, you can ensure that every aspect of your site is properly optimized.

After comparing more than a dozen of the highest-rated website builders, we’ve determined the following to be best for SEO:

1. Wix - A Leading Website Builder

Wix offers users an intuitive, easy-to-use website-building platform with over 500 professional templates and thousands of apps in the Wix App Market. With Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI), anyone can create a website from scratch.

Using Wix SEO tools:

  • Personalized plans. Wix’s personalized SEO plan includes a keyword analyzer that tells you which meta titles and descriptions will boost site traffic and increase search engine visibility.
  • Step-by-step guides. Your personalized SEO plan includes a step-by-step guide on how to improve rankings, and an optional Site Booster app that offers tips on crafting high-performing URLs, alt text, and hyperlinks.
  • Extra tools. Wix’s App Market offers a variety of SEO-focused apps, including XML sitemaps, MTHL5 optimized code, and CDN providers.

Overall, Wix’s website builder is simple to learn and offers numerous tools for improving your site’s SEO.

WIX WIX Visit Wix

2. Web.com – A Simple SEO Solution

With its simple point-and-click interface and a slew of tools for generating web traffic, Web.com’s do-it-yourself website builder is a fitting website builder for people looking to create a business-oriented website.

With Web.com, you’ll have the SEO advantage thanks to:

  • Easy meta tag creation. Adding meta titles and meta descriptions is a breeze with Web.com. These tags are essential for search engine rankings because your title and description are what users see in the search results.
  • Mobile-friendly themes. Web.com offers a number of responsive themes that automatically adapt your site to different screen sizes and dimensions.
  • Dedicated SEO experts. For an additional fee, Web.com offers dedicated SEO professionals who help optimize your back-end and build high-value links to your website.

Web.com Web.com Visit Web.com

3. BigCommerce – The Best SEO Solution for Online Stores

In addition to world-class online store capabilities and an easy-to-use site builder, BigCommerce offers Best in Class SEO for all business sizes.

Built-in search engine ranking signals include:

  • Rapid load times. Research indicates that 57% of users will abandon a page that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. The average BigCommerce site loads in under a second.
  • Site-wide HTTPS. Since 2014, Google has favored HTTPS webpages over the traditional HTTP pages. With BigCommerce Pro and Enterprise, all of your pages have the HTTPS protocol, a boon that may be worth the upgrade.
  • Google Trusted Stores. If you sign up with a Pro or Enterprise membership, BigCommerce will help to establish your site as a Google Trusted Store, which receives priority in Google search results.

BigCommerce BigCommerce Visit BigCommerce

If You Build It (Correctly), They Will Come

While each website builder has its own strengths, Wix is best at combining flexibility with sheer power, giving its users countless opportunities for boosting visibility and drawing traffic to their site. Wix is easy to use on the one hand, yet packed with powerful SEO tools and resources for smartly implementing them. With Artificial Design Intelligence carrying the load, and a comprehensive library of templates, apps, and guides to draw from, Wix offers the most ideal avenue for building an SEO-friendly site and increasing your numbers organically.

Chris Scalise
Chris Scalise has worked with major website builders since the early days of Adobe PageMill. For more than a decade, he has been addressing the web building and content management needs of leading online businesses like Coalition Technologies and Opposing Views. In his spare time, he reviews website design and creation.