SEO Best Practices

If you haven’t set a clear SEO strategy yet I’d recommend to start with the previous guide to get quick overview of how SEO works, what you can expect and what the trade-offs are. If you don’t have time for that just remember one thing: there are no tricks in SEO anymore. It’s all about creating authentic quality content and making sure people can find it.

Tooling

The most important tool is your site builder. This guide will use Framer for examples, but it’s just as applicable to other site builders, as long as they support the SEO optimizations below. Apart from the site builder you will need the following other tools:

Google Analytics

While Framer has built-in analytics, it’s hard to beat Google Analytics when you want to optimize for the Google Search engine. They record every relevant detail and have the actual data from the search engine to accompany your other metrics.

The most common way to add Google Analytics to your page is through Google Tag Manager. It’s essentially a tool that you add to your site once and allows you to visually configure any other service to your site.

Framer: How to setup Google Tag Manager

Google Search Console

Google provides a dedicated tool to get information on how your site exists in their database (the index). It shows you search and click statistics, which pages are indexed and when, the most popular keywords for your site and errors on any of your pages.

Framer: How to setup Google Search Console

Keyword Research

SEO is all about keywords; the words that people type in to find your page. We will define a list of two types of keywords that we’ll use everywhere. Think of them as seasoning for your site:

• Branded This one we get for free. It’s everything that has your product or company name in there. For SEO we are not interested in these, because people typing in your brand or product name already know about you. SEO is all about people discovering your product.

• Descriptive Words that best describe your product or service in the most generic way. For the iPod this would be “music player” and for Amazon this would be “online shopping” but could also be “cloud infrastructure”.

• Competitive Words that describe a value your product can provide and people are looking for. The iPod would have “best quality audio player” or “

Next to meaning and intent, we will be looking for keywords with the following properties:

• Relevance: "insurance" is a popular keyword, but much less effective than "car insurance Florida" if you're trying to sell car insurance in Florida. Competing for too broad keywords is not smart because it will be very hard and a large part of the audience won't find you relevant.

• Popularity: the more a keyword gets searched on, the more traffic it can send to your site. Search engines typically express this as "search volume" in thousands of searches per month.

• Competition: if there is only one site with these keywords on the entire internet, it will get all of the search traffic. But typically, thousands of sites compete for any keyword and

Now we need a keyword research tool. There are a lot of offerings but you'll typically get pretty good results with the Google Keyword Research tool that comes for free. The quickest way to find keywords is through your competitors.

• Find 3 - 5 competitors with established websites and analyze them.

• Filter out all the keywords with the competitor name or site in them.

• Sort keywords by volume and competition (competition is sometimes expressed in $).

Go through all of the keywords and select the ones that are most relevant for you. Order them all by maximum search volume but minimal competition. These are your best opportunities.

Split the keywords in a descriptive and competitive group:

• We're going to use the descriptive keywords as much as we can across your regular page content and for the backlink descriptions ("This is the best audio player on the market today").

• We're going to cluster the competitive keywords in related groups so we can target them with dedicated pages or articles.

Let’s look at a real example where we analyze the Webflow site for these keywords, assuming that we want to optimize our site for a site building tool.

You can see that the whole collection of descriptive keywords basically comes down to:

• (custom, free, create) website (builder, maker, development, designer)

There are a lot of broad keywords that we may want to drop that are too close to people who are obviously trying to look for a designer they can hire instead of a tool.

For competitive clusters we can discover a few different topics:

• Features: cheap domains, (free) templates, adobe fonts, color picker, ecommerce

• Topics: ux design tools, adobe fonts

Long tail

🚧 To be updated

Pages vs Sites

🚧 To be updated

On Page SEO

Optimize your title tags and meta description

This is how your page will get displayed on Google in the search results. This text should entice people to click and find out more.

It's typically fine to brag a bit in your description ("award winning") or lure people in ("free forever"). But don't go all Buzzfeed ("you wouldn't believe..."). Keep it informative, high quality and on point.

Google may decide you have better content on your page then your description or title and skip it entirely. If that happens rewrite them and see if they get picked up.

Note: there used to be a special keywords tag too, but modern search engines ignore it and directly extract keywords from your page content.

Framer: how to set a title and page description.

Ideally you create a unique title and description for every page. This is especially important for pages with a specific function like: pricing, contact, about, etc. If Google recognizes these pages it will add them to your results inline.

You can use the CMS to automatically set titles and / or descriptions for your pages based on the content. This is a great way to quickly produce large amounts of content directly with writers that automatically gets optimized for SEO.

Framer: how to use CMS variables in the page title and description.

Optimize your page content

Pick the right content to put on your pages. While this is a creative process you can use SEO a bit to help here too by doing the exercise to work back from given search keywords you want to optimize for. Just ask yourself what the intent is behind searching for that specific thing? Are people looking for a specific piece of information? A comparison? An overview? A way to contact you?

Make sure that your page hierarchy supports your keywords. The most important thing is to have an h1 header that contains lots of descriptive keywords and largely matches your page title. Never use more than a single h1, put everything else in h2 or h3 headers.

Sprinkle as many descriptive keywords as you can throughout all your copy. Make sure to do it in a way that makes sense to the reader and flows naturally.

Optimize your domain and urls

You can get a ranking bonus if your keywords are in the actual domain of your site. If you have carinsurance.com you’ll automatically rank high for “car insurance” keywords. But you’ll likely have a branded domain with your company name, so the next best thing is optimized urls.

Make sure your urls contain your primary functions or keywords in a readable way. Functions are things like contact, pricing, etc. so good urls are domain.com/pricing. A good primary keyword url could look like domain.com/camper-minivan-california.

Make sure all your urls are readable for both humans and computers. Use basic lowercase characters and no spaces (replace them with -).