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Are Weebly Websites Good for SEO?
Many business owners choose to build their own website on a do-it-yourself platform—like Weebly or Wix—rather than spend thousands of dollars with a website development firm to build a professional site. While there’s nothing wrong with this entrepreneurial spirit, building your own website using Weebly could pose costly for your business.
What Is the Purpose of Your Website?
Some business owners use their website as a portfolio or placeholder. It’s merely a place on the interwebz to send visitors when they request photos or testimonials. For others, a website could be at the heart and soul of your marketing campaign—driving more visits, leads, and sales.
If you want to grow your company by generating new customers and sales through your website, the Weebly platform won’t be as effective as other content management systems like WordPress.
Optimizing your website for search engines is done in a variety of ways—some related to on-page content while others are related to website code and structure.
How Does Weebly Stack Up?
IN-PAGE META DATA EDITOR
At first glance, it looks like Weebly is good for SEO. After creating a free Weebly website, business owners are allowed to edit title tags and meta descriptions for each page using the built in editor found in the left sidebar of each page editor.
After digging deeper, Weebly allows you to edit title tags and meta descriptions under the settings tab—separate from the in-page editor.
This is where things get confusing.
After editing the site’s meta data under the settings tab AND the in-page editor, we deleted the meta data entered in the settings menu.
After republishing the site, Weebly included duplicated meta data in the site code and structure. This could get confusing for first-time website builders, as it was confusing for our experienced team of SEOs (duplicated meta data shown below):
What you see above is not good for SEO and potentially has a negative impact on your website’s SEO value.
WEEBLY SITE CODE & STRUCTURE
A cleanly coded website has a website code and structure that is concise and includes little to no JavaScript code in the header section of the site. When using control + U (or right click anywhere on your site and select “Inspect Element,” you can view the source code of your website—what it looks like to search engine crawlers.
Weebly includes heavy amounts of JavaScript in their sites’ header sections. While this gives you the functionality to design and build a website unique to your business, it results in poor site code and structure and can slow down the speed of your website.
The highlighted area in the photo above is Weebly’s JavaScript code inserted in the header section of a website. This is not good for SEO purposes.
What Does Weebly Say About Its SEO Capabilities?
As we mentioned before, a lot of business owners use their website as a 24/7/365 sales rep that never sleeps, takes vacation, and never gets sick. It’s a sales tool used by many, but only if it can be found by search engines and in turn, by new customers in your service area.
To rank on the first page of search engines and be found by new customers, Google and other search engines must index your site’s web pages. Indexed web pages means Google has read your site and stored each page in its memory bank. That way, when someone searches for your products or services and is within your service area, Google displays your web pages. Customers click, fill out forms or call your office, and boom—you now have a lead.
When publishing our test site, we received the following message from Weebly regarding search engine indexing:
Look specifically at the lines the two red arrows point to. Although you built an SEO-friendly website, it won’t be indexed by Google, Bing, or Yahoo unless you upgrade to a monthly or annual plan.
According to Weebly, you must upgrade from their free website builder to “get search indexing.”
To Weebly’s credit, they do provide some pretty useful SEO tips and suggestions in their Help Center, complete with advice on:
- On-page SEO
- Meta data optimization
- Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) help
- Link building tactics
- On-page hierarchy
- Off-site SEO
- Citation building
- And more
Our Weebly SEO Review
Your website should be looked at as an investment in your company—not an expense. Most consumers turn to the Internet when they are looking for products and services, so if your website is not being found you are losing money to your competitors—guaranteed.
Launching a website on Weebly is a better solution than no website at all, but it lacks the customization, SEO capabilities, and flexibility that WordPress provides.
In our experience, WordPress sites provide the best combination of flexibility, customization, and community developer support available on the market today. Of the top one million websites on the Internet today, 48 percent of them are built on WordPress. Not to mention, WordPress has a multitude of plugins available for installation on your website for easy SEO optimizations and implementation.
The versatility of WordPress makes it an ideal website content management system for robust enterprise level websites all the way down to small local service providers.
In our opinion, Weebly is not good for SEO.
Affordable, SEO-Friendly Website Design from Blue Corona
Blue Corona has website design and development packages for everyone. From basic affordable website design options to full-featured, fully-customized websites, our team of designers can meet your needs.
Our websites are not just beautiful–they perform at a high level. What good is a beautiful website if nobody can find it? At Blue Corona, we specialize in creating websites with lead generation in mind–increasing your website’s ROI and helping you achieve your business goals.
Contact us today to more about how website from Blue Corona can help you grow your company and improve ROI on your marketing spend. Call us at (800) 696-4690 or fill out a contact form to get started!
About The Author: Blue Corona's Editorial Staff is determined to help you increase your leads and sales, optimize your marketing costs, and differentiate your brand by passing on our tribal knowledge. The team vigilantly stays on top of the latest in digital marketing, bringing you the top insights with expert commentary. Want to see something on our blog you haven't seen yet? Shoot us an email and our marketing team will get to work.
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The information on this website is for informational purposes only; it is deemed accurate but not guaranteed. It does not constitute professional advice. All information is subject to change at any time without notice. Contact us for complete details.
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