Navigating Webflow SEO

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In this issue, I'm chatting with Nik V. , who specializes in doing SEO for Webflow websites and for SaaS products.

I asked him 10 questions about doing SEO for Webflow websites, the importance of choosing a CMS, his tech stack, the future of SEO and much more!

So, let's not waste time and see what he has to say!

How did you get into SEO?

It is a really interesting story!

As I am from Serbia and was born in the 90ties, I grew up in a very different environment, so I didn't have access to the internet nor knew English until 2014 (I was 19 back in the time, and you can imagine a childhood without TV and internet lol).

Taking that into consideration I was obsessed with books, especially financial ones that were focused on the market heavily, from there I found the amazing book Principles of Economics and when I got access to the internet started to research digital appliances of the same as I always knew that I will have a business of my own.

In 2016, I started to get serious about that and also polished my English skills.

Clearly back in the day I practiced all the free stuff that you can find so PPC and SMM were the main channels (from my tech perspective I was researching algorithms etc...) but I didn't find satisfaction in them (somewhat too simple for me).

So, I stood up during my research on something called SEO and when I dig a little deeper about it I fell in love at first sight. It was the perfect profession for me!

Data analytics, algorithm research, and on top psychological appliances of basic rules of the market so you can imagine how obsessed I became with it!

In 2018, I got my first gig and it was one of the biggest back in the day in the crypto affiliate niche and from there, the rest is history!???

Why did you choose to specialize in Webflow SEO?

Luck to be honest!

I started to work in 2020 with an amazing agency that back in the day focused on white label (Veza Digital) and during keyword research, I found out that some so-called platform Webflow coming into the market as no code web development tool.

So following the call from the CEO of Veza, added that as a service page (from there it blew up and we were first offering that service on the SERP as agency).

Clearly, I needed to get familiar with it as Veza hosted their own website on Webflow and I was doing SEO for them and still I do!

One of the best successes that I had in my career but I can’t choose only one as from day one and my first gig I worked on very successful projects!

But from then I focused on polishing SEO skills for Webflow and 4 years later I can say that I am probably, if not the best, then for sure the most experienced Webflow SEO expert!

Do you think the choice of CMS is important for SEO?

For sure, choosing a CMS is very important for SEO!

The possibilities that you can get from choosing the right CMS are endless and one of the main reasons (clearly a good one as I need to be honest here and say that there are bad things too when we talk about SEO on Webflow) for choosing Webflow as a platform is their CMS!

What are the key challenges of doing SEO for a webflow website?

Ha, here we are!

So as I mentioned already Webflow has some disadvantages when we are talking about SEO, I need to state here a few of them: - not beginner-friendly - no plugins

- no sitemaps (you can generate automatically one but I wouldn't ever recommend this)

- no robot tags

- no canonicals

- questionable features that can affect SEO as localization (geo-located redirect that is horrible from an SEO perspective but luckily it can be turned off)

Clearly, if you are a seasonal SEO professional it is easy for you to do all of those manually but as I said if you are not comfortable playing with CSS and HTML can be quite stressful to optimize a site on the Webflow.

What are the SEO advantages webflow websites have?

CMS and design.

I always mention those two, design and UX on the websites that you build on Webflow are lighting ages in front of any other web development platform in the world.

Flawless animations, all main integrations that you can imagine.

And, if someone asks why I am mentioning UX in part about SEO - because in my approach I heavily focus on CRO as you know design without users is useless, the same story goes in a different way users without conversions are useless too.

Regarding CMS advantages, I would say the amount of possibilities that you can get with it and clearly better solutions for some of the things than WordPress!

Here I need to note that I will leave this decision to each professional as at the end of the day we all have our preferences.

I ranked websites from Drupal, through custom ones, to Webflow and each technology has some advantages and better solutions than others so I would say in the end it is a matter of your own choice!

What are some of the key things to check when you audit a Webflow website?

Uhh I would need to repeat myself here, as I said Webflow is not beginner-friendly so that list from above goes again here:

- sitemap

- canonicals

- robot tags

- check if the client using the localization feature (if they use it check the settings there)

- robot.txt (this is general advice) - JS rendering (this is a big one for Webflow as they are using JS for animations)

- I would also add Scheme Markups here but, as Webflow doesn’t offer a prebuilt way to implement them I am concerned that the majority of websites do not even have them (almost can bet on this).

So for a good audit of the Webflow website some knowledge and Screaming Frog would be enough for beginning!

What are some advantages of Webflow compared to other CMS platforms in general?

I would say speed, customization, design, and hosting solutions (this can be a big one as Webflow offers hosting on their own servers, and to be honest, I am not sure but they are using Amazon’s ones if I recall correctly but check this one).

It is not the cheapest option out there but if you want an amazing website built in less than 3 weeks with the animations from your dreams, and with a CMS that allows you to do whatever you want there, I would say go for it!

Be careful in finding the right SEO expert if you want to focus and generate users and leads from it, but that is some other story!

What are the main tools you use to do SEO?

I love basic tools so here is my list:

- Google Search Console

- Google Analytics

- Microsoft Clarity (heatmap tool)

- Screaming Frog

- Ahrefs

- I would say also different AI tools but for research purposes??

What would you think will play a vital role in SEO’s future meta game?

I hate to give this answer, but I would say that with the implementation of SGE (every day now), Digital PR and backlinks gained in an organic way would have even more importance than currently!

I don’t hate link builders and Digital PR agencies, even though I have some amazing partners from those industries because, in the end, you can’t rank without them if the niche is competitive, but I really think that backlinks impact overall is a bit over the top for the current ranking algorithm!

Also usage of AI!!!!

A lot of people and unfortunately experts utilize AI in regular work but in clearly wrong ways, usage of AI is something that will make a difference in the future so it is better to start now and prepare yourself and learn how to use AI correctly!

What are your thoughts on AI content?

The big thing in the SEO world nowadays!?

As we saw with the latest updates a lot of websites got punished because of pure spam of AI content and so-called heists went doom! I would need to agree with Google on that one.

Also, the whole March update (I wrote an article covering it) was aimed, I would say, for the first time in history towards SEO experts overall and abusing bad practices from expired domains to pSEO.

AI is not a bad thing and I think it will play a major role in the future of SEO (and overall in the future). If you don’t adjust you will be behind, my point with AI content is the next one - people use AI badly.

You have two limitations of AI content:

- hallucinations

- biases?

You can’t use AI for writing based on a pure input-output system.

There is a whole lot more in the background, so the prompts that I saw from top-notch SEO experts (btw, conferences in Dubai were amazing regarding this topic) and that I am applying are a few pages long and first to sort the problems.

With AI content you need to feed AI with relevant information about your niche/industry or topic and then have conversation with it in an attempt to process and generate way more information than humans!

That is the advantage of AI - it can process a lot more things way faster than humans and based on that fact if you utilize AI correctly there is no way that Google will punish you for something that is technically a way better result for the user than the rest of the SERP!

Always write content yourself or at least edit it but be creative and learn to utilize AI to your benefit and clients will be happy too!!!