As WordPress becomes more popular, our Franklin digital web design company gets more and more questions about WordPress and search engine optimization, or SEO. There seems to be more information floating around that WordPress is better for search engine results than other website platforms. We’re here today to talk about that. The notion is that somehow simply using WordPress will increase your search engine rankings is absolutely false.
As big proponents of WordPress, our Franklin digital web design team can agree there are a lot of benefits to using this content management system. Through the article, we will dive into those but first, we must explain the thinking and ideas around this lie to get to the bottom of it. We hear this from search engine optimizations, designers, and marketers more than anyone. Typically, someone who says WordPress is better for SEO isn’t bad, they just don’t understand code.
Why would someone suggest a tool like WordPress is better for SEO? Or worse, that you cannot rank without using WordPress? The first reason is the use of plugins to aid in the search engine configuration settings. A tool like YOAST allows you to edit your page’s heading title tag, meta content description, and canonical URL, and suggest which keyword the page is about. The plugin will give your article a grade to determine how well it is written and their determination of your SEO score. Next, the plugin will create and add the page to a sitemap that Google uses to see which pages it should look at on the site. Then, it will create schema.org, rich text or microdata, to let Google know specifically what the page is about and how to view the page. With other benefits like connecting to your Google search console, providing video SEO, and improving product or location pages, this is a fantastic tool!
Here is the simple reason WordPress is not better than any other tool for SEO: it outputs code like every other tool that Google reads. That means you can write code to do everything WordPress is doing and much more. Custom code is cleaner, faster, and potentially more precise, and it could easily be argued that this is better for SEO. Since WordPress and YOAST didn’t invent SEO, these aren’t foreign concepts that only WordPress developers know about. Almost any content management system allows you to edit title tags, meta descriptions, and the body content of a web page. Many other tools automatically generate a sitemap.
The biggest advantage of WordPress is that it is often quicker and easier to spin up a page that is good for SEO. With plugins like YOAST to grade the page, marketers and web developers feel good about what they have created and how well it will do in the search results. A benefit of using a robust plugin like this is that all the SEO benefits are in one place. You don’t have to cobble together plugins to handle every facet of improving your code. It is a worthy advantage.
At Bennett Web Group, we work with WordPress to help many clients with their SEO. However, we work with other platforms too because it is not always about fast and easy. As a business with specific needs, you need to get into the website platform that works best for your growth. We offer a free consultation to discuss your needs and properly advise if WordPress is right for you. To schedule, visit thomasgbennett.com or give us a call at 615-678-2699. We offer a free consultation where we can discuss the benefits and see if there are any downsides to your current approach. It is completely free and available to you so reach out today to learn more about improving your search engine results.