Which Website Platform is Best for SEO? Ep. 157

Do you wonder which website platform is best for SEO? If you're on Kajabi, do you wonder if you need to switch to Wordpress or Squarespace? Have you heard that Wix is bad for SEO? 

Let's break it all down today, and I'll help you determine if you need to switch website platforms for SEO or not. 

Focusing on SEO is great, it will help your website be more visible, but sometimes the things we hear or worry about just add complexity to the situation. I'll explain whether or not you need to change your website platform if you're focusing on SEO so you know what to do. 

Transcript

0:33

Hi, welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanted to talk about website platforms and your SEO. This is a question I get a lot, especially from my students, Rachel, which website platform is the best for my SEO? Before I get into this, before I start doing SEO, before I start creating more content, do I need to move my website to a different platform? In most cases, the answer is no. You don't need to move your website to a different platform. If you're on showit, Kajabi, Squarespace, WordPress. I don't know which other ones. Those are the main ones, Shopify, et cetera. Those are all ones that you can do SEO on. In my experience, the only one I found that really had an issue with SEO was the GoDaddy website builder, and it's possible that they've updated it. I haven't looked at it in the past couple of years, but it was one where you could not do SEO on the site, but the majority of the ones that are available today are. SEO Friendly. They are ones that you can optimize, you can customize, you can do what you need. So rather than worrying about, am I on the wrong platform, I want you to instead focus on learning how to optimize for the platform that you're on, because the thought of moving from one platform to another is actually. A very serious, sizable undertaking. It's not something that I want you to do, just because you think that the one you're on isn't the most ideal. From an SEO perspective, it's something that if you really need to make a change, you really don't wanna be on Squarespace. You really do wanna move to Kajabi. You wanna go to go high level, you wanna go to show it because of features that that platform has. Great, but don't think that you need to do it just to be able to do SEO. Sometimes when we get focused on things like I need to change the platform before I do SEO, that's actually our nervous system. Like I. Getting scared and so wanting to stay busy by focusing on something that feels less scary than like learning SEO. It's kind of interesting. I've been learning a lot about how our nervous system impacts us as entrepreneurs, and I found that to be fascinating. It's that busy work. It's staying busy doing things that aren't really moving the needle so often when we're thinking about, I need to change this, or I need to redesign my website. It's not actually what's going on, it's that something inside of us is scared. So maybe take a minute, take a deep breath, ask yourself what is it that you're afraid of doing? What is it that you think you need to do differently? And then like, what is the one next thing that I could do? So what's the one thing if I just started with one thing? So for you, let's say you're gonna stay on the platform you're on because now you understand you don't need to change. The platform that you're on is absolutely fine for SEO. So now what we wanna do is to look at how can I start to optimize my site without getting scared. So choose one keyword. Let's start with your homepage. Your homepage is honestly the easiest page to focus on because in most cases, your keyword for your homepage is gonna be your business name. Let's make it super simple. If you service a local area, let's go ahead and also use that local area, that city or town or city and state, depending if you're in a situation where like there's two cities with your name, there's one in your state and there's one in another state, then you might wanna go ahead and include the city and state both. But let's optimize that homepage. Let's just get it started, because that's gonna make it easier and it's gonna make everything else feel easier for you. So start with your business name. You're gonna create a title tag and a meta description with your business name as the key words, so you can do that. Your title tag should be a maximum of 60 characters, including spaces. Your meta description should be a maximum of 160 characters, also including spaces. Then I want you to make sure that you've used your keyword, meaning your business name or your name. If you're like a coach or a consultant. And if you are a local business, you've used your location information also in the first paragraph of your copy. This is important because it helps Google Bot, it helps ai, it helps all of that. It also helps the customer to know that this is the website, I found the right place. It is servicing this local area. And then you'll want to potentially use your keyword in some of your header tags on your homepage. So header tags are just those big fonts. The bigger text that breaks up your text on a small page. So think of it as like the titles between the paragraphs,'cause that's really what they are. They're title tags you're going to or your they're header tags. You're going to have one header tag for your page. If you're on WordPress by default, the page name is going to be the head, the H one tag. Then you'll have secondary H two or H three H two. You wanna think of as like your paragraphs. So if you have three points, let's say you're working on a blog post. I know we've been talking about the homepage, but let's, it's easier to explain it in blog post. Format. So let's say we have a blog post that's three tips. Tip one, tip two, and tip three would each be an H two tag, because they are a complete thought. They're a section of text. Then if you wanted to break one of those down further, maybe there's sub points in section number one. Or step number one, then you would use H three tags to break down that information into subsections to make it easier for your reader and also for your search engines, both your traditional and your AI search engines. That's going to help you optimize the page. So don't worry about, is my website builder the best one for SEO? It really doesn't matter. They're all going to be fairly SEO friendly. They're all going to have some pluses and minuses honestly. You're going to have more code, which is gonna slow things down a bit when you're using website builders, but it also makes it so that you can edit it on your end, which is ideally what I recommend. So whether it's Kajabi, Squarespace, show it, et cetera, you're going to have additional code just because of the fact that it is. It is a builder, it is gonna slow it down slightly. Site speed does impact our potential rankings, but it's not going to negatively impact you to the point that you need to have somebody hard code a website. I do not recommend that my site has that on like the core pages and it's a pain in the behind. And I am not the one who addresses who does that. I have a regular blog editor, and my blog is exactly like what you're probably used to on your website, and it's much more user friendly. And that is what I recommend a hundred percent. To be technically friendly, you wanna make sure that your site can really update. So the things you're looking for is, can I add content? Can I add header tags? Can I upload photos? Can I change the names of my photos? Can I write a title tag? Can I write a meta description? As long as you can do all of those core things on your website, you're going to be fine. You don't need to change your website structure, your builder, your platform to do SEO. The other thing you wanna look at. Is reducing your file size because your image file sizes will slow down your website, and that is what will impact you more than your choice of platform because large images. Load slowly, and they'll impact your site performance and they'll impact the user experience. So what you can do to help yourself is to either use a plugin like WP Smush if you're on WordPress. If you are maybe having photos done by a photographer, make sure that you have a version of them that are saved for web. You'll use those on your website versus the big, large files that you might use for print. If you are on a different platform and you don't have a plugin, or you don't have a way of doing it automatically, then you can use a tool like WP Smush. Sorry. WP Smush is the WordPress plugin. You can use JPEG mini, which is a tool that you can use to reduce the sizes of your images. If you're on Canva, you want to Remo, you want to just export your images as jpeg, not PNG, because JPEG files are smaller than PNGs. The only time you should use a PNG is if you need a transparent background on your image, because that is what you can get with A PNG that you can't get with a JPEG unless you need a transparent background. Don't bother with a PNG. JPEG is fine. It's also a smaller file on Canvas. Save it as a small one or a medium file. Um, start with small, take a look at it, make sure that it looks like it's got the right quality that you want. As long as the quality is good on a small file, it will load faster, which will help you. Ultimately, you're looking to have your images be kilobytes, not megabytes. So kb not mb. You want them small. You don't want big, giant images that are going to slow everything down. That's going to have more of an impact than whether you're on Squarespace or Kajabi or WordPress. Okay. Hopefully this helped. I know we talked a little woo there for a moment about nervous system regulation, but it's been fascinating for me. I've had the opportunity to learn. Um, quite a bit about how our nervous system impacts us as entrepreneurs, and it's been really, really interesting. And there are little things like that where you feel like you're stuck, you know what you should do, but you can't do it, or you feel like. Well, I've gotta figure this out. Before I do that, I've gotta redesign my website. I've gotta change my font. I've gotta change my brand. Maybe I need to change my platform. And so often that's just a nervous system reaction because we're scared about something. I had no idea. I'm finding it absolutely fascinating to learn about. If you are interested, if this is like, I wanna learn more about this, let me know. Send me a DM on Instagram, reply back to an email, something like that, because I have a friend who I've learned a bunch from. And she could potentially come on the podcast and talk to us about tips for our nervous system regulation. But I wanna make sure it's something that you're interested in because I've learned a ton from her and I bet she would be willing to come on and chat with us about it. But I wanna make sure it's something that you're interested in before I reach out to her and ask about that. Alright, that's it for today. Thank you for being here, and I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now. Bye.