Which CMS is best for SEO? Discover the top solutions

Highlights

You’ll learn about which CMS is best for you:

• Contentstack: API-first approach, built-in SEO tools, scalable and flexible
• WordPress: Versatile with plugins, but can slow down with excess
• Acquia-Drupal: Powerful SEO modules, complex for non-technical users
• Contentful: Fast and scalable but requires third-party integrations
• Sitecore: Extensive capabilities, costly for small businesses

Choose a CMS with integrated SEO features, ease of use and scalability to improve your online presence. Optimize your SEO strategy today and enhance your business growth.

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Are you aware that 69% of companies use search engine optimization (SEO) in their marketing strategies? These statistics show why SEO is necessary for organic traffic and business growth. 

That’s why choosing the right content management system (CMS) is essential to maximize your SEO efforts. Why?

Not all CMS platforms are the same. Some cater to e-commerce and enterprise businesses, whereas others are ideal for blogging. While others offer built-in functionalities for optimizing your on-page and technical SEO. However, platforms that lack SEO functionalities offer an extension that helps you with your SEO efforts.

Your CMS is functional if it creates optimized content for search engines. Before finalizing your CMS, evaluate its advanced SEO features. Why? The advanced SEO features will increase the chances of your content appearing in the SERPs.

Which CMS is best for SEO, its key features, and how do you choose the CMS that best fits your needs? Let’s find out. 

Which CMS is best for SEO?

The best CMS for SEO improves your website ranking and drives organic traffic. How?

SEO is no longer just about keyword targeting. Your backend decides your user experience and how search engine crawlers index your website. A CMS with built-in SEO tools and features can streamline your content optimization efforts, enhancing your online visibility. You need an SEO-friendly CMS because of these reasons:

Search engine crawlers

Your CMS allows search engines to crawl and index the content on your site. With a CMS, you organize your website structure, helping search engines assess your content’s relevance. This improves your search engine ranking. 

User experience (UX)

A good CMS for SEO optimizes your website layout, ensuring easy navigation and fast loading on any device. People who find your site easy to use spend more time on it because they have a seamless user experience.

On-page SEO elements

Getting on-page SEO right involves paying attention to meta descriptions, title tags and internal links. These elements decide your site's visibility on search engines. A good CMS handles these on-page SEO tasks, optimizing every page. Title tags and meta descriptions improve your rankings and organic traffic.

Key features of an SEO-friendly CMS

Customizable page elements

Customizable page elements like meta description, title tags and heading tags are essential for an SEO-friendly CMS. These customizable page elements tell search engines what the content is about. As a result, your website’s visibility increases and you attract more traffic. These are some customizable page elements that your CMS must have:

Title tags and meta descriptions

Your users see title tags and meta descriptions in the SERPs, improving your click-through rate. Choose a CMS that customizes these elements. 

Alt text

For images, alt text completes dual functionalities. Including alt text in your images increases your content accessibility while helping search engines understand your images. With a CMS, you add and update alt text to increase your user experience and improve your SEO.

Canonical tags

A good CMS uses canonical tags, which convey to search engines the version of a page to show in the search engine results page (SERP). Canonical tags remove duplicate content, ensuring you always display the correct version. 

URL setting

Search engines and users prefer clean, descriptive URLs. A good CMS should let you customize URL structures to create readable, keyword-rich links that connect with your audience.

301 redirects

Redirects are an integral part of your content audit strategy. That’s why you chose a CMS that allows you to create 301 redirects. For instance, if your website has outdated and redundant pages that bring no traffic or qualified leads, you can delete or redirect them. Besides avoiding broken links and 404 error pages, redirects ensure these non-existing pages are redirected to existing pages on your website. 

Page loading speed optimization

A high-performing and SEO-friendly CMS does much more than manage your content. It contributes to improving your website’s loading speed. A good CMS ensures easy management of image sizes and formats, helping users compress images without sacrificing quality. This significantly reduces your load time. Additionally, advanced caching mechanisms of many headless CMS solutions like Contentstack enhance speed. 

Integration with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is another beneficial feature. A CDN serves your site’s content from various locations, ensuring users experience faster loading times irrespective of their location.

Integration with SEO tools

A CMS makes it easy to integrate with SEO tools. For starters, many CMS platforms have strong plugin support. This means you can add SEO plugins to handle all your SEO tasks from your CMS without needing extra software or complex setups. Another critical feature is API access. APIs let your CMS communicate directly with external SEO tools, making seamless data exchange. 

Technical SEO features

A headless CMS enhances your technical SEO by speeding up how quickly pages load and improving your site's performance. Keeping the front end and back end separate allows content to be delivered swiftly across various devices without extra data getting in the way. This setup allows you to choose the best tools for SEO and ensures everything works smoothly across different platforms. A headless CMS offers the following technical SEO features:

• Website speed optimization
• Mobile optimization
• SSL/HTTPS implementation
• XML sitemap
• Internal linking
• Robot.txt

These features increase your website’s engagement for users and make it more appealing to search engines. 

On-page SEO elements

A headless CMS improves your on-page SEO. Its customizable content structures give you precise control over how you organize and display your content. This flexibility manages your meta tags, so your title tags, meta descriptions and alt text are search-engine-friendly.

A headless CMS streamlines the implementation of SEO best practices by keeping content separate from its presentation. You can tweak SEO elements without altering the user interface, making updates faster and more seamless.

Mobile responsiveness

Choose a CMS platform with mobile-optimized or responsive themes or templates. This helps you retain your website’s functionality and layout across mobile devices. Also, with Google giving priority to mobile versions first when crawling your website, a CMS that supports mobile responsiveness helps you capture more organic traffic. With more than 60% of organic search engine traffic from mobile devices, you need a CMS offering mobile responsiveness. 

Top CMS platforms for SEO in 2024

Contentstack

Contentstack is a headless CMS that manages your website content and improves SEO rankings. It uses an API-first approach that improves page load time and helps you integrate it with other SEO tools. Contentstack’s headless CMS offers flexibility and higher performance, and it optimizes your content for search engines like Google. Unlike other platforms, Contentstack connects with various marketing technologies, enhancing your SEO strategy. Its scalable architecture supports business growth without affecting performance.

WordPress

WordPress offers numerous plugins for increasing your website’s versatility and SEO-friendliness. However, when you use too many plugins, your site slows down. But that’s where Contentstack comes in. Thanks to the API-first design, you no longer need plugins, leading to an improved UX and better ranking. Also, it can be incorporated with your existing SEO tools.

Acquia-Drupal

Acquia-Drupal has powerful SEO modules for managing URLs, metadata and structured data, making it ideal for large enterprises. However, its complexity can be intimidating, especially for teams without deep technical skills. Contentstack offers a solution with an intuitive interface that simplifies content management while offering superior SEO features. As a result, you roll out SEO strategies faster, reducing time-to-market. Contentstack’s flexibility lets businesses adapt to changing SEO needs without the headache of a steep learning curve.

Contentful

Contentful is another SEO CMS with better speed and scalability than other popular content management systems. However, with Contentful, you need third-party integration to use the SEO features. For this reason, many companies switch to Contentstack. It offers a built-in tool to achieve your SEO goals. Contentstack offers a more efficient and less complicated way of managing SEO since it does not rely on third-party tools.

Sitecore

Sitecore offers extensive SEO capabilities like advanced URL management and analytics integration. Because of its high cost and complexity, small businesses prefer Contentstack. Contentstack delivers similar SEO functionalities at a more reasonable price, with an easy-to-use interface that enables teams to implement SEO strategies. The cost-effectiveness and user-friendly design increase your SEO potential.

Storyblok

Storyblok shines with its flexible visual editor and modular content model, which aids in SEO optimization. Yet, it may not match the depth of native SEO tools available in Contentstack. Backed by dedicated resources and a supportive community, Contentstack offers a comprehensive approach to SEO, ensuring businesses have access to the latest insights and support to increase their search visibility. The strong support network, clubbed with advanced SEO tools, helps you tackle SEO challenges and achieve higher search ranking visibility.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Adobe Experience Manager is a powerful tool offering detailed analytics. However, its complexity and high cost make it less attractive to smaller businesses. Contentstack provides a comparable SEO capability in a sleeker, more affordable package. Businesses can tap into Contentstack’s powerful SEO tools without the hefty costs or complexity of AEM, making SEO strategy execution more accessible and manageable.

Case study: How did Contentstack help Leesa improve their organic traffic?

Leesa was experiencing slow site speed and bad user experience, affecting overall customer satisfaction. They wished to switch to a headless CMS. After the research, Leesa decided to go with Contentstack as they offered quicker time to market, enhanced SEO and a better customer journey. Using Contentstack, the company increased organic article traffic by 30 times, cut down on development time by half and achieved a website load time of less than a second. Today, Leesa can create and manage content, improving their brand’s position while engaging their audience.

After using Contentstack, Richard Bilton, Director of Technology at Leesa, said:

“It wasn’t convenient. We wanted to work with Shopify, but we needed the freedom to produce our own content the way we wanted and to speed up the website and gain flexibility.”

Read the complete case study here.

How to choose the best CMS for your SEO needs

Check out the SEO Tools

When picking a CMS, use SEO features to improve your website's online presence. Look for customizable metadata fields to set each page's titles, descriptions and keywords. You can use clean and customizable URLs that are easy for search engines and people to understand. These features make your website rank higher on search engines. Built-in analytics gives insights into your website’s performance. Choose a CMS that offers XML sitemaps and schema markup for search engines to navigate your pages better.

Look at performance and speed

Choosing a CMS that can keep things running is crucial for a good user experience and high search engine rankings. Check out platforms with optimized templates that load quickly and effective caching to reduce page load time. These features ensure faster page loading, increasing user satisfaction and search rankings.

Think about scalability

As your business grows, your CMS should grow with you. It needs to handle more content and traffic while maintaining performance. A scalable CMS integrates with additional tools and systems you might need later. It should be able to manage more pages and users without slowing down. Such adaptability keeps your website more efficient and effective.

Ease of use

Your CMS is good only if your team can use it even without extensive technical knowledge. Choose one offering an easy-to-navigate interface. This user-friendliness reduces the learning time, helping your team implement SEO strategies faster. Plus, strong community support offers tips and troubleshooting steps to get the most from your CMS.

Integration capabilities

Ensure your CMS connects with essential tools and apps in your digital strategy. It should work well with marketing automation platforms, analytics tools and other SEO apps. Seamless integration will streamline workflows, enhance collaboration and increase SEO performance.

Consider the budget

Cost is always a significant factor when choosing a CMS. Know your budget and compare it with the features different platforms offer. Select a CMS with strong SEO capabilities that fit your budget. Balancing affordability with features is essential to meet your business goals and future needs.

Common mistakes to avoid when using SEO for CMS

Overlooking mobile optimization

How often do you use your mobile phone to search for something online? Your customers do the same thing. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, you witness a decrease in revenue and lose out on potential customers.

What to do:

• Ensure your CMS supports responsive design.
• Test your website on different devices.

Ignoring meta data

Metadata is information that helps search engines understand your page's content. Overlooking metadata can make your SEO efforts less effective.

What to do:

• Use your CMS to fill out metadata for each page, like title tags and meta descriptions.
• Include relevant keywords in this metadata.
• Keep meta descriptions short and sweet but intriguing enough to entice clicks.

Going overboard with plugins

Plugins can add features to your website. But too many can slow things down or make your website less secure. And neither of these is good for SEO.

What to do:

• Stick to only the plugins you need.
• Regularly update and review your plugins, removing outdated or unnecessary.
• Monitor your site's load times to ensure it stays speedy.

Not updating your content

Your website requires regular and fresh content. Users might tune out if your content becomes stale, and search engines might rank you lower.

What to do:

• Create a content calendar to ensure you're posting fresh updates regularly.
• Use analytics to spot which content needs a refresh.

Using complicated URLs

A long, confusing URL can turn away your users and search engines. Keep it simple and relevant.

What to do:

• Choose a CMS that lets you customize URLs.
• Shorten URLs to make them descriptive and easy to understand.
• Include essential keywords where they fit naturally.

Not monitoring analytics

Monitor your website's performance to tweak changes to your SEO strategy. When you ignore analytics, you miss the opportunity to increase your website's visibility.

What to do:

• Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your SEO success.
• Based on the insights obtained, make changes to your SEO strategies.
• Review and refine your approach to seize opportunities for improvement and drive better results.

FAQs

Which CMS has the best SEO?

An ideal CMS for SEO depends on your unique requirements and objectives. However, Contentstack is the best CMS because of its SEO functionalities.

Does CMS matter for SEO?

The CMS you choose influences your SEO efforts. An SEO-friendly CMS simplifies optimization tasks and increases your website's search engine performance.

Which platform is best for SEO?

Contentstack is the best CMS for SEO because it offers distinct features tailored to various SEO needs.

What is CMS in SEO?

A CMS creates, manages and optimizes your website content. However, an SEO-friendly CMS enhances search engine visibility and performance.

Learn more

Although a CMS makes creating and developing a website, the CMS you use continues to impact your SEO outcomes. Nevertheless, deciding which CMS to use is only the first step.

Ultimately, the best website CMS for SEO depends on your business requirements. Talk to us today to gain deeper insights using your CMS, and witness increased organic traffic.