Usually, when people talk about SEO, they only mention traditional approaches like keyword research, meta-title, meta-description, and so on. But what they often forget is that SEO starts from the core of the website. How a website is built has a lot to do with how your website will perform on search results.

But if you are someone from a non-technical background or not interested in building websites from scratch using code, website builders are there to do the core development part for you.

Therefore, website builders have a significant impact on SEO, and investing in a good website builder can boost your website’s SEO remarkably.

There are a lot of great options out there, and they can help to get your site ranking higher in search engines. This article will walk you through the list of the best website builders to help boost your SEO.

What is SEO and why is it important?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website’s visibility in search results to get more organic traffic and conversion.

On the search engine results page (SERP), people only click on the pages that have higher positions. According to Backlinko test results, the top 3 Google search results get 54.4% of all clicks. Among them, 27.6% of internet users click on the page ranking top (#1) on SERP. For the second position, the number drops down to 15.8%, and 11% of users click on the third-ranked page. Others hardly make it to double-digits. So it is important to rank higher on the search engine results page by optimizing your content for search engines.

How website builders can affect SEO?

Traditionally, search engine optimization was considered a separate operation from website building. However, search engines’ algorithms have changed over the years.

These days, search engines (Google in particular) emphasize more on factors like page speed, responsive design compatibility, and user experience. And these factors are directly related to web development. Thus, website builders have a larger impact on SEO.

Since the introduction of Core Web Vitals, page speed affects SEO. A slow-loading website will increasingly drop the LCP and FID scores which will massively affect your website’s rank on SERP. Besides, it is one of the first things to affect user experience. 

Furthermore, website builders include features to add meta titles, meta descriptions, and image alt text, also generate XML sitemaps, and integrate with Google Search Console. These features can make search engine optimization easier for websites. The more SEO-focused features the website builder has, the more chances you have to rank your website on the SERP.

Therefore, you need to choose a website builder that performs well in page loading speed parameters.

How to choose the best website builder for SEO

First of all, you need to choose the one that is best suited for your needs and your goals. However, while choosing the website builder for SEO, There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a builder: their ease of use, their features, and how well they will help you reach your goals.

Here are the things you should consider while choosing the website builder for your website:

1. 1. Mobile Friendliness
2. 2. Page Speed
3. 3. XML Sitemap
4. 4. Keyword support
5. 5. Customizable Meta Title & Meta Description
6. 6. Google Search Console Integration
7. 7. Customizable Image ALT tags
8. 8. Custom URLs
9. 9. 301 Redirect
10. 10. Structured data
11. 11. Social media integration

Best Website Builders for SEO

Choosing the right website builder for SEO can be difficult. There are several different options available, each with its benefits and drawbacks. Here, we’ll provide an overview of the best website builders for SEO, taking into account both your needs and your goals.

1. WiX

WiX has improved as a website builder over the last few years and offers a wide range of features that can be useful for creating websites. Meanwhile, with Google integration, WiX’s SEO is a great choice for any website. It scored top marks for SEO in our research, and all things considered, proved to be an outstanding website builder for SEO. It contains all the key features, with user-friendly controls that make it easy for you to optimize content for search engines.

WordPress SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES. 
• Page Speed: Overall Good. Server response time is a bit slower.
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Quite complicated.
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable from the built-in SEO section.
• Google Search Console Integration: Integrates directly for the dashboard.
• Image ALT tags: Editable
• Custom URLs: YES
• 301 Redirect: YES (built-in feature)
• Structured data: No built-in feature.
• Social media integration: YES

What’s unique about WiX SEO

1. Google integration: Directly connects with Google Search Console from the dashboard.
2. Automatically generates a robots.txt file.
3. SEO for multilingual sites.

2. WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular website builders, and for good reason. It’s easy to use, has a large community of users, and is free to use. Besides website design, development, and content management, it’s actually a very powerful website builder for SEO too. 

It ensures that websites built with WordPress are optimized for search engines. The most popular content management system (CMS) covers a majority of SEO requirements. Moreover, WordPress has a wide range of SEO plugins available that covers almost every feature required to optimize websites for search engines.

WordPress SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES
• Page Speed: Depends on the website.
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Plugin dependent
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable with plugins.
• Google Search Console Integration: Manual Integration
• Image ALT tags: Editable
• Custom URLs: YES
• 301 Redirect: Plugin dependent.
• Structured data: Manually generated or use a plugin
• Social media integration: YES

What’s Unique about WordPress SEO?

• Availability of highly functional SEO plugins.
• Most of the themes are SEO-friendly.

3. Squarespace

Squarespace offers a very competitive range of SEO options – putting it up there with the best of the best in the industry! From its intuitive and clear navigation to Keyword Search coming as standard across all plans, Squarespace offers its users some truly phenomenal SEO tools.

Squarespace makes its place among the best website builders for SEO with a wide range of SEO features. With a clean and minimal interface, Squarespace includes features like an SEO checklist and Google Keyword research making it a user-friendly website builder with SEO support.

Squarespace SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES. 
• Page Speed: Quite Good
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Advanced keyword research tool
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable from page configuration
• Google Search Console Integration: No dedicated feature
• Image ALT tags: Editable
• Custom URLs: YES
• 301 Redirect: YES (built-in URL mapping feature)
• Structured data: No built-in feature.
• Social media integration: YES

What’s unique about Squarespace SEO?

• Comes with a built-in keyword research tool.

4. Weebly

Weebly is an easy-to-use website builder with customizable web page designs and handy tools to build websites. Weebly’s SEO tools provide a great way to improve your web presence. It helps you create an SEO-optimized web page for your website, which can rank higher on search engines. By using Weebly, you can better manage your website’s search engine visibility and improve your visibility on the web.

Weebly SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES. 
• Page Speed: Good. But slightly slower than WiX and WordPress
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Non-integrated.
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable from the SEO section.
• Google Search Console Integration: No dedicated feature
• Image ALT tags: Editable for regular images. But non-editable for product images.
• Custom URLs: YES
• 301 Redirect: YES. Quite easy.
• Structured data: YES
• Social media integration: YES

What’s unique about Weebly SEO?

• The easiest way to set up 301 redirects.

5. Shopify

Shopify is a popular website builder for eCommerce websites. It allows you to create online stores with a great number of features and functionality. You can choose from a variety of templates and designs, or you can create your own. When it comes to SEO, Shopify comes with features to help business owners to make their online store visible on search results and generate quality traffic to it.

Shopify SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES
• Page Speed: Quite good.
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Not available.
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable from the SEO section.
• Google Search Console Integration: Manual
• Image ALT tags: Editable.
• Custom URLs: YES
• 301 Redirect: Manually manageable.
• Structured data: YES
• Social media integration: YES

What’s unique about Shopify SEO?

• eCommerce-focused features.

6. GoDaddy

GoDaddy has become increasingly popular due to its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use tools. GoDaddy offers SEO tools that allow users to optimize websites for search engines and improve ranking on SERP. The web builder is simple to use and provides advanced SEO support. However, their SEO support starts at a higher price range.

GoDaddy SEO overview:

• Mobile Friendly?: YES
• Page Speed: Comparatively slow.
• XML Sitemap: Auto-generated
• Keyword support: Available with the premium plan.
• Meta Title & Meta Description: Customizable from the SEO panel.
• Google Search Console Integration: Manual
• Image ALT tags: Editable.
• 301 Redirect: YES.
• Social media integration: YES

What’s unique about GoDaddy SEO?

• Provides SERP ranking analysis report.
• Keyword research.

Which website builder is best for SEO?

There are many great web builders for SEO, each builder has its strengths and weaknesses. But do they match the standards to be the best website builder for SEO? The website builders in this list match most of the criteria mentioned at the beginning of the article.

WiX builder is best if you are looking for automated SEO support. It provides the easiest way for beginners.

While WordPress has the highest number of customization options with a wide range of plugins. 

On the other hand, Squarespace has some unique features like in-built keyword research.

Coming to Weebly, it has features like the easiest 301 redirect and dozens of easy-to-use SEO tools.

Shopify is most preferred for eCommerce sites with basic SEO support for online stores.

And, GoDaddy website builder is good value for money with advanced SEO features available for the premium plans.

So, finally, which one is the best website builder for SEO? It depends on what you’re looking to achieve with your website. Overall, these builders can help you create a site that is optimized for search engine rankings, as well as improve the visibility of your website.

Things to look for in a website builder (Overall)

When choosing the website builder, there are some basic factors you should consider in any case. This includes the ability to create custom-made websites, page loading speed, responsiveness, accessibility to resources, and so on.

Here are some key factors to consider while choosing a builder:

• – Ease of usability
• – Efficiency in content management
• – Page speed and server uptime
• – Responsive design support
• – Theme compatibility
• – Template availability
• – Customization options
• – Resource accessibility
• – Plugin and add-ons
• – SSL encryption

Beyond any particular purpose, these are the basic requirements essential for website builders to create websites of any niche. Further in this article, we will discuss the SEO-specific website builder’s functionalities.