Weebly is a great platform for building a website for your business or online store. Our internal team thinks that Weebly is a good place for most people who are new to websites to start. We recently created an in-depth review of Weebly and how effective it is for SEO, but in this article, we will be talking about 4 tips for enhancing your Weebly SEO today.
Many of these tips I am about to give you, your digital marketing agency wants to keep hidden. They will implement these simple updates to your Weebly website and you will see traction for organic keywords and traffic. How do we know that?
I have experience helping Weebly users build SEO strategy to boost traffic and keywords on their website. Weebly is a great platform for businesses and artists, and we prefer to stick to the platforms that our clients like the best! We’ve done several Weebly SEO case studies and help clients boost their SEO across Weebly websites every month.
1. Update Page Titles & Descriptions
What’s the easiest way to boost my Weebly SEO? Updating your page titles and descriptions is the easiest way to start seeing traction on your website SEO. Apart from that, you’ll need to start creating more content.
We understand that most people using Weebly are probably generally new to SEO and we will be sharing the best practices for optimizing your website for search engines. Often times for local businesses, SEO comes down to optimizing your content for the keywords you think will bring the right customers.
Each page on your website will have a unique page title and description, and it’s important to optimize them individually. Click through each page on your website and then click the SEO Settings tab inside of the Weebly backend, as the screenshot shows.
Once you have entered the SEO Settings tab, you will see the following fields, generally filled out like this:
Optimize Each Page Title
This is the standard page title most websites will use for their services page, and we recommend writing SEO-focused content for this spot.
For example, if I was optimizing this Weebly website for an eyelash studio I would update the page title from “Services” to
Eyelash Extension Services in Los Angeles, CA
How can I improve my page titles for SEO? SEO Authorities everywhere agree that page titles can be long and should be descriptive, but here are some simple tips to writing great page titles:
- Describe the service or product you are promoting on the page.
- Try and keep your page title to under 60 characters.
- Be sure to also include your primary keywords the specific page should be ranking for.
- I recommend creating a document that lists each page, and each keyword the pages will be targeting. This will make sure you don’t overlap pages and keywords!
So now you know that you can do this yourself. Why would you want to work with us?
We have methods for A / B testing SEO copy to see what works with the best. With an in-house copy team, we are able to create up to 5 different versions of SEO text to see what works the best across search and user experience.
Updating Page Descriptions
The next step is to update your page descriptions. Where do page descriptions show on Google? When you search terms on Google, the text that shows right below the Blue link is where the meta description is. Your page meta description is essentially your “hook” for anyone searching content on Google. You want to lure them in with your description, so they click through to your page!
A lot of people get stuck on this step cause it can be hard to write out exactly what you’re thinking and combining that with a good meta description. People who both own the business and write the copy can have a hard time feeling good about what they are writing, and it can make the experience long and grueling.
For this services page, I would update the page description from “A list of our most popular services” to:
From eyelash extensions to microblading, our team of experienced aestheticians can help you bring a new look to your new life
This description is better for the following reasons:
- More descriptive
- Contains a hook for a potential customer reading on Google search
- Targeted keywords
2. Update URL Structure Across Your Weebly Website
Google and other search engines will analyze the content in your URL to best understand your website content. For this example above with a services page, the main URL services, and that’s great! How does your page URL affect your Weebly SEO?
When Google is reading and analyzing your Weebly sitemap they will take your page URL into consideration when they are figuring out what keywords to rank your page for. Here are some considerations when adjusting your page URL:
- Make your URL user-friendly. If someone is typing it on their phone or into a browser, it should be easy to remember assuming they know your domain.
- Consider the keywords your page should be ranking for, and be sure not to stuff!
- Avoid using dates in your URL unless they are attached to a blog post.
Be Sure to Redirect Changed URL’s
Why is my Weebly page returning 404 errors? Updating your page URL without redirecting is a really common mistake that users make when trying to optimize their Weebly website for SEO. If you change a page URL, you can go into your Weebly SEO settings and create a 301 redirect to the new page URL.
This will ensure that any “SEO juice” that this page has, gets transferred to the new URL.
Resubmit Your Weebly Sitemap to Google Search Console
Any time you update a URL or page on your website, you should resubmit your sitemap, or manually submit that URL to Google search console. Why should I submit my sitemap to Google? If you give Google direct access to your sitemap and any new URLs that are added to your website, they will take that information and hopefully display your new content across Google search! This is an important way to get your Weebly site ranking for keywords!
Add More Pages (More URL’s)
The final step is to either add more services pages or optimize my current one. This client I’m optimizing for offers both “eyelash extensions” and “microblading” to their clients. For both of those services, I have created a child page under services describing each service. The screenshot shows how to add child and parent pages on Weebly.
One of the biggest downsides of Weebly is that it has a disorganized way of organizing parent and child pages. If you add a page under service, it does not inherit the parent into the URL. This makes Weebly SEO-unfriendly for the long run, and why we recommend migrating to some businesses.
3. Don’t Get Distracted by Meta Keywords
Many Weebly websites I have optimized have hundreds of keywords stuffed into the Weebly Meta Keywords field. Do Meta Keywords affect your website SEO? Many SEO authorities like Yoast say that meta keywords are no longer effective and have been since retired by Google.
I am not sure why Weebly still has this function as an option, but many websites get distracted by this field and spend way too much time adding keywords into this field rather than adding keywords onto the page or description and title tags.
4. Add Custom HTML to Header & Footer
Moving into the final step of optimizing the SEO on your Weebly website, we will move into adding custom tags to the header or footer of your website. From structured data to integrated analytics tools, it’s important to understand how custom tags can add functionality to your website. How do I add schema to my Weebly website?
Adding Structured Data to Weebly
Depending on what type of website you have, adding structured data to your website can be a very effective way to generate results across Google search engines. For local businesses, use a structured data generator to create a schema that can help you rank better on Google My Business.
Contact us and we can work to create, implement, and measure structured data across your Weebly website.
Add Google Tag Manager to Weebly
Adding Google Tag Manager to your Weebly website can help you add multiple tags to your website with only one Javascript tag. This gif shows some of the tags that are available through GTM to add to your website.
We also have this video where Paul explains how to add the Google Tag Manager to Weebly:
From SalesForce to direct connection to every Google analytics platform, this is a good place to start for people who are working to optimize their website.
5. Build Backlinks using Google My Business or Directories
If you are a local business, you’ve probably heard of Google My Business. This is a great way for local businesses to get attention from customers who are nearby. Even if this doesn’t apply, you can still look for some reputable directories to sign up for.
Directories will help you build backlinks to your website, and although these aren’t the best backlinks, they are a good place to start.
Hire Me to Optimize Your Weebly Website
We can create a custom SEO campaign for your website targeting essential keywords to grow traffic from high intent customers. From content plans to website optimizations, we can effectively optimize your Weebly website for SEO.
