 Did you know that you can build a website that Google loves, without the need for coding skills? We'll explore the rise of effortless website builders such as Weebly and highlight pros and cons through our own case study. Find out how you can create a beautiful and functional website quickly and easily, while considering important SEO strategies, so your site is visible to your target audience... Building a great website is easier than ever! It used to be expensive and time consuming to custom-build websites. Then came Wordpress, which made it quicker/cheaper, however it still required web development support, sites got hacked and there were sometimes the issues of failing plug-ins. Now we have website builders like Weebly that make it easy for anyone to build a beautiful looking website, without the need for technical web development skills! Learn more about the wonders of website builders and how to build a website that Google (and other search engines) love, so your business is visible! The Rise of Effortless Website BuildersThis is a topic that regularly has debate among web developers and marketeers over the pros and cons of a free or paid website builder versus a custom-built website or somewhere inbetween. As recently as a few years back, this debate was much easier to win. But these days, online website builders such as Weebly are more advanced than ever. Even if going with the argument that 'some website is better than no website' - using one of these online builders is often far preferable over paying a freelancer to create a (potential) mess of HTML that could break with the next browser update or get hacked. Google also agrees that 'you don't need to know how to code to build a great website'. See Google Business Options, Options, Options! Here are some popular no-code website builders:
It's worth considering the type of site that you need and finding the best fit. For a simple content website we love Weebly as it's beautiful, easy to drag and drop and you'll be up and running in no time. We'll use Weebly as the example in this article to speak directly from experience. How To: Get Your Weebly Site Visible in GoogleWeebly automatically designs websites with SEO in mind, featuring elements like sitemaps, SEO-friendly HTML formatting, meta descriptions, and responsive design, so you're already on the right track. Apart from some SEO basics (and this article is NOT) an SEO guide, here are some Weebly-specific tips we came across: Firstly as a minimum - you must upgrade from Weebly's free website builder to the paid version in order to “get search indexing". If you plan to go anywhere with SEO in Weebly, this is a critical step. Weebly also provide some pretty useful SEO tips and suggestions in their Help Center, complete with advice on:
Highlighted Tips:
Remember that SEO is an ongoing process, and staying informed about best practices is key to improving your website’s visibility online. Also keep in mind that optimised websites have a higher chance of appearing prominently in search results based on relevant keywords, benefiting both search engines and visitors. READ MORE: To understand the importance of SEO see: 'Why SEO is (still) Important for Businesses in 2024...' Case Study: Why We Chose Weebly Vs a Custom Website BuildWe have web development skills but still chose to build our consultancy website through Weebly, starting with a site for the Australian market and more recently a site for the UK market. The Benefits: 1. It's Fast to Set Up Once we'd decided on the site structure and content, setting up the 6 page Weebly site took less than a day to get up and running (and a fair chunk of this time was spent on custom icons/images and SEO housekeeping). 2. It Just Works Even the excellent Wordpress is far from 'plug-and-play' and requires some developer knowledge to really get the best out of it. If you're only customising one of the base themes in Weebly, it really is difficult to break it. Also massive time savings on cross browser testing and mobile testing here. 3. Security We're targeting Wordpress* here (perhaps unfairly), since it is often the subject of hack attempts. With builders like Weebly, the security is taken care of since the entire solution is hosted. * It should be noted that there are secure hosted solutions available for Wordpress such as WPEngine that are an option. And the down side... It's not all roses though. There are definitely limitations to using a website builder like Weebly which can be frustrating. Moving the site to another provider isn't particularly easy either if you decide to go elsewhere later, so do consider all options before making a final decision. Website Builders & SEOThe Positives for SEO It used to be that custom websites ranked a lot better than templated sites but things have changed. We can't speak on behalf of all website builders but we've used Weebly and have had great success with visibility of our site in Google search. Weebly & SEO Here are a few of the highlights and tips: 1. Easy to access 'SEO' areas for pages and posts in Weebly allow you to add meta descriptions, SEO page titles, alt tags for images and permalinks. It's also quite simple to drop in header code for Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager (GTM) to start monitoring or tagging your site.  2. URL formatting is mostly quite SEO friendly out of the box and doesn't need much work. As mentioned above you can also tweak the permalinks for internal pages quite easily via the side panel. 3. Weebly automatically adds Facebook Opengraph (OG) code by default - making it more user friendly to share articles on Facebook (though Twitter cards are not automatically added) 4. Load times / performance grade are reasonable with a bit of basic image optimisation. Be sure to double check your site in Google's Page Speed Insights' Tool here. The Negatives for SEO Here are some of the areas we found that Weebly fell short:
Our Experience & ResultsSo what was the end result after the first 6 months? Below we'll share some results for our agency site that was launched in Australia (our UK site is in the early stages)... Please Note: Technical challenges and lack of perfect PageSpeed score aside... not many sites make it to page one in Google within the first 6 or even 12 months. Results: In our first six months of launching an Australian website we saw impressions for around 100+ non-branded phrases on page one and this improved steadily. One of the most competitive terms the site ranked for was 'digital marketing help'. Is this thanks to Weebly? Or is it due to some solid SEO principles and good quality content applied to a site? From our experience, we'd have to suggest the latter. The Weebly Review: Final VerdictWeebly sites are simple, beautiful and accessible for anyone without the need for coding skills. However, they come with some limitations and are not a magic bullet for SEO. However, if good SEO practices are applied to a Weebly site, along with an understanding of how the website builder works - SEO success is certainly achievable.
Coupled with security and time-saving benefits, Weebly and other website builders are a viable option for those looking to get a decent quality website up and running quickly. We give Weebly the thumbs up!
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