8 Best Practices For Implementing & Boosting Framer SEO

When you finish creating a stunning website with Framer, it's tempting to want to share it immediately with the world. But what if you discovered that no one could find it online? Like any other web design platform, Framer SEO matters. It helps your site get discovered by search engines so that real people can find it. In this article, we'll cover the basics of SEO for Framer websites and how to optimize your site so you can achieve your goals.

NUMI's solution is Framer design, a powerful tool to help you achieve your goals. Our team knows how to customize Framer websites for optimal performance, including SEO. We'll help you create a site that looks great, works well, gets found online 

What Is SEO, And Why Is It Important?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing a website's technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so that its pages are easily findable, more relevant, and popular for user search queries. As a consequence, search engines rank them better.

On-page SEO

Search engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit both the user search experience and the page’s ranking by featuring content that fulfills user search needs. This includes:

• The use of relevant keywords in titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headlines (H1)

These feature descriptive URLs with keywords rather than strings of numbers and schema markup to specify the page's content meaning, among other SEO marketing best practices.

SEO Is An Important Marketing Channel

SEO is a critical marketing channel. Organic search delivers 53% of all website traffic. That’s one big reason why the global SEO industry is forecast to reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO drives real business results for brands, businesses and organizations of all sizes.

Fragmented Search Journey

Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a product/service, their journey typically begins with a search. Today, search is incredibly fragmented. Users may search on:

• Traditional web search engines (e.g., Google, Microsoft Bing)
• Social platforms (e.g., YouTube, TikTok)
• Retailer websites (e.g., Amazon)

61% of U.S. online shoppers start their product search on Amazon, compared to 49% who start on a search engine like Google. Also of note from that same research: 

• 32% start on Walmart.com
• 20% start on YouTube
• 19% start on Facebook.

SEO's Impact

15% start on Instagram. 11% start on TikTok. Trillions of searches are conducted every year. Search is often the primary source of website traffic, making it essential to be search engine friendly on any platform where people can search for your brand or business.  

This means that improving your visibility and ranking higher in search results than your competition can positively impact your bottom line.

SEO Is Critical for Brands and Businesses

SEO is also essential because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive – filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include: 

• Knowledge panels
• Featured snippets
• Maps
• Images
• Videos
• Top stories (news)
• People Also
• Ask
• Carousels

Another reason SEO is critical for brands and businesses is that, unlike other marketing channels, good SEO work is sustainable. When a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Traffic from social media is, at best, unreliable and a fraction of what it once was.

SEO Builds Trust

SEO is the foundation of holistic marketing, where everything your company does matters. Once you understand what your users want, you can then implement that knowledge across your:

• Campaigns (paid and organic)
• Website content
• Social media properties

SEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales). It also builds trust, a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings.

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How Does SEO Work?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), making it easier for users to find your site. SEO is about creating content that appeals to human visitors and search engine bots. The better optimized your content is for SEO, the more likely it is to rank on the first page of SERPs.  

When someone searches for something, your goal is to be on that first page because most people don’t look past it. Ranking is the name of the game, and SEO is about influencing how I rank.  There are several ways to improve your SEO score, but backlinks are the backbone of SEO.

Backlinks: The Backbone of SEO

There were several search engines back in the day, but Google stood out because of a genius invention called PageRank. The idea behind it was simple but powerful: if lots of other websites link to your page, your page must be useful. 

Earning Backlinks

This concept is still at the heart of SEO today. Backlinks from other reputable sites signal to search engines that your content is valuable.

Imagine each backlink is a vote of confidence. The more high-quality votes (or links) you get, the higher you’re likely to rank. Not all links are equal. If Apple.com links to you, that’s like getting a supercharged vote, because of domain authority. 

Domain Authority: Why Not All Links Are Equal

Every website has a domain authority score based on how many and strong its backlinks are. Websites like Apple or CNN have massive domain authority, so a link carries more weight than one from a smaller, lesser-known site. In SEO, building up your site’s domain authority over time is crucial for long-term success. 

Keywords: The Words That Matter

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines. These help Google understand what your page is about. But it’s not as simple as stuffing your page with keywords; overusing them can get you penalized.

Keyword Hierarchy

You need to use them naturally and strategically, like putting them in your:

• Page title
• Headings
• Throughout your content

Keywords also come in hierarchies. If someone searches "minivan camping" in California, the broader keyword is "minivan camping." To capture more traffic, you want your content to cover both broad and specific terms.

Crawlers: The Spiders of the Web

Search engines use programs called crawlers, spiders, or bots to scan the internet. These crawlers go from page to page, following links and collecting data to store in a massive index database. 

When someone searches, Google checks this index for relevant pages based on:

• The keywords
• Links
• Other factors

Sitemaps for SEO

To ensure Google’s crawlers don’t miss any of your pages, websites can use sitemaps—a list of all the pages on your site. This helps the crawlers do their job more efficiently.

Scoring and Penalties: How Search Engines Rank You

When someone searches for something, Google doesn’t just spit out results randomly, it ranks them based on several factors. While backlinks are the most important, some penalties can hurt your score. 

For instance: 

• Keyword Stuffing: Using a keyword too many times can get you penalized. 
• Duplicate Content: If your page is identical to others, you won’t rank well. 
• Slow Loading Speed: A slow website can drive visitors away, and Google penalizes you. 
• Mobile Optimization: You'll lose out if your site isn’t mobile-friendly. The length of visitors' stay on your page is a critical factor in your ranking. 

If people click on your link but quickly leave and go to another site (this is called "bounce rate"), that’s a red flag for Google. It suggests your page might not be as relevant as they initially thought.

Google Analytics: The Secret Tool

Google offers a free tool called Google Analytics, which tracks how people interact with your site. This data helps Google understand how long visitors stay on your site, how many pages they view, and how often they bounce back to search results. All of this helps determine how well your page satisfies user intent.

SEO is about balancing three major things: getting backlinks from trusted sites, creating relevant content for your audience, and ensuring your website is technically optimized so Google can crawl and rank it. Once you have these in place, you can climb those rankings! 

NUMI's Design Guild

NUMI is a framer web design agency that world-class framer developers and product designers power. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing/vetting/hiring needs for design. Our fabuolous design team ensures all your design work is done well.

NUMI helps with:

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs
  

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today.

Is Framer Good For SEO?

Framer SEO is off to a good start right out of the box. This website builder automatically generates your site's XML sitemaps and a robots.txt file. That means search engines can easily crawl your:

• Framer site 
• Index its page

Framer also gives you control over the technical aspects of SEO. You can customize titles, descriptions, and URLs for individual pages to optimize how your content appears in search results.

The Real SEO Drivers: Content and Links

The website builder you use isn’t the magic bullet that will guarantee you top search rankings. Surprised? Don’t be! While tools like Framer (or any other platform) can help with technical SEO, your content and backlinks are the real drivers of rankings.

Relevance and Trust

Google ranks websites based on relevance and trustworthiness. It determines relevance by analyzing your content so your blog, product pages, and overall copy must be spot-on. As for trustworthiness, that’s all about backlinks. 

The more high-quality sites link back to yours, the more credible your website looks to Google. So, even if your website looks incredible, you won't rank well if the content and links aren’t there. 

Framer’s Technical SEO Features

Now, back to Framer. When it comes to handling technical SEO, things like:

• Crawlability
• Sitemaps
• SSL certificates

Framer has your back. It takes care of essential things like:

XML Sitemaps

Framer automatically generates a sitemap for you, so search engines can easily crawl and index your pages.

Robots.txt File 

It helps search engines know the following;

• Which parts of your site to crawl
• Where to find your sitemap

SSL Certificate

Framer gives you a secure HTTPS connection by default, ensuring your site’s data is:

• Protected
• Ready for ranking 

Fast Loading 

Speed is a big deal in SEO, and Framer uses tools like CDNs, lazy loading, and pre-rendering to keep your site quick.

Final Thoughts on Framer SEO

While Framer can’t write your content or build backlinks for you, it provides a solid technical foundation. For anyone focused on design but still wanting decent SEO, Framer is a great option. 

Just remember that if you want to climb those Google rankings, the content and link-building game counts.

Framer Built-in SEO Features & Functionalities

Analytics provides a comprehensive solution for tracking everything on your website. Use built-in analytics that is not sensitive to analytics blockers while staying entirely GDPR-friendly (no cookie banner needed). 

You can also track your progress with integrations such as:

• Google Analytics
• Segment
• HubSpot, which you can install with a single click

Metadata: Get Your Pages Optimized for SEO Right Out of the Box

Give your page a title and description, and Framer handles optimizing for search engines. You can easily add and manage the information displayed in search engine results, making it a convenient solution for improving your website’s visibility and ranking.

Sitemap: Enjoy Automatic Sitemaps With Framer’s SEO Features

Framer makes SEO optimization easy with its indexing and sitemap controls. With one click, you can customize page URLs and titles, and Framer will automatically generate new sitemaps. 

Real-time updates ensure search engines can access the latest information, improving search visibility and driving more traffic to your site.

Semantics: Use Tags to Improve Your Site’s Organization and Readability

Tags are a way to structure and define the content on your website. You can improve the organization and readability of your website, making it easier for users and search engines to understand and navigate the content. 

Whether you’re building a simple landing page or a complex web application, using tags in Framer effectively ensures your website’s content is properly organized and easily accessible. With the ability to use a variety of tags, including:

• Header tags
• Image tags allow you to create a website that meets your specific needs and goals.

Accessibility: Improve Your Website’s Accessibility for Both Users and SEO

Accessibility is one of the most essential building blocks on the web. It allows the most people to enjoy the content you create. While Framer can do some small things automatically, it comes down to the meaning you add to the elements on your site. 

Framer gives you excellent tools to improve accessibility, such as:

• Semantic and Frame Tags
• Image ALT text
• Tab order
• ARIA label
• Reduced Motion option

Lighthouse Scores: How Framer’s Built-In SEO Features Improve Performance Metrics

Using the latest web technologies and performance optimization techniques, Framer outputs websites that score well on Google Lighthouse, a popular performance analysis tool for evaluating the quality of web pages. 

Out of the box, websites created with Framer are optimized for:

• Fast loading times
• Efficient use of resources
• Great user experience

SEO Metrics

These lead to high scores on Google Lighthouse metrics such as:

• First Contentful Paint
• Speed Index
• Time to Interactive

Server-Side Rendering: Understand How Pre-Rendering Helps With SEO

Framer pre-renders every website as soon as you deploy it (server-side rendering). The pre-rendered HTML ensures that the Google bot can analyze your website without running any JavaScript and at a considerable speed boost, favoring your site in the rankings.

Pre-rendering Benefits

Pre-rendering works when you publish a website; we start a small process on the server that uses JavaScript to render you:

• HTML
• CSS

After a successful render, we store the HTML, which we can send to your visitors immediately, resulting in faster load times.

Hosting: Built-In Hosting for Optimal Performance and Reliability

Framer offers a convenient and efficient website hosting solution with its built-in hosting feature. You only need to click the Publish button, and your site will be deployed within seconds. 

The Framer hosting infrastructure is top-notch, designed for ease of use, speed, and dependability. It:

• Utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Features CloudFront
• S3
• Multiple load-balanced frontends with large in-memory caches, ensuring that your site is accessible from anywhere in the world with optimal performance

Is Webflow SEO Better Than Framer SEO?

When it comes to comparing Webflow and Framer for SEO, it’s like comparing a seasoned expert and a promising newcomer. Both bring some great features to the table, but one just has a bit more polish. Webflow is the SEO veteran in this showdown. It’s not only packed with tools but also makes optimizing your site feel seamless. 

You get full control over title tags, meta descriptions, headers, alt text, and structured data immediately. Think of Webflow as a Swiss Army knife for SEO; everything you need is already built-in and ready to go.

SEO for Framer

It’s almost too easy to adjust on-page SEO elements, whether tweaking a meta tag or fine-tuning your headers for optimal search engine love. Plus, Webflow’s clean code and ability to customize things like 301 redirects and canonical tags put it ahead for anyone serious about search rankings. 

Framer, on the other hand, is still honing its SEO game. It’s fantastic for beautiful designs and clean code, and it covers the essentials like meta descriptions and page speed—so you’re not starting from scratch in the SEO race.

Framer vs. Webflow

Framer is more focused on being the go-to tool for design pros, so some deeper SEO capabilities Webflow offers are still in development. If your priority is sleek visuals and minimal fuss, Framer’s a solid option. 

But for those who want that extra layer of control over SEO strategy, Webflow’s got the upper hand. Ultimately, Webflow wins this round, but Framer is catching up quickly. It may not be long before we see Framer step up its game, especially as SEO becomes an even bigger priority for creators and designers.

Get the Inside Scoop on NUMI and Framer SEO

Framer SEO is still developing, but it’s got a good start for beautiful designs. 

NUMI is a framer web design agency that world-class framer developers and product designers power. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing/vetting/hiring needs for design. Our fabuolous design team ensures all your design work is done well.

NUMI helps with:

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs
  

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today.

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8 Best Practices For Implementing & Boosting Framer SEO

1. Meta Titles and Descriptions: Your SEO Superpowers

You can provide custom title and description metadata for your entire site or individual pages in your site settings. You can also set custom titles and descriptions for your CMS pages. 

These elements help search engines understand your pages' content and purpose. Adding compelling copy to your site's title and description can increase clicks on search results, boosting your SEO performance.

2. Keywords: Create Quality Content

People previously added keywords in a specific section to manipulate search engines. However, search engines now ignore those keyword sections. Instead, they analyze all the text on your:

• Site 
• Extract relevant keywords

These keywords are determined based on their presence on your page and in your domain, as well as if other sites link to your site using those keywords. To influence this process, focus on creating high-quality content incorporating the keywords you want to rank for.

CMS & SEO

Various tools and resources are available to assist you with this. If you have content like a blog, news articles, or documentation, using the built-in CMS (Content Management System) is recommended. 

This lets you easily display content lists and automatically generate pages for each piece. Search engines can then crawl and analyze these pages.

3. Semantic Text and Elements: Don’t Forget About Structure

Proper semantic text and elements on your page are crucial for accessibility and SEO. A strong main heading (H1) is also important for SEO performance. 

Adjusting semantic tags on headers and image descriptions helps search engines understand your page's structure.

4. Images: Set “Alt” Tags

The “Alt” text of images is essential for both accessibility (e.g., for screen-readers) and SEO. Google and other search engines use it to understand what the image is about. Do not necessarily add keywords here, as Google will penalize it. 

Framer automatically optimizes the rest to ensure great image SEO. Tip: To improve accessibility, make sure to end the “Alt” text with punctuation (like a dot).

5. Videos: Set “Poster” Tags

Google and other search engines use the poster to display a preview (thumbnail) in search results and snippets (source). 

Ensure the poster is a minimum size of 60 x 30 px. Framer automatically optimizes the rest to ensure great video SEO.

6. Structured Data: Use JSON-LD

Consider implementing structured data using JSON-LD. This will enhance search results for content like events, articles, books, videos, and more. 

Data-nosnippet directive 

The ‘data-nosnippet’ attribute directs Google not to use certain parts of the page when creating the snippet for that page in search results.

Noindex Directive

This directive can be useful if you don’t want Google to rewrite your meta description when displaying your page in the search results. Preventing Google from rewriting meta descriptions might decrease your click-through rate, especially for long-tail keywords. 

This directive will prevent Google from using that content for any type of snippet, including rich snippets, and not just the meta descriptions.

Noindex Impact

This means that if you set this directive on a page level, Google will not use any of that content in snippets, which could impact the appearance of your page in rich results. It's important to note that while ‘data-nosnippet’ prevents certain page parts from appearing in search snippets, structured data on the page can still be used to generate rich results. 

Noindex Details

This means that while specific text content may be excluded from snippets, the structured data markup itself can still be utilized by Google to generate rich snippets. You can read more about the details of using this directive in Google’s documentation. 

If you still want to use this directive, you can easily add it to any layer in your project by using the ‘Googlebot: skip’ option in the accessibility section in the right sidebar.

7. Redirects: Retain Traffic

When replacing pages with a new design or reorganizing your site structure, it's essential to use redirects to ensure a smooth transition for old link traffic. This helps prevent traffic loss due to typos or changes in your site structure. 

You can create redirects in Framer by accessing your Site Settings. Just enter the old URL and specify the desired redirection path.

8. Analytics: Track Your Progress

Track your SEO success with Framer's built-in analytics. Measure your site traffic and identify its sources. Start seeing if your SEO setup is paying off. Explore more about analytics in Framer. Framer has a built-in analytics feature. 

It offers a site setting to integrate Google Analytics. Simply enter your analytics ID, and we will configure your scripts.

How To Do Keyword Research For Your Website?

Finding the right keywords to optimize your website is crucial in enhancing your visibility on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

Google Search Console provides insights into how your site performs in search results, while Google Analytics offers an overview of your traffic sources and user behavior.

Keyword Research

Start by using Google Analytics to identify what terms visitors use to find your site. This data can provide a list of relevant keywords already driving traffic to your Webflow sites. 

Google Search Console can show you the average monthly search volume for these keywords, helping you understand the potential reach of optimizing them.

Uncover New Keyword Opportunities

SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner can be used to discover new keyword opportunities. Look for keywords with high search volumes and relevance to your site's content. 

Remember, the main goal is to rank high in search results, so choose keywords that closely align with what your target audience is searching for.

Optimize Your Framer Website for SEO

Once you've identified your keywords, it's time to incorporate them into your Webflow website. For on-page SEO in Webflow, integrate your keywords into critical areas like meta titles, header tags, and in the alt tags of any images.

Specifically, your title tag should include a relevant keyword at the start, as it carries significant weight in search engines' ranking algorithms.

Subscribe To A Guild of World Class Framer Developers with Our Framer Web Design Agency Today

NUMI is a framer web design agency that world-class framer developers and product designers power. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing/vetting/hiring needs for design. Our fabuolous design team ensures all your design work is done well.

NUMI helps with:

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs
  

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today.

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