Webflow Technical SEO: What It is and How to Ensure 0 Issues

Technical SEO is a set of practices that include creating SEO-friendly site structure, XML sitemap, and canonical tags, as well as fixing page speed and duplicate page content.

It also involves finding and fixing broken pages and more issues (e.g., errors, warnings, and notices), such as:

This ultimate guide will help you understand how to optimize and structure your website for crawling and how to fix all technical issues for a flawless SEO experience.

Let's start.

9 Key Steps to Excel at Technical SEO in Webflow

Compared to on-page SEO, technical SEO is focused more on user experience factors, including mobile optimization and speed.

The good news is that Webflow comes with clean code, streamlining the crawling process for better SEO rankings.

To excel at technical SEO in Webflow, follow the key steps below.

1. Create and submit a sitemap (seo-friendly site structure)

Well-defined XML sitemap helps search engines understand your website structure. The best part is that Webflow generates a sitemap once you build your website.

Here is how to add sitemap in Webflow:

1. Go to “Site” settings > ”SEO” tab > ”Sitemap” section.
2. Disable the auto-generate feature for the sitemap.

And if you want to build a custom site map, follow these steps:

1. Create your Google site map online using this XML-Sitemap.com generator.
2. Copy-paste your sitemap code into the provided Custom sitemap.xml field.
3. Save changes and click on "Publish".

Next, paste your sitemap URL into the provided field in Google Search Console and click "Submit."

Once you see the success status, you're all set!

SEO-friendly structure means that all your website pages are linked logically.

Put simply, your homepage is just a few clicks away from all the other web pages.

Next, you should pay attention to orphan pages. These are pages without any links leading to them, making it difficult for search engines and users to find them.

Using SemRush, you can easily find and monitor those pages.

It also lets you know how to fix them:

2. Create a robots.txt file

Robots.txt files are crucial in guiding search engine bots through websites, directing them to crawl specific URLs while disregarding others.

This protocol is vital for ensuring that search engines do not index the content.

Those could be confirmation pages, free audits, and login pages. They don’t have to rank, though.

To create a robot.txt file, go to “Site Settings” > “SEO”. Then choose the “robots.txt” section and add the pages you don’t want Google find and index.

In the example above, here are the pages we used:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /free-audit

Disallow: /free-strategy

3. Redirect management (dead pages with backlinks)

Links break if you delete, edit, or move the target page to a new URL without updating the new link. This leads the user to an error page.

Let's say we publish a blog post on Webflow SEO with the slug /webflow-seo-is-webflow-good-for-seo. Then, we suddenly realize that the URL is too long and decide to cut the slug and keep only /webflow-seo.

If we forget to redirect the old link to a new one and create a specified URL, users will land on a 404 error page.

That's why it is important to format your URLs properly or redirect them once you've done with the changes.

Head to “Site Settings” > “Publishing” and find the "301 redirects" option.

Input the old URL into the "Old path" field on the left. Then, enter the new URL into the "Redirect to path" field on the right side.

Click on “Add redirect path” and that’s it.

Then, there are permanent redirect issues.

Using permanent redirects (301 or 308) is helpful in various scenarios, like when moving to a new domain or fixing duplicate content.

However, it's best to use them sparingly. Redirecting pages too often can eat into your site's crawl budget. This makes it harder for search engines to index new pages. Also, too many redirects can confuse users.

So, it's wise to limit this redirect practice.

4. Add schema markup and custom code

Schema markup (i.e., structured data) is code that helps your web pages to acquire rich snippets and search engines better access a page's content.

Rich snippets, a direct outcome of schema markup implementation, elevate your search results by providing brief context and information beneath the title and description. These snippets increase user engagement and click-through rates.

Here's a Schema markup code example for blogs in Webflow:

5. Replace HTTP links with the new HTTPS versions

If any link on the website directs to the old HTTP version, search engines may get confused about which version of the page to prioritize for ranking.

The HTTPS protocol is crucial for keeping your data private and secure when surfing the web.
‍SemRush

How do we solve this issue?

Simply replacing all HTTP links with the new HTTPS versions.

6. Improve your page speed score

When you apply your website's URL in PageSpeedInsights, each of the site metrics will be highlighted in red or yellow. The metrics highlighted in green indicate that your website performs well.

Areas highlighted in red indicate deficiencies impacting your website's user experience negatively. Those areas harm your website's visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).

For mobile:

For desktop:

Yellow highlights areas that need improvement, but they're less urgent than the ones marked in red.

In the example mentioned, PageSpeed Insights pinpointed the Largest Contentful Paint (how long it takes for a webpage to load its largest element) as the main issue for both mobile and desktop devices.

To ensure your website is optimized for this metric, you need LCP—2.5 seconds or less.

Clicking on a specific element provides more detailed information.

All in all, you should focus on the following:

• Utilize tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze and enhance metrics that affect page loading speeds.
• Optimize for the Core Web Vitals, including metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint -2.5 seconds or less, First Input Delay - 100 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift - 0.1 or less.
• Minify CSS, JS, and HTML files in “Advance publishing options”.

Web servers and browsers can proces files more efficiently without excessive formatting (e.g., adding spacing, comments, and clear variable names), which otherwise increases network traffic.

In Webflow, managing the minification process to streamline code is straightforward. Just toggle off all the available options in the “Advanced publishing options”.

7. Include canonical tags

Canonical tags (rel= "canonical") specify a link as the primary version, guiding Google to index and prioritize that page for ranking.

Canonical tags prove useful when Google discovers identical content across multiple pages on your site. In other words, without canonical tags, it may struggle to decide which page to index and display in search results.

The tag is located within the <head> section of a duplicate page and has this format:

And SemRush helps you find issues related to canonical tags:

You can also check out the "Canonicalization" statistics:

8. Fix duplicate content issues

Duplicate content refers to identical or nearly identical content that appears on different pages across your website.

For example, imagine you plan to publish a blog post and web page targeting a specific keyword.

Like this:

• yourwebsite.com/blog/website-design-and-development-services
• yourwebsite.com/website-design-and-development

Because the content can be accessed through two distinct URLs targeting similar keywords, search engines are inclined to perceive them as identical pages. So, it's much more difficult for search engines to prioritize which page should appear in search results.

This leads to cannibalization (i.e., duplicate content issues).

You can leverage SemRush by navigating to the "Issues" tab and searching for "duplicate" to check for any detected errors.

In our example, we have 0 duplicate content issues.

In our example, we have 0 duplicate content issues.

9. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Creating a layout that fits mobile screens and suits touchscreen devices is crucial.Websites should fit various screen sizes, touchscreen controls, and loading times.

They also need captivating designs, especially since many users browse on mobile devices while on the go.

Luckily, Webflow enables you to design different layouts manually and have more control over the whole process.

Here is how:

This grid system example is optimized for mobile viewing. It features two rows and one column. Therefore, Webflow gives you more control over your design.

The following grid system example is dedicated to tablet viewing, with two rows and three columns.

Optimized for desktop viewing, this grid system consists of four columns and two rows.

Conclusion

If technical SEO is not implemented correctly, Google will not be able to access your content, so it will not appear in search results.

Follow the best practices we provided here, and you'll soon reach 0 issues!

Best of luck!

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