Table of Contents
With more than 5 million installations in over 50 languages, Elementor is one of the top-rated WordPress page builders on the web. It is known for enabling users to create visually appealing web pages without requiring them to code.
The design features allow people to create a wide range of website pages – covering everything from portfolios to ecommerce stores. To capitalize on the high-quality nature of these Elementor pages, users are adopting a digital marketing strategy called Elementor SEO.
What is Elementor SEO?
Elementor SEO is a digital marketing strategy that aims to boost organic search traffic to sites made with the Elementor web design platform. As one of the most popular WordPress website builders, Elementor has many features to develop high-quality content. These include:
- Free and paid WordPress themes like Astra, Hello, and Ocean WP
- WooCommerce store integration
- Template library with more than 200 options
- Design tutorials
- Almost 100 widgets for creating web pages (headers, text, social icons, etc.)
- Compatibility with the WordPress Gutenberg block editor
Combined with SEO techniques like link building and keyword research, it increases your site’s chances for higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Over time, better visibility on SERPs leads to more organic traffic, which means more potential customers on your website.
Is Elementor good for SEO?
When compared to other WordPress website builders, Elementor is SEO-friendly. You will find that the editor is relatively simple to use and quite intuitive. From a user perspective, the Elementor page builder is one of the best options out there. Here are some of the top features that it offers:
- Custom font integration
- Responsive design for mobile optimization
- Designer templates
- Smart popups
- Drag and drop editor
The different design options help webmasters create attractive, well laid-out landing pages. Inexperienced web designers can follow hundreds of YouTube tutorials or step-by-step guides to take full advantage of these features.
In the end, though, Elementor can’t do it all for you. Knowledge of web design principles is key if you want a highly customized WordPress site. Elementor allows you to personalize almost every aspect of a page.
For overall site performance, you may want to look out for only a couple of issues. Anticipating roadblocks ahead of time will help you create a better site in the long run.
Common Elementor SEO problems
Whenever you use a page builder, you’re bound to run into a few issues. While Elementor’s design features create beautiful web pages, they can also create extra code that may slow down your website. Trusting that website data to a third-party platform also runs the risk of security issues. And Elementor, like many online platforms, has had these problems in the past.
Creates unnecessary code
Elementor produces more code than the standard WordPress editor. In fact, research has shown that a single Elementor widget can slow down web page load time by more than 60%.
Human web designers typically eliminate as much unnecessary code as possible. This is because extra code takes longer for the browser to load. Plus, it also takes longer to write.
When you use a visual editor like Elementor, you don’t control the code that’s being written. You then have the potential for extra data that doesn’t affect the actual web pages. The more of this extra data you have, the more time it takes for browsers to retrieve and display the content.
Below is an example of how Elementor produces unnecessary code for certain pages:
Standard page code:
Page code with Elementor:
All of this extra code takes longer for the server to pull up. The result is slower page speed. Overall, the more elements you add to your website, the bigger this potential impact becomes.
Has security gaps
In both 2017 and 2020, Elementor faced security issues that affected upwards of a million websites. The 2017 issue stemmed from a setting that gave unrestricted backend access to users other than the site admins. In 2020, a cyber-attack left Elementor Pro users vulnerable to external threats.
Both of these incidents resulted in quick fixes, but they created doubt about Elementor’s security protocols. If you use this software to build your website, ensure your security settings are set up to protect your data.
How to do Elementor SEO
While Elementor helps with frontend web development, there are things you can do alongside it to improve your SEO rankings. These techniques help you build a larger audience through top-notch content and website design. Their effectiveness will help offset the slower loading times that the Elementor editor creates.
On-page SEO
Your on-page SEO strategy involves all of the visible content on your website. This includes things like your listing in SERPs, written content, images, headers, and more.
After doing on-page SEO, the search engine should understand your content better. Users should also be able to navigate pages with ease and find the information they’re looking for as well.
Keyword research
Doing proper keyword research is a major component of successful SEO. It involves brainstorming relevant industry topics and finding words or phrases that people are searching for. To generate effective results, your target keywords should also be relevant to your business.
The goal of this process is to find the main topic for your content. Once you’ve found a keyword that is both relevant and sought-after, you can decide how to create your content.
During your research, you should also study current top-ranking posts to understand what approaches rank well in the search engine. Oftentimes, the search engine will show you exactly the tone, style, or angle to use for your own content.
Here are step-by-step instructions for discovering the best keywords:
- Brainstorm keyphrases and buzzwords in your industry.
- For each item on the list, brainstorm subtopics and keywords that match.
- Type the keywords into Google and see what type of content is on the first page of results. This is how you will discover the search intent behind the terms, which will guide your content creation.
- Use the SERPs to find related words and phrases. The “People also ask” section is a great place to find more options.
Other places to find related search queries include:
Once you’ve done your research, incorporate target keywords throughout your content. This helps search engines understand the page’s main topic. When they understand the page’s main topic, they have a better idea of which searchers to show the page to.
Great title tags and meta descriptions
Your SERP listing is the bridge between your website and search engine users. If your title tag and meta description aren’t persuasive and/or informative, people will be less likely to click on your listing.
All your hard work creating beautiful pages in Elementor won’t matter if no one clicks on your search listings. When writing title tags, use persuasive adjectives, appropriate word count, and target keywords to make it as relevant to the user’s search as possible.
Here is a great example of a title tag that is both persuasive and informative:
Meta descriptions are the place to expand on your title tag. You can use this space to add details about your products and services, pricing, and more.
Internal links
Crawlers follow internal links to find new web pages. Without internal links, they may not be able to find the content you’ve created. When crawlers can‘t find your pages, they can’t index them, which means that your content won’t show in search results.
Ensure that the anchor text you use is relevant to the content on the page you are linking to:
When including internal links, make sure you’re not just adding them to add them. Internal links should add value, allowing visitors to go more in-depth on a related topic should they please. Also, make sure that you go back to older pages when you create a new post and add internal links to the new page.
Image SEO
What’s great about Elementor is that it is a visual page builder. The workflow makes it easy to add multimedia elements like YouTube videos, images, and more.
Once you’ve added these components, you’ll want to optimize them using image SEO. This includes tactics like compressing file sizes, adding alt text and schema markup, creating image sitemaps, and lazy loading images on the page.
These techniques improve the crawling and indexing of images by making them easier to understand. With more context, crawlers gain a more accurate picture of the entire page’s content.
They also reduce the amount of space that images and videos take up. Since Elementor pages already load slightly slower, image SEO can greatly improve user experience without sacrificing multimedia content.
Content organization
Organizing your content well is crucial for improving the indexing process. Headers, sidebars, and jump links make it easier for crawlers to analyze and interpret the page’s content.
It also helps users. Jump links help them skip to relevant areas of the page rather than endlessly scroll to find the parts they’re interested in.
The Elementor “header” widget allows you to break the content down into sections easily. Take advantage of this design option to automatically update the HTML code to recognize H1 tags and various sections on the page.
You can also use the Elementor Header & Footer plugin to design and organize additional information. Use this tool to move contact information, social media links, and more to a better location on the page.
Off-page SEO
Your off-page SEO strategy is where you generate external sources of organic traffic through backlinks. Backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors for SEO. This is because they show Google that your site is trusted within your industry.
Search engines want to see that you have backlinks from other trusted sources. These are like upvotes to Google. If you earn them from high-authority websites, you are further demonstrating the quality of your content. Gaining Google’s trust through backlinks is one of the surest and most effective ways to boost search rankings.
Run an active social media account
Having a presence on social media can help generate backlinks to your Elementor site. You can use your profile(s) to:
- Respond to FAQs
- Share industry updates
- Promote products and services
- Showcase new pieces of content
- Develop partnerships with other businesses
- Increase brand awareness
The impact goes both ways as well. Elementor has customizable social media icons that you can add to your site:
This keeps users engaged and traffic flowing to your social media accounts while the accounts keep traffic flowing to your site. Most importantly, by amplifying your content and partnering with other businesses, you can increase the likelihood of earning backlinks from valuable sources in your industry.
Reclaim lost backlinks
Referring domains sometimes delete or change web pages that had a link to your site. This can cause you to lose the backlink and its influence on your SEO performance. Fortunately, there are ways to reclaim these lost links and regrow your backlink profile.
Use a backlink checker like this one from Ahrefs to locate lost links:
Once you find them, try reaching out to the site owner to see if they’ll add a new link to replace the old one. This saves you time because it doesn’t require you to create new content. You have to find new opportunities from old ones.
Write guest posts
While some people have claimed that guest blogging for SEO is dead, it remains one of the most popular forms of link building, so long as your posts provide value.
In this arrangement, you write content for someone else, and they may allow you to link back to your site in the content. This allows you to build relationships with other brands in your niche while also improving your credibility with the search engine.
To write guest posts, research some of the top websites in your niche. Try to look for sites with high domain authority scores and a similar focus to yours.
Once you’ve identified reputable brands, determine if they solicit guest posts. Many websites will have a dedicated page for guest post guidelines where they will explain what they look for in a post, how to submit it, and how it should be formatted, and if they will allow you to link back to your site in it.
Fix broken links
Another external opportunity is to fix broken links on other sites. Broken links are links to content that no longer lives on the internet. Because the web page isn’t live, a broken link will take users to a 404 page when they click on it.
This looks unprofessional, results in a negative user experience, and can result in users abandoning your site to find the information they were looking for.
Ultimately, broken links harm a website’s SEO metrics like bounce rate and the number of pages visited. Using a tool like Broken Link Checker will help you find the links:
Then, you can offer the website owners a replacement piece of content. Whether you create a new web page or offer them an existing one on your site is up to you. This is an effective strategy because it builds your link profile while helping others fix their broken links (thereby improving user experience).
Technical SEO
Your technical SEO strategy is all the backend work that makes a site both user and crawler-friendly. Creating a beautiful website with Elementor won’t matter if it doesn’t load fast, display correctly across all screen sizes, or isn’t accessible by crawlers. These SEO practices will ensure that pages load correctly and that the search engine can find everything it needs to index your site.
Switch to HTTPS
To make your site more credible, switch it to HTTPS encryption. This also protects user data and makes the site appear more legitimate to the search engine.
Without HTTPS, a user will see a security notification like this one:
That’s why having encryption is a ranking signal for Google. It is a clear indicator of a good user experience.
Simplify URL structure
Every new page you create with Elementor should have a simple but clear URL structure. It would help if you did this for every web page, making the entire page more crawler and user-friendly.
When creating a URL for a page, make sure it includes your focus keyword, and it is clear enough that visitors will have an idea of what to expect on that page.
For example, on the following page, the slug is the focus keyword “Webflow SEO,” separated by dashes (which Google prefers to underscores):
The keyword for this page is “Webflow SEO,” and it is directly behind the subfolder (“blog”) for the full URL:
https://granwehr.com/blog/webflow-seo
Simplifying your URLs makes it easier for users and crawlers to understand the topic of the page. URLs that have a string of random characters in them provide no context for the content.
Fix duplicate content issues
Duplicate web pages negatively impact your SEO. They confuse search engine crawlers, and they can cause two pieces of your own content to compete against each other in the SERPs.
Fix duplicate content issues by adding canonical tags. You can also tag a page as “noindex, follow” so that crawlers can find it, but it won’t be put in the index. This eliminates the issue of content cannibalization.
Improve mobile functionality
When creating your site with Elementor, make sure you use the responsive design options. This ensures that your web pages function correctly across all screen sizes and that the content looks optimal. Other mobile SEO tactics include:
- Unblocking CSS, Javascript, and HTML code
- Reducing and eliminating pop-ups and animations
- Using high-quality images
- Adjusting button sizes for mobile users
Use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to find improvement opportunities. Since Google considers mobile content a top priority, mobile optimization can improve your rankings within the SERPs.
Add schema markup
Schema markup, a coding vocabulary that defines elements on your website, helps your pages stand out in the SERPs. This component gives crawlers more context to understand the content. You can use it to define things like:
- Star ratings
- Authors
- Customer reviews
- FAQs
- Logos
- Breadcrumbs
Schema markup increases the chances that you will have what are called rich snippets in search results. They display important information underneath the meta description. This includes additional details about the content, product, or service:
Taking the time to add schema markup will take your Elementor designs to the next level. They will show users the page’s value upfront while also allowing you to take up more space on the SERPs, which may increase your click-through rate for SEO.
Best WordPress SEO plugins for Elementor
While Elementor simplifies the website creation process, it runs best with add-ons. To make it even more effective, download some WordPress SEO plugins. Here are some of the best SEO plugin options that will help you manage the technical aspects of your site, monitor important metrics, and create quality content worthy of high rankings:
- Yoast SEO plugin: It allows you to add schema, meta descriptions, titles, and more straight from the editor.
- Rank Math SEO: This WordPress plugin has an SEO tab that lets you set target keywords, analyze important metrics, manage your sitemap, and more.
- All in One SEO Pack: A tool with technical capabilities that can help you create titles and descriptions, edit robots.txt files, and integrate your site with Google Analytics.
- Squirrly SEO: A plugin that helps with keyword research and tracks rankings.
Using these page builder plugins for SEO will help you simplify the search engine optimization process to focus on managing your content through Elementor.
Get a complimentary SEO audit
Millions of website owners use Elementor to build amazing web pages for their users. By building backlinks, installing plugins, developing content that satisfies user intent, and more, you can greatly increase your chances for higher ranks. As part of your Elementor SEO strategy, these techniques will ensure that users can find, access, and benefit from the content you’ve worked so hard to create.
Want to see how you’re doing with SEO? Get an instant SEO audit below. Or, schedule a free consultation to see how intent SEO can boost search traffic revenue by 700%.