Weebly SEO: Main Features, Limitations, and SEO Tips

Written by: Branko Ilishev
Mar / 04 / 2024

Most eCommerce websites start out with good traffic numbers, but soon they “fall off a cliff” due to a lack of organic growth. Whether you use WordPress, Weebly, Wix, Shopify, or any other platform, regular SEO audits will enhance your eCommerce ranking aspirations. But, when you see nothing works, maybe you’ll have to change something in your current strategy.

This is the first sign why eCommerce SEO is a must for shop rankings.

But what exactly is SEO for eCommerce? What does it mean? How should I go about optimizing my site for eCommerce purposes?

Your web page should appear higher in Google SERPs so that the visitors can find the answers to their questions. Nowadays, eCommerce websites can benefit from SEO since most of the popular platforms have integrated tools. These tools and their features can help the webshop owner optimize the website and track down the ranking on search engines.

Today we’ll talk about Weebly as one of the simplest but still convenient platforms to build a business website. In addition, we’ll address the most significant Weebly SEO aspects and provide tips for search engine optimization.

To ensure you have a proper SEO strategy for the Weebly shop, you need to keep a few things in mind. For example, if you sell clothes and shoes, you need to include keywords such as “shoes,” “clothing,” and “fashion” in the title tag. Then, the description tags should contain these terms, too. Consider adding images to your web pages that contain alt text to describe each photo.

You should also create quality backlinks from other websites. For example, link your website to relevant blogs and other general information pages. A smart eCommerce SEO strategy involves monitoring data frequently and taking action accordingly.

The question is, are these Weebly SEO settings available and easy to use?

Weebly Main Features

In this part of the review, we will focus on a few features, including SEO, that Weebly offers as a website builder.

According to the users and tests, Weebly is an excellent value for money, relatively easy to use, and provides average design flexibility. People often choose it because of the rich free plan and the great basic SEO guides and tools.

The editor and builder are convenient, pretty basic, and able to be used by anyone. Weebly is an exceptional choice for small businesses and startups who want to keep things simple at the beginning.

an illustration of a person presenting Weebly SEO

What Does Weebly Offer for SEO?

SEO is the process of enhancing the website’s performance so that search engines recognize it as a relevant source or online shop. First, we’ll address several significant Weebly SEO features that are essential, and you get if you build a Weebly website:

  • Concise and understandable sitemap
  • Proper HTML formatting
  • Meta descriptions
  • Responsiveness for almost all devices
  • URL customization
  • Alt text to images
  • Editing meta titles
  • Page descriptions

So, when implementing SEO on Weebly shops, you may need to learn some Weebly SEO tricks and improve the site’s performance.

The best thing is that these features work great for local businesses. So, if you want to get your small business to the local SERPs, even these basic features can work for you.

Weebly SEO Limitations

One of the downsides of this platform is the several limitations when it comes to search engine optimization. It’s essential to mention all the potential downsides of Weebly SEO by comparing it to other popular eCommerce platforms you can also use for your business.

Many users claim that Weebly is a fantastic way to start with your SEO strategy, but it can’t be used in the long term. You will successfully rank for relevant keywords and create a strong backlink strategy, but you can’t implement custom structures using Weebly, which is a problem you mustn’t overlook.

When working on SEO for Weebly sites, you need to consider these limitations and decide which steps you would take next. Don’t exclude the options to use Weebly SEO specialist services to enhance the potential, and see how things go after that.

Finally, we will summarize the pros and cons of the tools and features this platform provides regarding Weebly SEO.

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Top Advantages and Disadvantages of Weebly SEO Tools

After you learn how to set up SEO settings in Weebly and access the needed tools, it will be much easier to determine the positive and negative sides. After that, you can set up the strategy using this Weebly SEO guide.

So, let’s get there.

Pros of Weebly for SEO

If you want to know how to optimize SEO on Weebly, there are elements you need to address. Luckily, there are various advantages you can use in Weebly regarding SEO.

1. Concise Titles and Meta Descriptions

You can easily set the titles and write the meta description in specific boxes. Pay attention to the 301 redirects if you change titles, page names, and product names since, otherwise, you will lose the traffic you already had.

2. Separated Headers and Footers

Weebly offers separate sections for headers and footers on each page and for the whole website.

3. HTML Embedding

The basic Weebly editor doesn’t contain H1 to H6 elements, so you can easily use custom HTML elements to incorporate them. This way, you show the search engines the crucial ranking signals.

4. Sitemap Generation

Even though it’s limited, Weebly provides a simple and automatic XML sitemap generation. You only need to submit the URL to the appropriate tool or search console.

5. Keyword-Focused Approach

SEO Weebly makes it easy to target the proper keywords and key phrases. Also, internal linking is easy, even though you need to do it manually. Nevertheless, it’s an advantage since it’s essential regarding SEO for Weebly blog posts and internal linking between pages.

6. You can Hide Specific Pages From Search Engines

You can select pages that perform poorly, are irrelevant, or are duplicates and hide them from the search engines without having to delete any of them.

These are the most crucial advantages of search engine optimization Weebly. However, nothing is perfect, so let’s see the disadvantages.

Cons of Weebly for SEO

If you want to learn how to improve SEO on Weebly, you need to know which things to avoid and the disadvantages of the platform.

So, be aware of these things:

1. No Directory Structure

Weebly pages are all on the same level, so the lack of hierarchy can be confusing for search engines. That’s why it’s great for small businesses but not the most convenient choice for enterprise-level webshops.

2. Lack of Heading Structure

As we mentioned previously, you need to use embed code elements to implement the heading structure. The default editor doesn’t provide H1 to H6 tags, which are crucial to SEO rankings.

3. You Can’t Really Use Link Attributes

Even though you can link other websites and resources, some of the attributes like rel or onclick can’t be used in Weebly. In general, you can build backlinks, but you can’t really track the visitor experience.

4. Generic Default Image Names

We all know that image names and alt texts are crucial for SEO. But Weebly gives the uploads generic names like a combination of numbers that are not valuable for SEO. Alt texts ease the thing, but it’s not enough for complete strategy implementation.

5. Prone to Spam

It’s one of the most significant Weebly disadvantages. Even though there is Weebly smart spam protection, it doesn’t filter IPs and blacklist words.

6. You May Have Issues With Other Languages

Weebly is not the best choice if you need to use multiple languages for your website. You are able to use subdomains, but you need to implement a different SEO strategy for them. This aspect can be a significant disadvantage if you want or need to use multiple languages on your Weebly site.

These are the disadvantages of Weebly when it comes to SEO, and since we covered both the pros and cons, let’s make a final verdict.

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Weebly SEO Final Verdict

We can conclude that this eCommerce platform is excellent for small businesses and startups, but migration is needed as your business grows.

It covers the basic SEO requirements, but you still need more advanced options to keep up with a good job and ensure your shop consistently ranks well on the SERPs. 

To explore other e-commerce platforms and learn how you can perform an SEO audit on them, take a look at the following blog posts:

FAQs

Is Weebly SEO-friendly?

Weebly is SEO-friendly when it comes to basic SEO requirements. However, if you want to rank your shop at the top of Google and other search engines, it’s best to hire an SEO agency. 

How do I add SEO to Weebly?

You will have to open the site editor by entering your email and password. Then, go to settings on the top right-hand side, settings tab, and click on SEO on the left-hand side. You will be able to make SEO improvements.

About the Author

Picture of Branko Ilishev

Branko Ilishev

Branko is your SEO prodigy. He manages the SEO team and finds creative solutions for your online visibility problems by thinking out-of-the-box. He also translates the collected data of analytics into understandable information that gives you concrete insights.