Since the early days of SEO, there have been SEO experts who got stuck on the wrong SEO trend. I know this, because I started my career in marketing as an SEO guy, and slowly transitioned to a broader position of a marketing manager.
Every couple of years, SEO experts realize they have it wrong with one thing or the other and there are new SEO mistakes to avoid.
SEO experts used to endlessly stuff keywords into the text just to get ranking. The smart SEO experts never did that, but most experts did. Finally, Google made their algorithm more advanced, and everyone stopped stuffing keywords.
The same went with links. SEO experts created huge link farms, spent their hours exchanging meaningless links, because links, even from spam sites, managed to promote search engine ranking. Some smart SEO guys understood it was spam and avoided this practice, but again, most SEO experts did it. Then Google changed their algorithm, and all experts ceased with link farms immediately.
I can go on, but the pattern is clear.
What if I told you that today, using the same misconceptions that led them in the past, SEO experts still commit the same mistake? They still overlook the big picture and focus excessively on the small details. Do you want to know where this misconception lies?
The answer is minimal code. The same obsession SEO experts had for keywords stuffing, for link farming, for W3C validation, for domain name, for length of content, the same obsession over one technical detail that is supposed to answer their every SEO need and create an endless supply of traffic, the same obsession is now directed towards minimal code.
The problem with this obsession is that it has deprived SEO professionals of using the most convenient and advanced design technology today: page builders. These WordPress page builders allow users to create highly professional looking landing pages and site pages, without any coding, and can potentially cut down hours and hours of labor from the SEO professional’s monthly workload.
I have to admit that there is some justification for the avoidance by SEO professional for page builders. Until now, WordPress did not offer a page builder plugin that was SEO friendly enough.
That’s why we’ve created a page builder that, among other advantages, is the most SEO friendly page builder ever seen on WordPress. It’s called Elementor, and it was built with the strictest code standards and delivers the best performance when creating page designs.
Now, before I go into more detail about how this page builder wins with SEO where previous builders fail, I want first to debunk the two main reasons these experts oppose page builders.
Why SEO Experts Object to Page Builders
The first reason they dislike page builders has to do with this obsession for optimization. What most page builders have in common is that they allow the user the freedom to visually design a page, while the code for the page is created automatically by wrapping content with DIVs. This might be a bit of a simplification, but in any case, you do end up with a page containing a lot of DIVs. This, in the eyes of the SEO guys, is not optimized code, as the code can be shorter.
In fact, there is no reason why not to use DIVs. These DIVs can be constructed with the best coding practices, and do not harm the SEO of a page in any way.
The other reason for the page builder opposition is, in fact, a justified one: until now most page builders were in fact poorly written, and added heaps of unnecessary code to the page. This is true for page builders that rely on shortcodes.
Another example of this bad code from page builders can be seen with the solution some page builders have to allow for full-width pages, in themes that don’t have this option. This solution is simply to take over the entire page using JavaScript and then force it to be full width.
In our page builder, Elementor, we’ve made sure no such code shortcut is made. We don’t use shortcodes, and we don’t force JavaScript to artificially allow full screen. These are just two examples, but sticking to the right code standards have been a guideline of ours throughout the development process, sometimes making us spend many hours thinking of the right solution that would not compromise the code quality.
I can say that the effort paid off, as our page builder has the fastest drag and drop and generates fairly optimized code.
Why SEO Experts Should Use Page Builders
Now we come to the part where I explain why this choice most SEO people make, not to use page builders, is so wrong. Also, how by incorporating page builders into their work, they could vastly improve their performance.
- Stop Relying on Developers and Designers I remember when I was working in an SEO firm a few years ago and got frustrated because I had to wait for the developers or the designers to implement my suggestions. This sometimes meant the entire month went by and I could not show the client any substantial improvement I have made, only suggestions. Page builders allow you to make any change yourself, and not have to deal with coding. This cuts the middleman, and so the SEO professional can focus on his job and not deal with learning coding or Photoshop skills.
- Create More Visual and Engaging Pages Gone are the days where simple text pages got high ranking on Google. Nowadays, to stay ahead in the Google search results, as well as to keep visitors engaged on your site, you have to make it visually appealing. You have to incorporate images, videos, and other visual content, as well as align the page in a creative layout. There is no better way to do this than to use a frontend drag and drop page builder.
- Making Pages More Dynamic Contact forms, animated elements, carousels. The more the visitor is engaged and interactive on your page, the more likely he is to stay longer, complete a conversion, and have a positive experience on your site. Using drag and drop widgets available on page builders make this job easy.
- Optimize for Conversions With page conversion optimization, sometimes what makes a page convert better could be as simple as a button color change. With page builders, you can make such changes at a click of a button, without getting into the code.
- Let the Client Control the Website A lot of times; SEO professionals are also in charge of being webmasters for their clients and manage their websites. Page builders are intuitive enough so even the most non-technical site owners can learn how to use them. Instead of harassing the SEO guy to make a change in a certain page, they just do the change on their own. It’s important to offer them this skill, even if it’s just for emergencies.
- Not Rely on One Theme Fashion and trends always keep changing. Just think of how websites looked like ten years ago. Page builders lower the reliance on the theme and make sure the content stays beautiful, without the need for further customization and styling, even if you switch to a new theme altogether.
- Less Plugins The more plugins you have, the worse it is for SEO. Each plugin adds calls to the server and makes the site slower. Page builders can make redundant plugins like Sliders, button creators; Google Maps embeds and many others. In fact, almost every widget that is included in our page builder (27 widgets and rising), is a save in a plugin that would do the same function.
- Much Easier to Manage the Site As noted on point 4, SEO freelancers serve a lot of the times as the site managers. With page builders, the job of changing and updating the various site pages becomes much easier, without having to code.
- Create Many Landing Pages as Well as New Pages Today we need to create a lot more pages on our website than before. New services and products, new landing pages for a campaign on a different ad platform. Because the competition online has risen so much, so has our need to create new dynamic and designed pages. This is a crucial service that is required from the SEO professional and is vastly improved through the use of page builders.
- Use SEO Plugins: Yoast SEO plugin is my favorite for analyzing what changes are needed for the page content works with full compatibility with the Elementor, page builder. Besides, you can also consider RankMath SEO plugin since it is lightweight and offers powerful features.
Conclusion
The best SEO professionals are the ones that were the first to foresee in which direction the Google algorithm was heading, and adapt their site optimization process accordingly to avoid SEO mistakes. I believe that today these professionals need to start using page builders (preferably Elementor of course) so that they can stay ahead of the game and streamline their efforts.
