Evaluating CMS Options: Which Excels in SEO?

A CMS provides the infrastructure that helps search engines understand, crawl, and rank your website effectively. A well-designed CMS supports essential SEO activities, such as managing metadata, optimizing URL structures, and ensuring mobile responsiveness. Importantly, not every website requires a CMS, but choosing the right one can significantly impact SEO performance for those that do.

Choosing the suitable CMS for your SEO means understanding the system's features and limitations. Some CMS platforms have built-in SEO capabilities that directly impact site performance, crawlability, mobile optimization, and metadata management. Your “one true” CMS can help you utilize these features to maximize your website's visibility in search engines, but which one?

Let’s explore the most basic tenets of SEO and your CMS, then answer the question begged by our article's title: “How do I evaluate my CMS options, considering SEO as an important priority?” 

In a Moz forum thread titled 'Does a CMS inhibit a site's crawlability?', an SEO professional shared a client story. Another SEO had told the client that using a CMS hindered their site's performance because it didn’t allow "direct access to the HTML." This SEO claimed that CMS platforms were generally bad for SEO since they supposedly prevented users from making direct modifications needed to enhance search engine visibility.

The forum conversation quickly debunked this myth. Hard as that was. 

The reality is that CMS platforms, when adequately configured, generate HTML just like any manually coded website. They also offer a range of SEO tools to make optimization more accessible. 

Another user shared their experience of replacing an expensive custom-built website with a Joomla CMS, which outperformed the old site in every category. The original custom-built site was developed to provide complete control over every aspect of its functionality, design and performance —unnecessary code was avoided, and there were no change restrictions. However, the high cost and poor execution resulted in underperformance. The secondary lesson here is that developer skills and using CMS features effectively matter.

With the right CMS features, you can ensure your website is easily crawlable, indexable, and optimized for ranking. 

As Lee Odden, a B2B marketing strategist, author, and international speaker, says, "SEO is fundamentally a set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, include, categorize, and rank your web content." In our ‘SEO Essentials of a CMS’ story, there are two protagonists: SEO crawlers (or spiders) and web content. 

1. URL structuring and redirection management: The CMS should allow consistent handling of trailing slashes, canonical URLs, and readable, intuitive slugs. It should also have built-in tools to manage 301 redirects and fix inconsistencies to maintain link equity and improve SEO.
2. Multilingual and SEO-friendly features: Support for hreflang and canonical tag alignment for multilingual sites. The CMS should facilitate shallow, static, and performance-optimized URLs, ensuring global SEO effectiveness and clarity for search engines.
3. Metadata management: The CMS should allow easy editing of title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text to support on-page SEO.
4. Schema markup integration: The CMS should support schema markup to enable rich snippets, improving visibility and click-through rates.
5. Mobile optimization and responsiveness: The CMS must support responsive design and mobile optimization for better SEO performance on all devices.
6. Site performance and Core Web Vitals: The CMS should help optimize page load speed and meet Core Web Vitals requirements like LCP, FID, and CLS.
7. XML sitemap management: The CMS should automatically generate XML sitemaps and allow customization for efficient crawling by search engines.
8. Content hierarchy and internal linking: The CMS should facilitate internal linking and support a logical content hierarchy to help search engines navigate the site.
9. User-Friendly and secure plugins: The CMS should support high-quality, secure plugins that are regularly updated to maintain SEO performance.

There are a lot of different CMS platforms, and they all have positives and negatives for your SEO. You can twist a CMS to do things it isn’t meant to do out of the box, but here, we’ll evaluate things in a product data-sheet fashion; the choice ultimately depends on your organizational needs and objectives. 

Joomla offers several built-in features to enhance your website's SEO:

• Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs: Joomla allows the creation of clean, descriptive URLs easily readable by both users and search engines, improving site indexing and ranking.
• Metadata management: The platform enables the addition of meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for individual articles and the overall site, aiding search engines in understanding and indexing your content effectively.
• XML sitemap generation: While Joomla doesn't include a built-in sitemap generator, extensions like JSitemap and OSMap can create comprehensive sitemaps, facilitating better search engine crawling and indexing.
• Responsive Design Support: Joomla templates are generally responsive, ensuring that websites are mobile-friendly—a crucial factor in search rankings, as search engines prioritize sites that provide a good user experience across all devices.

 Joomla has certain limitations that can impact its search engine optimization (SEO) effectiveness:

• Steep Learning Curve: Joomla's intricate nature as a CMS can make it difficult for newcomers to apply successful SEO tactics without significant learning and experience.
• Limited Extension Library: Joomla has fewer SEO extensions than WordPress, potentially limiting its SEO capabilities.

Content Management Complexity: Managing metadata and organizing content can be cumbersome for large websites, leading to inefficiencies. 

Advantages of WordPress for SEO

• Extensive Plugin Support: Tools like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack allow users to optimize metadata, manage XML sitemaps, and handle canonical URLs without technical expertise.
• Customizable Permalinks: WordPress enables the creation of clean, keyword-rich URL structures that are beneficial for SEO. 
• Responsive Themes: Many WordPress themes are designed to be mobile-friendly, ensuring better performance in mobile-first search algorithms. (Passion Digital, CodeCraftWP)
• Active Community and Resources: A vibrant community ensures that WordPress receives regular updates, extensive documentation, and a wide range of third-party plugins for SEO customization. 

Disadvantages of WordPress for SEO

• Plugin Overload: Heavy reliance on plugins for SEO functionality can slow down site performance, increase security risks, and lead to compatibility issues. 
• Duplicate Content Issues: WordPress can generate duplicate content through archives, taxonomies, and varying URL formats, which require proper handling. 
• Theme Quality Variability: Many free or inexpensive WordPress themes include bloated CSS and JavaScript, hindering site speed and SEO performance.
• Default SEO Settings: WordPress requires adjustments for basic SEO needs, such as permalink configuration and crawlability improvements, out of the box. 

Security Challenges: Being the most popular CMS in the world comes with its spotlight challenges,  making it a target for hackers.

TYPO3 offers a robust set of SEO features that can drive organic traffic to your website:

• SEO Configuration Flexibility: TYPO3 allows users substantial SEO configuration options, including advanced URL handling, structured content options, along with the ability to modify metadata without needing plugins.
• Multilingual Features: Renowned as one of the CMS’s standout features, TYPO3’s extensive multilingual capabilities allow editors to seamlessly localize content, exponentially increasing page visibility on local search engines, allowing marketers to engage new audiences with ease. 
• Seamless Integrations: TYPO3 boasts an array of integrations with enterprise-level third party softwares, including CRM and analytics platforms, allowing marketers to easily transfer data from the TYPO3 backend to external software.
• Multisite Capability: TYPO3’s page-tree backend architecture allows for extensive scalability. Editors can create new pages with ease, applying all of the aforementioned SEO features, including site-specific metadata in order to appeal to various audiences simultaneously through one unified backend, reducing overhead. 

Downsides of TYPO3’s SEO Offering

• Installation Process: As the CMS of choice for large-scale organizations, government institutions, and enterprises, setting up TYPO3 is something that typically requires a dedicated agency. 
• Learning Curve: Learning how to make the most out of TYPO3 can also be a time-intensive process that requires dedicating time to training team members in order for them to develop a familiarity with the CMS. Newcomes might find it difficult to navigate effectively.

To summarize, TYPO3’s SEO feature offering allows digital marketers and editors to engage with new audiences, driving organic traffic to select pages, and offering an immersive, personalized frontend experience through engaging on-site content. 

Data teams can take advantage of TYPO3’s robust analytics features and third-party integrations which enable a holistic overview of visitor behavior, whether it be web analytics that can be monitored directly in the TYPO3 backend, or data that passes from API integrations to external software.

Learn more about how TYPO3 can support your organization's growth

TYPO3 for E-Commerce