"How do I make my search results look [ this way ] or have [ that icon ] and [ those features ]?"
Google does not have controls to tell it what to display in SERPs. You give it signals through your META tags, sitemap, JSON-LD, and site content and it decides what to display. It will also display different things for different people based on region and device.
However understanding how to control these signals and how to optimize them to encourage the results you want is important.
This course covers some of these more technical aspects;
- JSON-LD
- META tags
"How do I control which pages appear in search results, and which do not?"
There are much better controls for this. We'll cover;
- META tags
- robots.txt
- sitemap.xml
Technical SEO
Webflow already supports automated sitemap generation, automated canonicals, page-level indexing controls, cms-item-level indexing controls, link rel= controls. Use those. For localized sites, it also supports localized sitemaps, and
For your specific site, you'll typically use JSON-LD for any schemas you want, like Organization, Website, Article. If it's a medical site, you can use FAQs also.
That's most of the technical SEO; the rest is content & backlinks.
Work on your titles, headings, META descriptions, page content, backlinks, image alts, etc.
If you want to compete hard and are struggling to rank important pages, external tools like AHREFs, screamingfrog, SEranking are helpful and some include AI tools that analyze your page and competition to make very useful content and keywork suggestions. The tools aren't cheap, but the results are solid.
Performance
Performance is another aspect of SEO, but it's relatively minor compared to content relevance and quality.
Webflow has built-in options for;
- CSS & JS minification
- AVIF and WEBP optimization for image assets and CMS images
- per-page CSS
- deferred Webflow JS
Use these settings to optimize your site's delivery performance.
Advanced Performance
Sygnal used to reverse proxy all of our client sites for added performance, however today that adds a lot of added infrastructure that's only justified in limited cases.
Since July 2024, Webflow already edge caches media so it's quite solid on the performance front.
In advanced situations, we'll still reverse proxy to control specific edge-caching rules at the page level, which can save 1.5 - 2 seconds on a moderately-sized page load.
