Verify: What CMS’s Rank Best in Google?
There’s a lot of debate about which CMS (content management system) is best for search engine optimization. I took 5 random industries (4 local & 1 national) and analyzed the top 10 ranked websites by content management systems, here’s what I found:
- WordPress (52%)
- Custom (26%)
- .NET (9%)
- Drupal (7%)
- HTML/Twitter Bootstrap (6%)
What you’ll notice is popular website builders like SquareSpace, Wix, GoDaddy, Weebly and even HubSpot typically don’t rank well. As SEOs we know that closed systems like SquareSpace do not offer the flexibility we need to properly optimize technical signals required by Google.
This might contribute to why you might never find a cheap solution like ‘Wix’ ranking. Most SEOs that I know of would never recommend a solution like these and would typically steer a business owner who wants to get serious about SEO towards something more flexible and custom like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
The other theory I have is platforms like Wix, SquareSpace.com and Weebly attract those who do not have the budget to invest in a real solution, or they simply don’t know what they’re doing.
While this was a very small test, I can assume the following:
- If you plan on having great sustainable search engine rankings, don’t buy a cheap website builder.
- If you invest into a cheap website building platform, don’t expect good rankings.
If you plan on building a business and capturing a piece of the 6,586,013,574 searches per day. Do it right.