One of the best SEO enabled content management systems is Drupal, particularly if you are a business or company that has a big reliance on SEO through organic traffic, as other CMSes generally need lots of addons/plugins to achieve this functionality or substantial amounts of custom work to get desired results using SEO.
However, with Drupal, several features are built into the application, including the availability of powerful DRUPAL SEO modules.
Drupal allows you to easily build a corporate website, an ecommerce website, a government portal, or any other type of website that will have a majority of the content hosted on an independent domain, and have all of the necessary building blocks to help you create a solid SEO foundation.
Below we will take a look into just a few of the advanced SEO capabilities offered by the Drupal CMS.
1. Clean URLs that are Search Friendly
Drupal automatically generates URLs that provide search engines with a user-friendly representation of the content and its relevance to users searching for that specific content. For example, with the help of the Pathauto Module, you can automatically create clean, user-friendly, standardized URL patterns for different content types (articles), the various taxonomy terms, and for users’ profiles (users’ accounts). With this feature, it ensures that the entire site has a consistent and SEO-friendly URL structure across the entire website.
The key benefits of having clean URLs are:
- No messy query parameters
- Easy keyword optimization
- Increased crawlability and indexing by search engines
- Improved user experience
2. Advanced Meta Tag Management
By providing Drupal with many options in how SEO is managed, the Metatag module provides a significant advantage to the system. By automatically generating important SEO meta tags like titles, descriptions, keywords, OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, and so on.
Why Does This Matter?
- By providing search engines with metadata about my content they will have an easier time understanding it.
- Page views will increase, which means more revenue.
- This will allow us to be sure that all pages use the same type of meta data.
Meta tag templates ensure that our configuration for SEO is the same across our site, no matter how large it may become.
3. Strong Structured Content & Schema Support
Drupal’s method of structuring content is ideal for SEO purposes because it allows the use of taxonomy, custom fields & types to allow easy organization and hierarchy. As well, with the Schema.org Metatag module, Drupal supports Rich Snippets, which increase the visibility of content.
Using Structured Content will enable you to:
- Create Rich Search Results – FAQ, Review, Breadcrumbs etc.
- Increase Semantic Understanding of your content
- Rank Higher For Your Targeted Keywords
As such, Drupal is the ideal platform for Enterprise Class Websites that house large or complex content repositories.
4. High Performance Page Speed & Optimization
The speed at which a webpage loads is one of the most important factors for Google’s ranking algorithm, and Drupal performs very well in this area. Included in the Drupal core is a wide variety of built-in performance features, including:
- A caching system
- The aggregation of JavaScript/CSS files
- A BigPipe rendering method
- Image Styles/lazyl loading capabilities
When these performance features are combined with Server Optimizations and CDN usage, the Drupal website will achieve Highly rated Core Web Vitals scores making it very search-friendly.
5. Mobile First and Responsive Design
Drupal versions 9 and 10 utilize a mobile-first design strategy to ensure optimal performance on devices of any type. Additionally, since mobile usability is an important ranking factor for search engines, Drupal enables your site benefit from technologies that optimize for mobile platforms by providing:
- Responsive Themes
- Layouts Optimized for Mobile Devices
- UI Components Optimized for Touch
Because Google places a premium on mobile-optimized websites, Drupal provides an easy way to meet Google’s expectations.
6. SEO Improved Through XML Sitemaps
Using the XML Sitemap module, Drupal creates search engine-friendly sitemaps for your website that allow search engine bots to crawl your website more quickly. You can control which items appear on your sitemap and also, as new items are added to your website, your sitemap will update to include the new content.
Benefits of efficient indexing on Google and Bing include:
- Faster indexing of items on Google and Bing.
- Greater efficiency in crawling.
- More visibility for your website’s most important landing pages.
7. Canonical URLs and Automated Redirects
To eliminate the duplicate content penalty—which may hurt your site’s search rank—Drupal enables users to create and deploy canonical URLs for your website. To help ensure that search engine spiders and crawlers locate the correct page version, Drupal provides a number of modules that perform this function.
- Redirect module
- Global Redirect module
- Canonical URL module
Each module assists you in creating canonical URLs for your website and improving the authority of your overall site to minimize search rank dilution.
8. SEO Multilingual Websites
Of the many available content management systems, Drupal is well suited for multilingual SEO. Among other features, Drupal provides for translation of:
- Content
- Menus
- Blocks
- Taxonomies
- URLs
By using proper metadata and hreflang tags, Drupal helps ensure your multilingual sites comply with Google’s expectations.
9. A lot of SEO and Analytics support.
Drupal easily integrates with all the largest Analytics and SEO platforms, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Yoast SEO (Drupal Module)
By utilizing these integrations, you can track your keywords, fix your crawl errors, optimize your on-page content, and manage your SEO strategy as a whole.
10. Drupal is Highly Customizable for Technical SEO
Drupal is an excellent choice for developers and SEO professionals who require maximum control over their sites. Customizable areas include:
- Robots.txt
- XML Sitemap Priority
- URL Patterns
- Breadcrumbs
- Canonical Tags
- Header Tags
- Schema Data
- Page Rendering
- Redirect Rules
As such, Drupal is the ideal choice for complex SEO requirements on larger enterprise websites.
Final Thought: Advanced SEO Capabilities Built into Drupal
Drupal is a very powerful CMS for organizations that are serious about achieving high rankings on search engines, with capabilities that include Clean URLs and Metadata, Fast Speed, and Extensive Schema Integration. Developers and marketers can use the tools provided by the platform to build search-friendly, high-performance websites.
If you are searching for a CMS that can provide long-term SEO success, complex content problems and the scalability to support enterprise-level traffic and content management, Drupal is undoubtedly one of the best CMS solutions available today.
