Weebly & SEO

[Taytoday]

Hi Folks,

Just wondering if using Weebly as our website builder negatively affects the ability to rank? (no access to source code)

Or can enough be done without needed access the code to rank reasonably well?

We'll be entering the cosmetic surgery niche.

Many thanks

Trev

 

[fisicx]

Weebly is pants for SEO. In fact anything is pants if you want to rank well for cosmetic surgery unless you have very deep pockets.

 

[MASSEY]

If you're entering cosmetic surgery, a .weebly website will look terribly unprofessional.

Simple wordpress site sexed up would look a million times better.

Reminds me of another failed / never got off the ground idea i had http://www.cheapsurgeryabroad.co.uk/

That site is on a free wordpress theme, it's one of the more uglier ones, you can find plenty that are easy to customise.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Cosmetic Surgery and Weebly is a complete non starter. it is fiercley competitive and you will need every edge you can. A Wordpress site won't cost that much and as long as you get the imagry and content right it should carry it off.

As I said though Weebly is a non starter.

I am hearing alarm bells as it appears you have chosen them based on price, is this the case?

if you have no budget then consider another niche.

 

[Northstar100]

I'm going to to go against the flow here. I started my wedding photography business 4 years ago and my website was with Weebly. I chose a very simple white design and it looked great. For searches 'my town wedding photographer' I hit page 1 quite quickly. I'm close to Manchester and for 'Manchester wedding photographer' I got to page 3, I even ranked for Cheshire wedding photographer.

At Christmas I changed to Wordpress, thinking I'd get to P1 for 'Manc wedding photographer'. My highest position was 13 and I'm now on 23 I think.

If I was doing it all again I would still use Wordpress though as it's a lot easier to upload photos and edit I find.

 

[Low Cost Sourcing]

Weebly is just terrible and extremely expensive if you go for their business plans. The only real thing you can do when it comes to SEO is keywords which is pretty pointless in this day in age.

I agree WordPress with a good theme, layout and content with a good SEO plugin such as Yoast plus many other things you can do will help you much better and could even work out much cheaper for you in the long run.

 

[fisicx]

At Christmas I changed to Wordpress, thinking I'd get to P1 for 'Manc wedding photographer'. My highest position was 13 and I'm now on 23 I think.

Did you sets up 301's, keep the same site structure, copy the pages titles etc? If not then that's why your ranking dropped.

 

[Northstar100]

pretty sure my 301's are ok, I use the redirect plug-in for Wordpress.

 

[fisicx]

No, I meant setting up 301s from the old site to the new. You can't do this within Wordpress. In any case the redirects are only small part of the transfer package.

 

[Audrey Wright]

If I'm ready to commit 10k for a surgery, I won't buy if from a £10 website. Weebly is a platform for amateur sites, portfolios (maybe), personal blogs and diaries...
It's a suicide go for Weebly as a platform for a commercial site, and an expensive niche too..

 

[Annoying Donkey]

If I'm ready to commit 10k for a surgery, I won't buy if from a £10 website. Weebly is a platform for amateur sites, portfolios (maybe), personal blogs and diaries...
It's a suicide go for Weebly as a platform for a commercial site, and an expensive niche too..

I doubt the average cosmetic surgery punter would know a weebly site from anything else... Though I wouldn't recommend a weebly site for any business.

 

[cpon]

With Weebly you actually can access parts of the html and change certain tags from h2 to h1 for example. I see a lot of bad comments about Weebly here but I'm not exactly sure why. The new designs are very nice. Minimal, responsive designs.

 

[Audrey Wright]

@WeblinkPlus They don't need to know it's Weebly, they need to know if it's authoritative or not and I'm almost entirely sure it will "leak"..

@cpon You say it like it's really a nice feature to be able to change html tags and access your content...

 

[StevePoster]

It doesn't matter whether if it is Weebly or Wordpress to use in building you main site but it will vary on how well you can deliver an important information from your site and must be interesting, engaging, new, and beneficial to the users.

 

[makeusvisible]

I don't mean to point out the obvious..... but for cosmetic surgery I would assume you are charging mainly 4 figure sums. Why would you not want to invest the same in a properly graphic designed website, with professionally written content, and a properly configured SEO friendly structure?

With any website, you will generally find that the level of competition generally equates to the value of sale. The website is just a starting point..... getting people to it is going to cost significant sums of money.... do you really want to spend that money taking people to a weekly website you knocked up for a few £?

If you are serious, you need to set a budget for a properly constructed website, an Adwords or PPC plan to get initially traffic, and an SEO campaign for your long term.

 

[uk22]

You can rank Weebly very easily it has a Domain Authority of 96 so you can send a ton keyword anchor text links without getting penalised.

Having said that WP is far more cost effective and more profesional.

 

[CH Design]

I would stay away from all forms of DIY websites such as this especially with you being in such a high end market, having a proper website for a business such as yours is a must as im sure your competitors will have them. Not to mention how unprofessional it is to have .weebly or .wix etc... at the end of your domain people just wont be impressed. Your website says everything about your business and if your website looks unprofessional it will give the impression that your business is to.

In SEO terms I believe that ranking a site through these websites would be very very difficult to get anywhere close to the top. Especially in your field you are better spending a few quid and getting a good site and getting it ranked properly. Your website/SEO should not be considered a cost it should be an investment think of it that way.

 

[Deleted member 233498]

If you want to go down the SEO route, Wordpress is a good natural choice. But please, please, please don't touch these free DYI website creator tools, they are just not worth it.

 

[Alby10]

Weebly is pants for SEO. In fact anything is pants if you want to rank well for cosmetic surgery unless you have very deep pockets.

Spot on, free styled website compilers like Weebly and Wix, tend to be difficult to rank. You would be better going with a wordpress site, with responsive theme and relevant plugins etc.

 

[Aqueous]

Hi Folks,

Just wondering if using Weebly as our website builder negatively affects the ability to rank? (no access to source code)

Or can enough be done without needed access the code to rank reasonably well?

To answer the question in the OP I wouldn't go as far as to say Weebly would negatively affect your SEO. Specifically I have seen no instances myself where there is a direct negative effect from using this platform and as one of the other posts above says, they managed to rank on page one with their Weebly site without any issues.

Having said that however I concur with the consensus above; get a proper website built. The investment will repay you many times over and getting Wordpress to rank #1 is a lot easier than a Weebly or Wix site.

 

[exciteseo]

Use Wordpress. It is far more flexible than weebly and is very SEO-friendly