Webflow to Framer - My 1 Year SEO Review (2024)

last year we moved our entire SAS company's website from webflow to framer 300 plus Pages which includes blog articles that generates close to 50,000 unique visitors to the website month of a month 10% of this traffic converts into free signups on our app yeah I mean this is our company's Lifeline it's a big and tough decision but we did it now the question of why we moved was answered in a separate video we did last year and covers how basically framer is just a way better option for design Le startup teams but in this video we're going to dive into a one-year review since glor big move to frer and how has it impacted our operations SEO and other marketing activities just before I get into it if you're new to this channel I'm om frug designer turn startup founder in this channel I share all of my learnings around building delightful products and trying my best to achieve breakthrough growth so if you're interested in this go ahead and click subscribe to stay notified now nine times out of 10 moving any site to a new web Builder will impact current SEO we've seen this before when we previously moved our site from WordPress to webflow about 3 years ago and at that time we had about 15 to 20% % drop in our organic traffic after the move this is despite making sure we ticked all of those critical items in the checklist website structure content accuracy external links load speed optimizations setting up canical URLs redirects the whole list if it's helpful I've dropped a link in the description of an article that breaks down this checklist in detail along with the SEO definitions 101 now anyone migrating to any new web Builder should definitely do a complete risk assessment of whether or not it's worth potential risk of losing some of their organic traffic in our case we'd already built out a number we sites on framer we were blown away by the speed of how fast we can go from concept to a fully responsive publish site so this decision was really about future proofing our ability to quickly roll out beautiful pages and expand our site for marketing campaigns with zero friction now of course this is a huge benefit for us but at the expense of our organic traffic may be questionable at the time we had a lot of questions about framer's ability to be bulletproof in terms of the SEO capabilities which includes the CMS features page lad times across devices ability to get crawled properly by Google and a bunch of other questions valid questions since their pivot as a startup from being a prototype tool to a web Builder was very recent luckily their team was really helpful in terms of answering any concerns we had let's go through some of these answers that the framer team had for us from a technological standpoint their codebase behind their Dynamic content delivered through the CMS or any static content seen in any framer component is recognizable in Google so they assured me that the site will be 100% crawled in index technical terms for saying that your site will be searchable on Google the essentials were definitely in place for the CMS for example the ability to add custom Fields meta titles and descriptions meta tags alt text this meant that we can migrate our blog content seamlessly with the same optimizations and the best part about the CMS was that they were about to roll out their CSV input at the time which would speed up the process for migrating 300 plus articles in fact in the future we want to be able to build a template marketplace with their CMS so the CSV input is a great way to publish templates on our side and ensure it's consistent with what we have inside our app until of course framer releases their CMS API fingers crossed in terms of the other Su performance features there's many to take note of number one you can easily plug in Google analytics and their settings but framer also has its own gdpr compliant analytics built in which is great for a quick overview of your website's performance number two framer automatically generates your sitemap based on your site structure this helps search engines like Google crawl your site more efficiently you can customize and publish URLs and Page titles with one click and framer will automatically generate new sit Maps so these real-time updates ensure search engines have access to the latest information improving search visibility and driving more traffic to your website number three they've built in accessibility features to reach a broader audience which is quite easy to set up number four they also have service side rendering which means that framer pre- renders your website's HTML and CSS as soon as you deploy it resulting in lightning fast load times and finally point five hosting framer offers reliable built-in hosting you can connect your custom domain on paid plans or use a free framer domain and just click the publish button and your site will be deployed in seconds they use AWS Cloud front S3 and multiple load balance front ends with large in memory caches to ensure your site is accessible from anywhere in the world with Optimal Performance with all our technical requirements checked off the list it was very reassuring to see other super noteworthy companies like zapier dribble ltif files and many others start to make the shift the stars were definitely aligning for us so we made the big move in May 2023 we had to move hundreds of pages with the fresh design but what's mind-blowing was that it only took us 3 weeks now again note like I said even with a solid migration process we knew that our SEO would be impacted at least in the short term but with all our due diligence and research it was just clear that the long-term benefits outweigh the cons by a huge amount now let's do an analysis of where we're at now which is just under one year ahead since our website went live we'll be covering three parts in this analysis operations SEO and marketing activities starting with operations with a complete shift to 100% design Le on our website these are some of the tangible impacts we've had on our operations now in terms of what we're spending on framers uh pricing plan we're on the annual Pro Plan which works out to be about 20 or around 20 $5 per month which gives us everything we need and so far we've noticed that we saved around 85% of our time on delivering new pages and websites on top of that an additional $180,000 saved on annual expenses on Freelancers and agencies who we used to hire for previous web Builders we've noticed a 2X increase in the efficiency to deliver marketing campaigns and a 3X efficiency of our app development team since they're hardly required to spend much time at all on our website so huge time and cost savings all around in fact we' reduced our team size by 50% since last year and we really believe that framer has to do with a big part of it because we've just simply been more efficient okay now let's go through the big one SEO 40 to 50,000 unique monthly visitors to the website like I said this is our company's Lifeline now we did lose traffic in the first weeks of migration because of various areas such as components with nested links which impacted the time for our site to get properly indexed at first we Panic as we saw almost a 50% drop in our traffic numbers but this seemed to be more of an analytical issue not an actual drop in traffic so as soon as we fix the errors after the framer team pointed them out to us by July 2 months in we picked up our traffic from where we left off since then we have more or less been maintaining the same volume of organic traffic without actively publishing a lot of new content which is great also despite constantly adding new things to our website we still hit top level Lighthouse scores something to make note of if you have lots of blog Pages for us we recently cross our page limit numbers and that causes the site search to be limited so we had to buy their add-on to allow sitewide search again which cost an additional $240 per year so overall there's been success in our SEO there's still things observing as I've noticed some inconsistencies with our traffic data between Google analytics framers analytics and sem rush but this is quite normal with SEO and it could be for many factors as we're also running paid ad campaigns which could also cause users to arrive through direct search and we're actually in the process of improving our traffic data and endtoend user analytics by integrating Google tag manager and mix panel with framer and hopefully I'll do a video on that soon now let's cover how the migration has impacted our marketing activities the most powerful thing with frer is we have been able to successfully deliver deal pay Pages really fast so whenever we want to test various pricing and discount codes we can very quickly throw up a landing page by using existing components link it to an external stripe payment page where developers do their web hook magic to process their account upgrades after a purchase with this simple process we can deploy entend campaigns within just a week now it's a Well oiled workflow hosting webinars is a breeze since we can simply throw up the embed component and add any registration form from streaming platforms like Zoom or streamyard the same goes for lead capture currently we use magic forms frame component which can integrate with our email marketing tool brao and push our leads there instantly the founder of magic form is an awesome guy he actually specifically integrated Bravo for us when we requested it the best part of this component is that it's got all the settings we need to match the design to our exact design system now the most powerful part of moving the frame is how versatile the CMS has become they're constantly rolling out updates and in addition to our Blog the CMS has given us the ability to create a very sophisticated template Marketplace directly on our site by combining two CMS collections one for the template creators and another for the actual templates this's a whole tutorial that framer made specifically on this by using conditional filters which is very helpful I'll link that tutorial in the description below currently our template Marketplace page has one of the highest visitors volume and it's an ideal programmatical SEO strategy that allows us to automatically publish user generated content right on our site with all the keywords we need to attract the right customer and this is just the first step for us we'd love to keep exploring other ways to programmatically generate content through framer CMS I've said it before and I'll say it again the only thing we need now is an API so that we can add more Automation and even publish all of our templates that's currently inside frame of CMS directly on our application and that's our one-year review Deep dive to quickly summarize operations we saved around $18 to $20,000 of quantifiable costs and almost 10x our efficiency team-wide by becoming design Le on our website ecosystem SEO we've maintained our organic traffic with minimum content publishing efforts marketing we've launched two times the amount of campaigns than normal and built a fully functional template marketplace with huge programmatical SEO benefits honestly framer just makes me excited put all the technical stuff aside our team just loves using it it's probably the first web Builder I'm genuinely excited to open up and start using every day now I know I might sound a little bit like a fanboy but really it's just so much fun to use so much so that we're actually considering moving our entire application design to framer just because it'll be so cool to see a tangible tactile application on the web versus a flat prototype on figma stay tuned for future vide where we'll be uncovering more about framer as the backbone of your marketing funnels in the next videos I hope to speak more about the marketing Integrations inside of framer and even dive more into the programmatical SEO stuff too but most of all I'll be giving all of you guys an inside view of how our companies are progressing overall with all of these systems in place so do make sure you subscribe if you enjoy this video you might like some of these recommendations next that's it for now I'll see you soon and make sure you never stop building

Channel: Omar Farook | Building Tech Startups

Views: 6,000

Keywords: SaaS, startup, tech, technology, software, tech startup, vc funding, fund raising, seed round, business tips, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, tech entrepreneur, ui/ux, ui/ux design, user experience, user research, growth, seo, marketing, framer, web builder, web design, webflow, figma, onboarding, prototyping, ceo, founder, nocode, microsaas, team, leadership, mindset, productivity

Id: qtV2kGsu9MI

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024