If you're considering using Umbraco CMS or you are currently in the process of building a website with Umbraco, you might be wondering: "Is Umbraco actually good for SEO"?
The short answer is Yes, but you need to make sure everything is configured properly.
Umbraco is a CMS that gives you a lot of control. Developers have a lot of power and can really transform the website into something that works for your business. But this also means you don't get a lot out of the box, like SEO.
In this article, I'll break down:
What Umbraco does well for SEO
Where it falls short
What you need to configure
Whether you need an SEO package
All this information is coming from someone that has been building with Umbraco for years and has a lot of knowledge in the area of SEO.
Why Umbraco is technically strong for SEO
Like I said before, Umbraco doesn't restrict you in any way. Something that is both its strongest feature but also its biggest weakness. However, if you have a developer that knows what he is doing, he can build a SEO system that will work for your specific use case. Umbraco allows you to do a lot of custom things that normal CMS platforms wouldn't allow you to do, so let's go through some of these features.
Clean HTML output
Umbraco doesn't force you to use any special HTML in order to make it work. Every page, every content is something you can customize to your liking. This means that you aren't held back by injected Umbraco scripts that might be slowing down your website or meta field rules that don't fit your company. The HTML can be build however you want, with whatever scripts you want and with any SEO feature that you might need.
Full control over URLs
Usually a CMS platform will generate an URL for your page and that will be it. Umbraco will still generate an URL for your page, but the developer is able to customize it a lot more. Do you want the name of your collection page to be different from the URL? That is possible with some special fields. Do you have dynamic pages that require custom URLs based on their categories? This is also possible with content finders and url providers. Umbraco provides a lot of tools to customize the URLs to ensure that they work for you instead of you having to live with whatever the platform forces you to use.
Performance
While content and authority are the biggest ranking factors, performance plays an increasing role in both rankings and user experience. It is important for your website and your clients. Because Umbraco runs on the latest Net version, you have a great potential to make your website blazing fast. Net is a mature framework with a lot of packages/guides around performance. There are various methods like:
Output caching
Proper hosting
Optimized media
CDN usage
and much more to ensure that your website is fast. And with these things you can easily meet the Core Web Vitals requirements.
Where Umbraco falls short for SEO
SEO is not enabled by default
Like we talked about first, SEO is not something that Umbraco itself comes with. Your developer has to make sure that it exists. If they don't implement it or don't do it correctly, this can massively impact your website. I've seen clients that had a robots.txt that blocked their website, but nobody knew about it! By default, Umbraco does NOT provide:
Meta tags management UI
XML sitemap generation
Robots.txt management
Redirect management (it does creates redirects when renaming things, but you cannot create your own redirects)
Structured data tools
404 monitoring
All of these features need to be build by a developer if you want to use them. Ofcourse it depends on the type of website and how far you want to go with SEO, but if the structure isn't in place, you also can't customize it to your liking.
Inconsistent implementation across projects
In my years of building Umbraco websites, I've seen a lot of custom made solutions for the missing SEO features. Some work better than others, but each time there is a learning curve to using them. Some work automatically, some only manually and each time you open up a new Umbraco website, you'll have the question "How do I manage meta fields?". It is very much dependent on the developer implementing the website. This might not always be a bad thing, but it does make it more difficult to find things if you aren't able to ask the internet about your custom solution.
So... Is Umbraco good for SEO?
Yes, if you treat SEO as part of the build.
Umbraco gives you the framework in order to build a SEO platform that works for you, entirely custom and created for your use-cases. However, this does require someone that knows what they are doing. If you are expecting a "plug and play" solution out of the box, you won't get it with Umbraco. But if your developer is knowledgeable, they can build you a solution that really fits your website.
Should I use an Umbraco SEO package?
There are various SEO Umbraco packages on the market and they all have their differences. I won't go into them here, but it is important to understand what sort of features you'll require. If you are building a small brochure website, maybe you only need access to some meta fields that you can edit, but the moment you want to do something more serious, you might need more features.
Of course you can rely on your developer to spend time building it, but why build something when other people already did the heavy lifting? Packages allow you to:
Have a good quality implementation that is tested by other people in the community
Reference the internet to find out about various issues, functionalities the package might have
Not have the build the same thing yet again
Packages save you time that allows your developer to spend more time on the business logic of your website in exchange for some flexibility and perhaps a cost. Though both can be overcome in some situations.
If you are looking for an Umbraco package, two of the most popular ones at the moment are:
SeoToolkit (Free and actively maintained)
SeoChecker (Battle tested with a lot of years of experience)
Both are solid choices if you are looking for a package.
Final verdict
Is Umbraco good for SEO?
Technically, yes. Strategically, only if you implement it correctly.
It’s one of the most flexible CMS platforms for SEO, but it doesn’t automate best practices for you.
That’s why many Umbraco sites rank extremely well…
And others struggle to appear at all.