Elementor Pro SEO: Mistakes and Solutions to Optimise the Rankings of Your WordPress Web Content | 2024 Guide

Elementor has burst onto the WordPress scene as an indispensable tool for anyone looking to improve their web design.

This page builder plugin lets you customise every corner of your page without writing code.

But what makes it stand out?

The magic of Elementor lies in its intuitive, elegant and easy-to-use interface. Even beginners can create attractive designs easily or learn from the tutorial on its own website.

On top of that, plenty of add-ons have appeared that bring a whole host of features and boost this design plugin, making it a genuinely complete tool.

But what’s the catch?

Design plugins tend to load the website with code, making it load much more slowly and making it a challenge to optimise the site for SEO.

This doesn’t mean you can’t do SEO for Elementor, but it does mean that you need to know how to work with it on our website so that it doesn’t become a problem later on, and that’s what I’m going to explain in this article.

The free version vs. Elementor Pro

You may be wondering:

Is the free version of Elementor enough for my website, or should I consider making the leap to Elementor Pro?

• The free version is a solid starting point, offering basic tools for customisation and optimisation.
• Elementor Pro is a real toolbox of advanced tools for those who want to take their website to the next level in SEO.
  With more sophisticated design options, premium widgets and editing capabilities for WooCommerce, the Pro version lets you create a unique online experience.

What really makes Elementor Pro shine are the features that boost your web strategy, including:

• Full design customisation
• Access to themes and templates
• Dynamic content creation
• Speed optimisation features
• Integration with SEO plugins
• AI text generation
• AI design block generation

Elementor key points: pros and cons

• Elementor is a no-code page builder for WordPress that improves website customisation.
• Its intuitive interface and the advanced tools in the Pro version make this process easier.
• Working with this plugin requires server configuration so that our website works properly and can deliver good SEO performance in terms of speed.
• You need to avoid installing too many design plugins or Elementor add-ons, as they slow the website down.
• Keeping Elementor and plugins up to date prevents technical problems

Advantages of Elementor

Let’s talk about all the good things:

• Elementor is any web designer’s dream thanks to its ability to create stunning designs in just a few clicks.
• Its learning curve is surprisingly quick, which means you’ll master the interface in no time and start building custom web pages without using code.
• The ease of creation lets even the greenest users feel like professionals, creating designs that once seemed beyond their reach.

As well as design flexibility, Elementor lets you create and reuse assets across different pages, editing them centrally, which saves time and effort.

Additional plugins work like a power-up, offering extra features that take your designs even further, giving you greater freedom on your website effortlessly.

Disadvantages of Elementor

Despite its design advantages, it’s a headache when it comes to SEO optimisation.

This happens because it forces the browser to download a lot of resources, such as JS and CSS files, of which often only 1% of all the code is used.

At server level it also consumes a large amount of resources, so we need the server to be powerful enough and to carry out the configuration needed for our website to work properly.

Nor should we forget the habit of installing more plugins than we need on our WordPress, which slows the website down even further, and that’s when it really becomes a problem (even more so if we use several plugins that require a lot of server resources, which is when things get complicated).

It’s true that Elementor now has some features for optimising the website’s loading speed, but I usually end up using other plugins to finish off this part.

Improving loading speed in Elementor

Loading speed is a critical aspect both for SEO and for providing a good user experience, and Google rates fast-loading websites positively.

Adding too many elements and widgets in Elementor, as well as overusing plugins, can increase loading time and add unnecessary code, harming both SEO and the user experience.

That’s why it’s essential to run speed tests using tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights and analyse Elementor usage on each URL in detail, to weigh up the impact that icon libraries have on the site’s performance.

To optimise loading speed on sites designed with Elementor, it’s advisable to apply the following settings:

• Use tools such as Page Speed and GTMetrix to analyse and improve the site’s performance.
• Make sure the PHP version and the database are up to date and optimised.
• Compress and optimise images to reduce their size and improve loading.
• Minify and combine CSS and JavaScript files to reduce the number of requests to the server.
• Use a caching service to store static copies of pages and speed up their loading.
• Have a good server and increase the server’s PHP memory limit to 768 MB -> define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘768M’);
• Use a CDN to improve speed.
• Filter the loading of plugins or files by page, using functions.php or a plugin that helps you do it.

Sometimes, if you have too many plugins, this task may be much more complex and it may be more viable to build the website from scratch, but these are extreme cases.

If you apply these improvements, you should get good results on your website.

How to do SEO for Elementor

When it comes to SEO for Elementor, it’s done in the same way as for any website built with WordPress.

Broadly speaking:

• Keyword research.
• Planning content creation and optimisation.
• Fixing internal technical SEO On-Page errors.
• Fixing crawling and indexing problems.
• Media outreach and link strategy.

The process is very similar, except that we need to pay special attention to its main weak point: speed and excess code.

Keyword research: studying keywords

To start any project where you want to do SEO, you need to carry out a keyword study or keyword research.

There are many tools for this research, from Google itself with the suggestions it shows you as you search, through Keyword Planner, Semrush and Sistrix, and even artificial intelligence can help us with this.

You mustn’t lose sight of the competition.

If we study the competition with tools and analyse their websites, we’ll find plenty of opportunities to work into our keyword research.

Once we have the keywords, we need to group them and sort them by page, so we know which keywords we want to rank for on each page and which pages we want to create on our website.

Content planning

Once the keyword research is finished, we need to start working on content planning, that is, when content should be created or optimised.

Here you can use Excel, a Google spreadsheet, Notion or Airtable, or you can use more advanced task-tracking tools such as Trello or Asana, among others.

Month by month, pages will be created and optimised according to the plan, placing keywords in key spots such as the title, description, h1, text, images and schema.

When we work on this content, it’s important that we analyse Google’s top 10 results carefully, so we can create better content based on them and build a good structure that makes it easy for users to find what they need.

Fixing internal technical SEO On-Page errors

To fix the website’s technical problems, we’ll need to use a crawler-type tool that crawls our website and points out the existing problems.

Some of these tools are Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Sitebulb and Oncrawl.

There are also other tools that, although they aren’t crawlers, also help us identify specific problems on the website.

• Screaming Frog Log Analizer: lets you analyse the website’s access logs and identify whether there’s a problem, making the analysis easier with this tool.
• Search Console: flags various problems on the website and possible improvements, as well as impression and click data, among other things.
• Schema Validator: lets you check whether the website’s schema is correct and test it before implementing the code.
• PageSpeed Insights: analyses the website’s speed and suggests possible improvements.

Fixing crawling and indexing problems

One of the main technical problems people don’t pay attention to is crawling and indexing problems.

These usually happen because people think that using redirects, canonicals and noindex is enough in many cases, when they don’t know how to use them properly.

This means that many pages don’t receive their authority properly and rank lower, or that Google’s robot spends its crawl time on pages we don’t want to rank.

To avoid this, it’s important that links always point to pages with a 200 response code, that robots.txt is used correctly and that noindex pages are avoided.

Media outreach and link strategy

As with any SEO strategy, we need either an investment in link building or a strategy for creating content that helps us earn links.

A link building strategy based on investment is the easiest and fastest way, but if we want to work on something more natural, we can opt for various classic strategies such as:

• Creating features or resources: offering a useful feature or resource for free can make it easier to earn links, as users recommend it to one another.
• Creating and promoting studies: we can carry out interesting analyses around key dates to share them with the media and earn links.
• Creating viral content or infographics: infographics tend to be shared quite well, and if the content is really well put together, we can contact websites or blogs in the sector that might find it interesting and earn links that way.
• Taking part in, sponsoring or collaborating on events: taking part in events is another way to get people talking and eventually linking to your website. Usually, you’ll at least get a link on the event’s own website. And if the event is very big and gets media coverage, you may well pick up one or two more.

These are just a few simple ideas, but there are many more.

The goal is to grab attention and get people talking about you.

Responsive design and user experience

Responsive design and user experience are two aspects that can’t be ignored in search engine optimisation.

Elementor gives you tools to make sure your website looks and works perfectly on mobile devices, an important factor for search engine rankings.

User experience is enhanced with Elementor Pro, as it offers more features such as:

• Customisable templates.
• Customisable widgets.
• Customisable theme builder.
• Breadcrumbs.

These are just some of them, but you can find the full comparison here.

A web design that properly responds to users’ needs and offers an excellent user interface isn’t just more attractive; it will also help users feel comfortable on our page and stay longer, and as a result it will be rewarded by Google with a better position in the search results.

Analysing and measuring website performance

An effective SEO strategy requires not only implementation but also analysis and measurement.

When using Elementor, it’s essential to manage and measure your website’s progress to make sure your efforts are paying off.

With this builder, we need to pay special attention to speed metrics and keep an eye on whether the server is responding well.

It’s also important to set up tools such as GA4 and Search Console, among others, to track how traffic, keywords and conversions evolve on our website.

The detailed analyses we carry out will help us develop smarter strategies and make data-driven decisions that can significantly increase user engagement and retention on the website.

However, to get the most out of your SEO efforts with Elementor, you need to correctly interpret and apply the data gathered from on-page metrics.

Let’s look at some analysis tools and how you can monitor essential metrics to improve your website’s SEO.

Tools and plugins for working on the SEO of our Elementor website

We’ve already covered several points on how to do SEO in Elementor for our website, so let’s look at some tools and plugins that can help us further in our day-to-day work.

SEO plugins compatible with Elementor

These days most WordPress SEO plugins are compatible with Elementor.

I mainly tend to use Yoast or Rank Math.

I think both are good for preparing our site for search engines.

Neither is better than the other, but Rank Math does offer many more features than Yoast, so it’s a matter of taste.

Yoast is perhaps much easier and more intuitive, as it has fewer configuration options, but for me both are good options on WordPress.

Schema plugins compatible with Elementor

The plugins above already include schema markup by default, and we can even add markup code with Elementor, although on many projects I tend to use Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP.

It lets you add automatic markup to every page, import markup already created with Yoast, Rank Math or other plugins, and customise the output with custom schema.

As plugins go, I think it’s pretty good.

WPO plugins compatible with Elementor

Now we come to Elementor’s Achilles’ heel: loading speed.

Elementor already includes features which, I must admit, have improved a lot in recent updates, and you can tell from the response of the websites that configure them.

The only drawback is that it has few customisation options, so for some speed settings we may prefer to configure them with a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, Super Cache, LiteSpeed, etc.

Personally, I use WP Rocket, as I think it’s one of the best-performing plugins currently on the market.

There are others, but they don’t seem to work very well, or at least that’s not the impression I get.

Perhaps it’s because they have too many customisation options and the configuration is much more complex, but using WP Rocket with Elementor gives me pretty good results.

As an extra, we can use a plugin for conditional loading of files or plugins, such as Plugin load filter or Perfmatters, which will save us requests and downloads of files we don’t use on certain web pages.

CDN

If we really want to stand out and get the very best loading speed out of our website, we can use a CDN service.

It will help us serve content to users and bots much faster, as well as offering plenty of advanced configuration options for our website’s speed.

There are several, such as CloudFront, NitroPack, RocketCDN, etc.

Content writing tools

When writing highly SEO-optimised content, I tend to use SurferSEO.

It helps me a lot with optimisation and with analysing related terms to rank for a keyword.

It’s something I often tell people who ask me: content I create with SurferSEO is content I get ranking.

Solutions to common SEO problems in Elementor

Despite its many advantages, Elementor is a real challenge for SEO when it comes to speed.

Heavy use of code and JavaScript can reduce web page loading speed, which has a negative impact on SEO.

This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to rank; there are solutions to these common problems. In the previous section I mentioned several plugins that can help us with speed in Elementor.

And at the beginning of the post, I mentioned some special server settings that would help us with performance.

For example, I recently carried out some optimisations on this website, queseo.es.

The website runs on Elementor Pro, doesn’t have many plugins installed and uses Elementor’s own hosting, and it had this score on mobile:

It took me just a few minutes to install WP Rocket, make a few quick settings and raise it to a speed score of 93:

Configuration settings to avoid SEO errors

Configuration settings in Elementor are essential for avoiding SEO errors that could harm your site.

A common error is duplicate titles when the «Hide title» option is enabled in Elementor, as the H1 isn’t removed but hidden, which can lead to confusion and duplicate titles.

H1 headings are important for SEO, as they help search engines understand the structure and main content of the page.

It’s also advisable to carry out a manual review of the Elementor configuration and the page content to confirm that SEO practices are being applied correctly.

Crawlers such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb can help you detect these errors and problems.

These small tweaks can make a big difference to how search engines perceive and rank your website.

Maintenance and updates for healthy SEO

Regular maintenance and updates are essential for keeping the SEO of your Elementor-designed website healthy, as well as protecting you against possible vulnerability attacks.

Keeping Elementor, your theme and WordPress up to date is crucial to avoid compatibility problems that can harm the site’s performance, SEO and security.

A lack of maintenance and updates can lead to high server resource consumption and slow loading speed, which is bad for the user experience and, in turn, for SEO.

It’s advisable to schedule regular reviews and update all your website’s components to make sure they work optimally.

This not only prevents technical problems but also ensures that you’re using the latest features and improvements that Elementor and other plugins have to offer, keeping your website in line with SEO best practice.

If you manage lots of websites, you can use tools such as Modular DS, which let you update and monitor all your WordPress installations, updates, health status and backups from a single dashboard.

Practical tips to boost your SEO with Elementor

To boost your SEO with Elementor, there’s a variety of practical tips you can put into practice. One of the most important is customising URLs to include relevant keywords and creating friendly link structures, which improves both usability and SEO. In addition, removing unnecessary characters and managing redirects properly can have a significant impact on your rankings.

Image optimisation is another crucial aspect of SEO. In Elementor, it’s advisable to use next-generation image formats that offer high quality with a reduced file size, which helps improve loading times and the user experience. By following these tips, you’ll be able to make the most of Elementor’s capabilities to improve your website’s SEO.

Future-proofing your website: Elementor and new SEO trends

The world of SEO is constantly evolving, and future-proofing your website is vital to keep a competitive edge. Elementor is no stranger to this reality and offers capabilities for optimising Core Web Vitals, which are key for SEO because of their direct impact on user experience and on rankings in Google. Mobile optimisation is especially critical, as Core Web Vitals are calculated mainly from the user experience on these devices; Elementor provides responsive templates and widgets to meet these performance criteria.

Elementor is also incorporating artificial intelligence features that allow SEO content to be personalised based on user behaviour, thereby improving relevance and rankings. And with voice search growing in popularity, Elementor is updating itself to make it easier to optimise content for this kind of search, including better detection of common questions asked by users.

By keeping up to date with the latest search trends and algorithms, Elementor ensures your website is ready to face the changes and challenges of the digital future.

Summary

We’ve come a long way on our journey through SEO with Elementor, from discovering its basic features to exploring advanced strategies and getting ready for future trends. Elementor proves to be a powerful and versatile ally for any SEO strategy, offering an intuitive interface, attractive design capabilities and advanced customisation in its Pro version.

However, like any powerful tool, Elementor comes with its challenges, especially around loading speed and server resource consumption. But with practical tips, solutions to common problems and constant improvements, you can overcome these obstacles and optimise your website for search engines. In the end, what matters is action: taking what you’ve learnt and applying it to improve your online presence, making sure your website doesn’t just survive but thrives in the ever-changing digital landscape.