How to do SEO with Kentico CMS

While search engines don’t consider which CMS a website is built on when ranking websites, using Kentico comes with some great features that make optimising it easier and quicker for your SEO team to work with so they can spend more time growing your organic traffic.

Optimising Kentico Content Management System (CMS) websites for great organic search performance is not markedly different to the process with a website built in any other CMS. The basics of day to day ranking improvements remain the same – create great content, optimise with on-page SEO and then promote that content to gain exposure and links. 

Luckily for website owners, Google is CMS agnostic and doesn’t take into account what brand of CMS a website is built in when deciding website rankings, despite what some SEO salespeople may say moving to their preferred system will do for your rankings… 

What it really comes down to is the CMS features that the platform has and how easy it is for search engine marketers to use day to day when optimising and promoting the website to improve performance in organic search.

Is Kentico Good For SEO?

Kentico includes many features that make it great for SEO. Core SEO tasks such as on-page linking, meta data input, custom hyperlink creation and content creation can be easily handled via the Pages application.
Simple 301 redirect options, the ability to optimise URLs for keywords and simple multi-culture website switching save SEOs time and make the Kentico CMS simple to work with.

Lightning quick websites that Google loves can be developed in Kentico MVC, keeping Google and website users happy.

While there are some complications around using aliases, this feature can still be utilised if your search marketing and development teams are aware of how to handle it.

URL Handling

Website content trees can become very lengthy as many website editors will well know. Deep folder structures can make for great compartmentalisation and organisation of content, but this structure also means URLs can become unwieldy and require shortening. 

While Google doesn’t have any requirement for URL length, optimising the length is beneficial from a click through rate and user experience point of view. Shorter URLs make it easier for searchers to digest, at a glance, what your page is about and to decide if they should click through. When performing SEO with Kentico CMS be aware that sometimes URLs will need to be optimised.

Unoptimized URL
example.com.au/products/widgets/widget-services/blue-widget-servicing/melbourne

• URL is too long

• Hard to read in search engine

• Hard to understand the pages content

• Reduced click through rate

Optimized URL​
example.com/products/blue-widget-servicing-melbourne

• URL is too long

• Hard to read in search engine

• Hard to understand the pages content

• Reduced click through rate

The second URL is more concise and easier for searchers to digest in a search engine results page. When using Kentico for SEO, take use of the simple feature which allows us to optimise this by shortening URLs. Search Engine Optimisation is all about getting web pages to rank on ‘page 1’ of Google, so ensuring that click through rates are a high as possible is the last step once those high rankings have been obtained. 

CREATING URLS IN KENTICO FOR SEO 

The Page Alias tool in Kentico is a simple feature that allows content managers to quickly add additional paths or shorten longer URLs.

Under the ‘URLs’ dropdown of your page, the alias can be configured to a custom path.
 

Easily configure a custom URL alias in Kentico

It’s worth noting that, when this alias is created, a new copy of the page is created instead of a redirect. Both pages are valid, indexable URLs with self-referencing canonical tags…and identical page content. So, while the Alias feature is a powerful tool for creating paths to your content, for search engines this creates a problem. 

If two pages have the same content, but vary only by a few words in the URL, then search engines can’t identify which page is the ‘correct’ one to show users. While Google wont “penalise” a website for having a few duplicate content pages, however as it may not be able to decide which is the right page it may index the page that has the long, un-optimised URL over your snappy new short version. This can negatively impact the click through rate, even if the page ranks highly.

To identify if any alias changes are causing issues on a website, SEOs can access the ‘Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical’ within Google Search Console to identify if there are any pages that have duplicate content issues.  

Duplicate URLs that Google has flagged can be found in Google Search Console.

SEOs will need to advise development teams when this occurs so they can update the canonical tags for the re-named URL. With canonical tags set to shorter, optimised versions and internal linking set to shorter URL pages, Google will be able to identify the right version and display it in results pages.

This feature of Kentico will not present problems for an search engine marketing and development team who have experience working with Kentico CMS for SEO improvements and using it in search engine marketing. Both departments will be able to work together to identify where there may be the need to update the website’s canonical tags and implement these changes.

Simple Page Deletion & Redirects

Culling old page content is a common occurrence on a website. It may be to remove pages that contain products or services that are no longer supplied, old pages that are sucking up crawl budget (the wonderfully named ‘zombie pages’) or pages that are simply out of date.
Any SEO worth their salt knows to redirect these pages, and Kentico has a simple check box in the page deletion screen which makes this easy, rather than going through a custom table.

On the ‘delete page’ screen, simple check boxes will catch all aliases and set up 301 redirects.

If the page had any aliases then these can be redirected without the need to map them 1-to-1 in a custom 301 redirect table, saving time by catching all versions with a simple click of a button.

Easy Meta Data Setup

Meta data is a breeze to set up in when optimising for search engines with Kentico, as Page Titles and Descriptions can be updated under the Metadata tab in Properties. 

By default, the CMS pre-ticks a check box to “inherit” meta data of the top node, which will keep meta properties the same across all pages. 

Deselect ‘Inherit” when editing meta data to prevent duplication

Given that Page Tiles are still strong signals which enable Google to correctly categorise your pages, taking time to create unique meta data across all website pages is important to ensure pages will rank for the right terms.

While the deprecated Page Keywords feature is also still present if needed, this can be safely left blank as Google does not utilise this feature as a ranking signal – and they haven’t for more than 10 years (but some old SEO myths never seem to go away).

Hreflang Handling & Multi-Culture Sites

Hreflang can be a nightmare to set up and requires extreme attention to detail to ensure each attribute is set up correctly and doesn’t leave a site with circular hreflang attributes or missing data. This can lead to mass dropouts of pages within search engine results as Google sees pages incorrectly marked up as duplicate content and so will only index one version (if you’re lucky) or neither version (if you’re not).  Fewer pages in results means less organic traffic – an SEO’s worst nightmare.

Luckily, Kentico can be configured with a simple switch tab between cultures pages to simplify working with hreflang attributes on region-specific pages. This makes updating attributes simple across 2, 3 or more cultures, rather than having to sign in and out of several CMS or browser tabs.

Use MVC for Super-Fast Websites

Fast load times are critical for SEO success. Google has been using site load speed as a ranking factor since 2010, so for brands serious in ranking highly in search engines having a fast site is a core technical SEO requirement. 

But it’s not just Google that needs to be impressed. If you’re killing it with your SEO and ranking highly, but your page is slow to load, then all those users your SEO team worked so hard to get to the site may end up just leaving without converting. 

As page load times increase, users rate of exiting the site without interacting with it also increases.

The MVC model lends itself well to fast load times due to the separation of systems within the CMS that allow requests to be streamlined. There are also options to cache assets with MVC, further improving page speed load times. Having SEOs and Kentico developers experienced with optimising the CMS for page speeds can drastically improve the performance of your websites conversion rate and search marketing ROI.

As an example you can check out the Blue Cross website we recently developed which has an average load time of 2 seconds on desktop across most pages .

Kentico is Great for SEO

In short, Kentico is a fantastic CMS to use when optimising for search engines. While Google and other search engines tend to be “CMS agnostic” and don’t rank one system over another, the important question when selecting a CMS is “which one will make it easiest for me to run my SEO campaign”. With Kentico there are clear benefits for SEO, and broader digital marketing teams to use when trying to save time and investment whilst delivering outstanding SEO results.