Notion is a stellar tool for storing, displaying, and managing content. It’s sleek, easy to use, and helps you create shareable web pages.
But those are some very basic website building features that won’t cut it for modern businesses.
They can’t scale unless potential leads find their way to their website from different channels, the most cost-effective one being organic search. There is no better way to attract relevant traffic than optimizing content for search engines.
Notion alone is not the best tool for SEO, it can help you create a responsive website with a free SSL certificate. However, the SEO checklist is much larger - Your website must be fast, engaging, secure, keyword optimized - and most importantly, helpful to your readers. Does that mean you can’t create advanced search engine optimized websites with Notion? Not unless you use Super.
Super helps you create appealing websites through Notion while supporting all the SEO capabilities required to rank your content.
7 reasons why Notion is not SEO-friendly (and the workaround):
1. Notion charges too much to connect with a custom domain
Your domain name is the identity of your website. It’s the name you assign to your space on the internet.
Once you build your brand, your domain is what people search on Google to find you and avail your services. That category of searches is called brand search and it’s known to convert traffic into leads at a higher rate than any other form of search.
Also, having a keyword in the domain name will earn SEO brownie points. In short, the domain name is what everything circles around.
But it will cost you $12 per month just to connect a custom domain with Notion. You get many more features with the Super plus plan at the same cost when paid annually.
Free Notion sites are assigned an AI-generated domain names - the below image exemplifies the randomness.
The notion.site element indicates that the website continues to be under Notion’s domain, which means you don’t own the space. All the content you create - you create for Notion. That’s a bad place to be in if you run a legit business.
Let’s change that.
Super lets you customize the domain name of your website on Notion along with many other features at nearly the same cost. It acts as an interface that takes your content on Notion and puts it under the domain name of your choice.
The below image is an example of a website with a custom domain. It was created with Super.
2. You can’t edit Meta-titles and Meta-descriptions on Notion
Search engines are always on the lookout for new content. When they discover your page, they dig deeper to understand what the page is about. The meta-title and meta-description of a page must summarize the content on the page for the search engines’ easy consumption.
You must include the primary keyword in both and add the value proposition. In addition to helping search engines, both copies play a crucial role in improving the click-through rate (CTR). They should highlight the pain point they solve to encourage viewers to click.
You can’t modify the meta-title and meta-description on Notion. You are stuck with the copy that Notion auto-generates for every page under its domain. It’s a huge drawback on the SEO front.
But you need not worry about that if you use Super. You can access the pop-up that captures the details in two clicks! Here’s how you can do that.
3. You can’t customize your website
There is no point in getting search traffic if you can’t convert it into leads. If people do not like the experience you provide on your website, they will leave.
Search engines demote the page position if they notice that a chunk of visiting traffic consistently leaves a website quickly without clicking on any internal links. Low engagement traffic is detrimental to your SEO efforts.
Notion is great for organizing your content but does not give you many options for customising the look and feel of the pages. All you get is a bare-bone website that looks too simplistic and bland. You can’t customize the design to brand.
There is no way to create Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons that are required to guide people to other pages within your domain.
As a result, search engines detect a high bounce rate and a low pages-per-session count resulting in a poor position on the search result pages.
With Super, however, you can design your website to brand. You can create and style the CTA button in Notion the way you want to. Super helps you create a website that not just converts but also one that you are proud of.
Does that mean you need design skills? Absolutely not! Super offers customizable SEO-friendly Notion templates that help you craft a website in minutes.
4. You can’t track website performance on Notion
The customers you acquire from search follow a journey:
- They find you on Google.
- Click on your listing there.
- Land on your page.
- Interact with the content. And finally,
- They convert into a lead.
They may drop-off from the journey at any stage. Your goal is to minimize the drop-off and clear hurdles on their path to purchasing your product or services. To do that, you must know where the drop-offs occur before you fix them.
You can’t find those opportunities if your website is only on Notion. That’s because you would not be able to integrate it with any user-tracking tools other than Google Analytics. This means you won’t be able to connect your site to heatmaps, AB testing tools, newsletter tools, etc.
However, by signing up with Super, you can set up tracking in a few simple steps. Super lets you access the code section of your webpages. You can paste the tracking codes copied from your tools and put them in the <head> section of your code as shown below.
5. Notion does not support Schema
Getting on the first page of a Google search is one thing but getting clicks on your listing is a different puzzle. For that, you need to stand out from your competitors.
Click-worthy meta-titles help but another effective strategy is using all available search visibility avenues that Google offers - also known as rich snippets. Setting up the schema markup will help you do that.
Schema is a script that sets up your content in a way that it becomes accessible to search engines for being displayed in different visual formats.
Schema provides visual relief to the searchers. When they see something different from the usual blue links on the Google search results page, they stop and read. It often results in an increase in the CTR.
You can not add Schema code to your Notion-based website if you are not using Super.
Super allows you to add the markup in the Code section that we covered in the previous segment. If you really want to stand out from the crowd on Google, you must give Super a shot.
6. Notion offers limited mobile-SEO capabilities
About 65% of all searches originate from mobile devices - Ignoring Mobile SEO is leaving money on the table.
Your website must render well on mobile screens. That means, the font should be big but not take up the whole screen and the website must load fast. Additionally, you should be able to hide elements on mobile while letting them show on the desktop.
With Notion, you sure get reasonably fast-loading pages but that’s because there are no design elements to slow it down. You get pages that render well on mobile but that’s where mobile SEO ends.
With Super, you get a mobile responsive layout automatically, and you can add custom codes to make the mobile version behave exactly as you want. You get greater control and better engagement.
7. Only paying customers can index Notion pages
You need to pay $10 per month to index your Notion pages. If you have the budget, consider paying a dollar extra for accessing Super. The extra dollar can not just get you better SEO features but also many other capabilities that can turn your website into a lead generating engine.
Other SEO benefits of using Super with Notion
With Super you can:
- Design pages without impacting page load speed
- Add alt-text to images and rank in Google image results
- Add hreflang tags to target an international audience
FAQs
Can you create an SEO-friendly Notion website?
You can create a top ranking website on Notion in spite of the limitations faced on the platform by signing up with Super. With Super, you can not just optimize content for search but also improve upon signals that influence the search engine crawlers. You need not worry about on-page and technical SEO if you are supported by Super.
What is search engine indexing in Notion?
Search engine indexing in Notion refers to the automated process of adding Notion pages to a search index and retrieving them when a user types in a relevant search query. Search engines like Google routinely crawl the Notion website, identify new content, map the keywords to the pages that contain them, and arrange those pages in an index.
How to enable Search Engine Indexing in Notion?
You can enable search engine indexing in 3 simple steps:
- Click on Share at the top-right corner of your screen
- Enable to toggle - Share to web
- Turn the toggle on for Search Engine Indexing
Access an illustrative explanation of the above process here.
