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 these basic site building features won’t cut it for modern growing businesses that depend on search engine traffic to generate leads. That’s because traffic acquired through SEO efforts is more sustainable that most other marketing channels like social media, newsletters, YouTube, etc.
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.
9 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.
It is a key contributor to your lead generation strategy because your domain name is what people search on Google to find you and use your services. The category of searches containing your domain name is called branded search, and it usually converts traffic to leads at a much higher rate than any other form of search.
In addition to that, having a keyword in the domain name gets you SEO brownie points.
With so much riding on it, the domain name impacts everything brand and lead-gen.
In other words, you must have a custom domain name to build a thriving online business. But you get a domain with the notion.site extension in the free Notion plan, as opposed to more common and natural-looking extensions like .com, .co, .ai, etc.
The notion.site extension indicates that the website continues to be under Notion’s domain, which means you don’t own the space. All the content you create is under Notion’s ownership. That’s a bad place to be if you run a legit business.
You can get a custom domain extension with Notion sites, but it costs an extra $10 per month, on top of the Plus plan that costs $8 per month without any additional features. You get the same design and performance capabilities as free plan users.
Let’s change that.
Calculate the true cost of ownership of Notion sites
You get many more features with the Super plus plan at $12 per month, when paid annually. That’s 33% cheaper than Notion Sites.
The below image is an example of a Super website with a custom domain.
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). So they must highlight the pain point they solve to encourage viewers to click.
You can’t modify the meta title and meta description on the Notion free plan. 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.
You must signup for the Notion Plus Plan or the Business plan to add the meta tags. It costs $18 per month when paid annually, including the base plan and Notion Sites costs.
Super, on the other hand, supports adding meta details for free.
Here’s how to modify the meta tags in Super:
After signing up: 1. Go to the ‘Pages’ tab in the dashboard
2. Click the three-dots icon and click the ‘Edit SEO settings’ option
3. Add meta title and description under the ‘Property overrides’ section
4. Save changes
That’s it. You have successfully updated your meta tags.
Need more reasons to use Super to build Notion sites?
3. You can’t customize your website
There is no point in getting search traffic if you can’t generate leads. And if people do not like the experience you provide on your website, they will leave without visiting your ‘money’ pages.
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. You can still hyperlink in Notion, but internal links do not have the same impact as CTA in driving clicks.
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 only 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 that 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.
This way you can integrate your Notion site with any tool of choice.
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 you need to leverage all available opportunities 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.
It provides visual relief to searchers - when they see something different from the usual blue links on the Google search results page, they stop and take notice. It often results in an increased CTR.
You can not add Schema code to your Notion-based website as there is no view where you can add custom code.
Super allows you to add the markup in the Code section that we covered in the previous segment.
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 and load fast. That means the font should be big but not so big that it takes up the whole screen. Additionally, you must have the option to hide certain page elements on mobile while letting them appear on the desktop to enhance readability on smaller screens.
With Notion, you do 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 Notion’s mobile SEO capabilities end.
With Super, you get a mobile responsive layout automatically, and you can add custom code to make the mobile version behave exactly as you want. You get greater control and better engagement.
7. Notion does not provide control over the URL structure
Notion users on any of the paid plans can customize their domain extension but even they can’t edit the URL slug.
The slug is the part of the URL that comes after the domain name and extension.
In the below image, for example, the alphanumeric text that follows /engteam/ is the slug.
There is no way to create a readable slug in Notion. That’s a problem because users usually hover over a link and check out the URL to ensure they land on a legit page. But if the URL does not provide that information, users hesitate to click on it. Furthermore, a strong brand must have easy-to-read, pretty URLs - Notion just doesn’t cut it for them.
Super, on the other hand, makes changing slugs easy:
1. Go to the ‘Pages’ section in your Super dashboard
2. Click on the three-dots next to the target page and click on ‘Edit page’
3. Type preferred URL slug under the ‘Page Path’ section
4. Save changes
Pro tip:
Keep the slug as short as possible but include your primary keyword for SEO benefits.
8. Notion Sites does not auto-create sitemaps
The sitemap of a website is a page that records all pages within the domain. Website owners can submit the sitemap to search engines like Google and Bing, making it easy for them to parse through pages. Ideally, the sitemap should auto-update each time you publish a new page so that the search engines have the latest snapshot.
Though search engines have other ways to discover your site pages, the sitemap provides a foolproof method of making all your URLs visible to them. The faster search engines discover your content, the faster they index and serve it to users.
One of the SEO drawbacks of Notion is that, unlike Super, it doesn’t auto-create a sitemap.
9. Notion does not build a Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file of a website acts as a set of instructions for search engine crawlers. Website owners can use this file to guide search engines on how to crawl their site, specifying which pages or sections should be indexed or ignored. Ideally, the robots.txt file should be easily editable, allowing you to update crawler instructions as your site evolves.
While search engines can still crawl your site without a robots.txt file, having one provides a more controlled method of managing how your content is discovered and indexed. The more precisely you can guide search engines, the more effectively they can crawl and index your content.
One of the SEO drawbacks of Notion is that, unlike more SEO-focused platforms, it doesn't provide built-in support for creating or managing a robots.txt file. This limitation can hinder your ability to optimize how search engines interact with your site, potentially affecting your overall search visibility.
Other SEO benefits of using Super with Notion
With Super you can:
- Design pages without impacting page load speed
- Add hreflang tags to target an international audience
Notion SEO templates
While Notion is limiting when it comes to SEO capabilities, it's worth noting that there are ways to enhance your SEO efforts using Super, when using Notion’s non-website features.
One effective approach is leveraging SEO templates. These templates can significantly streamline your optimization workflow, ensuring consistency in your efforts and saving valuable time.
Super offers a range of SEO-friendly website templates, which are excellent for quickly creating optimized sites on top of your Notion content.
For those looking to dive deeper into SEO strategy and planning, consider checking out this collection of templates.
These comprehensive tools can help you develop and execute effective SEO strategies, potentially mitigating some of Notion's inherent SEO drawbacks and boosting your site's search engine performance.
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.
