Is Notion good for SEO?
Ahh, Notion websites — beautiful, simple and almost impossible to mess it up
Whether you've added a custom domain to your Notion website or you're just having it hosted by Notion themselves, let's have a look at the question: Is Notion good for SEO?
The short answer is: Notion websites can be indexed by search engines (Google, etc) if you're on a paid plan, but they're limited. If you're paying, you might as well pay for a Notion website builder so that you can have 100% chances to rank on top positions in Google.
Let's have a look at the options.
SEO options for Notion
Option 1: Free Notion Plan. No indexing, limited
When you're starting out, Notion allows you to create beautiful pages which can feel or even made to look like websites.
The problem?
At one point, Notion added a function called "Search engine indexing":
Before that, Notion pages could index on some searches where the competition wasn't super high. That was showing its limits.
Now, by default, pages are rarely indexing for searches, as time went by from this specific feature.
Option 1 — not viable at all.
Option 2: Paid Notion plan. With indexing, but still limited
So we'll just pay for Notion to get this feature, and then we'll get to the #1 positions of search queries, right?
Not really and no, respectively.
Here's the thing: Notion charges $5/mo (or $48/year) for the Personal Pro plan. Even then, if you turn that tick on, you'll still be limited. It's better than nothing, however, and it's very convenient. But we've got options 3 and 4 below which are about the same level of convenience, and with more potential.
Anyway, coming back to this. So what's the catch?
- You'll be getting your credit card out
- You'll still be limited, but it's better than nothing
- On the flip side (the good part), this all happens in the Notion app, so if you don't want to leave it for whatever reason, this might be the best option
What are you losing though?
- No control over the meta title (the blue, bigger text in the Google preview above) or the meta description (the grey, smaller text that you see in searches below the title). That sucks
- No control over the preview image, when the page is shared on social
- The site will be slow, which highly impacts the positions. As of 2021, Google puts a lot of importance on this metric.
- No SEO continuity, as you're on a subdomain of Notion.
Option 3: Use a Notion Website Builder, which makes Notion good for SEO
Here is where we come in — although there are other Notion website builders, it costs nothing to try us out and it costs you to try our competitors (though we estimate we'll force them into offering a freemium plan), so no need to take out your credit card.
With Simple.ink, we transform your Notion pages into websites — as simple as that.
Pop in your link from the Notion page, spend about 30 seconds → your website is live.
That's how easy we've made it.
Now, we're offering paid plans if you want some pro features, but nothing stops you from going to optinon 4, which is...
Option 4 (if you're on a budget): Stick to a free Notion Website Builder
This is for you if you're either not sure whether you want to commit (nothing wrong with that), or you're on a budget.
If you're on a budget, the deal we're offering is simple and fair: we'll just grow with you, and until you start growing, the website is on us.
If you're unsure, you've got generous free plan to test out, see if Simple.ink has everything you need (and if it doesn't, let us know in the live chat what it is that you need — we'll probably build it for you!)
With our Notion static site generator, you won't be limited by any of the points we've listed earlier. The only caveat is the payment you'll have to make if you're looking for a paid feature (make sure you check our pricing page to see whether you need any of them).
Plus, as time goes by, we'll expand more and more beyond just the basic capabilities.
Why Notion pages are not optimized for SEO
By default, Notion pages are not exactly optimized for SEO:
- The page speed is far from perfect
- Meta descriptions and meta titles are poorly optimized
- You can't add any preview pictures
- You're ultimately on the Notion (sub)domain
- You'll need to be on a paid Notion plan to be able to activate search indexing
The more important question is: do you have everything aligned so that you can reach top #1 positions with your pages? The answer is: probably not.
The thing is this: if the competition for those searched words is also limited by something like Notion, you have chances. But if they are not limited (chances are, they're not limited), you'll have a handicap.
Especially if we're talking about a highly-searched word, where competition is fierce. The more value is there behind a searched query on search engines → the more competition there will be.
So what can you do?
We've researched the whole internet (not really, but almost) and the following seem to be the only options:
- Pay for Notion. At the time of writing this article, Notion charges $4/mo billed yearly or $5/mo billed monthly for the Personal Pro plan. That's the plan you'd need to get to enable search engine indexing, but even that is limited in itself.
- Build your website using something like Simple.ink → our pricing page is here, and we offer significantly more features besides just perfect SEO capabilities.
- If you're on a budget, we have a very generous free plan. Check out the link above → that plan in itself will give you perfect SEO capabilities for your website, which will be hosted on a beautiful subdomain of ours (e.g. yourname.simple.ink)
Is a Notion static site generator good for SEO?
Thankfully, these issues can be all solved with our Notion website maker function, which builds your Notion pages into a website with our Notion static site generator . We've built Simple.ink pretty much to address all the issues that stood between a Notion page and a live website. Why?
We think the Notion text editor is a great tool, but it just didn't have everything it needed to be able to create beautiful, stunning, fast-loading websites for people such as yourself!
So the bottom line is: on Notion websites built with Simple.ink, yes, SEO is doable. Moreover, there's nothing stopping you from reaching #1 positions at all — unlike a free Notion plan or even a paid one.
Besides, the speed of iteration you have over competitors in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) gives you an edge.
Curious to see everything that's editable? Sign up for a free account — it costs you nothing, and we won't hit you with a paywall at any point. Everybody gets a free Notion website, and we have an unlimited free plan!
Is Notion SEO friendly?
We can safely assume that Notion is SEO friendly. Though, the problem is that unless you don't go with the paid Personal Pro plan, you can't index your pages, so all of that SEO work is not going to be visible on the internet.
Though, with a free Simple.ink Notion website, your are going to avoid all of that, and once your website is done, your pages will rank on Google for free. Therefore, in this situation, Notion is indeed SEO friendly.
Can I use Notion as a website?
You absolutely can.
Notion website are not only beautiful and simple, but they can also be fast and perfectly optimized for your use case.
That in itself can give you an edge over competitors who have bloated websites, that try to do too many things at the same time and end up doing not too much at all.
If you want to build a quality website that will be a good marketing tool for your business or service, give Simple.ink a try. We provide affordable and easy to use websites to help get your business off the ground. Notion provides a full package of text edit tools (and more than that, really) that can help any website get built. Once your Notion page is ready, Simple.ink turns that into a website in about 30 seconds — sky is the limit.
It's a great choice for all sizes: a small business, say, or a personal website that you want to share your ideas with the world. Even startups or other bigger businesses use Simple.ink to create Notion websites!
