Hey there, I'm Meg Casebolt the CEO of Love at First Search and I'm here to talk about whether or not it makes sense to put your website on MemberVault or to put it on another platform like WordPress or SquareSpace or Wix or Weebly or Shopify or any of the other places around the internet. So we get the question a lot on MemberVault of like will MemberVault be good for my SEO? Or is WordPress or Wix or Squarespace better than MemberVault?
And surprise, I'm here to say there isn't really an answer for this. So here, platforms aside, here are the things that Google actually cares about when it looks at a website. Does it have high quality content?
Does it load quickly? What's the page speed load time? Is it secure? Or is it likely to be hacked?
Is anybody else talking about it? Are there backlinks coming into it? And Google doesn't care if it's built on WordPress, or if it's a custom thing, or if it's something that your cousin built in his basement, they don't really care so much about the platform, they care about all those other pieces. Now, you will hear a lot of people saying like WordPress is best. And the reason for that is because they're WordPress developers, and they make money on WordPress. But also because WordPress as a tool, WordPress is a piece of software. It's not like it's an open source software that anybody can download for free. And the software itself, like the WordPress interface, is very small and very fast. But there are a lot of ways that you can really mess up a WordPress site. You know, if you, if you buy it, put it on, if you install on shared hosting that's very slow and crowded, if you install a bunch of plugins that are really, you know, ugly and take up a lot of space, and they're slow, if you don't install an SSL certificate, so your site's not secure, and it's very hackable, if you upload really big images that slow down your load time, like people love WordPress, because they control all of those variables. But every lever that you push could mess it up a little bit. So you know, developers will say WordPress is the best because it's fast. But if you don't have a developer in your back pocket to make sure that it's fast, it could actually go a lot slower than some of those out of the box solutions. In terms of those software's as a service, like the the website tools that we're familiar with, we know the names of like, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, which are the best. My two favorites are Squarespace and Shopify. I think they're not as fast as a fully optimized Wordpress site. They're not as customizable, but I think that they do have the best sort of out of the box solutions. Wix and Weebly are also very popular, they're better than they used to be. But they do still definitely have issues. Originally Wix was built on. Try not to get too nerdy was built in a language called Flash, which Google did not love. Now, they've mostly moved over. So the crawler bots can read it a bit more easily. But they still do some weird things like they just add a bunch of letters to the end of the URLs, which I don't know why they do that. Weebly is also limited in the ways that you can structure the content, like they only allow you to have h1 and h2 is but none of the three, four or five sixes. And they have really limited customizations and they don't allow you to do as much with SEO at their lower tier options. So those are not my preferred platforms. But MemberVault can do all those things. Right? What did I say? I said that Google wants a site to be fast, it wants it to be secure. It wants it to have good content, it wants it to have good backlinks. You can do all of that on your MemberVault site. Google doesn't care. If you build on MemberVault, and have the world's best content, it's going to outrank a WordPress website that has crappy content. This is about more than what is the platform. This is about what do you do with it? Oh, my gosh, I feel like there's some sort of sex joke here about it's not the size. It's the motion, right? Sorry, I can't help myself. I've never seen an issue with my number. Well, in terms of the page speed load time, in part because people aren't building memorable websites that have like giant, beautiful images, it's really meant to share really great content, sell amazing products, and get people involved with your business. And I also do want to say the development team, in my six years of being a MemberVault user, I've seen the SEO on the site and on the platform improve. And I know that this is a priority for them, because they call me when they have questions. Right. So if you build your entire website on MemberVault, you're more likely to see it do well on SEO than if it's only the place that you host your products because there's just more information for Google to look at. So if you have your blog on there, if you have your about page, your homepage and all of your product suite, then you'll do better than, you know, if you split yourself between two websites, and then you're splitting the traffic between those two websites. So the more high quality content you create, the more likely you are to rank for that content. The more links you have coming into that site, the more likely you are to rank for that content, regardless of platform. So if this is something where you're like, I want to move everything over to MemberVault. But I'm scared about SEO. You know, go, you know, go look at your domain authority, figure out what's happening on your existing website. And then you can make an educated decision about whether or not it makes sense to move yourself over. Or, as we talked about in the domains video, maybe you just want to take your membership website, put it into a subdomain. That way you can still benefit from both of those resources on one single domain. The last question I have about this about SEO tools and how they work is like, Oh, but I have Yoast on my WordPress website and MemberVault. It doesn't have Yoast. Before I before I get onto my Yoast toolbox, I'm climbing up right now. Um, Yoast is a plugin. It's the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. And people always get concerned if they're leaving WordPress, if they're on a site that isn't WordPress, that Oh, what if I don't have Yoast? And here's what I have to say about Yoast. Yoast is a very helpful reminder tool to help you take your keywords and optimize your content for your keywords. It does not help you determine the correct keyword for that page strategically. And it does not actually communicate directly with Google. It is not Yoast that is getting you the traffic. It is the work that Yoast is reminding you to do on the page. So all of those optimizations that it's like you get a green light for doing this like write your SEO title, write your meta description, put your keyword into your, your post title into your headlines into your alt text, all those things that it's reminding you about. You can do on any platform. Yoast does not make those changes. Yoast reminds you to make those changes. It's a checklist. It's a good reminder system. A green light does not mean that you will rank for it. A red light does not mean that you won't. It's just a checklist. Let me say it again. Yoast does not talk to Google. Actually, Yoast can, if you're not careful, Yoast can actually make your post worse. Because you might rank you might be optimizing for the wrong keyword. Or you might be over optimizing and shoving keywords into places that it doesn't really belong. So don't rely on Yoast as the indicator that you're doing well with SEO. Rely on a solid SEO strategy of thinking through what you want people to find that page for and making sure that it's the best quality content that it can be and don't get so caught up in like, Oh, I got a green light this one's only yellow. It's a tool. It's not a strategy. All right, there's my rant about MemberVault versus WordPress and what the right tool is for your business and the fact that you can build a really great website on any platform, including MemberVault. It's the quality of the content, the quality of the backlinks, the Page Speed, load time, like there's so many things that matter that have nothing to do with the platform that you choose. So if you want to move to MemberVault, you absolutely can and you can still get SEO traffic to your MemberVault site. All right. If you have any other questions, definitely check out other videos about domains about migrations and about what was the other thing I talked about duplicate content. Go check those out if you have more questions