Elementor and SEO: how to make an Elementor site easy to find

Elementor is not bad for SEO. An Elementor site can rank as well as any other WordPress site if you watch eight points: your headings, your speed, your SEO plugin, your images, your text, your mobile view, your internal links and what you automate. Complaints about Elementor and Google are almost always about how a site was built, not about the builder itself.

Elementor makes it easy to drag together a beautiful page. It also makes it easy to build a page Google can do little with. Below, per point, is where it goes wrong and how to set it right.

The basics of WordPress itself are in WordPress SEO. This article covers what is different with Elementor.

1. One H1 per page, and headings in the right order

This is the most common mistake on Elementor sites.

In Elementor you choose the level of every heading widget: H1 through H6. Many people choose by looks. The big heading becomes H1, a smaller one H3, because that looks nice.

Google reads headings as the table of contents of your page. The H1 says what the page is about. The H2s are the chapters. The H3s are the sections below them.

How to set it right:

• One H1 per page. The heading that names the topic.
• H2 for every section. Even if you want it to look small. Set the size separately under Style.
• H3 for parts within a section.
• No heading tag for decorative text. “Welcome” or “Get in touch” in an eye-catching font does not need to be a heading. Use a text widget.

Watch out for a double H1. Many themes show the page title at the top as an H1. Add another H1 in Elementor below it and you have two. Hide the theme’s title in Elementor’s page settings, or make your own heading an H2.

Take a wedding photographer in Asheville with four H1s on her homepage: her name, “Portfolio”, “About me” and “Contact”. The words wedding photographer appear in no heading at all. After the fix the H1 is “Wedding Photographer in Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains”, and the other three are H2s.

2. Use an SEO plugin, and fill in the fields

Elementor has no field for the SEO title or meta description. Your SEO plugin does that.

Yoast SEO and Rank Math both work inside the Elementor editor, so you do not have to leave the page:

• Yoast has its own section in the Elementor editor menu.
• Rank Math has an SEO tab in the Elementor panel.

Fill in the title and description for every page. On Elementor sites, often only the default is there: “Home - Business Name”. Read how to write a good SEO title. Which plugin fits you is in the best WordPress SEO plugins. The options beyond Yoast are in Yoast alternative.

3. Keep your pages light

Every section, column and widget adds code. A page with thirty sections, each with three columns, gets heavy. On a phone with a mediocre connection you notice.

What helps:

• Build flatter. Use containers instead of sections inside sections inside columns.
• Shrink images before you upload them. A multi-megabyte photo as a background is a well-known cause of a slow page.
• Go easy on animations. Every element that flies in costs load time.
• Turn off what you do not use. In Elementor’s settings you can disable fonts and icons you do not need.
• Use a caching plugin and good hosting.

Test your most important pages at pagespeed.web.dev, on the Mobile tab. You do not need a 100. You want the page usable within a few seconds and not shifting while it loads.

4. Put text on the page as text

Elementor invites beautiful visuals. The danger: important information sits only in an image.

A price list as a picture. A banner with your services baked in. Opening hours in a photo. Google does not read that, and neither does ChatGPT.

Everything a customer must be able to find goes on the page as real text: what you do, where, what it costs, how to reach you.

Text inside accordions and tabs is not a problem. Google reads it.

5. Give images alt text

There are two kinds of images in Elementor.

The image widget. It takes the alt text from the media library. Fill it in there.

A background image. It has no alt text. To Google it does not exist as an image. So use backgrounds only for atmosphere, not for photos that show something that matters.

If the photographer’s best photos are section backgrounds, that looks great but cannot be found in Google Images. With the image widget and alt text like “Couple at a Blue Ridge Parkway overlook in fall”, that changes. More in alt text.

6. Check the mobile view

Google judges your site on the mobile version. Elementor lets you hide things per screen size. That is handy, and it is a risk.

If you hide a section with text on mobile, that text counts less. Check in Elementor’s mobile view:

• all important text is still there
• headings are readable and not too large
• buttons are big enough to tap
• nothing falls off the screen

7. Put internal links in your text

Elementor sites often lean on buttons and the menu. The running text has few links.

Google uses the words of a link to understand what the page behind it is about. A button saying “Read more” says nothing. A link in a sentence saying “see our wedding stories in western North Carolina” does.

Add links to your other pages in your text widgets. Two or three per page is enough. How to do it well is in internal links.

8. Automate the recurring work

You set the first seven points right once. After that, work keeps coming back: titles that could be better and descriptions missing on new pages.

Software can take over that work, also on an Elementor site. This is how GreatCompany works: on pages built with a page builder such as Elementor, GreatCompany improves the title and description. Those live in your SEO plugin’s fields, separate from your design. The text and images inside your Elementor pages stay as they are, so your layout stays intact.

You can undo every change with one click. How it works is on the page about automating WordPress SEO. Also read which SEO tasks you can automate.

Quick check of your Elementor page

Point	How to check
One H1	Right-click, View Page Source, search for <h1
SEO title filled in	Look at the text on your browser tab
Speed	pagespeed.web.dev, Mobile tab
Text as text	Can you select the price or your city with your mouse?
Alt text	Media library, click an image
Mobile	Elementor’s mobile view, or your own phone

Want to go through the whole site at once? Follow the steps in SEO audit.

Switching away from Elementor: necessary?

Rarely. You regularly hear the advice to replace Elementor with the standard WordPress block editor because it would be faster. It saves some weight. It also costs you a new site.

An Elementor site gains more from good headings, light images and filled-in titles than from a few tenths of a second of speed. Fix the eight points above first. If your site is still slow after that, it is time to talk to your web developer.

What could be better on your Elementor site?

GreatCompany is opening in the US soon. Join the waitlist and you will be among the first to see which titles and descriptions are missing on your site, which errors we find and whether ChatGPT names you or your competitor.