What's Better for SEO — Notion or Webflow?

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Context

Earlier this year, I was selecting a platform for a blog website, and couldn't decide between Notion and Webflow.

One of the most important factors to me in a blog website is its SEO compatibility. I want to know that my articles can be properly indexed and ranked in search engines.

Therefore, I decided to conduct an experiment to see how Notion and Webflow blogs will behave under similar conditions.

Note: for Notion website I am using Super.so hosting platform with Notion Static.

Research

Questions

For this experiment, I wanted to find out answers to the following questions:

  1. Are the pages of Notion and Webflow websites will be indexed by search engines?
  2. How Notion and Webflow pages will be displayed in search results?
  3. Who is ranked higher in search results by domain — Notion or Webflow?
  4. Who is ranked higher in search results by relevant keywords — Notion or Webflow?

Method

  • Host both blog websites under subdomains
  • Publish one article per each blog website
  • Analyze SEO performance of each article by the end of the test period

Conditions and Approach

Time period: 1 week

I decided to set a time frame for the experiment to be over, and 1 week seemed to be a reasonable period to make a conclusive decision about two platforms.

Setup

For this experiment, I established 2 simple almost identical blog websites: in Notion and Webflow.

I hosted them under 2 different subdomains of my main website:

  1. blog.yampolskymax.com for Notion
  2. blog2.yampolskymax.com for Webflow

Webflow

For Webflow website, used free Evermore blog template and purchased CMS hosting plan required to host Webflow sites under your domain.

I filled in some basic content and uploaded 1 article.

In the end, Webflow site looked like a standard blog website.

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Notion

For Notion website, I created a simple page with a database containing a single article.

I used super.so Notion Static rendering engine and their trial plan to host the website.

Here is how the Notion site looked in the end.

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Content (articles)

I published 1 article per blog to analyze how the content of the articles will be indexed and ranked in search engines.

For each article, I set up a pretty slug matching the article's topic:

  • Notion: /3-things-i-learned-from-atomic-habits-by-james-clear
  • Webflow: /no-meetings-no-deadlines-no-fulltime-employees-gumroad-analysis
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Note: I intentionally published different articles to avoid duplicating the content and, therefore, risks penalizing one of the sites' ranking.

Google Search Console

After hosting both websites, I uploaded both their sitemaps to GSC and manually requested indexing to speed up the process.

Results

After 1 week, I went back to check in on the results.

All the pages of both Notion and Webflow were properly indexed and displayed in Google Search.

By Domain

I first made a search query by my domain (site:https://yampolskymax.com/) to see how Webflow and Notion blogs were ranked relatively.

Highlights:

  • Notion's blog home page was ranked higher than the Webflow home page
  • Additionally, Notion's database page called Blog Posts (that was not a part of an experiment) was also ranked higher than the Webflow home page
  • Article page of Webflow was ranked higher than Notion's article page
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Figure: Google Search by domain
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By Keywords

Then, I used the article title text to make another search query to see how both articles ranked relative to other pages for the same keywords.

Highlights:

  • Webflow's article was listed at around ~160 out of 175 search results by the query gumroad case study research
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    Webflow screenshot
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  • Notion's article was listed at 10 out of ~10.000.000 results by the query 3 things I learned from atomic habits
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    Notion screenshot
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Conclusion

  • Both Notion and Webflow websites are SEO-compatible and indexed by search engines.
  • In 1 week, the Notion article became ranked in the top-10 of Google Search for a highly competitive search query.
  • Based on domain ranking, Search Engine ranked Notion's website home page higher than Webflow. In contrast, the article page of Webflow was ranked higher.
  • Conclusively, it is fair to say that in terms of SEO ranking, Notion Static is a superior option compared to Webflow.