Even though ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are changing the digital content landscape, SEO remains critical. In fact, technically sound SEO might be more crucial than ever. That’s because your content needs to be higher quality, easier to find, and more organized than before to compete with faster content production.

A website that takes two seconds to load will convert visitors at a rate of 34%. One second more and that rate drops to 29% — falling lower and lower as load times increase. And page speed optimization is only one facet of SEO on your website. Your content management system (CMS) needs to load your content quickly while using simple URLs, structured metadata, and multilingual sitemaps to win attention at a global scale. 

Drupal is a popular open source CMS that has all these SEO features and more. Here’s a guide on how to use Drupal to improve SEO across all the sites you manage. 

Is Drupal SEO-friendly?

Short answer, yes it is. While a CMS alone doesn’t guarantee higher rankings and organic search performance, Drupal has all the SEO-friendly features you could want from your CMS. Good SEO also depends on factors like the quality of your content, the structure of your website, and the number and quality of other sites that link to yours.

Organizations of all sizes — across industries and worldwide — use Drupal to build and manage corporate websites, e-commerce sites, mobile applications, digital signage, social networking sites, intranets, portals, microsites, resource directories, kiosks, and more. 

Here’s a short list of features that make Drupal SEO-friendly:

• Clean URLS
• Customizable metatags
• XML sitemaps
• Page speed optimization
• Mobile optimization
• SEO modules
• Multilingual capabilities

SEO modules

Because Drupal is open source, users can run or modify it as they see fit – including developing their own modules for it. There are a host of SEO modules that can enhance your Drupal website's SEO performance. These modules provide functionalities like metadata optimization, automatic generation of SEO-friendly URLs, XML sitemap generation, and more. 

1. Pathauto: This module automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias.
2. Metatag: This module allows you to automatically provide structured metadata, aka "metatags", about your website.
3. Redirect: This module allows you to redirect from old URLs to new URLs.
4. Simple XML Sitemap: This module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl a website and keep their results up to date.
5. SEO Checklist: This module provides a checklist of good Drupal SEO best practices. It keeps track of what has been done and what still needs to be done.
6. Real-Time SEO for Drupal: This module offers real-time content analysis to optimize for keywords, post length, meta descriptions, and other elements of SEO.
7. Token: The Token module provides a centralized API for using placeholders in Drupal. It's not strictly an SEO module, but it's often required by other SEO modules like Metatag and Pathauto, as it allows for dynamic data in fields like path aliases and metatags.
8. Hreflang: This module is particularly useful for multilingual sites, as it helps improve the way search engines understand your language versions and presents search results to users in different regions.

These modules not only make it easier to manage your SEO efforts but can also provide additional functionalities like tracking your keywords' performance, validating your structured data, and more.