Shocking CMS – Search Engine Friendly??

Once again I am asked to vet the CMS for a potential client and once again I find it is completely unsuitable for progress in natural search. The irony is that it was sold for a very large sum of money as the perfect solution and very SEO friendly.

In essence what we have is a system that duplicates URLs so if you take any number of different routes through navigation to get to a single product the url is customised as you go. I managed to find 6 different URLs for one product which means that the content on that page is duplicated the same number of times.

It is impossible to get the home link to reference just root domain so there are duplications of the homepage too, meta info is auto generated and is driven by the product identity at point of entry for each product and to put the icing on the cake the title is preceded by a default entry for the company name.

Descriptions are sitewide for categories so all child pages adopt the category description!!!

We contacted the well known off the shelf CMS provider to be told that the system cannot be customised and alterations would need to be factored in to future build improvements for the whole platform!!!

So here is the dilemma – If we create the recommendations for improvement for our potential client we would effectively be making the proprietary CMS platform search engine friendly for the provider for free and for all their clients who are on the system already and in the future.

This of course is not something I can do and especially given the arrogant stance of the CMS proprieter, sadly this client has a choice, stay out of natural search and rely on other forms of marketing such as PPC and social media or bin the system and get a truly flexible one and let us customise it.

It is a huge choice for them to make, the system they have was a significant investment that they were looking at using for long term business growth, its brave to write that off so I think they will not go for a change.

What will happen is that they will talk to another SEO agency who will promise them great things, take their money for a while and then repeat the pattern over time whilst always failing. Of course the CMS proprieter should be nailed for advertising and selling a system that is supposed to be the real deal for SEO but then most CMS proprieters peddle that myth and fail miserably.

Its the bandwagon, selling something off the shelf as a module of a larger system, that demonstrates very nicely and is instantly available with the hook of being an SEO friendly CMS is so very attractive to retailers of all sizes.

For me any retailer who is seriously thinking of this type of investment should get their SEO agency on board first and then get the systems on offer tested and analysed for custom SEO functionality, any marketing director who does not do this then leaves himself open to a huge dose of egg on face with a big black hole in the budget.