Check out the complete guide to Drupal SEO in 2025 to help your site consistently rank higher in search results.
Setting up a site is one thing. Making it visible for the search engines is another. Build it and they will come — but only if they can find you. The problem is relevant: almost 91% of pages do not receive traffic from Google. If you set up SEO correctly and your site stays in high positions from month to month, you will receive stable traffic, not one-time bursts from short-term promotions.
This is crucial for any website, be it a corporate site, a news portal, or an online store, including one based on Drupal. Drupal sites all have the necessary tools, including modules, responsive architecture, and a thriving community. With each new version of Drupal, improvements affect speed, performance, metadata, UI/UX, and other factors, making Drupal more SEO-friendly.
SEO guidelines continue to advance due to many factors, for example, search engine algorithm updates, and the methods previously used to get a site to the top of a search engine no longer work.
However, a consistent guide can help you learn current Drupal SEO practices and find answers to common SEO questions.
We put together this in-depth guide to help you secure a top spot in search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your site, and enhance its performance so your site thrives in the complex world of search engines.
Search engines don’t care what CMS the site is built on; they only care how well the site meets their requirements — how fast it works, whether its content is valuable, and whether its user interface is convenient. So, Drupal has no advantages or disadvantages for SEO. Promoting a Drupal site follows the same steps as promoting any other site. There’s no magic in SEO — just smart, consistent work.
First of all, this is technical optimization — for example, the site should load quickly, be adaptive to mobiles, and easy to scan by a search bot.
In addition, it is important to select keywords — study the search queries that users utilize and analyze what brings traffic to competitors.
You also need to correctly configure the headings, meta tags, content structure, and interlinking; in other words, you need to perform on-page SEO.
Another important factor is link building and mastering off-page optimization. Here it is useful to gain social media mentions, earn links from other sites, and share your content widely.
Also, as the first steps in the direction of SEO, you need to do a few basic actions:
You need to make some technical adjustments so that your site meets the basic SEO requirements of search engines and that they can easily crawl, index, and show your pages in search results. Why reinvent the wheel? Drupal is suitable for SEO because this system has built-in features and modules that allow you to customize the site as needed. Since Drupal is a modular system, developers do not need to write code to extend its SEO features. They can install ready-made modules that will do everything themselves — automatically add the necessary meta tags, create a sitemap, set up redirects, and manage URLs.
Also, from a technical optimization perspective, we recommend paying attention to the following technical SEO requirements for a Drupal site.
Website speed is very essential for SEO because web pages that load quickly attract visitors and retain them better, therefore having lower bounce rates. How long do you think website visitors are willing to wait for a web page to load? Three seconds — and 32% of users have already left the page in frustration. More than three seconds — and the bounce rate already grows to 40%.
High website speed helps it appear in good positions in Google search results. If you want to speed up your Drupal site and save it from damnation, start by optimizing your images. The larger the image file is, the slower the site can load. We recommend using free tools like Adobe Photoshop to reduce the size of your images without losing quality.
Also, a good idea is to leverage Drupal’s caching capabilities. Caching helps your pages load faster and saves the often assessed material. Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation modules can minify CSS and JavaScript files and speed up your site even more.
To get good SEO results with Drupal, you need a content strategy that works well for search engines and real people. There are several steps that will help you with this: defining your target audience, analyzing competitors, and preparing your list of keywords that match your audience’s interests and your content. All this will help you clearly define your promotion goals. Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.
Identify your target audience
Before you start promoting your website, you need to understand who you are promoting it to. Here are some helpful questions to answer:
The more carefully you create a portrait of your site’s user, the easier it will be to choose the right keywords for compelling content and structure the site.
Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs help study the interests, behavior, and search queries of the audience. With their help, you can see how people formulate search queries, what they ask, and what topics concern them.
Analyze your competitors
If you study the top search results for the target topics, you can spot not just informational websites, but also your direct competitors. Ahrefs and SEMrush also come in handy here. No need to guess — the answers are often right in front of you. Pay attention to which pages bring your competitors the most traffic. Also, analyze what their site structure looks like, what keywords they use, and where their backlinks come from.
Collect keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines when they look for something, like your product or service. You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Google Keyword Planner to find them.
Start by writing down some basic keywords that describe your business. Then expand the list and group them — for example, into informational keywords (like “how to choose” or “reviews”) and commercial ones (like “buy” or “order”).
Pay attention to two things: search volume and competition. Search volume shows how many people search for that keyword every month. The higher the volume, the more popular and competitive the keyword is. If many websites target the same word, it’s harder to rank for it.
To improve your chances, try long-tail keywords that usually show what the user wants. Fewer people search for them, so the competition is lower. Long-tail keywords are beneficial for SEO and may include questions starting with words like “what”, “how”, or “which”.
On-page SEO in Drupal is like tuning up your website to make it work better and faster. Every detail matters — from images to meta tags — and helps improve how search engines see your site. Here are some simple ways to strengthen your Drupal website with good on-page SEO.
Like strong connections in a good professional network help a business grow, off-page SEO helps more people find and choose your Drupal website. Let’s look at the off-page SEO and link-building techniques needed to expand your site’s reach.
Link development is the foundation of Drupal’s off-page SEO. The more reputable websites link to you, the higher your search engine ranking is, and you can improve your position even in a highly competitive environment. To get quality links to your Drupal website, we recommend creating content that is truly useful and original. Reviews, how-tos, research, and guides are popular because they help other users solve their problems.
Another strategic step is guest blogging. You create valuable content on a related topic for a third-party blog or site and add a link to your website. Think of it as a win-win: they get quality material, and you get your profit.
Focus on cited sources — they must be reliable. Content becomes useful when it mentions official statistics, highly expert studies, and real examples. You can also increase the value of content if you create it as an answer to real user questions. Such questions can be found, for instance, through the Google SERP function People Also Ask (PAA), in support tickets or user comments, or with the help of special tools like AlsoAsked.
If your site operates in several languages, Drupal’s Hreflang module is useful to show search engines which versions of pages correspond to which language and region. Otherwise, they may offer users an irrelevant language version. The module automatically adds the necessary tags to each language version of the page, which makes the website more understandable for search engines in different countries.
After you have set up technical and content SEO, you need to monitor the technical condition of the website. SEO services, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics, or tools like Screaming Frog, help you. These assistants notice errors in time, show how pages are ranked, which ones bring traffic, and which need to be improved.
This tool helps you track which pages are indexed, finds indexing errors and other technical issues, shows the search queries for which the site is shown, and checks whether the hreflang markup is correct for multilingual sites.
With Google Analytics, you can see:
The latter indicator is important to identify pages that require revision.
Website auditing tool Screaming Frog scans a site in the same way as a search engine bot. It identifies broken links, issues with meta tags, duplicate pages, and incorrect heading hierarchy. With this program, you can export all SEO data for every page and analyze it manually or automatically.
SEO for Drupal is an ongoing process of learning and adaptation. Think of this Drupal SEO guide as your first step on a journey of discovery. To get the best results, it’s smart to team up with a reliable SEO contractor who truly understands Drupal and search engine best practices. Attico offers Drupal SEO services to help businesses increase their site visibility in organic search, unlock their site's full potential, and improve user experience.
