GoDaddy SEO Review – What Really Happens to Your Rankings

If you’ve ever signed up for a GoDaddy website builder, you’ve probably seen the promise of "built‑in SEO" on the sales page. It sounds great: a few clicks and your site will rank higher, right? The truth is a bit messier. In this review we’ll peel back the hype, look at the actual tools GoDaddy offers, and see how they affect your search‑engine performance.

Built‑in SEO tools: what’s included?

GoDaddy gives you a handful of SEO features right out of the box. First, there’s the SEO wizard that asks you to enter a title, description, and a few keywords for each page. It then generates a basic meta tag set and checks for common errors like missing alt text. The wizard is simple enough for beginners, but it stops short of advanced schema markup or custom canonical tags.

Second, you get a site‑speed report that pulls data from Google PageSpeed Insights. It highlights slow images and suggests minifying CSS, but you can’t implement the changes directly in the builder – you have to edit the theme files manually, which defeats the purpose of a drag‑and‑drop platform.

Third, GoDaddy offers a local SEO boost for businesses that add a Google My Business link. It adds a simple NAP (name, address, phone) block to the footer, which helps local searches a little. Beyond that, there’s no integrated backlink analysis, keyword rank tracking, or content auditing.

Cost vs. performance: is it worth it?

Pricing is where the rubber meets the road. The basic website builder starts at around £4 per month, but to unlock the SEO wizard and the speed report you need the “Premium” plan, roughly £8 per month. If you add a domain and email, the bill climbs to about £12‑£15 monthly. Compare that to a dedicated SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, which start at £80 per month, and GoDaddy looks cheap. However, the cheapness comes with limited features.

What does this mean for rankings? In our tests, sites built on GoDaddy with the SEO wizard saw a modest bump in click‑through rates because the meta descriptions were present and roughly on point. But after three months, the traffic plateaued and never broke into the top‑10 for competitive keywords. The reason is clear: GoDaddy doesn’t help with content quality, backlink acquisition, or technical depth that Google rewards.

If you’re running a simple brochure site for a local plumber or a small coffee shop, the built‑in tools may be enough to get you onto the first page for “plumber near me” or “coffee shop in [town]”. For any site that wants to rank for broader terms, you’ll quickly outgrow the platform.

Bottom line: GoDaddy’s SEO suite is a good starter kit for absolute beginners, but it’s not a substitute for a proper SEO strategy. Pair it with external tools, create high‑quality content, and build backlinks if you want sustainable growth.

So, should you trust GoDaddy’s SEO promises? Use the wizard to avoid glaring mistakes, but plan to invest in deeper optimization as soon as you can. That way you get the ease of GoDaddy’s builder without sacrificing long‑term search visibility.