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5 Best Blog Platforms for SEO in 2025
Compare the Top 5 SEO-Focused Blogging Tools
Jacob Bear
February 17th, 2025
All of your content is wasted if nobody sees it. This is why so many creators look to blog platforms for better SEO.
But what is the best blogging platform?
There are many SEO-focused blogging tools that can help your content gain visibility and traction, but not all of these tools work the way you want.
The SEO tools that might be right for someone else may only be marginally useful for you.
It’s a matter of choosing the right blogging platform for your situation. There’s no right answer for everyone, but we’ve narrowed it down to a handful of good choices.
Here are the top blogging platforms for SEO in 2025.
Table of Contents
5 Best Blog Platforms for SEO Optimization
Every blogging platform has its own capabilities and strengths. Here’s an overview of the best blog platforms.
beehiiv – SEO Tools and Audience Growth Built-In
It’s not surprising that a user on Reddit described beehiiv as “a better Substack.”
beehiiv’s SEO-friendly tools make keyword optimization easy, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
With a few clicks, you can manage details such as meta titles and descriptions. You can remove indexing or disable breadcrumbs.
On the other hand, if you don’t understand these features, beehiiv handles them by default. SEO happens automatically. You don’t need to do anything.
This built-in-SEO allows creators to focus on content. It makes beehiiv the ideal platform for bloggers seeking strong SEO results.
beehiiv also has several built-in tools to help you grow an audience. These include analytics and signup forms. You can even arrange for other beehiiv users to boost or recommend your blog.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of beehiiv is that emails and posts are generated simultaneously. Every blog post can be sent to your email list, and every email is posted on your blog.
In addition to growing your audience quickly, beehiiv also includes multiple monetization features.
With a few clicks, you can put some of your content behind a paywall. You can insert ads or get paid to “boost” related content.
Want even more income streams? You own your audience. You can give them links to your own products or services.
If you’re against having a newsletter/blog combination, beehiiv might not be the best platform for you, but it’s the most user-friendly way to publish, distribute, and monetize content without a bunch of plugins.
Pricing: Free with up to 2,500 subscribers. Middle tier starts at $34/month, depending on audience size.
Medium – Visibility Boost, but Limited Control
I wrote on Medium during the pandemic. I’m not using Medium currently, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
Are you overflowing with a passion to write? Does this matter more than anything else? If yes, Medium might be a good choice for you. It’s user-friendly, quick to set up, and free.
Since Medium is a long-established platform, it has high domain authority. This gives your content a better chance to grow organically.
In addition, Medium has a large internal audience. This could potentially bring you new readers.
However, the advantages of Medium start to fade if you’re looking to build a brand. It’s also a flimsy way to generate revenue.
For one thing, you have very few customization options. This limits your control over SEO and makes the platform worthless for branding.
Also, any traffic or authority you generate goes to Medium. If you ever decide to leave, you take none of these advantages with you – ditto for your readers and followers.
The size of Medium’s internal audience is a potential advantage. However, Medium tends to work like a model of the internet. The big, popular, established writers get the lion’s share of views and exposure.
In other words, you’ll have to grind for a while before you start to get noticed.
Finally, if you want to monetize your blog, your only option is what Medium currently chooses to pay you. On a typical day, I earned between $0.13 and $1.20. I can’t tell you how it works.
Their current system is based on how long members spend reading your content. This is modified by factors such as “engagement points” and something called a “member read ratio adjustment.”
But if you want to get your content in front of a bunch of eyeballs for free, Medium may be a good blog platform for you. If you don’t want to deal with hosting or set-up, it’s a no-brainer.
Pricing: Free
Why Trust Me? Years ago, I launched a WordPress blog about riding a bike through rural southern Italy. In 2020, I moved the content to Medium. I’ve experimented with six different blog platforms and recently adopted beehiiv as my favorite. |
WordPress.org – SEO Flexibility, but Hosting Required
Entire worlds have been built around WordPress.
The secret to the platform is that you can choose from thousands of plugins and themes. You can make the platform do almost anything you can imagine. It’s like a giant digital Legos set.
When it comes to SEO, there’s a popular plugin called Yoast. Yoast will help optimize your posts and suggest ways to improve your SEO.
A big disadvantage of WordPress is that you have to arrange hosting for your website. You also need to make a lot of design choices. The daunting array of themes and options can lead to analysis paralysis.
If you’re willing to tinker around and spend about $100 a year for hosting, WordPress is a powerful blogging platform. It gives you endless options to expand and branch out into e-commerce, courses, communities, and other business models.
However, many bloggers are switching to easier, done-for-you platforms like beehiiv. It turns out many user-friendly platforms still give you plenty of options.
Pricing: Free, but prices for hosting and premium themes/plugins may vary.
Wix – User-Friendly, Limited Advanced SEO
At the extreme opposite of WordPress, you will find Wix.
Wix is the easiest website-building option you can have. This puts it in a category that would be similar to Medium, except that with Wix, you get to build your own website. You also own the audience and the authority.
Wix makes it simple to design your own site. There are more than 800 templates that you can customize with easy drag-and-drop features.
You’ll create a website that looks exactly the way you want, and you won’t need to pore over hundreds of templates or make dozens of micro decisions while writing code.
If you want to really get the most out of Wix, upgrade to the paid version. This is what most bloggers do.
As you might expect, there are limits to how you can customize Wix. You don’t have full control over SEO.
You can still use the “old school” SEO strategies: embed keywords in your content and write strategic headings. But when it comes to SEO, there's not a whole lot you can do beyond this.
The real downside is that Wix is not a Blog platform. Wix is really a website-building platform that you can use to create a blog. As you can expect, Wix has its limitations.
Pricing: Starts at $17/month for minimum features
Squarespace – Strong Visuals, Limited Choices
Squarespace doesn’t include as many templates as Wix, but they are stunning.
Squarespace works well as a highly visual website platform. It’s suitable for E-commerce and other businesses.
You can use Squarespace for blogging, too, but there's a brick wall at the end of the road. A Squarespace website will only support a maximum of 1,000 pages.
In fact, Squarespace doesn’t recommend having more than 400 pages, as this will make the site perform slowly.
If you're planning to blog long-term, this is an unacceptable limit. If you post daily, you'll be running into problems soon after your first year.
Pricing: Core features start at $23/month.
3 Reasons beehiiv Stands Out as an SEO-Friendly Platform
Bloggers might object that “beehiiv is a newsletter platform.”
Without giving all the reasons why a blogger should have a newsletter, let’s look at what beehiiv lets you do in practice.
beehiiv is as easy to use as Wix or Medium, but it provides the power and flexibility of more complex platforms. Also, beehiiv will grow with you as your audience becomes larger and more committed.
Simple SEO Tools That Don’t Complicate Blogging
You don’t have to be an expert. Most of beehiiv’s SEO tools run automatically. However, if you want more control over your blog’s SEO strategy, beehiiv’s SEO tools are easy to toggle on and off.
You can also choose specific tags and descriptions by typing them into beehiiv’s Website Builder.
Enhanced Content Discovery for Google
The beehiiv platform uses comprehensive, auto-updating sitemaps in every beehiiv publication. This makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your web pages.
In addition to being some of the best-optimized sites on the web, beehiiv sites are fully mobile-responsive.
Our engineers constantly update all beehiiv sites to fit the best practices indicated by Google's optimization guidance. This and other SEO enhancements make it easier for Google to find your content and rank it, boosting your visibility and audience reach without any additional effort on your part.
You just have to keep writing great blog posts.
SEO Features for Audience Growth and Engagement
If you don't want to have a newsletter, it's still worth using beehiiv’s newsletter integration for SEO purposes even if you just send it to yourself and a couple of friends. Whenever you do this, you're populating the internet with shareable links back to your blog.
More importantly, the features that increase your email open rates will also enhance your SEO.
How To Maximize SEO on beehiiv
We've put together a detailed blog post SEO checklist. But if you want the TL;DR, here it is.
Optimizing Titles and Meta Descriptions
How would you describe your content? What words would a potential reader use when searching for this content?
Use these terms in your meta tags and descriptions. Write a description that will cause a potential reader to say, “That’s for me.”
Next, go to beehiiv’s Web Builder. Click on the cog in the top right, and it will open the Title and Descriptions settings.
Enter your brilliant, audience-centered, SEO-optimized description and click “save.”
Leveraging Analytics To Understand Audience
When beehiiv co-founder Tyler Denk was working at The Morning Brew, he and his colleagues were frustrated by the available analytics.
The dashboards were designed with E-commerce in mind. They didn’t provide any useful insights about where their readers came from or how they engaged with the content.
The Morning Brew team spent a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the analytics they wanted.
When they started beehiiv, they set things up correctly from day one. The result is beehiiv’s proprietary 3D analytics, and the system is constantly updated with new and better dashboards.
Use analytics to find out what drives your audience’s interest. Use this data to create content that has more of an impact on SEO.
Whenever you’re wondering what to write, you’ll have a clear idea about topics that will bring you the most new views.
Using beehiiv’s Built-In Growth Tools for SEO
Growth is a two-way street.
Organic growth will help you show up more in searches and grow your audience as a blogger – and there's a flip side to the coin.
Using beehiiv’s growth strategies will not only grow your audience, but it will have an impact on your SEO.
You're effectively creating more links to your blog. As people begin to subscribe and follow you, this grows your business and the authority of your site. It shows the algorithms that your site is popular and important.
Once people are interested in your site, they may want to hear from you directly.
You have an opportunity to give them this gift with no extra effort. Every post you write also goes out to your email list as a newsletter when you use the beehiiv platform.
Put all these features together, and what do you get? Multiple opportunities to grow and monetize. You could do this today by starting a beehiiv blog.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Best Blogging Platforms:
What Is the Best Platform for Blog SEO?
Overall, this honor goes to beehiiv. beehiiv has successfully balanced customizability with ease of use. It gives bloggers an SEO-friendly website without the need for plugins or programming skill.
What Is the Best SEO Blog?
There are many excellent SEO blogs, but we recommend Semrush as the best SEO blog.
Which Platform Is Best for Blogging?
If you’re a hands-on, Do It Yourself (DIY) sort of person, try using WordPress. If you just want a place to publish your writing without any hassle, try beehiiv.
Do Blog Posts Really Help SEO?
Blog posts really do help SEO, but only if they are created strategically.
The most important SEO task a blogger can do is to have a clear keyword strategy. Create blog posts that use those keywords in the copy, especially in headings.
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