I’ve been hesitant to buy Wordpress Themes that use pages builders or use page builder plugins instead of html and short codes because I am concerned how they they will effect SEO.
Any reason to be concerned?
I recently purchased a beautiful theme and was surprised that my only option for creating page content is through it’s page builder. I use the Yoast SEO plugin and doesn’t recognize any of the content on the page.
Just wondering what other’s thoughts are?
It depends on how “this” page builder works… If it uses post meta to save page builder content, then the default content will be empty. Yoast SEO only recognize the default content, that is why this plugin doesn’t recognize page builder content.
Thanks. So if it uses meta then it wouldn’t hurt SEO? I’m not 100% on how page builders actually work other then it looks like they save a ton of time.
Like PrimaThemes suggested it will depend on a lot of things including the theme you are using and the page builder being used.
Have you tried switching to the classic editor, it usually defaults to html when I do that.
Well you win some you lose some 
I personally don’t like page builders. I am more of power user orientated, hence shortcodes. I tend to create my own very custom page builders when the design of a certain theme demands it. But that is only on those areas, like projects.
A homepage built using a page builder that uses meta data would not affect SEO any differently to one you built 100% manually (wrote all the HTML yourself in the post HTML editor).
Wordpress uses PHP to create the HTML browsers download and render, which means that everything search engines see is the final output (HTML). If you use a page builder that uses meta, you may not see it in Wordpress’ post editor, but the end-result is the same as if the content were visible in the post editor. Also, Yoast may not be able to analyse your page, but as long as the theme/page builder outputs internal-seo-friendly code, then it is fine.
In short, it definitely doesn’t make any difference whatsoever.
I am about to release a new theme and developed, what I believe to be, a fantastic drag and drop page builder for it, that has all its data completely stored/manipulated using meta. It makes for a very enjoyable and high quality user experience. I used shortcodes on my first theme, and even though they work fine, they make for a very, very bad user experience, and I am never going back to them
P.S: As someone who has a lot of experience in SEO, I can safely say that to rank in search engines the most important thing is still high-quality content and a good portfolio of backlinks from relevant, good external sites.
Page builder available in wordpress does not harm SEO. Just like using php driven wordpress does not harm your chances to rank well in search engines, using page builders is also just a convenient method to build websites quickly without affecting your chances to rank well.
Essentially the source code of each page built using page builders will contain HTML contents which can be crawled and fetched by search engines.