Having a website is essential for every business in today’s digital world.
But affording a self-hosted website is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially for small businesses.
They mostly depend on popular website builders.
Wix is one of those website builders that gained popularity, especially among small business owners, startups, young entrepreneurs, and freelancers, due to its flexibility and easy user interface.
If you are a beginner who wants to devote more time and effort to running your business, does not want to design every aspect of your website on your own, and is tolerant of a few SEO limitations, Wix can be your ideal bet.
This article shall discuss the SEO-friendliness of Wix and guide you through the steps to optimize SEO for your Wix website.
Is Wix Good For SEO?
There was a perception that Wix and SEO do not gel together due to the bad reputation they had earlier for not offering basic SEO features like changing URL structure and adding alt texts for images, etc.
However, the scenario has totally changed now.
Now, you can implement most on-page SEO optimization features using SEO for Wix, just like any other website builder.
Hence, the short answer to the above question would be ‘Yes’.
As the search advocate of Google. Mr. John Mueller stated:
Pros And Cons Of Wix SEO
Like any other web-building platform, Wix website SEO offers many advantages and has a few limitations.
Pros
Wix search engine optimization provides you with the following benefits,
- Most beginners enjoy using the Wix platform due to its no-coding environment and drag-and-drop features.
- SEO for Wix offers a hassle-free integration of your Google Search Console and Google Analytics account.
- The platform offers a comprehensive SEO knowledge base to cover SEO for Wix websites.
- Wix SEO optimization offers advanced tools like URL redirects manager and robots.txt editor.
- SEO for Wix allows you to add structured data to individual web pages.
Cons
However, you also need to compromise with the following limitations of SEO with Wix,
- Wix SEO does not allow you to edit your sitemap.
- SEO for Wix websites makes it difficult to rank for reverse image-based search results pages by generating cryptic image file names.
- SEO for Wix is not suitable for multilingual websites as it does not offer complete control over editing the URLs in different languages.
- You need to upgrade to paid plans for SEO in Wix to stop displaying ads on your website.
How To Optimize Your Wix Website?
This section will provide the 10 best tips for optimizing your SEO for Wix websites.
Here you go!
Follow Wix SEO Wiz
The Wix SEO Wiz offers you a checklist to set up the SEO of your website.
You need to follow the below mentioned steps to implement Wix SEO Wiz,
- Click on the ‘My Site’ tab of the Wix Dashboard.
- Click on the ‘Marketing & SEO’ in the drop-down menu.
- Next, click on the ‘SEO’ from the next drop-down menu.
- The Wix platform will prompt you to take further steps to complete your SEO setup.
- You need to provide a few business details and keywords (which you can further edit after completing the setup process).
- Clicking on the individual tasks shall provide you with detailed instructions.
- For example, if you click on the task “Add the homepage’s description for search results”, you will get the following instructions.
How To Connect Your Wix Website To Google Search Console And Google Analytics?
If you have a paid subscription to Wix SEO, then adding your Wix website to Google Search Console and Google Analytics will be a cakewalk using the Wix SEO Wiz setup.
Connecting To Google Search Console
After completing all the tasks mentioned under ‘Step 1’, click “Connect and submit your site to Google Search Console” and “Connect Now”.
Wix SEO Wiz will prompt you with further steps you need to complete.
Connecting To Google Analytics
You need to follow these steps,
- Click on the ‘My Site’ tab of the Wix Dashboard.
- Click on the ‘Marketing & SEO’ in the drop-down menu.
- Next, click on the ‘Marketing Integrations’ from the next drop-down menu.
- Next, you must click on the ‘Connect’ button under the Google Analytics section.
Perform Keyword Research
Like any other SEO mission, performing thorough keyword research to identify the terms your audiences are frequently searching for is essential for Wix SEO optimization as well.
However, you must consider the best free keyword research tool like RankWatch to find the most relevant keywords related to your parent keyword accurately.
The tool will suggest a list of organic and long-tail keywords related to your seed keyword in the blink of an eye.
It also provides search volume, cost-per-click, and keyword difficulty (competition) for each keyword.
Keywords having high search volume and low or medium competition are ideal for your Wix website SEO.
Design Top-Notch Content
Offering a blog section containing top-notch SEO-optimized content on trending topics is one of the most effective ways to drive organic traffic.
The same is true for your Wix website as well.
The best part is SEO for Wix offers “blogging functionality” as one of its standard features.
Enhance On-Page Optimization
Optimizing your content for on-page SEO plays an essential role in the Wix website.
The two most essential on-page elements that you need to optimize for Wix search engine optimization are,
You must choose a reliable on-page SEO checker like the RankWatch SEO IQ to optimize the above two elements.
The RankWatch SEO IQ shows the exact usage of keywords in your title tag.
The tool also suggests the changes your title tag needs. Moreover, the on-page SEO checker also helps you optimize your meta description.
The tool suggests the keywords you must include in the meta description to enhance your SEO.
Now that you know the keywords you must add in your title tags and meta descriptions, let’s see how to implement them in the Wix platform.
Editing your title tags and meta descriptions in Wix calls for the following steps,
- Click on the left-hand menu of the ‘editor’ page in the Wix dashboard.
- Click the “Site Pages and Menu” icon.
- Select the page you want to edit from the list appearing under the ‘Site Menu’.
- Click the horizontal three dots appearing next to the web page title.
- Next, you need to click the ‘SEO basics’ to edit your title tags and meta descriptions.
- The platform also shows you a search snippet preview on Google before your edits go live.
- A few additional optimization tips for title tags and meta descriptions,
- Keep the maximum length of your title tag within 50-60 characters.
- Keep the maximum length of your meta description within 120 characters.
- Use active voice to make your meta descriptions actionable.
- Use CTA (Call-To-Action) phrases to design your meta descriptions.
Make Your URL Slugs User-Friendly
URL slug is the last part of a URL address appearing at the extreme right of the URL tag.
It would help if you designed descriptive and user-friendly URL slugs to offer a better experience to users and describe search engines the purpose of your web page content.
Wix SEO optimization allows you to include user-friendly URL slugs using the ‘SEO basics’ settings.
Here are a few additional optimization tips for URL slugs,
- Make it short and descriptive.
- Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores ( _ ).
- Only use lowercase characters.
- Try to avoid using special characters.
Design A Solid Interlink Structure
Internal links on your web page content help readers easily navigate to other web pages containing relevant content.
A strong interlinking structure boosts topical authority and relevance to search engines as well as readers.
You need to follow the below-mentioned steps to add internal links to the Wix platform,
- First, select the text part of your content that you want to use as the anchor text.
- Click on the ‘Link’ icon showing in the pop-up window.
- The ‘Which page?’ drop-down lets you choose the page you want to interlink.
Optimize Your Content’s Images
Using unoptimized or oversized images in your content increases the size of your web pages.
If the web page size exceeds the standard permissible limit, the page uploading speed drops drastically.
Hence, you must use optimized images of the right size to ensure a faster page speed.
Once you finish optimizing your image sizes, checking your web page size using a reliable web page size checker like RankWatch would be helpful.
If your web page size is within 3 MB, you can be assured of a fast page uploading speed.
One more essential aspect of image optimization is to add unique and descriptive ‘alt text’ to your images. That describes the purpose of the images to search engines and help users using screen readers.
You need to follow these steps to add an image alt text in Wix SEO,
- Go to Wix ‘Image Settings’.
- Click ‘Image text’.
- Type the alt text in the box provided under the “What’s in the image? Tell Google” section.
Acquire High-Quality Backlinks
Google and other search engines consider authoritative backlinks as one of the major ranking factors.
If your blog content has high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources, it increases the trustworthiness of your site to search engines.
Your readers also get opportunities to read valuable content from other reliable sources.
A solid backlink strategy is essential for SEO blogs.
Hence, it would help if you analyzed your backlinks using a free backlink checker like RankWatch.
You only need to enter your website domain in the ‘New Project’ box at the top of the tool page and hit enter.
The tool provides the total number of referring backlinks, active links, and deleted links.
You must start working to regain the deleted links.
The tool also shows the number of links (Do Follow) feeding link juices to your website by showing the total number of Do Follow and No Follow links.
Tip: Analyzing your competitors’ backlink strategy is equally important in link building. You can replicate their backlink strategy to gain links from authoritative sources.
Conduct Regular Site Audits
Once you finish setting up your Wix website and implementing SEO strategies by following the above steps, you need to conduct regular site audits.
That helps you to identify if there are technical SEO issues stopping your Wix website from ranking higher on search engine results pages.
However, conducting a site audit manually can be time consuming and inaccurate.
Choosing a reliable tool like the RankWatch site auditor is essential.
After analyzing all the technical issues, the tool provides an overall site score for your website.
The site auditor tool also categorizes the issues considering their criticality, thus helping you understand which issues need immediate attention.
Final Thoughts
Beginners and small business owners avoid self-hosted websites due to a lack of expertise and affordability.
Instead, using a reliable website builder makes their lives way easier.
Wix is such a website builder that offers an easy user interface by providing drag-and-drop features.
Moreover, the Wix SEO Wiz takes care of most SEO elements without demanding any technical expertise from its users.
Though the platform is less advanced than more complex content management systems like WordPress, it can easily satisfy the requirements of most small businesses.
If you are a beginner who is more eager to put your effort into business instead of making a website on your own, Wix can be an ideal platform for you.
Share Your Thoughts