Wix site SEO: Tips and tricks for Wix website owners to promote their websites with better SEO
There is no denying that Wix is one of the most popular website builders out there at the moment. However, one gripe that a lot of people have is that Wix seems to have been built for design and with little consideration taken to make it SEO friendly. If you are someone who agrees with this, and keen to get on with marketing your business using SEO, then this guide has been designed to help you.
Continue reading to discover everything you need to know about how to enhance the search engine optimisation of your Wix website effectively.
Why does Wix get a bad reputation for SEO?
As a lot of business owners can appreciate, it can be extremely hard to get rid of a bad reputation once it sticks. A few years ago, there were a lot of problems with Wix sites that made it feel like competing in Google was impossible, reviews were poor. This resulted in Wix getting a bad reputation in terms of SEO. So, let us take a look at some of these past issues…
Wix was based on Flash technology. Even those with little SEO experience know that Flash is a big no-no when it comes to search engine optimisation! Flash is bad for SEO for several reasons. It uses text content that cannot be read, it does not have any URLs, it cannot be indexed or searched, and there is no way of monitoring outbound links. In basic terms, it’s just terrible when it comes to SEO!
There was no way of adding alt attributes with Wix.
There was also no way of optimising meta descriptions, URLs, or title tags for blog posts.
The bad URL structures would also give marketing professionals nightmares. Wix used to add weird and wonderful characters to your website’s URL, which were anything but SEO friendly.
No AMP pages.
Wix sites were infamously slow.
When you consider everything that has been mentioned, you do not have to be an expert to understand why Wix ended up with extremely poor reviews and a bad reputation. However, the company has been working very hard over the past few years to make steps forward. All the issues that have been discussed above have now been rectified. A lot of people would agree that Wix now has a SEO offering that is on par with its rivals. Nonetheless, as we all know, a bad reputation can stick and is difficult to shake off!
Some Wix users are experiencing issues
Even though Wix has made a lot of changes, a lot of business owners have reported that they are still struggling to drive traffic to their Wix website. We are going to take a look at some of the problems they encounter below. However, it is not all doom and gloom, as effective SEO can be achieved, and we are going to reveal how.
But first, back to those issues that are still being experienced by Wix users today…
Lack of keyword research options
Poor on-site optimisation
Pages use image-based content
Pages have too thin content
No link building strategy
Websites that are taking too long to load
How can you improve SEO on your Wix website?
Now that you have a good understanding of some of the issues people have been facing with their Wix website, let’s move onto the good stuff, rectifying these problems! You probably already know the importance of SEO but you feel that your Wix site is not delivering the results you had hoped for in terms of online visibility, here are some of the things that you should do...
Complete the setup for Wix SEO Wiz
Similar to the SEO tool Yoast that is used within WordPress sites, Wix has got the Wix SEO Wiz tool. The first thing that you need to do is make sure that you have Wix SEO Wiz setup for your website. To do this, go to the dashboard for your website, and find the app that says, “Get Found on Google” and click on this.
Login > Marketing Tools > Get Found / Rank Higher on Google
When you do this, the Wiz SEO setup will load, and you should complete all of the tasks that are outlined in the checklist. Make sure to add social profile links, contact information, description, and website title. You should also connect your site to the Google Search Console, as well as submitting a sitemap to Yahoo, Bing, and of course, Google. Setting up Google Analytics in Wix is also advised. These are all of the basic tasks that you are going to need to complete in order to make sure that you have the foundations in place for good SEO on Wix.
Do your keyword research
Although Wix does not currently offer any type of keyword research tools this doesn’t stop you from using other free tools that are available. The best free tool to do this comes from Google itself. It’s the Google Keyword Planner.
We will be writing much more in-depth posts than this mere mention later on, but to put it simply. Make sure that what keywords and phrases that you are targeting are being searched for in the first place. Identify keywords that are targetable for your site, if you have a new site with very few links you might want to target longer tail, less competitive phrases. If your domain name has been on the internet a long while, then you may be able to target more competitive terms. Google provides simple competitive scores within the keyword planner tool. These are designed for competitiveness for Ad campaigns but as a guide, you can assume that if that keyword is highly competitive in Google Ads it is probably competitive for SEO too.
Identify target keywords for all of your pages, and liberally use them in the meta data, the URL structure and of course in the content as well.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: Find a keyword tool or a group of keyword tools that work for you. Some other tools that you might want to review include:
Create a blog on your Wix website
One of the best things you can do for your Wix website is create a blog. Blogs are an excellent way to promote your business online to potential consumers. If you built your own website, you'll know that Wix enables you to start a blog with ease, meaning you can begin writing straight away. A blog is a great way to help you outrank the competition on certain keywords, particularly those long tail keywords. However, this is only going to be the case if you go about it in the correct manner.
When it comes to creating a blog, you need to think carefully about the type of content that you are going to create, create a content marketing plan. You need to think about your target audience and what is going to bring them to your site. Think about the issues that they are facing that are also relevant to your company, issues that your services or products fix. Write content that addresses those issues, fixes them, and then offers additional support should your customer require more advanced or expert services.
In addition to these ‘evergreen’ style posts, there are lots of different types of content that you can create in order to generate traffic and positive exposure. This includes everything from sharing personal stories, to insights about your business, to new things that are happening at your business, to industry news. The options are endless. However, make sure you do not write for the sake of writing. You need to make sure that all content delivers value to the audience and that it is written in a manner that is exciting, easy to read, and keeps the person interested.
You also need to make sure that you use keywords effectively within your blog posts. Of course, you need to do this naturally. No one should be able to spot keywords within the post, but they should be there. Again, use the Google Keyword tool or some of the many other keyword tools that are available.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: When creating evergreen content (tips and guides rather than current business or timely news), you’ll need to create a content plan. Start by asking yourself the most commonly asked questions that your clients ask you about. How do I do this? What are the benefits of doing that? Create a list of topics that are based on commonly asked questions about your service or product and then provide the solution within the blog post. Calendarise it and commit to writing informed and quality pieces of content regularly.
Optimise your images for search
The next piece of the puzzle is to make sure that your website is optimised in terms of the images you use. Make sure images are not too big in size, as this can slow your website down. You should compress these files without losing quality.
To do this you can visit a website like Reduce Images. This free tool allows you to resize your images physical size and of course file size. Make sure that you do not have any images over 100kb, target 40kb or as close as you can get it without losing to much quality.
You also need to make sure you add Alt tags to your images. This tag should be a few words that explain your content. This helps search engines to ‘read’ the images. Make sure you use keyword rich text for this.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: The Wix SEO Wiz will help you to identify images that do not contain Alt text. But for a scalable review of your image sizes try using the Web Speed Test Image analysis tool.
Improve the Speed of your Wix Website
Speed is such a big factor when it comes to SEO but also when it comes to providing the very best experience for your website visitors. If you are building from a template, as most people to at the very least to start with, you’ll know that templates come loaded with images and functionality. One of the greatest strengths of Wix is that Wix sites do look great. However, this does come at a price. The out-of-the-box templates that you can choose from are usually incredibly slow. When you start to add additional functionality, plugins, and apps this further impacts so the speed. So, what can you do? Here’s ten points listed on the Wix blog that Wix have identified as ways and means to improve the speed of your website.
Try not to overload your homepage, use written content over images
Prioritise the above the fold content, give your website visitors something to read whilst the rest of the page loads
Do not have too much media on your website, keep it to a minimum and spread out necessary media across other pages
Use the Wix AMP function to improve the speed of your blog on mobile (Currently not available for core pages).
Be aware of your text-image relationship.
Use plain text over other design elements
Reduce the number and styles of fonts, max three fonts on your website aim for less.
Limit your use of animations or avoid using them altogether
Focus on mobile performance first, Google does, so, so should you.
Limit the number of third-party apps – this is a biggy!
To dig into some of these points a little deeper, let’s talk about some of the specifics. For example, the YouTube or Vimeo apps. Video is great, it is a great way to showcase your business or brand however, the apps that Wix provides are horrendous for page load time. Adding a video to a page can add seconds. So, try not to use them on pages that are important to rank. Add them to less critical pages such as your About Us, but do not add them to key service pages or your homepage.
Other elements that create incredible drag are contact forms. Again, they are extremely weighty and slow the load time of the page, so instead of adding contact forms to your key pages, add links to your contact page instead, this will prevent them adding precious seconds to your main pages, again avoid adding a contact form to your homepage.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: The weightiest of the apps is the Google Maps app. This one really does impact your page load time. If you are tempted to promote your businesses location on every page. Be aware that having a useable dynamic Google Maps plugin is not the right way to go. We have seen that this plugin can add 4, 5 or 6 seconds to a page’s load time. The amount of time that the page takes to load is amplified as the app calls the location and data from Google and then loads that data to the page. The only place for this app is the contact us page. Avoid using it anywhere else on your website.
Measuring Speed and Performance
If you have an existing Wix website or you are trying to optimise the performance of a new website. Measuring and monitoring the performance of your load time or website speed is critical.
Wix has created a tool for this. It’s called the Wix Speed Test and you can find it here. We have a number of issues with this tool. The main issues being that it isn’t accurate when you compare it to Googles own speed insights tool. Sometimes the difference can be staggering. But which one is the most important? Well it’s Google’s of course. Speed is a ranking factor and is important for your UX (User Experience). As you can see in this table below (courtesy of Crazy Egg), the impact of a slow loading website directly impacts your bounce rate.
Bounce rate is monitored by Google, if customers always bounce and they do not from your competitor’s website pages then their web page is probably more relevant or useful, therefore Google will serve it over yours and rank it more highly. This may not be because your website is less useful but because the load time is worse.
Either way you to need to manage and monitor your website speed using either of the tools. Although the Wix Speed test isn’t accurate compared to Google’s. You can use it to optimise your speed. When you make an alteration to a page, test it using one or the other tools. If the speed of a page you are working on improves when you make a change, then you have made a positive step. You can also use the tools to test the impact of adding different media or apps to your web pages.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: Identify slow loading pages on your website by using Google Analytics then audit your assets and amend accordingly, shrinking large images or removing third party apps that may be slowing the page. You can find your slowest loading pages in Google Analytics by logging into your Google Analytics account and navigating to Behaviour > Site Speed > Page Timings. Open the date range so that you have more data and identify your worst performing pages on your site, amend accordingly.
Improve the Quality of your Content
How many times have you heard the phrase ‘Content is King’. Well it certainly is. Google is becoming more and more sophisticated about understanding and translating content. Google goes way beyond identifying keywords and phrases and now understands related keywords, even context. It wants to serve the most relevant and highest quality content that it can. So how does this impact Wix websites? The majority of Wix websites are built using their many templates. This is the core strength of using the platform. It is easy to create a good-looking website using Wix. However, the problem with Wix templates are that they are minimal when it comes to written text. Sometimes that are very much over reliant on imagery and function. Sometimes images just look better. Content, great content is also hard to do. Writing high quality descriptive and user-friendly pages is difficult. Content takes time to write so many websites are very light when it comes to the written word. If you want to rank your Wix website for competitive keywords and phrases you will have to invest in content. Take the time to write great content and really consider what your website visitor wants to see when the eventually land on your website. Most web pages have between 200 and 500 words. However, to rank a page on the first page of Google you need to have a lot more content. According to a study from search engine journal, the optimum length of a page that ranks on the first page of Google is 1,900 words. That’s a lot of content! In the old days of SEO, it was about the amount of keywords on a page, now a major ranking factor is the length and in turn quality of your content.
A word of warning on content length. Before you think you can write a load of rubbish and rank a web page if you hit the optimum amount of words remember that search engines want quality too. You cannot stuff a page full of irrelevant content or ramble on about a subject until your website visitor becomes bored and leaves. It must be highly relevant, quality content. This is why it takes so long to write great content. You need to consider your target market, understand exactly what they want and need and give it to them. Start by writing punchy introductions that cater for readers with low attention spans, give them what they want and the ability to find out more or contact you in the first 250 words. Then break down your content into sections, prioritised by the most important so that readers that want to read more about you or your service have the ability to do so.
Wix website templates are not optimised for this amount of content so take the time to design your pages well. Add relevant images where applicable and break up the content so it isn’t a huge mountain to read. Think quality. Not quantity and if you genuinely can’t write the optimum amount of words then don’t. It is much more important to have quality content over quantity. But where you can try to achieve both.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: Use Search Console to identify the keywords that a page is ranking for and to identify content that could be included on the page. Via Search Console, examine the exact queries that a page is ranking for. Also, what Google is ranking you for. Check the performance of a page by clicking: Performance > Pages then click the specific page that you want to examine. Then look at the queries tab to see what queries that page is ranking for. Sometimes you will find a whole host of subjects, that you could add to that page. These are usually highly relevant terms but as ever only write about the subjects that you find that are relevant to that page and would add value.
Add internal links
Internal links are links from one page of your website to another page on your website. Internal links are good for SEO. They tell Google what your other pages are about, they spread authority through your site. They move potential customers or readers on a journey through and eventually to the point of conversion. You will need to make sure that you add internal links to all of your website pages. Wix makes this easy to do and it is an easy way to enhance your SEO efforts whilst lowering your bounce rate. Internal links should be created to every page and you should use keyword rich anchor text in order to post them. Remember these key points when creating internal links for your Wix website…
Use descriptive anchor text with your links so that people can understand what the link is about.
Link over optimisation - do not use one keyword to link a page. You should target a number of keywords or phrases.
Make certain that all internal links are dofollow links.
Add a nofollow tag to external links.
Use two or three internal links per post or page.
Be sure to no have any ‘dead end’ pages in your site and always provide a route to more content should the reader want to read on. Our website visitors on a journey through your website and remember to consider the end goal of that journey.
Advanced SEO Expert Tips: Again, you can use Search Console to identify internal links and how many a page has within your website. Login into your Search Console account and click: Links > Then navigate to the Internal Links section and open the report. By reversing the report to see the pages with the least links you will start to be able to identify pages that need more links pointed to them.
Master link building
Links or external links are links from other websites on the internet that link back to your website. You are going to need to get back links to your site if you are to rank well. Links that point to your homepage as well as to other pages on your website.
There are two ways that link building is done in the current day and age. The first is to hire someone to create back links for you or to take the old-fashioned approach of creating links by yourself.
The other approach is white hat link building. This is all about the generation of exciting content and promoting it to people that enjoy it and deem it worthy of a link from their own website. Both methods work in 2020. However, the first suggestion, if done incorrectly, could result in your website getting penalised on Google because you are trying to manipulate Google’s algorithm.
Link building is a core requirement of good SEO. To rank a site, particularly in a competitive market you will need to generate quality links consistently.
A Wix Expert SEO agency could help you with this and build your websites authority in line with Google’s regulations.
Obtaining links can be a slow process but persist with it, get only quality links form blogs and websites and you will be in good stead. We’ll be writing a lot more about link building in future posts. So please do sign up to receive updates from us so that you can get our useful guides and posts.
Summing up Wix SEO
So, there you have it: A lot that you need to know about enhancing the visibility of your Wix website using SEO. If you follow the advice that has been discussed in this blog post, you should notice some improvements when it comes to the exposure of your site.
Remember to focus on the fundamentals of Content, Technical SEO & Speed and Links whilst taking into account the other points mentioned above you will be well on your way to ranking your website.
Of course, good search engine optimisation is not something that can be achieved overnight. It needs persistence and hard work. However, you will definitely have a much greater chance of achieving your goals if you follow the tips that we have provided above.
Improve Marketing is a full-service seo marketing agency who specialise in digital marketing and SEO. If you need help with your SEO or have any questions that you would like answered with regards to Wix site SEO or indeed anything else why not get in contact with an Improve Marketing Wix SEO expert and let’s talk about how we can help you to rank your Wix website rank in search engines.
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