Wix SEO

What is Wix?

Wix is a popular website builder that offers an easy drag and drop interface to design visually appealing websites. It is a budget-friendly solution for small business owners who are interested in developing their website themselves.

The best part about Wix is that there is no prior coding or website design experience needed to design a website. Anyone can easily build a website using the 500 customisable templates and the easy-to-use features offered by the platform.

Is Wix the Right Platform For Your Business?

If you are a small business on a tight budget, then you probably do not want to spend your resources on hiring web designers and developers to work on your business website. In such a case, using a platform like Wix can help you go live with your website with just a few simple settings.

So, if you are a small business owner with no coding experience, then Wix may be the right platform for your business. In case you want to build a sophisticated website with advanced design and unique capabilities, then Wix might not be the right platform for your business website.

Does Wix Have Good SEO? Are Wix Websites SEO Friendly?

Yes, Wix offers a variety of basic and advanced SEO features that makes it easier for its users to implement SEO on their Wix site. Free tools such as Wix SEO Wiz take you through a step-by-step plan to implement basic SEO on your website.

Though Wix comes with many in-built SEO-friendly features and capabilities, simply sticking to these might not be the best idea. In this guide, you’ll learn much more about all kinds of SEO strategies that you should implement on your Wix website to ensure that your website soon starts ranking on the first page of Google.

Do You Need a Paid Plugin to Improve Wix SEO?

No, you do not have to use a paid plugin for Wix SEO optimization. The platform comes with many SEO-friendly in-built features and capabilities using which you can implement on-page SEO for your website.

However, the Wix App Market comes with various paid SEO apps such as Rabbit SEO and Site Booster that can help you improve Wix SEO. Some of these apps come with a free plan. So, you should definitely check these apps out.

Wix On-Page SEO Strategies

Now that you are done with the initial set up for your Wix website SEO, we can move on to the question: how to do SEO on Wix? It starts with on-page optimisation strategies. But first, what is meant by on-page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to the optimisation strategies that can be implemented on each page of your website. Through on-page SEO techniques, you can implement certain strategies on your web pages, contents, and settings to improve the search engine rankings.

Off-page SEO refers to the strategies that need to be implemented outside of your web pages. We will delve into off-page SEO in the next section.

Perform Keyword Research

The first step to on-page SEO is the process of keyword research. Keywords are nothing but the search phrases that we use while searching for something in search engines.

For example, if you are looking for some workout inspiration, you may search for the term “at-home 20 min exercises.” So, this is a keyword. When any website optimises its web page for this keyword, it is likely that the page will rank on search engines like Google.

In order to bring the right people to your website, you should perform keyword research and come up with the right set of keywords for your website.

Keywords can be short-tail or long-tail. Short tail keywords usually are highly competitive and difficult to rank for. Short-tail keywords get higher search volume. You should aim to use a combination of both short-tail and long-tail keywords for the best possible results.

Another broad way to categorise keywords is informational and commercial. Suppose that you own a photography business. Then keywords such as “wedding photography tips” and “best selfie poses” will fall under the keywords with informational intent category. This is because users searching these keywords are only interested in learning more about photography.

Whereas keywords such as “best wedding photographer in Sydney” are the ones with commercial intent. The users searching this term are looking to hire a photographer.

In order to get the best results, you should optimise your website for both informational and commercial intent keywords. You can add commercial intent keywords to your site’s core pages such as homepage, landing pages, contact us page, about page, services page, etc. You can optimise your blog pages for informational intent keywords.

Keywords with commercial intent will help you get customers within a short time. Keywords with informational intent help your site rank higher over time, and people will eventually start getting familiarised with your brand. This will ultimately lead to more customers for your business.

Find Target Keywords With Informational and Commercial Intent

There are various ways to find the right informational and commercial intent keywords for your business website. Here are some of the easiest ways:

• Google Search Results Page:The easiest way to find keywords is to use the Google search results page. Start by creating a list of main topics and subtopics that best describe your business. Next, search for these keywords on Google.When you start typing the search term on the search bar, you’ll find that Google will come up with a list of autosuggestions. All these are keywords that users search for and you must use for your website.
  

  When you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find the “Related searches” section full of keywords that are related to your main search term.

  

  In the middle of the page, you’ll find another section called “People also ask.” This section consists of query-based keywords that users search for. You can also use these keywords to optimise your site. Using a tool like KeywordInsights.ai will help with this process.

  
• Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension:The Keywords Everywhere free Chrome plugin comes up with a list of related and long-tail keywords for every time you do a Google search.
  
• Keyword research tools:If you want to go more in-depth with your keyword research, then using a keyword research tool is a great idea. You can use tools such as SEMrush, ahrefs, AnswerThePublic, Also Asked and more to find the right keywords for your website pages and blog content.All these tools work in a similar way. Simply search for the main keywords or topics relevant to your business. The tool will list down a bunch of keywords that you should optimise your content for.Most of these tools also have indicators for the search volume and SEO difficulty for any keyword. Consider going for keywords with comparatively lower SEO difficulty. These keywords will be easier to rank for when you are just starting out.
  

Research Your Competitors

Researching your competitors is also a great way of coming up with the right list of keywords that you should optimise your site for. Most keyword research tools allow you to perform competitor analysis.

Simply type in your top competitors’ URLs in the above-mentioned keyword research tools, and you’ll get a list of keywords that these websites are ranking for. Going after these keywords is a great way to get more potential customers to your business website.

You can use tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc., for finding competitors’ keywords.

Optimise Your Website’s Pages For Target Keywords

Once you are done with your keyword research, your next step should be to start optimising your web pages for the right keywords. You can begin with the homepage, followed by the other important pages.

You might have already done this as a part of the SEO plan provided by the Wix SEO Wiz. Now, you can go back and make changes with the new set of keywords that you’ve found.

For this step, simply go to your Wix site’s editor and start editing the homepage’s text. Start adding the main target keywords and the related keywords to different parts of your homepage.

Make sure that you do not stuff the keywords on your homepage so much that the text seems unnatural. Ensure that the text is readable and makes sense to any website visitor.

Similarly, you can also edit other pages of your website, such as the About us page, Contact page, Services page, etc., to include the right keywords.

Optimise Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and URL Slugs

Apart from the text of your website’s pages, you should also include target keywords in the title tags, meta tags, and URLs of these pages. Optimising these settings for target keywords will also help you rank higher in Google.

For editing these Wix SEO settings, go to the Wix editor > Main Pages. Here, select any page and go to SEO (Google.) Here, you can add the page’s title, meta description, and URL slug – all optimised for the right target keywords.

Create High-Quality Blog Content

Search engines such as Google love to rank websites that offer some valuable information to the users. Hence, maintaining an up-to-date blog can be added plus for the SEO of your website.

With the right Wix blog SEO, your site will start ranking for informational keywords. Eventually, your Wix site will receive more visitors. And all this will help you generate more leads and land more customers.

So, start creating unique, valuable blog content for your target audience from the day you start your website. Ensure that you create content around topics that your target audience will be interested in.

To find topics for your blog, you can use the keyword research methods mentioned in the previous section. You can also research your competitors and look at the type of content that they are putting out.

For creating blog content for your site, go to the Wix dashboard > Blog > Create New Post. This will open up a text editor where you can add your content, along with images, videos, GIFs, etc. Once you are done, you can hit publish, and your blog post will be live.

Ensure that you figure out the right keywords for every blog post that you publish. Use these target and related keywords in the posts’ title, headings, sub-headings, image alt tags, in the blog content (introduction, body, and conclusion), meta description, and the URL slug.

Ensure Proper Page Structure

Just like site structure, having a hierarchical structure for every page on your site is also very important in determining your search engine rankings. Without a proper page structure, search engine crawlers will find it difficult to go through your pages and comprehend their contents. Improper page structure also affects your site’s accessibility.

Therefore, be it main web pages or blog pages, ensure that you follow a proper page structure. Follow a hierarchical structure by starting with the title, followed by H1, H2, H3, etc. and then come to the paragraphs. Ensure that you structure your content into numbered or bulleted lists wherever possible.

Add Structured Data

Structured data or schema markup is a format used to mark up the information about any website. Structured data helps search engine crawlers to understand the content and the context of your website.

Adding structured data can help your website show up in rich results at the top of the Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs.) By default, Wix adds structured data for blog posts, product pages (for eCommerce stores), event pages, booking pages, and forum posts.

But, if you want to add any other type of structured data such as recipe, breadcrumb, event, FAQs, etc., to your Wix site, then you can do that too. You can use tools like FAQSchema Generator, Schema.dev and this one from Technical SEO to generate the schema code.

Then, copy this structured data code and head over to your Wix editor. Under Pages > Main Pages/Blog Pages > Advanced SEO > Structured Data, you’ll find a place to paste the copied structured data.

Ensure Readability

Search engines such as Google stress user experience as an important factor in ranking different websites in SERPs. Google uses a set of UX signals to measure the UX of any website page that it crawls and uses this information to rank the pages.

To ensure a good user experience for your site, good readability is a must. Hence, with every page that you publish on your Wix site, ensure that it is easy to read and understand to visitors landing on the page.

• Follow a proper hierarchical page structure. Add descriptive headings and subheadings for every section of the page.
• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short.
• Avoid huge walls of plain text. Instead, leave blank spaces that allow readers to skim through the contents of the page.
• Support your content and break up plain text with plenty of media in the form of images, screenshots, videos, GIFs, charts, graphs, infographics, etc.

Optimise Content for On-Page UX Signals

As discussed earlier, search engines like Google prioritise user experience as an important ranking factor. Google uses UX signals to measure the user experience offered by your site. Hence, optimising for these UX signals can help you rank higher up on SERPs.

Here are some of the UX signals that should optimise for:

Bounce Rate

Users are said to bounce when they leave your site without taking any action, such as clicking on a link or making a purchase. For any website, there will always be users who bounce.

But, you can reduce the bounce rate by ensuring that you offer the visitor what they came looking for. Bad website design and navigation are other factors that can lead to increased bounce rate.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is the amount of time any user spends on your page. You can increase dwell time by creating content that is in-depth and valuable. Adding engaging elements such as images and videos to your web pages can also help.

Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Organic CTR is the percentage of users who view your site’s link on the SERP vs. the ones that click on the link and land on your page. Optimising your SEO title, meta description, and URL can help increase the organic CTR of any page. Ensure that the title and meta tag are descriptive and enticing enough for the users to click through.

User’s Search Intent

Search intent is the main goal of the user when searching for a query in a search engine. The search intent can be informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. It is important that you optimise your content for the right search intent.

For example, when a user intends to look for information on a topic, your page should be optimised for informational intent and not commercial intent. If not, then the user will bounce off your site.

Optimise For Speed

Speed is also a vital ranking factor considered by Google. Did you know that users will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load? Hence, optimising your site for quick page load speed is a crucial part of SEO.

Wix offers some default features that ensure that your site’s performance is high and the pages’ loading time is significantly reduced:

• Wix uses a global system of cache services, and proxy servers called Content Delivery Network (CDN) that significantly reduces your site’s loading time.
• Wix offers automatic, or manual page caching that again helps reduce the page load time. You can control this by going to the Wix dashboard > Pages > Main Pages/Blog Pages > Settings > Advanced Settings.
• Wix also offers automatic image optimisation. Image files with larger sizes are the main factor that contributes to slowing down a page’s speed. Wix automatically compresses the images that you add, resulting in better performance.
• Wix also offers lazy loading of images, which again results in higher page load speeds.

You can use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to check the speed of your desktop and mobile versions of your site. The tool also offers suggestions for improving the speed of your website.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Having duplicate content on your Wix site can lead to a huge setback in your search engine rankings. Having duplicate content means that your site’s pages compete with each other while ranking for a search term on Google. This is not an ideal scenario and must be avoided at any cost.

Optimise Images

As discussed in the above section about speed optimisation, images are usually the ones that contribute most to the slowness of any web page. Hence, optimising images can be a significant factor in improving your site’s speed and performance.

By default, Wix offers image compression and lazy loading, so you do not have to explicitly worry about these steps. Apart from these, you should also ensure that you add descriptive, keyword-rich titles and alt texts to all the images that you add to your site. Google also considers these factors while ranking your site.

Implement Internal Linking For SEO

Internal linking is the process of adding relevant links to your site’s pages from other pages on your site. Internal linking is also a crucial part of SEO, and hence it is important to implement internal linking as a part of your on-page SEO.

Here’s how you can implement internal linking for your Wix site:

• Add links to related posts and pages from each page on your site.
• Ensure that you add keyword-rich anchor texts to your internal links.
• Internal links help link equity flow from the linking page to the linked page. Hence, try to link to important pages such as the homepage or services page from the other pages.
• Do not overuse internal links, as this may hurt your SEO.

Conclusion

Wix is one of the most popular website builders that offers a hosted solution. It is beginner-friendly, extremely easy to use, intuitive, comes with hundreds of templates, and offers a wide variety of SEO-friendly features.

Using the strategies and tips provided in this ultimate guide, you can plan out your entire SEO strategy and start ranking on top search engines soon.

If you want to explore other alternative Website builders, you can check out our comprehensive guides on SquareSpace SEO and Webflow SEO.