As someone who has chosen to create a website, you already know how crucial SEO is for your online success. By influencing how Google perceives and ranks your website in search results, you’re more likely to drive more traffic to your pages. It also helps to attract visitors with the right intention, meaning that they are actively looking for a business, product or service like yours. This results in higher chances of visitors converting.
There are different levels of optimization techniques and features you can opt for when creating a website. For example, if you’re a business owner just starting out, you can take advantage of the Wix SEO checklist, which creates a personalized checklist of all the SEO elements you need to cover - on top of enabling instant indexing of your homepage by Google.
However, if you’ve been in the game for longer, or simply want to take control of exactly how your pages are displayed in search results and on social networks, then keep reading. In an effort to continuously improve its offering and cater to professional users, Wix has several SEO tools designed to help you work more efficiently. From canonical URLs to structured data, let’s discover how to use these features to the fullest:
How to use Wix SEO to optimize your site:
01. Meta tags for social media share
You know the important role that social media plays in the success of your business. Ensuring that your brand remains consistent throughout all social channels is imperative to your image and reputation. So, where does this come into play?
We’ve all experienced that moment when scrolling through Facebook only to see a shared link that looks a little ‘off’ - a cropped image or some automatically extracted text that makes no sense. It’s definitely not something you wish your followers (or potential clients) to see.
With the Social Share panel in your Wix editor, you can control exactly how each page of your site looks, from the text to the image, when shared on the major social media platforms.
Here are some helpful formatting guidelines:
Image size: The recommended size is at least 1200 x 630 pixels.
Title: The length should be 55-70 characters (including spaces).
Description: The length should be 100 - 300 characters (again, including spaces).
How to customize the social media meta tags of your Wix pages:
1. Open your Wix editor.
2. Click ‘Pages’ (on the left hand side of the editor).
3. Choose the page you wish to customize.
4. Select the ‘Social Share’ tab.
5. Upload an image and update the text that will show when your site is shared to any social network.
02. Structured data
Adding structured data to your pages is highly advantageous for your website architecture and helps Google contextualize your content. For example, if you have a physical location, adding a schema markup on your contact page will help the bots understand that “123-456-789” is not just a series of numbers - it’s actually your phone number, and should be used to provide better and richer results to searchers. The same goes for your restaurant menu, postal address, opening hours, ratings and more.
Structured data language was harmonized by Schema.org in 2011, which explains why we also refer to this as “schema markup”. Start using it as an excellent way to grab the attention of potential clients amongst an endless sea of competitors.
How to add schema.org structured data to your Wix website:
1. Prepare your schema. You can generate the structured data using a tool like Schema Markup Generator.
2. Open your Wix editor.
4. On your panel, select the ‘Advanced SEO’ tab.
5. Under ‘Structured Data Markup’, select ‘Add New Markup’ and paste your schema in JSON-LD format.
6. After you’ve added your schema, use the ‘Validate Your Markup on Google’ button to check that there are no errors. Wix also validates the schema within the structured data field.
It's important to note that you only get access to this tool if you have a Wix Premium Plan.
03. Canonical URL
In the event that you create two pages that show identical or similar information you have to explain to Google which URL should be treated as the main version and therefore appear in search results.
For example, if you write a blog article called, "Answering All Your Questions: What is SEO and how does it affect your ranking in 2019?" you will use the same keywords, structure and, for some parts, content as you did for your 2018 version. Although the original post is still valuable, you’ll want people to be directed to the newest one, every time they look for “web design trends” in their search engine. Implementing a canonical URL solves this issue.
It’s important to note that Wix automatically adds a self-referential canonical tag to your site. Unless there is a good reason (like the example above) to change the canonical tag you should keep it as is. Additionally, you can customize your default canonical if you need to.
04. Image optimization
Image optimization is an important part of optimizing your website’s performance. Good site performance is crucial for a great user experience on your site and anything that is good for the user is likely to improve your SEO as well.
First of all, all images uploaded to your Wix site are optimized to fit the relevant screen, without sacrificing quality. Images can also be converted to WebP by Wix, which aids faster downloads.
On top of this Wix websites use lazy loading and temporary placeholders - these make sure users get priority content first, while the rest of it loads. Along with automatic caching, which serves return users a saved version of your site and improves page load speed, by avoiding a long sever request, there are several ways in which your images are optimized for your sites performance.
05. Indexing
Wix has a number of SEO features that help you control how your site is crawled and indexed by Google. The first is the auto create and submit sitemap feature - it creates and submits your site to Google, so it knows what to crawl. The editable robots.txt file allows you to choose which of your pages Google sees and crawls, and which it doesn’t. And, the Google Search Console integration gives you not only access to this popular Google tool and all of its data on your organic traffic, it also helps Google index your site or identify issues to fix that might be preventing your pages from being indexed. This is crucial to getting your business found on Google.