Take a moment to think about the last time you searched for something on Google. What subconscious criteria ran through your head as you chose the listing worthy of your click? On your way to making that decision, you undoubtedly cast many other possibilities aside. Perhaps it was because the title didn’t immediately speak to your question, or the URL looked iffy.
Don’t let your clients’ pages be the ones that are passed over.
When you get hired for a web design project, part of your job is positioning the site pages you build for success within search engines and across social media. Publishing blog or website content that is well-written and valuable to readers is the critical foundation required for any powerful optimization effort.
The next chapter is managing how these pages are displayed in online searches and on social channels, from the page title to position on the SERPs (search engine results pages). Giving them the utmost clarity helps people searching on the web know when your client’s content holds the answer they’re looking for.
Ultimately, a boost in web traffic means you get to deliver a clicks and impressions metrics report that you and your clients are both satisfied with.
To start taking control over how each site page you create appears on Google and social channels, the Advanced SEO Panel is what you need (besides winning content, of course!). If you’re interested in championing your SEO expertise and earning the trust - and business - of more clients, get to know the new, sophisticated features available and how you can use them to the benefit of your pages. Nothing is out of reach with advanced SEO tools from Wix.
SEO (Google)
This is a spot you already know well as the place where you decide how the site pages you create are displayed in search engine results. Specifically, it’s where you input a strong page title, description, and unique URL.
Wondering how to optimize these SEO tags for SERPs? Wix SEO Wiz is there to offer customized suggestions based on specific keywords you want your pages to rank for. This is just one perk of the personalized plan this SEO solution devises for each site you create.
This section benefits Wix user Red Fern, as you can see below. By using an optimal format for their SEO title, and emphasizing their location in both the title and description, they are practicing an excellent local SEO strategy. It’s one example of how you can use the panel to help your clients appear on Google in the most advantageous ways for their businesses.
Social share
Google’s SERPs aren’t the only spot where your clients’ websites show up. So many of our news feeds are covered in article and website shares. And, if you’re anything like us, you’ve definitely cringed when you’ve seen a page appear with its description or title most definitely extracted from some default text on the page. Not a pretty picture.
How do you get your client’s site looking good for social, then?
If you leave everything as is after crafting your page SEO settings in the previous panel, that same SEO title and description will automatically be used for social. Sometimes, that works perfectly. Yet, other times, the messaging you develop for your clients’ social presence should be different than what shows up in the search engine results. Different audiences, different intent.
Use the Social Share panel to control the text and images that are displayed when your client’s site is shared on social networks. Having great images, titles, and descriptions for each and every page establishes a more professional look for their business, and increases the chances that people will visit their website.
Follow these guidelines when formatting your social share settings:
Image: Recommended size is at least 1200 x 630 pixels.
Title: Officially known as the ‘OG’ (Open Graph) title, it should be between 55-70 characters, including spaces.
Description: Officially known as the OG description, the recommended length is 100 characters, with an absolute maximum of 300 characters, including spaces.
Advanced SEO
This panel contains the input areas you need to manage and add more sophisticated SEO tags to your page. These professional and complex features offer you even greater capacity for sharply structuring your clients’ SEO:
Structured data:
You know how Google has been filling out their SERPs with more and more opportunities to differentiate the listed results? Think of rating stars, or carousel entries, or business hours and contact information. These are all ways of giving upfront clues to the searcher about what a page contains.
Those additions are great news for your clients. And structured data is your mechanism for explicitly signaling to search engines when your clients’ pages contain elements that are prime for display.
When could that be the case?
For example, if your client’s business has publicly-available high reviews, what better way to earn the average Google searcher’s trust (and customer inquiry) than making sure those five filled-in golden stars appear next to the company name?
Or, maybe your client is a chef with a robust blog of recipes that would be prime for a spot in a carousel. It should be your mission to get them into that position zero, eye-catching stage. And it will be the tags you insert into your structured data that can make that happen.
That communication between your structured data input (using JSON-LD format) and search engines crawling your clients’ pages is enabled by their joint use of Schema.org-defined vocabulary. They share a language, making it that much easier for you to “speak to” indexing bots and deliver specific instructions about how a page’s content should appear in the SERPs.
Custom meta tags:
Another way of broadening the context you expose to search engines is through pieces of code known as custom meta tags. We reviewed the most important examples of these above (such as the meta description and page title), which you can count on already being included by the SEO panel as managed tags.
However, the world of HTML is vast, and perhaps you know of a different tag that will further assist search engines by describing what lies within the page. That’s when the custom meta tag section of the Advanced SEO panel is useful.
Canonical URL:
In the event that you’ve created two pages for a client that show identical or very similar content, you’re left with a big SEO problem:
You now have two distinct URLs that lead to the exact same page.
When that occurs, Google will see these pages, identify the similarity in content, and will independently decide which page is the primary (‘canonical’) one. That could lead to the undesirable outcome of diffusing the search engine’s attention across those two links, or to not have the proper meta tags or URL you want to appear in the SERPs.
Canonical URLs are the remedy to that potential problem. When Google is confronted with multiple URLs that seem to direct visitors to the same or closely-related content, they instruct Google which URL contains the main version of the content.
This situation could arise if, for example, your client wants to publish an updated article aimed at the same keywords as one written several years ago. Also, if certain content is no longer available on their site but they can answer the same search intent with a newer, relevant page.
A self-referring canonical tag is already automatically generated for each page you create. Therefore, if you would like to create a hierarchy of how Google is assessing and displaying the pages you’ve created with identical content, just enter the Advanced SEO panel for the alternate pages and change the currently-listed canonical URL so that it points to the primary page’s URL.
Where can I find the Advanced SEO Panel?
If you’re ready to start using structured data, custom meta tags, and canonical URLs to take control of how the site pages you create appear on Google and social channels, look no further than where you were already heading to manage SEO settings:
Within the Editor, open your Site Menu from the left hand Editor panel.
Click the three dots next to the Page whose SEO settings you want to access.
Select ‘Settings,’ and then use the tabs at the top to navigate to the specific section you want: SEO (Google), Social Share, or Advanced SEO.
Connect with other Wix Partners about how they’re taking advantage of these tools by joining the Wix Forum conversation.
