See the latest advanced SEO features in action. Watch a demo from Wix SEO Product Manager Dana Jaffe and discover how to make these new professional tools work for your website.
Transcript: New advanced SEO tools webinar
Speakers
Edu Giansante, Head of Community, Wix
Dana Jaffe, Product Manager, SEO, Wix
00:00
Edu: Are we live now? Can you see us? Okay, we should be live now. Is it live? Yeah, we're live. Finally, thank God. Oh my God, guys, this is reality, this is going live for real. We had some issues with YouTube and we had to use the backup code for them. But it worked. We're finally live. I'm really sorry for the eight minute delay. But I'm glad that we're here and that we can finally see you, talk to you, hear you. And we're ready to present something really exciting with SEO.
And I'm right here on stage. Dana, join me, Dana Jaffe, she's an expert in SEO at Wix, she works in the product team. And I'm glad that this worked guys, seriously, like today, it was a challenge. Like we had some issues, I think with some servers at YouTube. And finally, it's all sorted.
My name is Edu Giansante, I'm Head of Community at Wix. And I'm seeing a lot of comments from people all over the world. I see people in Ireland, in the UK and they're grabbing their cup of tea because I know it's four o'clock now, it's time for tea, and everyone else might be grabbing their own beverages. I'm hoping you guys are all good, still happy to be here with you. And really again, as I said, apologies for the delay. So without further ado, I want to introduce you to Dana and Dana, please take it away.
01:19
Dana: Hello, everyone. It's really good to be here with you today and live. I hope that some of you were already with us at last year's webinar. And I'm very excited to show you what we've been up to in the last year. So let's get started, Edu, right?
Edu: Sure. Yeah, go for it.
Dana: Okay, so before we jump in, I just want to briefly introduce myself. So as Edu said, my name is Dana, I'm leading the SEO product team here [at] Wix. And we're in charge of helping you guys help your clients better succeed on search engines. And today, we'll cover many of our new and exciting releases. We'll start with URL customization for blog posts and product pages. We'll talk some more about our structured data markup capabilities and the new features that we have there. We’ll talk about bot log reports, robots and additional meta tags. We'll also have a sneak peek at our upcoming release, which is very exciting. And we'll have some answers and feedback. Yes.
02:22
Edu: Amazing. I love that. Guys, make sure you send your questions. We have people in the chat to help you with questions in between. But obviously, if there are questions that are relevant to ask Dana during the presentation, I will throw them in here so she can answer. So yeah, go ahead Dana.
02:38
Dana: Great. Okay, so let's start with something that I know many of you have been waiting for for a long time. And it's URL customization for blog posts and product pages. And what does it actually mean?
It's the ability to customize the default structure of either the product pages or blog posts that you get by default with Wix. So you know, when you work with either the Wix Blog or Wix Stores, you get the default structure of that product dash page or post, and so on. And from now on, you can customize that to meet your site or business needs. You can edit the prefix, you can remove the prefix, you can add a suffix, you can do basically whatever you want. And I can share that we're also working on more and more ways to customize the URL with more cool and useful variables.
I do want to remind you guys that URLs are very delicate and crucial. So make sure you don't make any unnecessary changes and that all of the changes that you're making—you make them very, very carefully.
As you know, and if your site is already live, and then you make changes to your URL structure. Chances are that both visitors and bots that used to have links to your site now have broken links, because the URLs are no longer valid.
This means you need to handle 301 redirects to redirect them from the previous URLs which are broken to the new ones. And the cool thing about this feature is that we handle everything automatically for you. All you need to do is keep the checkbox on and the redirects will be added automatically, including fixing any loops that might have occurred. So it's really cool and recommended to use.
Edu: Nice.
Dana: So now I'll show you [what] it looks like and how you can get to it with some cool examples. So in your site's dashboard, go to Marketing and SEO and then to SEO Tools. That's the screen that you'll see. Click on SEO Patterns. And then you can choose the relevant page type.
In this example, we'll go for product pages. Here you have all of the different settings that you can customize on the page type level for products. Choose page URL, and then you see the default URL structure that you get with Wix. So in this example site I'm selling toys for kids. So I want to change the product dash page prefix to be slash toys.
So once I do that, this checkbox will appear. It will offer to automatically redirect everything from the previous structure to the new slash toys one. After clicking Save, you will get this pop-up making sure that you are approving all of the changes that are about to be made, because they will be made immediately on the spot. And after you click Confirm, everything will be applied. So that's an example of how to use the URL structure feature. I hope you guys are as excited as I am about this one.
05:25
Edu: This is amazing. This is actually a game changer. I love the fact that it's so simple and straightforward. This is awesome.
05:32
Dana: Yes, I like it too. Thank you Edu. And you can also do exactly the same thing for your blog post pages and soon for more and more page tags in Wix. So stay tuned.
And moving on to structure data markups capabilities. But before we dive in, just to make sure we're on the same page, what are structured data markups in the first place?
So they are pieces of code added behind the scenes of the HTML on your site. And they're there to basically better explain to the search engine bots, what the content is on the page. What does it include?
Think of it as a better way of communicating with these bots using a dictionary that they already know, you can explain to them. So hi Google, this page, for example, includes a recipe that is the code that you're seeing here on the right. And it takes X minutes to prepare these, these are the calories of this recipe and so on.
And the cool thing about the structured data markup capability is it's not just giving search engines more context of the content on the page. Later, you can have these pages appear as rich results on the search results page.
Like the example you see here for again, the recipe, which is very cool, very useful, and can increase your conversion, your CTR in search results. So in Wix, the cool thing is that we take care of many structured data markups for you automatically. We add it to your product pages or event pages, your blog posts, your booking services, pages, and many, many more.
But for now, you can also control these markups that we add automatically for each of your page types. You can add more than one, you can add your own, and so much more. And let's see some examples of what you can do with these new capabilities before we show an actual example.
So first, you can switch the default markup for your blog posts. So you can choose between article, news article and a post, which is very cool and very useful for blog users. You can add additional markup to any of your pages. But I do recommend to do it only when it's relevant because search engines are very, very sensitive to faulty data. So I wouldn't risk it and only use it when it's highly relevant to the content of your pages.
And if you see the markup that we gave you by default, and you want to make a change, you want to add something, to remove something, you can convert it to a custom markup and basically use it as a template to get started and just make your own changes, save it and it will be immediately applied. So let's see an example.
So this feature as well can be found in SEO Patterns. But instead of the page URL card, you just need to click on the structured data markup one. If you click on the product markup or again in the product example here, you'll see the default markup that you get from Wix. It includes basically the code that we're adding for you. So everything is here for you guys to see. And a quick brief explanation and also a link to learn more on the schema and the logic that is implemented behind it.
This is of course, just a demonstration of an example of how it can look when it's being shown as a rich result in Google. If you want to make changes to the presets, you can click on the Convert to custom markup [link].
And it will open this new model, you can name your schema, you can make your changes, add variables that are relevant. And once you apply this, the previous Wix schema will be automatically hidden because we don't want to have two schemas of the same type. It doesn't make any sense. And your schema will be automatically applied. So that's one example of how to use this cool new feature.
09:17
Edu: This is excellent. Dana, there was a question that came up here actually more and more. So I want to ask here because I feel it's relevant. Will this be available for Editor X anytime soon?
09:26
Dana: Already [is].
09:29
Edu: Oh my God. There you go. Great news. Great news. Alright.
09:35
Dana: Great. So let's talk about bot log reports. And again, I want to make sure we're all on the same page. So what our bot log reports or you might know it as log data analytics. So think that every time either bot or human requests to access a page on your site, we keep a row in our databases with this information.
Which page did the bot ask to access? Was the response successful or not successful? And so on. What’s the date? What’s the time? And by analyzing this data, you can really understand how bots interact with the website. Are there any issues? Are there any errors? And if you really learn how to dive deep into these reports, you can also identify opportunities, and we'll talk about that later.
So we have several reports. And each report can help you answer a different set of questions. For example, which bots are actually crawling my website? And [at what] frequency? And which pages of my site are being crawled the most? And are there any HTTP errors that the bots are encountering, while crawling my website? And when I say HTTP errors, I think the most common famous one is the 404, the infamous one to be more exact.
I'm sure it happens to all of you, when you try to access a page and you [see] “page was not found 404 errors”. That is probably the worst thing that can happen from the search engine’s perspective, because like once it happens, chances are that this page won't show up high in search results again. So we want to prevent that from happening. And of course, to prevent that from happening to the site visitors as well. We don't want them to encounter any errors. So let's take a look at some examples of how to interact with these reports.
So you can find them in your site's dashboard, Analytics and Reports under the Reports tab, if you scroll down, you'll get to the Marketing and SEO section. And the bottom three reports are at the bot log reports. So the first one is Bot Traffic over Time. So when you open it, you can see in this example, in the last 30 days, each day, which bots crawled your website and in how many hits you had from each bot, which is super, super interesting. So you can see in this example, we pre-filter the top four bots, which are Yandex, Bing, Google Desktop, and Google Mobile.
And of course, if you want to take a look at all of the bots that are crawling your website, you can just remove this filter and then you'll get like a very, very high level view of all the bots that are crawling your website.
Of course, you can add, similar to other Wix Analytics reports, which I hope you guys are familiar with because they are very, very cool and valuable. You can add filters, you can change the dimension looking at by week or month instead of day, you can look a bit back. And it's very, very cool. And also similar to the other analytics reports, you can download the report, you can subscribe to it to get updates, you can take a look at the about this reports app to get more tips and insights on how to use these reports. Very, very cool.
12:41
Edu: Amazing, Dana, there are some questions. I mean, some of them were from the prior part of the presentation. But I kind of feel that we should ask them now because people were kind of catching up with your talk. So one of them is will it be possible to add different JSON specific markups to each post, for example, how to, recipe and so on?
13:02
Dana: That's a great question. It will be possible. It's not possible today. But we're working on it. It's in the oven. It will be possible.
13:09
Edu: Nice. Love that, love that. That's great. And there was another question that I feel again, since I'm stopping you already, why not—can the schema be added to dynamic pages as well?
13:22
Dana: Currently only using the Velo API, but we're also working on that and [it] will also be available.
13:28
Edu: That's super. Love that, love that. Cool. Alright, keep going.
13:32
Dana: Great. So moving on to the next bot log report. And that's the bot traffic by page. And this one is very interesting. I've hidden the names of the pages here because that's a real site. But here you can see some kind of a histogram that tells you which of your pages are being crawled the most.
And same here you can add filters, you can change the number of pages that you want to see. This can really give you an indication of which of your pages are more successful, or have the potential to be successful. So it's really, really interesting and insightful. You can also view this report in a table format, if you want, like a different viewer to download it and then make an Excel or Google Sheets analysis on top of that.
And the last one, which is kind of my favorite, I'll tell you is that response status over time. So when you get here, you can see for each day, how many—either hits or unique pages, you can choose the measure that got a response code that wasn't a success. Meaning either a 404 or a 500, which is a server error or a 301 redirect, meaning how many times a bot accessed the page and was redirected to another page. That's not an error, but it is something that's worth tracking.
But the 404s are what should be, I think, the most interesting and if you take a look at the table view, you'll be able to see for each page, the response that it got, how many hits, when it started and when it ended. So you can track the latest issues that you have and act to fix them by adding a 301 redirect, obviously.
So there are many more things and we don't have much time. But there are many more things to do with these reports. I encourage you to check our Knowledge Base articles about this and ask us questions in the Community later. So we'll be able to answer you guys.
15:25
Edu: That's amazing. I'm loving this. Guys keep coming [with] questions. I'm trying to pull them up here, as you ask. There's a lot of comments coming in. So if I'm not able to put it here for Dana to answer live, maybe we can do it at the end. But also, there's the Support team making sure that the questions get answered in the live session, in the chat. So we've got you covered, so you're fine.
15:49
Dana: Great. So moving on to robots, and custom meta tags. So meta tags, just again, to make sure we're all on the same page, are snippets of code that better describe the content of the page or HTML tags added to the HTML. They're not visible on the page itself. Yet, they do give, as we said, search engines more information on what the page includes. And one of the most important meta tags is the robots one.
Robots basically includes instructions for search engines on how to interact with the page when it's being crawled. So you can tell the bots to not index this page, so it won't show in search results. You can tell them to not follow links on the page, to not index images on this page, and many, many more [instructions].
And now, you have full control over these robots meta tags, what you used to have up until now with Wix is the famous slogan, right? Remember it, the index, no index, so it's still there. And it still works, it’s still there, it is completely correlated with the feature you see here. But this one has another and more and more directives, for more advanced users, like your guys’ purposes.
So you can customize this robots meta tag for both individual pages by going to each page’s SEO Settings panel, or for specific page types all at once, if you want to save some time, using SEO Patterns.
And let's see an example. So again, if you go to SEO Patterns, to Products and open the robots meta tag, you can choose which directory you want to turn on. By default, they're all off. So search engines can freely crawl all of your product pages without any issues. Then you can of course, select one, click Save. And I do remind you guys that if you're having second thoughts or regretting any ones that go back to default, you always have the Reset to Default button that you can use and reset to the default settings.
So, robots meta tag is just one example of a meta tag and there's so much more. And as you know, we've been working very hard in providing you the best grounds to succeed when it comes to SEO. So we added all the meta tags that we find valuable and important. But if you feel that there is a mistake, or think that there was a mistake that you would like to add that is not supported by default, then you can easily do it using the custom meta tag feature. So when you’re in SEO Patterns, again, expanding the additional Meta Tags section, you can click the Add New Tag [option]. And this will open a small window in which you can add the tag in. So similar to the other features that we talked about today, you can add it to both individual pages or to all of your pages of the same type at once using the great SEO Patterns tool.
18:39
Edu: I love that. There's a question that's kind of related to that, that Marcus has actually left here. Let me just make sure I've pulled it up for you, it is a question around customizing meta tags for dynamic pages. Is it possible to do that?
18:54
Dana: So there are very specific meta tags that you can customize for dynamic pages at the moment, the relatively basic ones, but similar to the structured data capabilities, we're also working on allowing everything you see here for dynamic pages as well.
19:08
Edu: Nice. I love it. Thank you.
19:13
Dana: Yes. Okay, so now is the time for a sneak peek at our upcoming release, which I personally find very, very exciting. So soon, we will be launching a new tool which is basically a consolidation of many tools and capabilities that we have, and it will be called SEO Settings.
And as you saw, you can customize settings for individual pages at site level, at page type level using SEO Patterns. But from now it will all be consolidated under one tool and it will be your go to place to see all of the SEO settings that you have defined for all of the pages, for all the page types and to see all of the pages at once which is extremely valuable. The editing experience will be easier and, in the future, we will also support importing all of the SEO settings using CSV and also exporting it. So there is a lot to wait for. And I do want to show you some screens if that's okay.
20:10
Edu: Wait, wait before you share the screen, because this is actually a big, big game changer. I'm already excited with everything that we have shared to date, which is amazing. And now you're telling us that there's an ability to have all of this in one single page in the near future where we can control everything.
20:24
Dana: That's exactly why I’m telling you.
20:27
Edu: We didn't script that actually. I just said that out loud, improvised. That's amazing. Really, like I'm super excited, because I love this fact that we're like making lives easier for everyone. And this is extremely good, guys. This is actually big, big. So tell us Dana. Can you show us what it looks like?
20:44
Dana: Yeah, I want to show you the screen and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback, guys. So when you go to SEO Tools, and what used to be SEO Buttons will now be SEO Settings. And the general SEO Settings for the site level that used to be here will not be there anymore, but inside SEO Settings.
So once you click on SEO Settings, you will see a prettier version of what we have today for both SEO Patterns, editing by page type, or setting your site preferences. These are the global, general settings that used to be in the main page.
And once you click on any of them, let's continue with the product example, you'll have two tabs. The first one—Customize Defaults, which was which was previously known as Patterns, it will include all the settings that we just talked about today—page URL, structured data markup, robots meta tag, additional meta tags, and of course, the search engines and social media, which is like the relatively basic section. So it will all be here.
But when you click Edit by Product, you'll get this very cool table with all of your product pages, and a high-level view of the settings that you've defined for them. And if you click on one of them, the settings panel of that individual page will open. So you'll be able to edit everything in the same place. Yes, I hope you guys like that. And we hope to release it very, very soon. We're working on that. And we also have many more exciting features and releases. We're thinking about you guys and your needs all the time. And I can't wait to come here again and tell you about the next thing we have planned for you.
22:31
Edu: This is so good Dana. I'm actually over the moon here. I'm trying to get all the comments, but I've thrown one here for you. Diana is saying oh, thank you, it's such a pain to wait for each page to load. And Erica, thank you, this is really, really good. And I love the fact that this is really like thinking like, what would make our Partner's life easier? And that's how I'm pretty sure you put yourself in their shoes to understand how we can solve it for you? You know, on the level that will make sense for you. That's amazing.
23:02
Dana: I can tell you that that's exactly what we have in mind. These are exactly the sentences that we're saying when we have our meetings and defining what we're going to do and how. So how can we make everyone’s lives a bit easier when working with us? So that's exactly it.
23:16
Edu: This is so good. I love that. That's great, guys. That's amazing. Amazing. Well done again. And I want to make sure obviously, we had some questions coming in and I was trying to kind of go through everything. Just a lot going on in the chat here with a slight lag and then trying to keep on track and hear what's going on with that. So guys, if you have questions, throw them here in the comments. We have a few minutes for questions before we wrap it up. But obviously if it gets to a point where like you didn't get your question answered, or you have like maybe follow-up questions after you try this out, go to the Community, so you can ask it there. I'm pretty sure there’s a ton of people who will be willing to help.
I'll make sure to ping Dana from time to time and tell her hey Dana, get someone from your team here to help us because this question needs attention. So feel free to throw your questions there as well. So we have two places for Community—Forum and we have the Facebook group. If you're not there yet, I'll put the links up soon enough here. But yeah, it's time for questions, guys, time for questions.
Let's see what's coming [in] here. Actually a lot of good comments again. So Phedra Digital say, “Best Wix Partners live webinar ever.” Yay. Dana, this is awesome. Thank you for the sneak peek. Oh, let's see Derek, “That's great information.” Thank you. My God. There’s a lot of good compliments here. There you go, Killian is asking, “Will the SEO Settings be available for dynamic pages?” I think we kind of answered that, right?
24:39
Dana: Yes. Not at the first phase. But yes, it's definitely in the plans.
24:44
Edu: Alyssa is saying, great job excited to see the new releases. Yes. We're super excited. Yes, yes. Let's see. Oh my God. It's a lot of thank yous. They're thanking you again for the time. Okay, Danny is asking a question here, “Any tools upcoming for FAQ schema?”
25:04
Dana: So FAQ schema can basically be added to any of your static pages using the structured data markup capability because you can paste whatever code you want there. But I wasn't planning on telling you that but another bit of a spoiler, we are working on better and easier ways for adding schemas to your sites and I'll keep it there, I think.
25:33
Edu: You need to keep asking so you can get more from her. I love it. That's so cool. That's so good. Actually, yeah, more amazing things like MNF Web Solutions, super with a little boom. Yeah, that's amazing. Let's see what else Oh, hold on, there's someone else. So Jeff is asking, Can we add the ads dot txt or no app ads dot txt, as well?
26:00
Dana: It's already available using marketing integrations.
26:03
Edu: Amazing. Oh my God, this is like, you got everything like so prepared. Like it's almost like as if we're planning for the questions to come in and you knew all the answers. Like you're really good at this Dana. Thank you.
Okay. Let's see what else guys, feel free to keep sending the questions. I'm trying to keep track of things but it's just so many are popping up and I have a slight delay because I'm using the streaming and opening up the live feed here at the bottom. So forgive me if there's like a few seconds delay here from my end. Jessica White is asking, “Can bots crawl FAQ?”
26:40
Dana: Bots can crawl all of the pages. Basically. There is no limitation.
26:46
Edu: Okay, let's see what else here oh my God, there's a ton of questions here, how much time do we have left here? Can we get someone in the backend here like the director telling you in my ears here how much we have left? Because I have so many questions. I will keep asking them if you guys don't stop me. I'll keep going and you guys let me know. Okay, Wix Trainer is asking me to explain, I see him a lot, “Any new features to send SEO reports to clients? Can you do something around that?”
27:18
Dana: So yes, we have it in our plans. Once we finally finalize our 2022 plans, I'll be happy to share some more information on timelines. But as I said, guys, we have you in mind, we have your needs in mind. So we're planning that as well.
27:39
Edu: Amazing. Love it. Love it. It's so good. Oh, my God. Okay, so it looks like we're actually five minutes over time. But we had a delay at the beginning. So I'm assuming like, we're actually still on time. So we're still okay with that. But let me see if there's more questions. Let me ask the director here in the backend.
DJ guy, do we have more time? Are we good to go? Can we keep going and ask Dana more questions? Okay, yes, we can. We've got the green light from our DJ in the backend, the director, and the producer’s thing. Yes. Okay. Let me throw more questions. Yeah. Dana has all the answers. I know. I know. MNF is telling you this in the chat. Hold on. Let me see.
What else can I pick here because I lost track here with things. Feel free to ask again. In case I missed it because maybe it was thrown to the bottom. And then I have to read it again. But let's see. Ah yeah, Kelena, you thought about everything in here. She did. Okay, so Simon has a question, “What's the future for multilingual SEO?”
28:43
Dana: That's a great, great question. So currently, you can customize the SEO settings for your secondary languages, for your static pages, for your site pages, meaning we also plan on allowing that for other page types during 2022. We will also be improving our Sitemaps to better support multilingual sites. And again, I know it sounds like a cliche, but we really have you guys in mind, and we really want to do what's best for you. So we're working on that.
29:12
Edu: Nice. That's super cool. That's super cool. Yeah. Okay. So Simon, sorry, I missed your question. Because I know someone said that. And thanks again for bringing this up. Because it's hard to scroll up. So happy days. That's good.
Yeah, so Vinita was asking this question. So yes, we answered Simon, so we got it. We got him. Yes Simon! Okay. Let's see what else, okay, so, gosh, it's coming. So Ralph is just saying yay, yay. Thanks, Ralph. Yay for Simon hare, yay for Dana too.
Amazing and, okay, so we answered this integration of ads, the ads dot txt. We get that question already. So I'm trying to keep track of things here. It's really hard. I need my producers in the backend to help me otherwise it's gonna be super tough to get through. Okay, are there okay, Diana is asking this question. Are there any plans to add Google Image detected keywords to Media Manager? Google now uses AI to pull keywords based on an image instead of an alt text. I didn't know that, I'm learning with you.
30:20
Dana: Yeah, so it’s something that we are discussing these days. I do not have a final answer yet, but I'll be happy to update once I do.
30:29
Edu: Okay, that's good. Okay, cool. So guys, now we've officially completed the 30 minutes, because we were eight minutes late. And now it's 38 past whatever time you're in. So I want to really thank you again, then for being on top of everything that's going on in the SEO world. I mean, you know this better than anyone, and thanks for, you know, really thinking about how Partners are working and how to make their lives easier.
I hope this has been helpful for you guys. And I hope you liked all the sneak peek, because that was like, we actually even got like more than we initially anticipated. So that's really good. Thank you again Dana, thanks for your time.
31:02
Dana: Thank you guys so much. And again, please leave your feedback in the Community and ask us questions. We really want to hear from you. We really want to improve for you guys. Thank you for having me, and I look forward to the next one.
31:15
Edu: Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you everyone for their time. Thank you everyone who stuck around even with the slight delay we had and thanks for being awesome and for, you know, keeping this Community vibrant as usual, it's been like this forever. So thank you again, thank you again. It's really good to be here. I'm thankful for you guys. So have a good end of day or beginning of day for you. Bye.