Author: George Nguyen
With the right tools and know-how, any brand can grow online. That’s why our aim in 2022 was to give Wix users accessible, efficient SEO tools and features so that they can work smarter, reach more customers, and save time.
From integrated Google index status details to automatic on-site SEO optimizations to monitoring your site speed for actual users, here are the SEO updates we rolled out in 2022.
Table of contents:
Save time with automated optimizations
Successful websites will always require care, attention, and work from site owners. However, there are some tasks—particularly the more tedious, manual ones—that are better left for automation.
To that end, Wix automatically implements structured data markup for local businesses, redirects when you change page URLs, and creates an image sitemap for your visuals.
Structured data for local business homepages
Structured data enables you to tell search engines about your business/website. This helps them understand that you’re a local business and enables them to associate details, such as your address or logo, with your business.
In addition, structured data also powers rich results, meaning that search engines, like Google, can use the information to enhance your presence in the search results (by showing your business logo and address in the results, for example).
When you add a business name and location to your account, Wix automatically creates the appropriate local business markup (which includes your business name, URL, logo, and address) and adds it to your homepage for you, giving you a slight kickstart with your local SEO.
Automatic 301 redirects
If you update a page’s URL slug (as you might to update content about annual Black Friday sales, for example), backlinks pointing to that page may stop working unless you add a redirect.
Without a redirect, you’re likely to miss out on any link equity the page has earned (which could negatively affect your rankings and organic search traffic) as well as any traffic you might be receiving from those now-broken links.
While you can manually create your own 301 redirect using the URL Redirect Manager, Wix automatically creates 301 redirects whenever you update a page’s URL slug, which helps to eliminate human error and saves time.
Images sitemaps
Images are an absolute necessity for some online businesses (such as eCommerce brands, recipe blogs, etc). Adding images to your sitemap can help Google discover images that it might not otherwise find, potentially enabling you to extend the reach of your images beyond your site and into the search results.
Wix automatically adds images to sitemaps for product, event, and public group pages, as well as forum posts. This may help with indexing and is especially useful for larger sites that contain a lot of images.
Read our article on how to optimize images for search on Wix to learn about other optimizations we handle for you, such as automatic compression and lazy loading.
Scale by optimizing multiple pages at once
As your website grows, it’ll get more difficult to keep tabs on every page, which makes it easy to lose track of what’s working correctly and what needs your attention.
To help you monitor for technical SEO issues and roll out optimizations at scale, we’ve launched a Site Inspection tool as well as a Site Speed dashboard, and revamped our SEO Settings.
Site Inspection tool
Powered by Google’s URL Inspection API, the Wix Site Inspection tool shows you when pages have issues that could prevent them from appearing in Google Search (as well as pages that are properly indexed).
The Highlights section also provides an overview of your site’s most common status details (so you can see the reasons why your pages may not be showing up in Google Search) as well as your index status on mobile devices.
In addition, you also have the ability to drill down into specific pages so that you can prioritize fixing the ones that are the most valuable for your particular business. The Full report (below the Highlights section) shows page-level details that can help you do just that.
Select a page to reveal its information panel (shown above). This panel can show you specific details about the page’s coverage state on Google Search, when it was last crawled by Google, rich result eligibility (such as missing structured data fields), and more.
SEO Settings
The SEO Settings enable you to make one change and implement it across all pages of that type (main pages, blog posts, forum posts, product pages, event pages, etc).
In other words, you can optimize all your pages (of a given type) at once, instead of implementing that change to each page manually, which could be very time consuming for larger sites.
There are a number of timesaving features that you can access within your SEO Settings. Here are just a few things you can do:
Designate a particular title tag structure for better SEO and/or to highlight your brand.
Update your structured data markup for all pages of a certain type, all at once.
Automate your meta descriptions to pull in your post excerpt or other variables.
Site Speed dashboard
In addition to being an official Google ranking factor, speed is also an expectation from potential customers: a zippy site inspires trust in your business and enables visitors to do whatever it is they came to do on your site in a timely manner—whether that’s buy something or read a blog post.
The Site Speed dashboard (accessible from the left-hand navigation panel of the Wix dashboard by selecting Analytics & Reports > Site Speed) shows your site’s current loading speeds based on what your actual visitors are experiencing as well as Google Lighthouse performance scores (which estimate your site’s speed under lab conditions).
This data enables you to understand your user experience from both a visitor’s perspective as well as Google’s perspective.
You can use the Site Speed dashboard to benchmark your average speed against similar sites, troubleshoot loading times for individual pages, and even get tips on improving your Core Web Vitals metrics, all so that you can rank better and meet your audience’s expectations.
Customize your site for your business and its audience
Wix enables you to get your website up and running as quickly as possible by providing a range of presets and out-of-the-box features. However, some site owners may have a specific vision for their site, so customizability is just as important. That’s why we’ve added the ability to change your site’s multilingual URL structure and customize its structured data.
URL structure customization for multilingual sites
Subdirectories are the default option when creating a multilingual site on Wix. But, depending on your site, the state of its SEO, and the direction you want to take your optimizations, subdomains may be a better option.
You can select the right URL structure for your multilingual site within the Multilingual Dashboard. For more information on how to do this, as well as when you might want to opt for a subdomain over a subdirectory, read our Help Center article on editing your multilingual site’s URL structure.
Customizable structured data markup
If you want enhanced visibility on the search results, you’ll need properly formatted structured data markup.
In addition to the structured data for local businesses (mentioned above), Wix provides out-of-the-box structured data markup for product, blog, course, and event pages, and forum posts, giving you a headstart on your quest for rich results. Should you want to override the existing markup or add markup where there isn’t already, we empower you to do so.
As mentioned above, you can also bulk edit your structured data for all pages of a certain type in the appropriate SEO Settings menu. For specific instructions on all the ways you can customize your structured data, see our guide on how to use standard and custom markup (via Search Engine Journal).
Research keywords and conduct audits with SEO integrations
Taking your SEO beyond the basics often involves third-party tools, which can be intimidating initially. To help newer SEOs and site owners gain a foothold (as well as optimize workflows for experienced SEOs), Wix has partnered with Semrush and Lumar (formerly known as Deepcrawl) to introduce two integrations that enable you to find viable keywords and check up on your site’s technical health.
Semrush keyword research integration
SEO doesn’t occur in a vacuum—you’re likely competing for clicks against similar brands. Keyword research is one way to minimize the competition and get closer to audiences that are actually looking for what you have to offer by targeting their intent (what they’re looking for, instead of the words they’re searching).
Wix’s Semrush integration provides site owners with keyword options, search volumes, seasonality trends, ranking difficulty, and even searcher intent from the leading provider of SEO-related data.
This integration is accessible from your SEO Setup Checklist. Read our article about keyword research with the Wix Semrush integration to learn more about how to get started and how to use this tool effectively filter out the competition and reach target audiences.
Deepcrawl for Wix
Maintaining your site can get more challenging as it grows and matures. Deepcrawl for Wix offers an automated crawling solution that can help you monitor for broken pages, links that deadend, missing descriptions and H1s, duplicate titles, and status code trends.
The Deepcrawl integration, available in the Wix App Market, makes this information accessible from your dashboard. What’s more, it automatically crawls your sites on a weekly basis, meaning that all you need to do is check in regularly to monitor for issues, enabling you to fix them before they begin to affect your business.
SEO on Wix in 2023 and beyond
In 2022, we rolled out tools and features to help you save you time, automate tasks, work efficiently, and customize your site so that it can satisfy your needs as well as the needs of your potential customers.
With 2023 on the horizon, we’re pursuing increased functionality via more integrations, enabling you to use your favorite tools and platforms as part of your workflow on Wix. Check out our updates and releases page to stay up to date with the latest additions, and bookmark the SEO Learning Hub to expand your knowledge and take your website and business further.
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.