Search Results

Join this webinar to learn how structured data  supports your visibility in AI and search in 2026. We’ll explore how this data helps you show up across classic and conversational search engines, including traditional Google search, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT. You’ll also see how schema markup works in new Wix SEO features like NLWeb.  Expect insights from Martha van Berkel, schema markup expert and founder of Schema App. You’ll also get a tactical look at structured data on Wix from Crystal Carter, Wix’s Head of SEO Communications. What you’ll learn: See how schema markup impacts visibility in AI search Learn how to generate your schema markup that drives growth Discover NEW schema markup features in Wix SEO tools  Martha van Berkel Co-founder and CEO of Schema App Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App , a semantic technology company that leverages advanced schema markup to build content knowledge graphs for enterprise marketing teams. She focuses on helping marketing teams globally understand the strategic value of schema markup and thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape. LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with 20 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid AI Search & SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush and more. LinkedIn

Author: Crystal Carter Image optimization is essential to improving SEO , online visibility, and driving conversions.   Wix websites  have SEO image tools that can be used to improve both site performance and search engine discoverability.  This article will explain exactly what you need to know about image optimization and detail the powerful automatic features Wix uses to ensure your images are fully optimized for search.  We’ll cover: What is image optimization? Why image optimization matters What Wix does to optimize your images Image compression The optimal image format Optimized image loading What you can do to optimize images on Wix Add image alt text Generate alt text with AI on Wix Use captions to provide context What is image optimization? Image optimization is the process of making your images discoverable and rankable by search engines, relevant to your pages, and optimized for fast page speeds. Why image optimization matters "Images typically make up the largest payload of a webpage," says Alon Kochba, Head of Reliability, Performance and Production at Wix. "If they aren't optimized, you risk severely slowing down your initial page load, which hurts Core Web Vitals, specifically Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Poor optimization can also cause layout shifts (CLS) and waste mobile bandwidth." Meanwhile, properly optimized images can help improve your site’s user experience by appealing to visual learners and making your content more digestible. Your image optimizations can even be the difference between a positive and negative experience for users that rely on screen readers (more on this below). Images are also important from an SEO perspective . Believe it or not, images can be a great source of traffic to your website . This is all the more true as, over time, Google has introduced more features to the SERP that prominently include images. Google’s Image SERP, with its refinement filters, can be a major source of site traffic. What Wix does to optimize your images " Instead of requiring users to manually compress files or understand formats, Wix abstracts the complexity away," Kochba says. "The infrastructure is built to automatically process, compress, and serve the most optimal version of an image based on the end-user's device, screen resolution, and browser capabilities, without sacrificing visual fidelity." In fact, Wix maintains the smallest image footprint among major CMS platforms , according to the Web Almanac 2025 by the HTTP Archive . Wix sites load a median of only 194 KB  of image data on mobile devices, significantly lower than WordPress (1,250 KB) or Squarespace (1,511 KB). This performance is a direct result of Wix’s "stronger defaults"—systems designed to produce consistent, lightweight payloads without requiring the user to do anything. Image compression As mentioned, large image files can result in your page not loading as quickly as it could. To prevent this, Wix automatically resizes and compresses your images, in most cases. This is done without sacrificing the quality of the images. Perhaps more importantly, this process takes place on the server side. Without getting into all of the technical details, this enables Wix to serve the number of pixels actually needed to produce a quality image and no more. That makes it easier for the images to load quicker than they would otherwise. Large images You should be aware, however, that Wix does not compress images that are over 25MB. If you’re working with image files this large, you should compress them on your own before uploading them to your site. Use online tools like Sqoosh to reduce file size. Low resolution images Low-resolution images  can be a significant barrier to website quality. The Wix Photo Studio now features a suite of AI image tools  designed to address common issues with low-resolution images  and media refinement. AI Image Upscaler:  Transform low-resolution images into high-quality assets without pixelation. Generative Expand:  Adjust aspect ratios without stretching or distorting your original content. The optimal image format For years, WebP was the gold standard for web performance, offering significant savings over JPEG and PNG. However, technology has moved forward, and Wix has moved with it. Wix now automatically converts and serves your images in AVIF  (AV1 Image File Format) whenever a visitor's browser supports it. "AVIF outperforms WebP in most cases and is supported by all major browsers," Kochba says. "It pushed the boundary of compression further, drastically reducing page weight and improving mobile loading speeds without losing image quality." Kochba says this allows Wix to produce smaller image payloads. AVIF files are approximately 50% smaller than WebP  and can be up to 80% smaller than a standard JPEG without sacrificing visual quality. This drastic reduction in file size is a major reason why Wix sites maintain such a small image footprint compared to other platforms. Because Wix’s conversion engine is so robust, the old advice of uploading as a JPEG to save space  is no longer necessary. In fact, Wix now recommends uploading the highest-quality version of your image possible— at least 2560x1440 pixels . Whether you upload a high-resolution JPEG or a PNG, Wix's server-side optimization will intelligently compress it and serve the most efficient  version to your users. This means you can focus on the quality of your content, knowing that Wix is automatically handling the technical heavy lifting to ensure your site stays fast and lightweight. Optimized image loading How images load, or more technically, how they are rendered can have a big impact on both the page’s overall performance and the user experience. To that end, Wix does the following to automatically support optimal image rendering. 01. Low-quality image placeholders (LQIP) If large image files slow down a page’s loading time, Wix uses low-quality image placeholders to improve performance . These are versions of the images you uploaded that don’t use as many pixels. As the page loads and becomes interactive, the full pixel load is displayed. Basically, a version of the image, using very few pixels, initially loads so that the page can be rendered quickly. As the page is rendered, that low-quality placeholder is then replaced with the high-quality, compressed version of the image you originally uploaded. 02. Lazy loading Lazy loading basically means that images will only load when they come into view on the browser. Think of it like this: You have 20 images on a page, but only two of them appear above the fold (the area of the page that is visible when the page first loads). All 20 of those images could be rendered, but what for? No one is going to see the majority of them until they scroll down (if they scroll down). With lazy loading, the only content that loads is what the user needs to see. In this case, the two images that appear above the fold will load, while the other images will only load as the user reaches them upon scrolling. The result is a faster overall page load and improved user experience. An example of an LQIP and its corresponding high quality image. The LQIP is replaced by the high quality image almost instantaneously. How to optimize images on Wix Half of the image optimization equation has to do with your site’s performance while the other half is all about your images being indexable and, ideally, highly visible on the SERP . You can get the most out of Wix’s image optimization capabilities by being mindful in how you go about image placement on your site. Of course, there’s also the need to make your site accessible , and how you optimize your images has a lot to do with that as well. Let’s dive into it. Use galleries strategically Having multiple image galleries on one page can slow down how quickly that page loads. If gallery-heavy pages are a must for your site, consider implementing “load more” buttons so as to only show a few gallery images upon the initial load to help improve performance. Use GIFs sparingly Be strategic about using multiple GIFs on a single page, or a GIF and a gallery on the same page, etc. These files are often large and will not be auto compressed by Wix’s backend. Add image alt text This is where SEO and accessibility converge . Alt tags, also known as alt text, are the written description of what is portrayed in the image. Think of it as the written version of the image. It tells visitors who can’t see the image (including search engine bots) what the image is about. When visually impaired users use a screen reader, these tools make written text into audio content.  When a screen reader encounters an image with alt text, the reader will read the description of the image aloud. This gives a visually impaired user context for what's on the page. It also helps search engines and agentic browsers in the same way. When a search engine reaches an image, it can read the alt text to understand what that image represents. Best practices for writing alt text Does this mean you should write long-winded descriptions? No. You should aim to be descriptive but succinct. Focus on context:  Identify the most important message in the image and center your description around it. Avoid redundancy:  Screen readers already know it is an image, so there is no need to start with "image of" or "picture of". Be specific:  For example, instead of just "waffles," use "waffles with syrup" to provide better clarity for both users and search engines. Don't keyword stuff:  While including keywords can help SEO, the primary goal should be accurately describing the image for humans. Being descriptive but succinct will help you with search engines and, more importantly, increase your site’s accessibility. How to add alt text on Wix While you can add alt text to individual images via the Settings  panel in the Editor, Wix now offers a more streamlined approach through the Accessibility Wizard . The Wizard scans your entire site for accessibility issues and prompts you to add missing descriptions in one centralized location. Adding alt text via Settings When adding alt text to individual images, you can do so directly within the editor via the Settings  panel. This is useful for providing immediate context as you add new media to your pages. Access the Panel : Click on any single image in the Wix Editor, Studio Editor, or Wix Harmony Editor and select the Settings icon . Input Description : Enter your description in the field labeled "What's in the image?" . Galleries : For images within a gallery, you must select Manage Media , click the specific image, and enter the description in the Alt Text  field. Save Changes : Press Enter  to save your text, and ensure you Publish  your site to make the alt text live for search engines and screen readers. Using the Accessibility Wizard To access the Accessibility Wizard  and optimize your images, click Settings  in the top menu of your editor, select Accessibility Wizard , and click Scan Site  to identify missing alt text. From here you can: Scan and Fix:  The Wizard identifies images lacking alt text and lets you enter descriptions directly in the task panel. Generate alt text with AI:  If you have a large number of images, you can use the built-in AI tool to generate descriptions for specific images or an entire page at once. Note that AI generation is not currently supported for SVGs or GIFs. Mark as Decorative:  For images that are purely aesthetic (like borders or background shapes), you can use the Wizard to mark them as "decorative". This ensures screen readers automatically skip them, providing a smoother experience for visually impaired users. Generate alt text with AI on Wix Wix Studio premium plan users can save time by generating alt text for images in bulk or one at a time. While image recognition technology is surprisingly accurate, it often cannot provide the specific context of your page; always review and edit AI-generated text to ensure it's accurate. To access the AI generation tool for alt text, open the Accessibility Wizard  from the Settings  menu in your editor, click Scan Site , and then select Add alt text to images . Use captions to provide context If you want to write something more descriptive, save it for the caption. A well-worded caption not only helps your readers better understand and interpret the image, it can also help search engines. Search engines can use the text surrounding the image to contextualize what that image is. Use captions whenever you can (so long as it is done in a natural way). Image optimization is a joint effort As you can see, there's a lot that Wix automatically does to help optimize your images. At the same time, the image optimization process depends on several factors, like the type of file you upload and how you name your images. By keeping these factors in mind and being strategic in how you implement images, you can save time and reap the full benefits of image optimization on Wix. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Crystal Carter Structured data  has become a crucial tool for website owners looking to improve their performance in search.  Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a standardized format that helps search engines better understand your website's content. When implemented correctly on your Wix , Wix Studio , and Wix Harmony  websites, structured data can lead to rich results in Google search, including eye-catching features like recipe cards, event listings, and product snippets. In this guide, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about implementing structured data on Wix, from the basics to advanced implementation techniques. Whether you're new to SEO or looking to optimize your existing Wix site, this guide will help you leverage structured data to improve your search visibility and click-through rates. The SEO benefits of structured data Structured data markup  is a standardized format that helps search engines understand your page content by turning visible webpage text into machine-readable data. Google recommends JSON-LD as the preferred format, and schema.org serves as the central resource for over 800 structured data types. Structured data serves as a translator between your website and search engines. While search engines can crawl and understand basic HTML content, structured data provides explicit clues about the meaning and context of that content. Think of it like adding labels to your content that tell search engines exactly what they're looking at. Here are some specific benefits. Enhanced search visibility through rich results : When properly implemented, structured data enables your content to appear as rich results in Google search. Rich results are visually enhanced search listings that display additional information beyond the standard title, URL, and meta description. For example, a recipe page with structured data might show cooking time, calorie count, and star ratings directly in the search results. Rich results also correlate with higher click-through rates. Better understanding of your content: Google uses structured data to better understand the content of your pages and gather information about the web in general. This includes information about people, companies, and other entities mentioned in your markup. While structured data isn’t a direct ranking factor, this improved understanding can indirectly benefit your SEO efforts. How to add structured data to your Wix sites Wix offers distinct ways to add structured data: Automated default structured data by page type and feature SEO Settings & Custom Page Markup This multi-layered approach ensures that your site stays SEO-compliant by default while allowing for customization when needed. Automated default structured data by page type Wix, Wix Studio, and Wix Harmony websites automatically add structured data for many common content types as you add the pages. Wix Stores product pages Wix Blog posts Wix Forum posts Wix Events pages Wix Portfolio Online programs list pages Wix Video Automated default structured data by feature On Wix, local business schema and site search schema are added when you update features and information on your website.  Local Business structured data  is automatically added to your home page when you update your Settings > Business Information to include your name and address.  When you add the Wix Site Search app  your website automatically generates Sitelinks search box . Google can use this markup to display a search box when your pages appear as search results. Optimize automated schema markup You can optimize the automated schema markup that is on your website by…  choosing the right page or WixApp types for your content improving on-page and back-end content  Choosing the right theme, page type, or WixApp  for your content will ensure that your page type includes content fields that support your schema, and, where applicable, that your schema is best optimized for the most relevant rich result for your content. Creating pages with robust content helps you optimize your structured data markup because Wix generates this data based on your page's content. This means improving the quality of information you add to your site can also improve the quality of your structured data.  For instance, if your product information is only partially complete, your structured data will not include as much detail as it could. The schema on the page will be valid, but it will give less information to search engines than a complete product page. SEO Settings & Custom Page Markup On Wix, Wix Studio, and Wix Harmony websites, you can access the Wix SEO Settings panel to modify your structured data. To begin, navigate to SEO Settings in your Wix dashboard, then select the page type you want to work with, and click "Customize Defaults." From there, you can preview the existing markup, see how dynamic variables populate, view rich result examples, set custom markup by page type, and add additional markup by page type. How to customize the default Wix structured data markup If you want to modify what Wix provides rather than start from scratch, click "Preview preset" then "Convert to custom markup." Give your markup a name, then edit the JSON-LD code directly. Use the "Add Variable" button to pull in dynamic content from your elements on your Wix website— things like product names, URLs, prices, and images. When you're done, click "Apply," then "Save." How to add a new custom structured data markup to a Wix webpage Use Wix SEO Settings to add custom schema markup to your Wix webpage. Navigate to the specific page's SEO settings > Advanced > Structured Data markup. Click "Add New Markup," name your code.  Below the name of the code, you’ll find a box to add your code. When the code is ready to add to your post, click "Apply" and "Save." Unlike the templated structure data, this is an open field, so you’ll need to add schema that you’ve already generated here.  This approach is best suited for pages with information that doesn’t regularly change, like a home page that doesn’t include prices that change with seasonal offers. How to generate schema To generate schema, you can use third-party schema markup generators, an AI assistant, or Aria ,  the AI business assistant in your Wix dashboard. Aria is trained in the schema.org vocabulary so it can create code when you give it source material.  For instance, to generate recipe schema for a profile page with Aria, you’d open the chat, add recipe information, and ask it to generate the code. Aria may use placeholders for fields like URLs, but you can paste the code into the Add new markup box, then fine-tune it in the future.  If you’re using Aria or an AI assistant like ChatGPT, you can use the following prompt to create structured data. Try this prompt in Aria Generate schema.org [schema type] structured data markup in JSON-LD, based on this information [paste page copy]. Can you add more than one schema to the same page? Yes, you can add multiple schema types to the same page. A blog post that includes an embedded video, for example, can have both BlogPosting and VideoObject markup, giving search engines a fuller picture of your content. Validate before and after You can only submit valid structured data markup  on your Wix website. Wix also has built-in validation in both the SEO settings panel and the IDE. Code with incorrect or incomplete syntax will see an error message that says “Markup can only be in JSON-LD format.” Common reasons for error messages include: Not balancing your code. If you use a single {} or [] at the beginning or end of your code without closing it at the other end, you'll have an unbalanced statement and invalid code. In the code above, for instance, the code opens with  [{ but ends with only }, invalidating the whole block.  Using the wrong quotation marks. In JSON-LD “” and "" are different. If your code won’t submit, this might be why. Missing , after each line. Strings of code in  {} or [] lists should be separated by , or the code. For instance, in the code below, the invalid markup does not have a , after the string "height": "653". This breaks the code. It can be tricky to see where the issue is. In these scenarios, you can use Aria, Wix’s built-in AI agent, to help you correct your code.   Simply explain that you have received an error message, paste the code, ask Aria to help you correct it, then resubmit. Try this prompt in Aria: I received an error message for this schema markup [insert code]. Can you correct the code? While you're creating a custom schema, you can also use Google's Rich Results Test  to check whether your schema is eligible for rich results, or the Schema.org Validator  for a broader check, before you add it to your website. Schema best practices and common pitfalls Only mark up what's visible.  Structured data must reflect content users can actually see on the page. Adding markup for hidden content violates Google's guidelines and can result in manual penalties. JSON-LD can be case sensitive.  "BlogPosting" is valid; "blogposting"may not be valid. Mind your capitalization, and be careful with quotation marks. A misplaced character can break the entire schema. Choose the right schema type.  With over 800 types available, it's tempting to approximate. Take the time to find the most accurate type for your content, rather than forcing it into something that doesn't quite fit. Start with high-traffic pages.  You don't need to implement structured data everywhere at once. Prioritize your most visited pages first, then expand from there. Plan schema into your content workflow.  When building new page types, consider structured data requirements from the start, rather than retrofitting it later. Audit twice a year.  Schema.org adds new types regularly, and Google periodically introduces new rich result features. A biannual review ensures you're not missing opportunities and that your existing markup stays accurate. Measure your results.  Before adding structured data to a set of pages, note their baseline performance in Google Search Console: impressions, click-through rate, and average position. Check back after a few months to see whether rich results are appearing and whether performance has improved. As you implement structured data on your Wix site, remember to be patient. It can take time for search engines to crawl your updated pages and for rich results to appear. Continue monitoring your performance, stay informed about new schema types and rich result features, and iterate on your implementation based on the data you collect. The landscape of search continues to evolve, with structured data playing an increasingly important role in how search engines understand and display web content. By mastering structured data implementation now, you're positioning your site for success both today and in the future of search. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Crystal Carter Get started by: Creating a website → We all just want a little attention. And that is essentially what bounce rate tells you—how much attention your site is getting from its visitors. It helps you understand if visitors are interacting with your site or leaving after just a few seconds. But, bounce rate has evolved over the years—both in definition and in value as an SEO reporting metric . In this blog post, I’ll show you how that evolution impacts your SEO  strategy. Table of contents :  How Google defines bounce rate Ways to check your bounce rate In GA4 In Wix Analytics Whether bounce rate still matters How to reduce bounce rates and improve engagement Bounce rate alternatives What is bounce rate? In 2024, Google’s bounce rate metric measures the percentage of users who did not “engage” with your website during a session. This means that their session lasted less than 10 seconds and/or did not have multiple screen or page views (as measured in Google Analytics 4 ).  Bounce rate is the inverse of a site’s engagement rate, so the engagement rate combined with the bounce rate will always amount to 100%. This definition is an evolution of the concept of bounce rate  from earlier versions of Google Analytics (i.e., Universal Analytics).  In Universal Analytics (UA; deprecated  in July 2023) Google  defined bounce rate as “the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page.” In other words, if a user came to your site, but didn’t click on any other button or view any pages (aside from the one they first landed on), that was considered a bounce. All of those users divided by the total number of visits to your site gave you the bounce rate.  In 2021, Google retired the term “bounce rate” and added the “engaged sessions” metric. Under this definition, the user’s visit needed to last longer than 10 seconds, include a conversion, or have multiple screen or page views to be considered an engaged session. Then in July 2022, Google re-introduced the bounce rate metric, explaining that it is the inverse of the engagement rate  (engaged sessions divided by total sessions). So in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. What is bounce rate in Wix Analytics? Within Wix Analytics, for Wix and Wix Studio websites, bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who left your site after viewing only one page. This aligns more closely with the historic definition of bounce rate in UA. How to check bounce rate Many analytics tools can help you assess bounce rate. Here’s how to find bounce rate in: Google Analytics 4 Wix Analytics View bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 There are a few ways to see bounce rate in GA4. Depending on your account level access and requirements, you can add bounce rate to custom reports and explorations. Insights If you query “bounce rate” in the search bar, you can see an Insights drop-down and site panel that shows you the sitewide bounce rate.  Custom reports If you are an account admin, then you can add bounce rate as a metric in a report. For instance, in the Pages and Screens report below, I added bounce rate and engagement rate as metrics. Explorations In Explorations, you can add bounce rate as a metric, then add it to your settings so that you can see it in your visualization or table. View bounce rate in Wix Analytics When you create your website with Wix or Wix Studio, you can utilize  Wix Analytics  tools to better understand visitor behavior and bounce rate. You can view sitewide bounce rate data in the Behavior Overview section . Or, you can use the Page Visits report to get more granular data on bounce rate (along with dozens of other metrics, including URL, date, device type, user type, city, and UTM campaigns). Does bounce rate matter? Bounce rate is a measure of the proportion of users that have not engaged with your site, so it can be a useful starting point for assessing the quality of your site and the strength of your marketing funnel. A high bounce rate may indicate that more visitors are coming to your site and turning away before interacting with your content. A low bounce rate means that visitors who reach your site are more engaged and tend to click on something else before leaving.  A high bounce rate can tell you that visitors are not interested or not able to access your content or complete transactions. So, some SEOs see bounce rate as a potential signal of a need for conversion rate optimization (CRO). Taking note of bounce rate in conjunction with conversion rates may help you to determine if your site is performing well. If both are poor, then it is important to evaluate what might be causing this downturn. Bounce rate can also tell you something about your targeting and advertising. Visitors might leave your site quickly if they came for something different than what you’re actually giving them. This could happen if you are misrepresenting your product, targeting a mismatched audience, or not researching keywords properly . Is bounce rate a Google ranking factor? SEO experts will tell you that the question of whether bounce rate is a Google “ranking factor” or not comes up frequently from clients (or others) who are learning SEO. To be clear, bounce rate is not a Google Search ranking factor. During a session of Webmaster Central office hours  in 2022, John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google, addressed the misconception saying, “I think there’s a bit of misconception here that we’re looking at things like the analytics bounce rate when it comes to ranking websites, and that’s definitely not the case.”  So with regard to SEO, you can use bounce rate to assess how engaged users are with your content or page layout, but you should not expect bounce rate optimizations to have an immediate impact on page rankings. What is a good bounce rate? Understanding whether your current bounce rate is good or bad (in comparison to industry benchmarks) can be tricky because “bounce rate” measures two different user behaviors in GA4 and in its predecessor UA. Bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 The percentage of users who did not engage with your website during a session (i.e., their session lasted less than 10 seconds and/or did not have multiple screen or page views). Bounce rate in Universal Analytics (deprecated) The percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page. If you’re looking to compare historic bounce rate benchmarks from UA, referencing a tool like Wix Analytics (which uses the same bounce rate assessment as Google’s Universal Analytics) can help you compare data more consistently. Depending on your industry and the type of site that you have, you should expect different bounce rates. For example, a page that sells products or services should not have the same bounce rate as a blog. Since the goals of the two sites are different, the expectations of how many people click to navigate to another point on your site should also differ. It’s also important to consider the devices people use to access your site. Depending on your content/offerings, it is possible that users reaching your site from a mobile device might not take any additional actions. Instead, they might wait to browse your site from a desktop. You could therefore see a large difference in bounce rate between mobile device users and desktop users. According to data  from Custom Media Labs, desktop users bounce 42% of the time across industries and website types (on average). They also found the average bounce rate for mobile devices to be about 16% higher across industries.  This indicates that many users bounce, and that you can have a perfectly healthy website that sees almost half of its visitors bouncing. However, it is always important to strive to increase engagement and decrease your bounce rate as this can help your business grow and thrive. How to reduce bounce rates and improve engagement To truly understand bounce rate, you also need to understand what can cause it to fluctuate (and thereby how you can improve it).  Bounces can occur for a number of reasons—for example, a user might: Fail to engage with a page because it did not load Arrive at a page and quickly return to search because they need to refine their query Arrive from Google via a jump-to-text link which immediately answers the question An example of a jump-to-text link in Google Search. And then there are other cases in which a page might intentionally send users away from the website or into a different channel. For instance, a page or screen with a phone number might have higher bounce rates on desktop than mobile because users are picking up the phone. All of this to say that a high bounce rate might not mean that there is anything wrong with the page.  However, if you want to explore changes in engagement rates, it’s worth taking time to: Check for technical issues Test your content Review PPC campaigns Check for technical causes that lead to low engagement and high bounce rates Slow loading times can impact engagement rates. A website that takes a while to load may cause users to turn away without even seeing your site.  You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights  or the Wix Site Speed Dashboard  to check your website’s loading time. You can reduce your site’s loading time by ensuring that you haven’t overloaded it with excessively large photos or videos, and that you’re limiting the number of fonts. Simple changes can have a huge impact on how many visitors reach your website. Test your content priority and UX Examine the navigability of your site and its user experience (UX) design.  Good website navigation and UX help visitors understand how to use your site and reach the pages they’re looking for. Poor design can mean that a visitor can’t find a button that they are looking for or, alternatively, that clicking on a button will result in an unexpected and unwanted outcome.  You can mend such design blunders by changing the text or visibility of the buttons on your site. Optimizing small details, like the color of your site’s buttons in contrast to the background can affect how users experience your site. Review your PPC campaign targeting Conveying your product accurately on all advertising platforms is another potentially potent factor for reducing your bounce rate.  It is easy to imagine a scenario where you sell a product that provides a free trial. Therefore, it might feel appropriate to advertise your product as “free,” as it helps bring in more users and can ultimately lead to more conversions than you might have otherwise had. However, it’s possible that once users reach your product and understand the true costs that come along with it, they will turn away.  This lack of congruence between ad and reality can lead to a high bounce rate. Review your campaign landing pages and make sure they align with the keyword intent  for the ads. Alternatives to bounce rate Tools that measure user interactions via heatmaps, scroll tracking, and other methods can give you much more actionable information on user behavior.  Bounce rate can provide you with some top-level information, but it is rarely useful as a standalone metric because there are so many reasons why someone might bounce and because some engagement metrics can give false positives. An example of a heatmap in Microsoft Clarity. Source: Microsoft. For instance, a session where a user came to your website, clicked a broken button four times, and then left, would be seen as an “engaged” session—with no bounce. But, UX auditing tools can identify that as “rage clicking,” which would tell you to update the broken link. While bounce rate can provide some view into how users are interacting with your pages, those who are looking to monitor user engagement more closely should consider CRO and UX tools, like Microsoft Clarity  (shown above).  Engagement is more complicated than just bounce rate There are so many contributing factors to what makes a page earn a high engagement rate (and thus a low bounce rate). The fact that this metric has evolved over the last few years is a testament to that.  If you’re just getting started with bounce rate as an SEO reporting metric, remember to adjust your expectations for your business model and the way users are intended to interact with your pages. Remember, it’s more important that users are engaging with your brand and giving you their business than it is to target an arbitrary bounce rate. Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Mordy Oberstein Available in: English , Português , 日本語 , Deutsch , and Français    Get started by: Creating a website → Having a strong focus topic is becoming increasingly important for driving organic traffic from Google to your website. What’s more, establishing your focus topic helps to both refine your site’s overall identity and your target audience. One way to approach this journey towards topic and audience refinement is to choose the right focus keywords for your website. This is why we’re proud to partner with SEO toolset provider Semrush to give Wix users the data they need to better establish the focus of their websites. To make the most of these new capabilities, this article will walk you through: An overview of the Semrush integration within Wix Connecting your Wix account to the Semrush integration Getting started with Wix’s Semrush integration How to use the Semrush keyword research integration effectively Using your focus keywords in the SEO Setup Checklist An overview of the Semrush integration within Wix For those unfamiliar with the platform, Semrush is a leading provider of SEO-related data. In short, the platform helps you better understand your digital presence as well as that of the competition. The partnership we’ve established with Semrush focuses on the keyword research data it provides and integrates that data into the initial Wix SEO Setup Checklist (formerly known as the Wix SEO Wiz) found inside the Wix dashboard. We’ll explore the available data in more detail shortly, but first, here’s a quick look at the information you can access via the integration: As we’ll soon see, this data can enable you to refine the core topics (referred to in the SEO Setup Checklist as “keywords”) that are used as part of the foundational SEO setup for your Wix website. By refining the core topics (again, more commonly referred to as “keywords”) you give your site a better chance to rank on the search engine results page (SERP), target qualified traffic, and ultimately bring in more revenue. The completed Wix SEO Setup Checklist. Once discovered, these core topics (or “keywords”) can then be used to complete the SEO Setup Checklist, as optimizing things like the SEO title tags for your foundational pages ( homepage , about page, etc.) will require you to use one of your core keywords (when done via the Wix SEO Setup Checklist ; this is not a requirement if you are optimizing via the Wix Editor or other parts of the Wix dashboard). Simply put, the workflow when using the Semrush integration in conjunction with the Wix SEO Setup Checklist looks like this: 01. Refine your core keywords using the Semrush integration 02. Select your core keywords 03. Implement your core keywords as laid out in the SEO Setup Checklist Task completion within the Wix SEO Setup Checklist requires the implementation of one of the site’s core keywords. In the next section, we’ll take a look at how, exactly, to get started with this process. Before we move on, though, you should know that you do not need to pay to access the Semrush dataset—Wix site owners have limited access for free (more on this later). Connecting your Wix account to the Semrush integration When utilizing Semrush integration data as part of your Wix SEO Setup Checklist (and beyond) the first thing you need to do is connect your Wix account to Semrush. To do this, you need to access the SEO Setup Checklist via the Get Found on Google option in the Wix dashboard (within the Marketing & SEO section of your left-hand navigation panel). As you proceed through the checklist, you’ll be guided to an option to utilize the integration to choose your core keywords. If you have already started this process, then simply click the edit button within the SEO Setup Checklist to modify your current keyword selection. In either case, to access Semrush data, you’ll be prompted to establish a connection between Semrush and Wix. Once the connection has been established, you’ll be able to search through Semrush’s database for applicable keywords. There are two things to be aware of here: 01. You can add a maximum of five keywords to your SEO checklist. 02. If you are using the free version of Semrush, you will have the ability to run 10 keyword searches in a 24-hour period. If you already pay for Semrush, your access is dictated by your Semrush subscription. Getting started with Wix’s Semrush integration Now that your Wix site is connected to Semrush, how do you go about using the tool? Let’s first explore the data that is available to you so that we can get into a few actual use cases. For starters, the Semrush data works according to geolocation. That means you will get access to focus keyword ideas and data that are specific to a particular country. This is very important because the results can, in many cases, differ drastically depending on the country you select. Make sure you have the right country selected before searching for keyword ideas via the Semrush integration. With a country selected, you’re ready to get started searching for keywords to utilize within your SEO Checklist Setup (and beyond). To get started, search for a term that is closely associated with the core product, service, or topic that your site focuses on. For example, if my site sells ceiling fans, I might start by searching for the terms ceiling fans (we’ll soon see why we need to refine this term in order to choose an effective focus keyword): As you can see above, Semrush returns a slew of data. Let’s quickly look at what we have here (which will, in turn, show us why need to dig a bit deeper before selecting a focus keyword): Volume — This gives us an estimate of how often the keyword is searched for on Google each month. Trend — This shows the changes to the monthly search volume over time. Difficulty to rank — A composite metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank for the keyword given the competitive landscape on the Google SERP. Search intent — The intent associated with why a user would search for that particular keyword. Search intents can include informational, navigational, commercial and transactional queries (read our post on keyword and user intent to learn more). In this example, the first keyword option suggested by Semrush, ceiling fans , is searched for around 110K times per month, labeled as hard to rank for, with a trend that might indicate some seasonality (i.e., the dip in the Trend could reflect fewer searches depending on the time of year, which makes sense as who needs a fan when it’s cold out?). So, while trying to get your site to rank for ceiling fans is alluring because so many people search for the keyword each month it is, all things considered, not the best place for you to start as it is extremely difficult to rank for. If you search the keyword on Google (which you should always do when planning your content), you will see all sorts of eCommerce juggernauts, from Home Depot to Amazon to Wayfair, ranking for the keyword. As it stands now, the average site would be highly unlikely to rank for a keyword such as this and, at minimum, this would take a very long time to achieve (and, all other things being equal, only after a gargantuan amount of effort). If this is the case, how then do we use the Semrush data integration to choose the right focus topics/keywords? How to effectively use Wix’s Semrush keyword research integration The idea when choosing a focus keyword is that it should be exactly that—focused. Targeting an extremely broad (and therefore competitive) keyword with thousands upon thousands of searches a month is not usually very focused. The sites that rank for these kinds of keywords (keywords like ceiling fans ) have been operating in their respective industries for a long time and are leaders within the space. If that’s you, then great—you can certainly optimize your page’s title tag, headers, body content, etc. to target a broad keyword like ceiling fans . (For the record, an optimized page is not one that is written for search engines—your content should be written for users first .) However, for most sites, this kind of keyword is probably out of reach and might be something worth revisiting as the domain gets stronger. Dig deeper into keywords and topics with Semrush In the meantime, you can use the Semrush integration to dig deeper and find the right focus topics (again, I say topics over keywords because it’s not about a word per se, but how your site targets a topic overall). In our case, we need to ask ourselves if the site has a specific focus or point of differentiation from other sites selling ceiling fans. Perhaps the site focuses on designer ceiling fans or a specific type of ceiling fan, for example. In such a case, I might research the keyword designer ceiling fans : While the search volume is not anywhere near the 110K seen for the head term ceiling fan , it is a far more attainable keyword, with a search volume of 720 and a “medium” difficulty to rank. What’s more, it’s a far more targeted keyword that speaks directly to the target audience. Creating a home page that focuses on this segment of “ceiling fan” is more likely to produce qualified leads and not just rope in users from Google who are bound to be uninterested in the product itself, as most folks searching the term ceiling fans are likely looking for the typical product, not a designer edition of it. Let’s say, however, that you’re not exactly sure of the unique angle you should take. Alternatively, you can scroll through the initial results Semrush offers to see if there is a more targeted phrase that speaks to your business. For argument's sake, let’s assume your site mainly sells outdoor ceiling fans. While not an “easy” keyword to rank for, the term outdoor ceiling fan is far more attainable (and speaks to the business itself) while presenting a very nice search volume of 14,800 searches on Google per month: Still, a quick search on Google shows the same authority juggernauts dominating the SERP: It’s hard to compete for the term outdoor ceiling fans when a huge retailer like Lowes and the manufacturer itself (in this case, Hunter) are dominating the rankings. So, what now? Dig deeper. In this case, I would see if there is something unique about the outdoor fans this business sells, or if they are trying to sell these fans to a particular audience. Perhaps the site is focused on commercial customers. If so, Semrush already offers a topical suggestion that fits with industrial outdoor ceiling fans : Yes, roughly 500 people search for this term per month, not 15K. However, it is far more attainable to rank for and far closer to what our fictitious ceiling fan website actually offers (meaning that the site is more likely to produce sales, not just pull in traffic, when ranking for this keyword, all other things being equal). A quick Google search shows that, while big players like Amazon and Home Depot are still ranking, the SERP is also peppered with more niche sites as well: This tells us that ranking for the keyword, while not exactly easy, is feasible. Thus, targeting the term industrial outdoor ceiling fans with content that speaks to the topic on your home page, in your headers , in your title tag, etc. makes good sense and is a keyword to add to your list within the SEO Setup Checklist . There is one more quick point to make here: While you can use the Semrush integration to choose core topics/keywords to utilize in your Wix SEO Setup Checklist , you don’t have to use it that way. Rather, you can use the Semrush integration simply to find good topics to write about, either via a product page or even a blog post. For example, when searching for outdoor ceiling fans , Semrush came back with a suggestion to target the term 60-inch outdoor ceiling fan . While I wouldn’t make such a specific product the main focus of my site, seeing that 390 people search for the product each month, that the term is transactional (meaning the intent of the searcher is to buy something), and that it’s an “easy” keyword to rank for, I would definitely create a specific product page if I offered such a product. I might even write a blog post about 60-inch outdoor ceiling fans! The point is, you can use the Semrush data to either help you complete the Wix SEO Setup Checklist or just to find ideas about what to write about and target! Finding the fight informational keywords and content focus Let’s run through another example, this time focusing not on eCommerce content but on informational content (like a blog, etc). This time, let’s imagine our site is a gardening blog. We might be tempted to run a keyword search for the term gardening through Semrush. If we do, this is what we’d get back: The results include a lot of very high search volume suggestions that are either extremely hard to rank for or are just irrelevant to a gardening blog (or both). Again, let’s focus our search: Does our blog talk about the history of gardening? Does it offer tips about gardening? Assuming the latter, let’s run a search for gardening tips through the tool: Now, the keyword gardening tips is most likely going to be very competitive and hard to rank for as it’s a pretty broad term that includes every variety of gardening tips. Instead, I would focus on one segment of tips. Perhaps the blog has a focus on beginner content. In which case, the suggestion (shown above) for gardening tips for beginners would be a logical place to start as it still brings in a lot of traffic from search each month with a volume of 1K, but at the same time is not considered to be “hard” to rank for. Again, it’s not just about topics and keywords to use as part of the Wix SEO Setup Checklist . Use the Semrush data to see what other topics your site could discuss. For example, if we now search for what became our focus keyword in gardening tips for beginners , we get some nice ideas for a few blog posts: While they may not be the main focus of the site, a post on flower gardening tips for beginners and another on vegetable gardening tips for beginners could be a nice addition to this fictional site, and would reinforce the general focus around beginner gardening tips. Alternatively, you could simply enter another aspect of the overall topic into the tool and find other content ideas. In the screenshot below, I searched for gardening soil and got back the kernel of what might be a nice post on the difference between gardening soil and potting soil: Again, the point is not to limit yourself to only using the Semrush integration for the pages associated with your SEO Setup Checklist . Use the tool to its full capacity by finding new topics to write about on your site. And you can do all of this without ever leaving Wix. Of course, you can use the full Semrush toolset as well and can upgrade your Semrush account directly within the Wix dashboard: Coming full circle: Using your focus keywords in the SEO Setup Checklist Before we wrap things up, I’d like to come full circle and explain what to do with the focus keywords you end up selecting via the Semrush integration. For this, let’s use the term we decided on above: industrial outdoor ceiling fans . For starters, if the site solely sells this sort of fan, we might create a title tag for the homepage along the lines of: Industrial outdoor ceiling fans by Name of Business You don’t need to go to the Wix Editor to do this, you can add it directly in the SEO Setup Checklist : Along with that, I would be sure to include content on the homepage that broadcasts that this site focuses on selling industrial outdoor ceiling fans. To that end, I would either include an H1 or H2 header that discusses that the site sells that type of product, with at least a short paragraph further explaining what exactly it is that the site offers in this regard (for more on optimizing your homepage, watch our webinar on homepage SEO ). Per the Wix SEO Setup Checklist, there should be some content, at a minimum, on your homepage that aligns with your core topic/keyword. It’s also possible that industrial outdoor ceiling fans are just one type of product that I offer. Perhaps my site sells all sorts of industrial fans. I might then have a dedicated landing page or collection page honing in on industrial outdoor ceiling fans. In this case, I would optimize those landing or collection pages by doing the same—writing a title tag along with headers and body content that aligned with my products. Lastly, I want to reemphasize that good content focuses on the user, not on having certain phrases in certain places. If you set your sights on creating well-structured content that is focused and speaks to a target audience, you’ll likely create content that follows SEO best practices as a natural result. It’s all about quality content that makes the user’s experience as seamless and purposeful as possible. If you create content that aligns with that credo, you can’t go wrong. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin

Join us for a look at how AI agents can help you optimize your website and workflow. We’ll introduce AI agents, including how they can help your day to day workflow. We’ll also showcase Wix's built-in agentic tools for improving website visibility on Google and in AI search responses. Expect leading insights from AI automation expert, Dale Bertrand, and a tactical look at Wix-specific tools from Wix’s Head of AI Search and SEO Communications, Crystal Carter. Download Dale Bertrand's slides on How to Use AI Agents across your SEO stack and Crystal Carter's slides on tips for using Wix Harmony and Wix's AI Agents to grow your website traffic. Watch the webinar replay to learn What AI agents are and how they can transform your workflow The latest strategies for leveraging AI agents for website optimization Actionable tips for using Wix Harmony and Wix's native AI agents to improve website visibility Dale Bertrand Founder & CEO, Fire&Spark Dale Bertrand is a marketer and founder of Fire&Spark, an SEO and content marketing agency. He has two decades of experience in AI and marketing, drawing on his BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from Brown University with a focus on AI and computer engineering. LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with 20 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid AI Search & SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush and more. LinkedIn

Author: Krystal Taing Uberall is a location marketing platform that syncs your business information across dozens of digital directories so that customers find accurate details about your business wherever they search. Connecting Uberall to your Wix, Wix Studio , or Wix Harmony  website brings your local SEO , customer reviews, and social media management into one centralized dashboard. And it’s easy to do with "Get Found Today  in the Wix App Market. The SEO benefits of Uberall Local SEO success depends on three core factors: consistent business information across the web, a strong volume of citations (mentions of your business on other sites), and active review engagement. When your name, address, and phone number differ across directories, search engines lose confidence in your listing and rank you lower.  Uberall solves this by acting as a single source of truth that pushes accurate data to over 125 directories—including Google, Apple Maps, Bing, and Facebook—simultaneously. It also helps your business appear in AI-powered search tools, which increasingly influence how customers discover local businesses. Monitor and manage customer reviews Managing your online reputation through the integrated review dashboard helps you build trust with both search engines and potential customers. Uberall on Wix brings your reviews from various platforms into one clear view so you can respond to feedback promptly. SEO practitioners recognize that review velocity and response rates are key local ranking factors; by using Uberall’s AI-powered response suggestions, you can maintain a professional and active presence with minimal manual effort. This proactive engagement signals to search engines that your business is reliable and highly relevant to users. Analyze performance with local insights Analyzing your local search performance data empowers you to make informed, data-driven decisions for your SEO strategy. The Uberall app provides a dedicated analytics tab where you can track impressions, clicks to call, and direction requests generated from your listings. For a professional SEO, these metrics are essential for proving ROI and identifying which locations need more optimization. By seeing exactly how users interact with your brand across the web, you can refine your local content and stay ahead of the competition. How to install the Uberall Wix App Adding Uberall to your site is a straightforward process handled through the Wix App Market. Simply log in to your Wix account, navigate to the App Market, and search for Get Found Today  by Uberall.  Once you select the app, click "Add to Site" and follow the prompts to grant the necessary permissions. This connection serves as the bridge between your website and Uberall’s extensive network of over 125 directories, including Google, Apple Maps, and Facebook. Log in to your Wix account and open the Wix App Market . Search for "Get Found Today"  by Uberall. Click Add to Site  and grant the necessary permissions. Follow the onboarding prompts to link your site to the Uberall platform. Configure your business profile Connecting your business information to the platform allows Uberall to serve as the single source of truth for your local SEO data. Setting up your profile correctly ensures your business details are consistent across the web. After installation, the Uberall dashboard will guide you through a setup wizard where you enter the core pillars of your digital identity. Business NAP:  Confirm your Name, Address, and Phone Number. Operating hours:  Set your standard and holiday hours. Business categories:  Select up to ten relevant categories to help search engines index your services. Service areas:  If you’re a service-based business without a storefront, you can define your service radius and hide your physical address. This information should be consistent with information that you include in your local business schema markup  for your websites. Ensuring this data is consistent is the foundation of local ranking success, and Uberall handles the heavy lifting of distribution instantly. Sync your locations and social accounts You can import existing location data directly from your Google Business Profile  or Facebook pages to save time and ensure accuracy. Once these accounts are linked, any updates you make in your Wix dashboard will automatically push to every connected directory and social platform. This synchronization eliminates the need for manual updates and keeps your online presence professional and reliable. Local SEO is an ongoing process, but having the right tools in place makes it significantly more manageable. Frequently asked questions about the Uberall app on Wix Is there a free version of Uberall on Wix? While the app is free to install, using the service requires a monthly subscription starting at $14.90. Some Wix Premium plans may occasionally offer promotional trials or credits, so it is worth checking your available vouchers. How many directories does Uberall sync with? The “Get Found Today” app syncs your business information across up to 125 global and local directories, including major platforms like Google, Bing, Apple Maps, and leading social media networks, boosting not only your local search presence but also your visibility across AI-powered search tools.  Can I manage multiple locations with Uberall on Wix? Yes, the platform is designed to scale with your business and can handle multiple branches. You can manage data for all your locations from a single dashboard to maintain brand consistency. Does Uberall help with Google Business Profile management? Yes. It allows you to sync and manage your Google Business Profile directly, ensuring your NAP data and reviews stay consistent with your other directory listings. Will using Uberall improve my local search rankings?   While no tool can guarantee a top ranking position, Uberall significantly boosts local SEO by ensuring data consistency, increasing citation volume, and encouraging review engagement,  all critical ranking factors. As AI-powered search changes how customers discover businesses, Uberall also strengthens your AI visibility. The result is stronger digital presence, higher-intent traffic, and more customers across every location. Krystal Taing - Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions, Uberall Krystal Taing is the Global Director of Pre-sales Solutions at Uberall. She is a Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert and faculty member at LocalU. She helps brands at managing hybrid customer experiences. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: James Clark If you want your website to succeed on Google, you need to understand how visitors make their way to your content. That means you need to learn: How Google “sees” your content The keywords people search on Google that lead them to your web pages This information is the foundation for successful SEO, whether you’re working on an enterprise-level website or a personal blog. And there’s one resource you can use to learn both: Google Search Console (GSC) . The data that Search Console gives you access to (along with some complementary web analytics ) can help you create well-informed strategies, capitalize on emerging trends, fix technical issues, and so much more—making it the quintessential tool for SEO. In this guide, we’ll look at: What Google Search Console is How to get started with GSC GSC features overview Main dashboard overview Insights Performance reports Search Results report Discover report News report URL Inspection Page indexing report Experience reports Core Web Vitals HTTPS report Enhancements Shopping Ungrouped reports Links report Crawl Stats report Pro tips: Getting the most from GSC Connecting Search Console with Google Analytics 4 Using Search Console data in Looker Studio Using the Search Console APIs Wix’s Google Search Console integration Site Inspection tool SEO Dashboard Wix Analytics GSC reports What is Google Search Console? Search Console is a free tool from Google that, in the search engine’s own words , enables you to “monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.” In a nutshell, it helps you understand how Google sees your site and fix issues it may have found. The Overview section in Google Search Console. Third-party SEO tools have developed ranking scores (such as Moz’s “ domain authority ,” for example) to estimate how Google sees particular sites. Google Search Console (GSC), on the other hand, gives you direct access to information that Google has about your site. What does Google Search Console do? GSC is a reporting platform, but it’s capable of much more than that. It also allows for two-way communication with Google: you can use it to tell the search engine about your site and request that it takes particular actions (whether Google acts on those requests is a different matter). The reporting side of GSC The action side of GSC GSC will give you information on:​ The queries you’re ranking for in Google Search results The pages on your site that Google has (or hasn’t) crawled and indexed The quality of your user experience You can use GSC to: Submit a sitemap so Google can easily find your latest content Request that Google re-index a page (or remove it from search results entirely) Tell Google you fixed an issue that it discovered—like unavailable (404) pages, for example We'll look at each of these reports and capabilities (and more) in detail as part of this guide. GSC’s Removals tool is useful for when you need to urgently remove content (URLs) from Google Search results. Who uses Search Console and why? GSC is available to anyone who owns or manages a website and completes the verification process (more about this in the next section ). Once you verify your site, you can then invite other users to that property. Using Search Console is entirely optional and you don’t need to use it for your site to appear in organic (that is, non-paid) search results. That said, if organic traffic is at all important to your business model, then it would make sense for you to use Search Console. On a practical level, GSC can tell you if there are any problems that might be holding back your performance in Google’s organic search. When it discovers specific issues, it will flag these by email or through alerts in Search Console itself: And even if GSC discovers no issues, it can still help you refine your content strategy and grow your organic traffic. This means GSC is relevant to everyone from a small business owner with a single site looking to get leads from organic traffic, through to large agencies managing a number of sites on behalf of clients. How is GSC different from GA4? Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) are both free tools from Google that give you invaluable insight into your site’s performance and help you make website/business decisions. It’s no surprise that people might confuse the two—especially as it is possible to link the tools together and see Search Console-powered reports directly within GA4. We’ll look at that in our pro tips section later . That said, these tools are very different both in terms of the data they provide and the questions that data can help answer. Put simply, GSC is an SEO tool that tells you how Google sees your site —it’s focused on organic search performance. On the other hand, GA4 is an analytics platform that tells you what people do on your site —it’s focused on user activity. Google Search Console (GSC) Google Analytics (GA4) GSC focuses on organic search performance, and can help you answer questions such as: Has Google discovered my content? Why hasn’t Google indexed a particular page? Am I ranking in Google for a particular search query? ​GA4 focuses on user activity, and can help you answer questions such as: Where is my traffic coming from? What content are my visitors engaging with? What is driving conversions ? However, there is some crossover—both tools can give you insight into the amount of traffic you receive from Google organic search. But, be careful when making direct comparisons as the tools use different metrics: the number of search clicks (GSC) almost certainly won’t equal the number of new users (GA4) acquired from organic search. A user may click more than once, or perhaps the click is registered in Search Console but your analytics tracking code doesn’t fire, for example. GA4’s User Acquisition report showing the number of new users acquired from organic search. Also, remember that Google isn’t the only source of non-paid search traffic. Many other traditional search engines have their own equivalent of Search Console—for example, Bing offers  Bing Webmaster Tools .  In addition, AI search engines such as ChatGPT are becoming an increasingly important source  of traffic and conversions. But, as Google still accounts for over 90% of the global search market, it probably makes sense to start with Search Console. How to get started with GSC In order to use Search Console, you must first verify your site to prove that you own or manage it. This is to prevent other people from accessing business-sensitive data about your website, and potentially even making changes that will affect its presence in Google search. Google provides a number of methods to complete verification. The method you choose will depend on your technical skills and the level of access you have to your website. You will also need a free Google account —if you have a Gmail account, then you probably have one of these already. To begin the process: 01. Go to https://search.google.com/search-console . 02. Click on the blue Start now button. 03. Log in to your Google account (or create an account) when prompted. 04. You’ll now see the “Welcome to Google Search Console” splash screen. (If you’re already logged in to your Google account, you’ll skip the second and third steps.) Google Search Console site verification methods On the “Welcome to Google Search Console” screen, you first choose the property type you want to verify: Domain or URL prefix . This determines the verification method(s) available to you. Out of these two property types, Domain is more powerful as it will show you how Google sees your URLs across your different subdomains and protocols ( HTTP or HTTPS ). For example, if you verify the domain example.com, you’ll be able to access Search Console data for http://example.com , https://example.com , and https://subdomain.example.com pages. On the other hand, URL prefix limits you to a single domain and protocol. If you verify the https://example.com prefix, you won’t be able to access data on URLs beginning with http://example.com or https://subdomain.example.com . However, there’s nothing stopping you from verifying multiple URL prefix properties. ( Pro tip: This could also be a useful way to manage access if you have colleagues or partners who are working on a specific subdomain.) The downside of the more powerful Domain approach is that it only gives you one verification method: DNS verification. This involves adding a record to your DNS configuration. Depending on your setup, you may need to do this through your domain name provider such as GoDaddy, or your website builder such as Wix . In many organizations, the person responsible for SEO may not be the one responsible for (or even have access to) DNS configuration—in which case, the URL prefix approach could be easier. Here, you have a choice of verification methods (in addition to the DNS approach): Uploading an HTML file to your website (Google’s recommended approach) Adding a meta tag to your website’s homepage Using your Google Analytics account Using your Google Tag Manager account Perhaps you aren’t sure how to upload an HTML file or add a meta tag (a small piece of information about your site, almost like a label). If so, it’s worth checking whether your platform, CMS, or site builder offers any tools to make this process easier. For example, Wix has a site verification manager where you can paste in the meta tag and it will automatically be added to your site. Whatever verification method you choose, remember that you will need to leave it in place even after verification. For example, if you upload a meta tag, removing that tag at a later date will cause you to lose access to that property in Search Console. For that reason, it’s sensible to verify your site with more than one method (if you can). Search Console metrics definitions Once you’ve verified your site, it can take some time (perhaps a day or two) for data to become available in Search Console. So, if you can’t see anything useful straight away, that’s nothing to worry about. And, if your site itself is new, there may be no performance data at all to start with—but, this will rectify itself over time as you create more content for Google to crawl and the search engine learns more about your site. While you’re waiting, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the most common metrics you’ll see in GSC. Total impressions: The number of times a page from your site has appeared in Google’s organic (non-paid) search results. Total clicks: The number of clicks through to your page from a Google search results page. Average CTR: Your average click-through rate , calculated as clicks / impressions x 100 (e.g., if you get one click from 100 impressions, your CTR is 1%.) Average position: Your average position in Google organic search results, with “1” indicating the first or top result. The lower the number, the better. The four key metrics as shown in GSC’s Search Results report (Performance section). Take care when looking at “average position” for the site as a whole. If you target a new topic area with your site content, you’ll naturally begin to rank for new queries and may bring your overall average position down. But this doesn't mean that rankings for your established queries have fallen, or that there’s a problem with your SEO performance. Search Console will also tell you about the status of individual pages (URLs) on your site. There are three main steps your pages will go through: 01. Discovered: Google is aware of your page, perhaps through a sitemap or via a link from another page. 02. Crawled : Google’s bot has accessed the page and attempted to read its content. 03. Indexed : Google has added the page to its index, which means it may choose to display it as part of a search result. It may be that certain URLs are discovered but not crawled, or crawled but not indexed. One of GSC’s main uses is to identify when this is happening and why. Data freshness in Search Console Before we dive into any specific Search Console reports, let’s talk for a moment about data freshness: how up-to-date the data in GSC is. Data freshness depends on which report you are using. The reports in the Performance section contain the freshest data—here you can change the time period to “24 hours” to see data that is just a few hours old. However, the most recent data may be provisional or incomplete. Google indicates this in two ways: A dotted line (as you can see in the screengrab below) A tooltip saying "Data is still being collected" when you hover over a data point Data from the most recent few hours is shown with a dotted line. For the other reports in GSC, data is typically available after two to three days. So if you visit GSC on a Wednesday, the freshest (most recent) data available to you may well be Monday’s. Occasionally the delay is longer than usual, in which case Google will flag this with a notification immediately above the report: GSC features overview When it comes to finding your way around GSC, familiarity with other Google tools definitely helps. Search Console, like GA4 or Google Ad Manager, consists of a number of reports all accessible through a vertical menu along the left-hand side of the screen. The key GSC reports are grouped into sections: Performance Indexing Experience Enhancements Shopping Some reports only become available once your site meets certain conditions. For example, if you don’t list products on your site, you won’t see the Shopping section. So don’t be alarmed if your GSC doesn’t have exactly the same reports as someone else’s, or if the reports you do have are in a slightly different order. At the top of the main menu is a drop-down showing your currently selected property. If you have more than one property in Search Console, you can use this dropdown to switch between them. There’s also an option to “Add property” if you want to go through the verification process for another domain or URL prefix. In this section I’ll go over the main reports and tools within Search Console, explaining what data they contain and how they can help you as an SEO or website manager. Main dashboard overview When you open Search Console, you’ll land on the Overview report. This gives you top-level metrics for GSC’s key reporting sections ( Performance , Indexing , Experience , and Enhancements , plus Shopping if you have access to it ). The Performance part of the Overview , for example, shows you the number of clicks from organic search—while Indexing shows you the number of pages indexed (and just as importantly, not indexed). In addition to the headline figures, each part of the Overview contains one or more graphs showing how your site has performed over the previous three months. The idea here is that you can quickly identify any unexpected performance changes and then click through to the relevant reporting section in Search Console to investigate further. Wix site owners who have verified their sites can view GSC data from directly within the SEO Dashboard . Your Overview report in GSC may also contain personalized recommendations from Google  to “help you prioritize your search optimization efforts.” These recommendations cover anything from problems with site loading times through to sudden changes in the performance of an important query. They are updated automatically, so it’s worth checking in every so often to see what’s new. Insights Immediately below the Overview in the menu, you’ll find the new Insights report launched in summer 2025. While the Overview focuses on overall site performance, Insights highlights individual pages, queries (and, for some sites, social media posts) that are trending. I say “individual,” but Insights does something you won’t see anywhere else in Search Console: it uses AI to group together queries with similar intent and report on them collectively. For example, one of my recent blog posts is a guide looking at how to open .eml files in Gmail. This means I’m ranking for queries including: how to open eml file in gmail gmail open eml file how to read eml files in gmail how to view eml files in gmail And many more! Search Console reports on how they are performing as a group (sadly trending down as I write this): As well as being convenient for analysis, this gives some insight into how Google might understand similar queries. Having written a post about how to open .eml files in Gmail, I can be confident that this post also covers how to read and view .eml files in Gmail without needing to target these queries separately. Want to do some deeper analysis? Click on any of your “query groups” to go through to a Performance report with a custom regex filter applied. Which brings me on to… Performance reports One Search Console quirk is that perhaps the single most important section is Performance , yet you may not see this section in your GSC menu at all. Two of the reports in this section, namely Discover and Google News , only appear “ if your property has reached a minimum number of impressions ” in those Google services. And if you don’t have access to either of these reports, GSC moves (and renames!) the third report, the one that covers your performance in Search. This means you might find the Performance report for Search in the menu immediately after the Overview (and simply called “Performance” ); alternatively, you might find it in a dedicated Performance section where it will be called “Search Results.” Search Results report The Performance report for Search (no matter what it is called in your GSC) gives you the data you need to understand how your content is performing on Google and how you might optimize it. It shows a table of all the search queries your website is ranking for—in other words, the keywords and phrases that users type into Google for which your site appears in the search results. Search queries for my personal site. I write technical marketing how-to guides, so most of the queries relate to problems that the guides solve. By default, two of the four key metrics (total clicks and total impressions) are selected—but you can click on the other two (average CTR and average position) to add them to both the table and graph on this page. The tabs immediately above the table let you swap from a list of your top search queries to a list of your top pages (with the same metrics—clicks, impressions, and so on). But what if you want to see the search queries for one particular page? 01. Click on the PAGES tab. 02. Click on the page you are interested in. 03. Now click back to the QUERIES tab. Click on a page in this list, and GSC will add a filter to the report restricting results to just that single page. If you want to remove or edit this filter, look for it at the very top of the report (above the chart). In this same section, there’s also a filter to change the search type—so if you want to know how your site is performing in Google Images or the News tab of Google Search, this is the place to go. Wix site owners who have verified their site with Search Console can view their Google search performance over time, top search queries on Google, and top pages in Google search results directly from their Wix Dashboard . Comparing time periods in GSC By default, the Search Results  report only shows data from the last three months—the same as the Overview . However, you can change this using the date range filter at the top: click on More to set a custom date range, or compare one period against another. This can be very useful if your business is seasonal. For example, a retailer selling Christmas trees would expect relevant search phrases to have high volumes in Q4, but low volumes in Q1. You can see this for yourself using a tool such as Google Trends , which shows relative interest in different search terms over time: For this sort of business, it makes little sense to compare Q4 to Q1. Instead, it would be much more accurate to compare performance in Q4 this year to Q4 the previous year. Be careful, though, because Search Console only retains data for the past 16 months . This means it isn’t possible to compare the most recent full year against the previous one in any of GSC’s reports, as this would require at least 24 months of data. As well as changing the date range, you can also change the granularity : whether Search Console shows your performance data in daily, weekly, or monthly “buckets.” Your impressions and clicks may be quite erratic because of breaking news or trending products, making it difficult to spot trends when looking at daily data. Change to weekly or monthly granularity using the dropdown in the top right, and suddenly the longer-term picture will become clear. Are clicks trending upwards or downwards here? It can be difficult to tell when looking at daily data. Reviewing your search data If you want to review your search data systematically, you can export it to Google Sheets or download it as an Excel or zipped CSV file. You can do this by clicking on the EXPORT button to the top-right of the report and selecting your preferred option. This will give you up to a thousand rows of spreadsheet data, which you can sort and filter exactly as you wish, and potentially integrate into your keyword research plan or an SEO report . For example, you might want to look at pages that have an average position of around 11 or 12 for an important, relevant search query. That average position means you are probably appearing towards the top of the “second page” of Google search results (Google having abandoned its move to continuous scroll  back in 2024) . Tweaking your content here could bump you up a few positions and see you appearing in the top 10 results, which may significantly increase the impressions and clicks you receive for that query. Discover report Alongside the Search Results report, you may also have access to the Discover report. This follows the same format (minus the “Average Position” metric) but is entirely focused on your performance in Google Discover —a personalized content feed available in the Google mobile app. Traffic from Google Discover is notoriously “spiky”—it’s not uncommon for publishers to suddenly receive thousands of visits to a single article appearing in Discover. This often appears in analytics tools as “direct” traffic and can be hard to identify. The Discover report in GSC is the place to go to see whether your sudden traffic surge has come from Discover. News report The third and final report you might see in the Performance section relates to Google News—though it doesn’t cover all news traffic. Instead, it focuses solely on traffic from news.google.com and the Google News app on Android and iOS. If you want to see traffic from the “News” tab in Google Search (which is what people often mean when they talk about “news” traffic), you’ll find this in the main Performance report for Search by adding the filter Search Type = News . Interestingly, you can still access the Google Discover and News reports in GSC even if they don’t appear in your menu. Go to: https://search.google.com/search-console/performance/discover https://search.google.com/search-console/performance/google-news Then, choose a property from the dropdown if prompted to do so. Annotations Right click on any graph in the Performance section to Add annotation . This is a small text note letting you provide some context for your performance data. This could include events like product launches, site migrations, server downtime or anything else that helps to explain why your data looks the way it does. URL Inspection Let’s say you have concerns about one particular page on your site: has it been discovered, crawled, and indexed? You could search for it in the Indexing reports, but a much better approach is to use GSC’s URL Inspection tool . To do this, paste your URL into the search box at the top of the page. (There’s also a menu item for URL inspection , but it just highlights the corresponding search box.) Once Google has retrieved the data about your page from its index, click on the Page indexing section to expand it and see all the details. Perhaps you’ve spotted some URLs in GSC reports that you feel shouldn’t be there. Just pop one into the URL Inspection tool and you will be able to see how Google discovered the page (usually through an XML sitemap or a link from another page). That should be enough information for you to tackle the problem or at least investigate further. Another key piece of information is the date on which Google last crawled the page. If the page is new or recently updated, and you are keen to get your changes reflected in Google search results as soon as possible, use the option up at the top to REQUEST INDEXING : Bear in mind, though, that this is just a request. Google tries hard to manage expectations in its search documentation: “Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all. Our systems prioritize the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content.” — Google Finally, the TEST LIVE URL option enables you to see the page as Google sees it (either as HTML or as a live screenshot). This can be useful for identifying any parts of the page that Google can’t (or won’t) crawl. One question that comes up in SEO circles occasionally is whether Google can “see” content rendered by JavaScript: the short answer is yes , but this tool is a good way to put your mind at rest if you have any concerns. As part of the live test, you can also see if Google was unable (or decided not) to load any page resources. In the following example, Google hasn’t loaded the analytics or advertising code for the site. Neither of these would be needed by Googlebot, so there are no concerns here: URL Inspection Mini Case Study Recently I had an issue where Google Search Console’s Page Indexing report was reporting some mysterious partial URLs that weren’t actual pages on my site. For example, for the page: https://www.technicallyproduct.co.uk/analytics/renaming-fields-in-google-data-studio-useful-but-confusing Google was reporting both that URL and the partial URL: https://www.technicallyproduct.co.uk/analytics/renaming-fields-in-google-dat . So, where was Google picking those partial URLs up from? I used the URL Inspection tool to inspect one, and it turned out that Google had discovered it via a referral from the article itself (rather than, say, an XML sitemap): Inspecting the source of the referring article, I discovered the culprit was some ad code I’d added to my site that included part of the URL for targeting purposes. I was then able to tweak this so it didn’t look like a relative URL, dissuading Google from “discovering” it in future. But if it hadn’t been for the URL Inspection tool, it would have been much more difficult to work out where Google was picking this “URL” up from in the first place. For the full case study, read my article “ Why is Google Search Console detecting partial URLs on my website site? ” Page indexing report While the URL Inspection tool is useful for troubleshooting problems on individual pages, it won’t tell you about issues that affect groups of pages or even your entire site. That’s where the Page indexing report (under Indexing > Pages ) comes in. (It used to be called the “Index Coverage” report, an appropriate name as it tells you how much coverage your site has in Google’s index.) The top graph shows the number of pages on your site that are (and aren’t) indexed, much as we’ve already seen on the Overview . But underneath that is a breakdown of the reasons why pages haven’t been indexed—and the number of pages affected by each reason: Under the “Source” column, you’ll see that some of the reasons will be marked “Google systems,” indicating that they relate to Google’s behavior; while others will be marked “Website,” indicating that “you should fix the issue if it makes sense to do so.” (Hover over the question mark icon at the top of the “Source” column to see Google’s explanation of this.) That disclaimer, and the fact that Google uses the word “reason” rather than “problem,” both indicate that—in many cases—it’s fine for URLs not to be indexed. For example, the following “reasons” aren’t usually cause for concern: Page with redirect ​This might relate to redirects you’ve added (or that your platform or site builder has added for you automatically; for example, when you delete a page or change its URL). It’s nothing to worry about, although you may want to check that the pages you are redirecting to are indexed correctly. ​ Discovered—currently not indexed Google has found your page but hasn’t crawled it yet. Unless you have a huge site (such as an established eCommerce site) with thousands of uncrawled pages, this isn’t anything to worry about either. Excluded by “noindex” tag The noindex tag is a small tag added to a page to tell Google (and other search engines) not to index it. This isn’t a technical problem, but do check to make sure you haven’t mistakenly noindexed a page you want to appear in search results. You might, for example, have added the tag when you were working on a new page (and it wasn’t ready for Google), but then forgotten to remove it. And, here are a few “reasons” that may require some attention/action on your part: Not found (404) An error indicating that the page couldn’t be found on the server. If you deleted that page from your website, you should put a redirect in place. If you haven’t deleted it, there might be a technical issue with your site. ​ Duplicate without user-selected canonical ​Google sees this page as a duplicate of another page, and is showing the other page rather than this one in search results. You can delete one of the duplicate pages or add a canonical tag to indicate to search engines which one is the main version. Redirect error ​This can happen when you have a long chain of redirects, or perhaps two pages that are both redirecting to each other, creating a “redirect loop.” To fix this, you’ll need to either break that loop or reduce the size of the chain. For example, you might have page A redirecting to B, B to C, and C to D. You could remove all of these redirects and instead redirect pages A, B, and C all directly to page D. Bookmark Search Console Help for a more comprehensive list of non-indexing reasons . Investigating errors Even when the Page Indexing report does indicate problems with the site itself, bear in mind that this report isn’t “real time.” It lists issues that Google found when it tried to crawl your content—not necessarily errors that affect your site right now. To put it another way, the report could well include problems that have already been resolved by the time you came to look at it. As a result, it’s really worth digging into each issue to see whether it still needs to be addressed. Click into any of the listed reasons for non-indexing to see: A graph of the number of pages affected over the past 90 days Some examples of the affected pages and when Google last crawled them You might immediately see a pattern: perhaps those 404s all relate to blog posts, or to tag pages. Here, for example, all of the affected pages are “feed” pages for specific categories: Once you know which section of your site is affected and when the problem started (or at least was detected by GSC), it will be much easier to investigate, see whether it’s still an issue, identify the cause, and then fix it. If you’re sure an issue has been resolved, the next step would be to ask Google to VALIDATE FIX . Sitemaps report Also in the Indexing section of GSC is the Sitemaps report. Actually, this is both a tool and a report, because it lets you submit an XML sitemap and then monitor its status. But what is an XML sitemap ? It’s a document that lists your website’s pages (or at least the ones you want search engines to crawl and hopefully index). Without a sitemap, search engines will still attempt to find your pages by following internal and external links (links on your site and on other sites)—but a sitemap can help them with that discovery process. XML sitemaps shouldn’t be confused with HTML sitemaps, which are mainly intended for users of your site rather than search engines. So how do you get an XML sitemap? It’s likely that your website platform or builder will be able to generate one for you, either as part of its core functionality or through a plugin or extension. Once you have it, enter its URL into GSC’s sitemap tool and click “Submit.” You can submit more than one sitemap if, for example, you are using domain verification and each subdomain has its own sitemap. The report will list: All submitted sitemaps When Google last read each sitemap The number of pages Google discovered Whether Google encountered any problems If you find that Google is not discovering a lot of your URLs, a first step would be to check that there are no issues with your sitemap. Sitemaps mini case study I noticed that Google was slow to discover (and then crawl and index) my latest blog posts, and suspected a problem with my XML sitemap. So, I visited the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console to see it was reporting one error: Clicking on the error gave me this detail: “Sitemap is HTML. Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.” What could be causing this? I tried to view the sitemap using the OPEN SITEMAP link in GSC, only to be redirected to the homepage—my sitemap no longer existed, which was why GSC was hitting an HTML webpage instead. My next step was to check the health of the software generating my sitemap, an SEO plugin added to the open-source platform my website was built on. In the back office of my site, I could see that the plugin was disabled—I’d done that myself during routine maintenance a week or two prior and had forgotten to re-enable it. So I re-enabled the plugin, causing the XML sitemap to reappear. But as GSC had encountered problems reading the sitemap, it might not try again for a number of days. And there’s no option in GSC to nudge it to do so. The solution? Remove the sitemap from GSC entirely (via Sitemap details > More options ) and re-submit it. Sitemaps can only be removed via the Sitemap details screen, not via the list of submitted sitemaps. Once I’d done this and refreshed my browser, I could immediately see a success message—Google had read the fixed and resubmitted sitemap within seconds: Experience reports The Experience reports within GSC provide a summary of your site’s user experience as Google sees it. This isn’t just about user experience, though—it’s also key to good SEO: “Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience… [they] look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience.” — Google As Google doesn’t always explicitly say what is and isn’t important to its ranking systems, this is unusually clear guidance and not something you should ignore. We’ll now dive into the two individual Experience reports: Core Web Vitals and HTTPS . Core Web Vitals Core Web Vitals are a set of factors that Google believes are particularly important to user experience. They measure “real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page” and break down as follows: Loading performance is measured with a metric called Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Simply put, this is how long it takes for the page’s main content to load. Interactivity  is measured with Interaction to Next Paint   (INP). This is the time it takes the page to give visual feedback to an interaction. For example, if you click to open an accordion or play a video and you don't see anything happening for a second or so, that is poor INP. Visual stability is the most interesting factor (although not necessarily more important to your SEO). Have you ever been on a web page and you go to click on something, when suddenly something loads on the page? Then, the whole page shifts around and you end up clicking on entirely the wrong thing (usually an ad)? That’s what Google means by visual stability, and it’s measured with a metric called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) . The less shift, the better. The Core Web Vitals report in GSC shows the number of URLs that are “good,” “need improvement,” or “poor” according to these three metrics. Are some of your URLs failing to hit the “good” rating? Click on the OPEN REPORT link alongside either the Mobile or Desktop section to see the reasons why. For example, this site has an issue with LCP on every page: That suggests the problem isn’t with individual pieces of content, but with how the site (as a whole) loads. It may be worth looking at the page templates, or considering caching to improve site performance. For more ideas, check out our webinar on how to optimize your site for Core Web Vitals . HTTPS report This shows you how many of your indexed URLs are HTTPS and how many are HTTP. The HTTPS protocol is better both for your users’ security and for your site’s SEO (Google has confirmed it is a ranking factor ), so if you have HTTP pages showing up here, it’s definitely worth diving into this report to find out why. It could be something as simple as an invalid certificate, or perhaps you’re missing redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. Enhancements Unless your site lists products, the last major reporting section you will see in GSC is Enhancements . This refers to features on your site that use structured data (e.g.,   breadcrumbs  and videos). But what is structured data?   Google defines it  as “a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.” For example,   structured data for videos  can contain information about the video’s: Upload date Expiry date Duration Contents (through a description or even a transcript) This is all information that Google wouldn’t otherwise be able to get by crawling a page with an embedded video on it. So, you can see how structured data can help Google and other search engines understand a page in much greater detail. This, in turn, can make you eligible to be shown in enhanced search results (also known as “ rich results ”). Sticking with our video example, Google might add a “LIVE” badge to a video to show that it was live-streamed, or choose to highlight “key moments” in your video based on the structured data you provided: A rich result in Google Video Search with "key moments." In this example, the structured data has been added in YouTube. Structured data may sound fairly technical, but there’s good news: Your platform or site builder—or even well-written third-party plugins—may add it to your pages automatically. And, GSC’s Enhancements  reports are the place to see whether this is happening. You’ll have access to a different report for each enhancement that Google has detected on your site. (The enhancement ‘Review snippets’ is always listed, whether or not you have structured data for this on your site.) Wix implements default structured data markup  on particular page types such as forum posts, as well as features such as Wix Site Search.So , you may see these rich results in your GSC Enhancements  section (even if you didn’t add the markup yourself). GSC will also flag up any errors it has found in your structured data implementation . For example, this site was missing the “description” field from its video structured data: You can see this now affects zero items, suggesting that the problem was fixed (and that Google noticed the fix). If your structured data does need a fix, this may be something you can tackle yourself—or it may be something you need to raise with a plugin developer via a support request, for example. Google also provides a free Rich Results Test tool that lets you inspect any page to see all the structured data it found and whether it’s eligible for rich results. Unlike Google Search Console, you can use this to inspect any page—whether it belongs to a site you manage or not. Shopping Whether you can see the Shopping section, and each of the reports within it, depends on the signals you are sending Google. In particular, Google looks for two types of structured data: Merchant listing structured data Product snippet structured data In practice, this means that not only online merchants have access to the Shopping section. One of my clients runs an automotive review website that makes use of product snippet structured data, and its Search Console account includes a Shopping section with a “Product snippet” report. If you are an online merchant, another action you can take to improve your reporting is associating your Merchant Center account  with your Search Console property. This enhances the “Merchant listings” report and adds a “Shipping and returns” section to your GSC Settings page. Your CMS or platform may also offer Merchant Center integration. For example, Wix lets you manage your Google Merchant Account directly in your Wix dashboard . Ungrouped reports Although most of GSC’s reports are grouped neatly into sections and featured in the Overview, there are also some ‘loose’ reports that get less prominence. They may be easy to miss, but you’ll be the one missing out if you do. Here I look at two of them: the Links report and the Crawl Stats report. Links report GSC’s Links report  is listed in the main menu, a little above Settings. It shows you: Top linked pages: external links . Your pages with the most links from other sites (otherwise known as  “backlinks” or “inbound links” ). Top linked pages: internal links .   Your pages with the most links from other pages on your site (i.e., the same domain). If a page doesn’t have any internal links, it won’t be listed here, even if it is indexed by Google. Top linking sites. The sites that are linking to you the most. Top linking text . The most commonly used anchor text in backlinks to your site. For each of these sections, click on MORE to see a full list of pages, link metrics, export options, and search filters. These reports are limited in that they don’t show historic data or changes over time: you can’t tell whether you are gaining new links, or when Google first detected a link. Remember, links aren’t all equally valuable. A link from an authoritative site, such as www.bbc.co.uk, will help you much more from an SEO standpoint than one from a smaller or less trustworthy site. But, GSC won’t give you any insight into how it values your various external links. To do that you’ll need to use a different tool that estimates how authoritative different sites are, like Link Explorer from Moz , for example. Crawl Stats report Even more hidden than the Links report is the Crawl Stats report (which is only available in root-level properties)—this one isn’t listed on the left-hand navigation menu at all. To get to it: Click on Settings in the main menu. Scroll down to the Crawling section. Alongside “Crawl stats”, click on OPEN REPORT. The Crawl Stats report is intentionally buried part-way down GSC’s Settings page. The Crawl Stats report shows Google’s crawling history on your website: the number of crawl requests it has made, the average response time from your server, the server responses it has received, and so on. Google has hidden this report because it’s aimed at advanced users with larger sites. The Search Console Help site says : “If you have a site with fewer than a thousand pages, you should not need to use this report or worry about this level of crawling detail.” The reason for this is that only owners of large sites really need to think about their crawl budget —the number of pages that Google will crawl on their site on any given day. If they have more pages than their crawl budget allows for, it could take Google a long time to detect any changes (i.e., SEO improvements may not generate results as quickly). The Crawl Stats report is designed to help site owners identify whether crawl budget is a concern—and if so, take steps to optimize it. For example, there might be an issue with crawl health: if Googlebot encounters lots of server errors or slow response times from a site, it will crawl that site less frequently. Most crawl requests for this site are successful, but some of the other responses may warrant further investigation. Pro tips: Getting the most from GSC We’ve seen that Search Console provides detailed information about your site’s performance in organic search—but that’s only one strand of your marketing activity. To make the most of your GSC data, it helps to see it in a broader context. Here are three ways you can do this. How to connect Search Console with Google Analytics 4 By connecting GSC with GA4 , you’ll be able to unlock new reports in GA4—and see GSC metrics (such as search impressions) alongside GA4 metrics (like key events ). The process as a whole is slightly unintuitive: not only do you need to link the two tools, you then need to “publish” the Search Console reports in GA4 in order to see and use them. To connect your GSC property to your GA4 web data stream, first follow the steps outlined in Analytics Help . Then, publish the Search Console reports in GA4: 01. Click on Reports. 02. Click on Library. 03. In the “Collections” section, find the collection called Search Console. You may need to scroll to the right. 04. Click on the menu icon (three dots) for this collection. 05. Select Publish. Google Analytics’ Search Console collection of reports must be enabled in the Library. After a few seconds, a new section called Search Console will appear in your GA4 reports menu. If you expand this, you will see two new reports— Queries and Google Organic Search Traffic . The good news is that these reports will show data straight away (going back to when you verified the site in Search Console or created your GA4 web data stream, whichever happened more recently). Here’s what the two new reports give you. Queries: This shows your organic search queries, along with number of clicks, impressions, CTR, and average search position—the four key metrics we saw in the GSC Search Results report. The report lets you wrangle the data in slightly different ways than GSC: for example, you can produce a graph of organic search clicks over time, broken down by device category (desktop, mobile, or tablet)—whereas GSC will just give you the headline figures for that in the form of a table. Google Organic Search Traffic: This report shows your landing pages along with key GSC metrics and some GA4-specific metrics (e.g., average engagement time, event count, and number of key events). Having this data side by side is highly insightful: after all, what is the benefit of a particular page performing well in search if it isn’t generating any engagement or conversions? The Google Organic Search Traffic report combines Google Analytics and GSC metrics in one table. If you use a different analytics tool than GA4, your tool may also integrate with Search Console. Piwik Pro and Plausible Analytics , for example, are two GA4 alternatives that offer that capability. Using Search Console data in Looker Studio GA4 is great for showing your organic search data alongside other website data, but what if you want to take an even more holistic approach and bring in other data sources, such as business revenue or marketing spend? You could use Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio), Google’s free data visualization tool. Looker Studio lets you pull in data from various sources using “connectors.” There are free connectors for pretty much every Google product, including Google Analytics, Google Ads—and Google Search Console. You can even pull in your non-website data via Google Sheets. To get started, follow the instructions on Looker Studio Help . The official Search Console connector in Looker Studio is free. Once you connect your data, you can put together your report by selecting different visualizations (e.g., line charts, heat maps, data tables, etc). Or, if you don’t want to build everything from scratch, Google has a Looker Studio Template Gallery containing a predefined Search Console report. Using the Search Console APIs For more advanced users, GSC offers an API (a way for other pieces of software to request data from, and send data to, Search Console). Strictly speaking, it offers four APIs, each with a different function: Sites (for managing properties in a GSC account) Search Analytics (for querying traffic data) Sitemaps URL Inspection So instead of logging into GSC and inspecting a particular URL, for example, you could write a piece of code that uses the URL Inspection API to do it for you—perhaps on a set schedule. But, you don’t have to be super technical to benefit from Search Console’s API. Other tools can (with your permission) use the API to provide you with Search Console data about your site. Wix’s Google Search Console integration Wix has integrated Google Search Console data into various aspects of your dashboard, making these insights more accessible and actionable from within the Wix platform.  To get started, verify your site by obtaining your meta tag from GSC and adding it to your Wix site, as described in this Help Center page . In addition to verifying your site, Wix’s GSC integration also enables instant homepage indexation and automatically submits your sitemap to Google. Wix’s Site Inspection tool Leveraging the above mentioned URL Inspection API, Wix’s Site Inspection tool  enables site owners to monitor the status of their pages in Google’s index from within their Wix dashboard (in the left-hand navigation panel, Site & Mobile App > SEO & GEO > Site Inspection ). This is the section to head to if you want to learn about: The proportion of your pages that Google has indexed and excluded The most common status details associated with your pages The index status, status details, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility for each of your URLs The Wix SEO Dashboard View your GSC performance data (clicks and impressions) by page or query via the Wix SEO Dashboard   (in the left-hand navigation panel of the Wix dashboard, Site & Mobile App > SEO & GEO ). In the “most significant changes” section, sort to see the greatest changes in clicks or impressions, helping you prioritize optimizations for your most important pages. Wix Analytics Google Search Console reports GSC’s reporting capabilities are essential for every serious SEO and website owner. To put those capabilities and insights at your fingertips, Wix Analytics features the following reports, with data from GSC: Google Search Performance over Time Top Search Queries on Google Top Pages in Google Search Results Average Position in Google over Time You can customize the data to fit your needs by adding or removing metrics such as Country and Device Type. Tap into GSC’s reporting features from Wix Analytics by going to Analytics > All Reports > SEO  in your Wix dashboard. Google Search Console is your roadmap to better SEO I’ve shown you that GSC is an SEO tool unlike any other. You don’t need it for your content to rank in search and for your site to get organic traffic from Google. But if you don’t use it, you are (to an extent) driving without direction: there’s no better way to get an overview of how Google sees your site and what issues might be holding you back. Even if you don’t use Search Console for its reporting capabilities, it’s still hugely valuable as a way to communicate with Google. Need to submit a sitemap or request a re-index? GSC is your go-to. What’s more, GSC is entirely free and available to anyone who owns or manages a website. If you’re just beginning your SEO journey, Search Console is a great place to start; if you’re an SEO professional with years of experience, getting familiar with its interface and capabilities can dramatically increase your efficiency. James Clark - Web Analyst James Clark is a web analyst from London, with a background in the publishing sector. When he isn't helping businesses with their analytics, he's usually writing how-to guides over on his website Technically Product . Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Wix and Wix Studio websites connect directly to Microsoft Bing, which can improve your site’s visibility in both classic and AI search results. You can also connect sites created in our new AI website builder, Wix Harmony . And there’s no reason not to do it: Connecting your websites to Bing is a straightforward process with Wix’s SEO tools . The benefits of connecting your website to Bing While many marketing teams focus their SEO strategy on Google (and now, AI search ), Bing powers a significant portion of search traffic, including searches through Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Integrating your site with Bing Webmaster Tools ensures your content is indexed accurately and provides valuable data to help you monitor your site's performance. More reasons to connect your website to Bing: Bing’s audience is significant and serves over 3 billion visits a month, not including ChatGPT. (Monitor ChatGPT’s growth here: Google vs. AI search .) Microsoft Bing serves as the primary search technology behind several major platforms, including Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia.  ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot use Bing as grounding for realtime searches, so performing here can help improve your generative engine optimization  efforts.  Since rolling out the Connect to Bing integration, around 112K Wix and Wix Studio websites have connected in total. With the integration now open to all users, an average of 30K new sites connect to Bing each month. Access to Bing Webmaster tools Integrating with Bing gives you free access to Bing Webmaster Tools, a comprehensive dashboard designed to monitor your site’s health and performance. This platform provides deep insights that go beyond simple traffic numbers, offering: IndexNow insights.  Monitor how many of your updates are being indexed in near real-time. Detailed crawl reports.  Identify and fix technical SEO issues before they impact your ranking. Keyword research.  Discover high-value search terms that your specific audience is using. Backlink analysis.  Track who's linking to your site and how it affects your authority. How to connect your Wix website to Bing Use the built-in SEO tools in your Wix dashboard to automate verification and ensure your content is indexed close to real-time via the IndexNow protocol. You have three ways to connect to Bing using Wix. SEO Assistant/Wix Harmony SEO Panel:  Just follow the automated prompts in the Wix Dashboard to verify your site and submit your sitemap.  If you’ve built your site with Wix Harmony, you can also connect to Bing directly in the Editor. IndexNow:  Great for all creators, this feature is automatically enabled to instantly ping Bing whenever you publish or update your site content. Site verification tool:  Manually retrieve and paste the Bing HTML Meta Tag into the Wix SEO Tools section so you can manage the connection yourself. 01. Verify your site through the Wix SEO Assistant/Wix Harmony SEO Panel The Wix SEO Assistant  is one of the most efficient ways to connect your site to Bing and other search engines because it automates the verification process. When you follow the steps in your dashboard, Wix communicates directly with Bing to confirm site ownership.  This method eliminates the need for manual code entry and ensures that your site meets the basic requirements for visibility. Once you’ve verified your site using the Wix SEO Assistant , Wix submits your sitemap to Bing automatically. If you’ve created a site using Wix Harmony, our new AI website builder, you can connect to Bing directly in the Editor.  You’ll find “Connect to Bing” under “Connect to search engines,” and you’ll be able to connect once you’ve connected a custom domain. Note: It’s best to complete the Setup and page optimizations before connecting, so your site will be indexed with the most updated content. 02. Leverage IndexNow for instant indexing Wix and Wix Studio websites support the IndexNow protocol  by default for all premium sites . Unlike traditional indexing where you wait for a bot to crawl your site, IndexNow uses a "push" method to inform Bing the second a page is live. When you hit “Publish” or update a blog post, Wix sends an instant signal to the IndexNow API. This signal contains the specific URL that changed, prompting Bing to prioritize that page for its next crawl. Because Wix handles this communication in the background, you get the benefit of near-instant search visibility without needing to click a single extra button. The IndexNow process happens for all users, whether you formally connect to Bing or not. But connecting to Bing gives you the ability to monitor and manage this connection from Bing webmaster tools. 03. Use the Wix site verification tool for manual connection Manual verification using the Wix site verification tool allows you to connect to Bing by adding a specific meta tag to your site’s SEO settings. This manual approach is ideal for advanced creators or those who prefer to manage the connection themselves. Perhaps you already have an existing property for the domain in Bing Webmaster Tools, or you need to use a different email account, a common practice for agencies.  If you prefer to manage the connection yourself: Visit Bing Webmaster Tools  to retrieve a unique HTML meta tag.  Copy this code and navigate to the SEO Tools section in your Wix dashboard , where you’ll find the Site Verification option.  Paste the code into the Bing field and save your changes to establish a permanent link between your site and the search engine. Troubleshoot common connection errors Troubleshooting Bing connection errors usually involves checking your site's indexing settings or verifying that the meta tag is correctly placed.  Confirm indexability If your site isn't appearing in Bing, first ensure that you have toggled on the setting that allows search engines to index your site in the Wix dashboard.  Check your tags If manual verification fails, double-check that the meta tag was copied in its entirety and that there are no conflicting tags from previous attempts. In some cases, it may take up to 48 hours for Bing to process the verification and begin displaying data in your Webmaster Tools dashboard.  Bing best practices to drive indexing performance  Improving sitewide indexing and ranking in Bing search results requires a combination of high-quality content and technical SEO best practices. For example, Bing puts a strong emphasis on clear, descriptive page titles and headers that accurately reflect the content of the page. Ensure your images include descriptive alt text and that your site remains mobile-friendly, as user experience is a major ranking factor. Additionally, Bing values social signals and local relevance, so keeping your business information consistent across the web can help boost your authority in their algorithm. All of this activity helps to show Bing that your content should remain in the index for users to discover in the future. FAQs about connecting a website to Bing How long does it take for Bing to index my Wix site? Indexing can happen within minutes thanks to IndexNow, though it may take a few days for your full site architecture to appear in search results. Do I need to submit a sitemap to Bing manually? No, Wix automatically generates and submits your sitemap to Bing once you have connected your site through the SEO Assistant. Why is my Wix site not showing up on Bing? Make sure the "Let search engines index this site" toggle is turned on in your Wix Privacy settings. Can I connect to Bing if I don't have a custom domain? To use Bing Webmaster Tools and professional SEO features, your site needs to be connected to a custom domain. Is IndexNow available on all Wix & Wix Studio plans? Yes, IndexNow is a standard feature integrated into Wix and Wix Studio for all users to ensure rapid content indexing. Gain a competitive edge by connecting your Wix websites to Bing Ultimately, diversifying your search visibility beyond a single platform is a non-negotiable step for building your online presence in 2026, and beyond. There’s a lot involved in maintaining a multi-platform marketing strategy, but connecting to Bing is, thankfully, one of the easiest. Einat Hoobian-Seybold, Head of Product SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. Linkedin

Watch this webinar looking at the latest Wix Studio SEO and GEO features designed to enhance your Wix website's visibility in 2026. We explore new AI search solutions, accessibility features, and indexing tools. Plus, get an exclusive sneak peek at what's coming this year! Download the deck with links to new features and follow along. In this session, we will discuss innovative ways to connect your website to search engines. You'll also learn about new features for tracking ChatGPT responses. Discover the tools you can use to expand your reach. Our expert panel will guide you through the newest tools and features available on Wix and Wix Studio websites. They will help you improve your online presence effectively. Expect valuable insights from Wix’s Head of Product SEO & A11y, Einat Hobbian-Seybold, and Head of AI Search & SEO Comms, Crystal Carter. You will also hear from Aviv Shamy, a key member of the team behind the leading Wix App Limy.ai . What You Will Learn The latest Wix & Wix Studio GEO & SEO platform releases How Wix & Wix Studio's SEO, GEO, and accessibility tools can improve website performance Actionable tips for enhancing AI visibility and achieving search success on Wix websites in 2026 Meet Your Hosts Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product, SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product  for Wix SEO & A11y, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 299M users around the world. LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with 20 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid AI Search & SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush and more. LinkedIn Aviv Shamny Cofounder and CEO, Limy Aviv Shamny is the CEO and co-founder of Limy, a platform helping organizations optimize their presence across the emerging agentic web. He's focused on building tools that help organizations adapt and succeed in a rapidly changing digital landscape.   LinkedIn

Author: George Nguyen Create with Wix→ Wix just launched Wix Harmony , a new AI website builder that combines vibe coding with visual editing capabilities you can control. Aria is the AI agent at the heart of Wix Harmony, and it's also integrated into Wix websites, enabling it to perform tasks right from the chat box. With Aria , not only can you manage back-office tasks, you can also improve your SEO by reviewing keyword performance, drawing user behavior insights, and even generating full blog posts, product or event pages. Working in parallel with our AI powered SEO tools , you’re able to optimize your site at speed. In this guide, I’ll walk you through some core SEO use cases so that you can adapt those workflows to achieve even more with the Aria AI assistant in Wix and Wix Studio. Table of contents: What is the Aria AI-powered assistant? How to use Aria for better SEO Evaluate SEO performance Monitor user behavior Generate content Blog post Product page Event page Create Schema markup Aria is your asset for better SEO What is the Aria AI-powered assistant? Aria is an AI-powered chat tool that simplifies your website management experience by enabling you to query and perform tasks right from the chat interface. It’s the first in a series of AI agents that will roll out to Wix and Wix Studio users to help enhance productivity and grow businesses. For SEO purposes, this helps you work more efficiently by:  Drawing on performance and user behavior data from your website (as opposed to exporting the right reports and uploading it to an external LLM for analysis) Streamlining content creation by creating drafts of your blogs, product, and event pages directly within Wix and Wix Studio (as opposed to copying and pasting the output from an external LLM) When combined with the appropriate team and permission settings , this helps your business or agency spend more time implementing optimizations instead of flipping between platforms to cobble automations together. How to use Aria for better SEO There are potentially endless ways you can use Aria to improve your SEO. Below are the fundamentals you’ll want to master before exploring more advanced or novel use cases. Evaluate SEO performance Monitor user behavior Generate content Create Schema markup Evaluate SEO performance Dig into data trends and extract strategic insights about how your website is performing in Google Search by asking Aria any questions that you would typically have to rummage through your Google Search Console  reports to answer. (Note: You must first connect your Wix website to Google Search Console for Aria to surface this data for you.) Try this prompt in Aria: " show me analytics for new search terms ." Aria will generate a report that looks like this: Use the following Aria prompts to learn more about your site’s Google Search performance: “Show me clicks and impressions data for last month” “Show me analytics for new search terms” “Which pages got the most clicks from Google search?” “Which pages got the most new visitors from Google search?” “Which pages lost the most clicks from Google search last month?” “What are my biggest traffic referrers from last month?” If you’d rather explore your data to draw insights, consider browsing your SEO dashboard to get a quick overview. And remember, Aria can only access your Google Search data if you’ve connected your site to Google Search Console. If you’re not connected, you can still use Aria to review other important aspects of website performance (more on that below). Monitor user behavior The Insights report in Wix Analytics. Wix Analytics  is a robust reporting tool that you already have access to, but those newer to reporting and analytics may need some help spotting trends and identifying opportunities. This is what our Insights  report  (shown above) is for.  To help you stay organized, the Insights  report is split into three categories: Attention required Growth opportunities Trends The ‘Growth opportunities’ tab in the Insights report. You can click the down arrow on each insight card to get more details: If you’re connected to GSC, useful information such as your most popular traffic sources, may be shown. There are tons of ways to apply these insights for incremental gains. For example: If your site sees a major traffic decrease from a particular source (e.g., Facebook, Google), you might want to investigate whether it’s industrywide or just affects your brand. If many visitors go to a specific product page in your online store, you could consider adding an incentive to buy. If you’re a local business and traffic declines in a given region you serve, you could investigate new competitors in that area.  You can also use Aria to call upon specific reports. If you’re looking to drill down into a specific set of metrics, Aria can also help you by generating filtered reports. The report generated by Aria based on my request. In this example, I asked for the highest-performing blog posts, but you can also ask for the lowest-performing posts (or products), which buttons get the most clicks, sales information, and more. Generate content In the examples below, I’ll show you how to use Aria to create a blog post, a product page, and an event page, as well as how to take those pages a step further in terms of optimization and value. Blog post To get started with creating a blog post, just tell Aria: “create a blog post” Aria will ask you about the topic of your post, its purpose, target audience, and key points or messaging. In the example below, I told Aria: “The topic is ‘what are vegan candles?’. The purpose is to differentiate vegan from non-vegan candles, highlight the benefits and potential drawbacks of this candle type, and help customers decide what type of candle to buy. The target audience is craft and hobby enthusiasts in their teens to late 50s.” Like any other piece of content (LLM-generated or human-written), you’ll need to edit the output  before publishing it. This draft is mostly complete, though: it has an optimized title, satisfies the intent behind the query, has a proper heading structure, and features images with alt text. Next, all I have to do is generate a meta description , tag a category, and add internal links  and the right CTAs . Product page Start by telling Aria: “create a new product” Aria will ask you about the name of your product, whether it’s physical or digital, its price, and key features to generate your description and fill in product details. The backend of the product page created by Aria. Check your new product page and add your product images/video as well as any other relevant information. If you’re selling digital products, you can even use Wix to generate product images  for you. Since Aria saves me a lot of time in the early stages of uploading a new product, I have more time to spend on conversion-driven optimizations , like improving my store’s overall user journey or showcasing reviews on key pages. Event page Much in the same way as above, you’ll start by asking Aria to: “create a new event” Aria will guide you through the process: You’ll provide your event’s name, the type of event (ticketed or RSVP), date, location. Aria then generates a number of descriptions for you to choose from, and may even include a map to the venue (depending on your template).  Aria also saves you time by generating an optimized title tag, meta description, and structured data for your new event. Create schema markup If you have pages that aren’t already marked up with structured data  (which makes you eligible for various rich results ), then there isn’t really an easier method to get the right markup than to ask Aria and paste its output into the Wix Editor. In this example, I asked Aria to “ Write structured data for my recipe. ” I provided the ingredients, instructions, and prep time; here’s a preview of what it generated for me: The bottom of Aria’s response shows directions on where to add this custom structured data. You can repeat this process for whatever type of structured data you want to implement, but remember, Wix Stores product pages, Wix Bookings services pages, Wix Blog posts, Wix Forum posts, and Wix Events pages come with preset markup , and local business markup is added when you add your business name and location. Aria is your asset for better SEO The examples above are just a selection of the most common ways to use Aria to improve your search visibility. There are far more potential use cases out there—you just need to see the opportunity and ask. For example, you could ask it to teach you how to optimize for ‘semantic triples’ (a semantic SEO concept), like we did in the webinar  above. Or, you can ask it to help you better understand how search works, like I did here: You can find your own use cases by first asking Aria whether it can help you with that specific task and continuing the conversation from there. The more you use it, the more you’ll discover new ways to save time and manage your website’s SEO.  George Nguyen - Founder of George Edits George Nguyen is an SEO editorial expert and the former 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. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Jennifer Long When you hear “SEO,” you probably think of websites. But SEOs need to position search data as the valuable metric it is: a real-time barometer of what people want—offline, too. Search data can, of course, be used to improve websites. But its value doesn’t stop there. At its core, SEO reveals demand, intent, and unmet needs. Relegating it to just the web means missing out on some of the most valuable customer intelligence a company can access. When used beyond marketing, search data can influence how products evolve, how features are named, and which audiences or use cases are worth pursuing. I call this off-label SEO: using search data to inform products and services, not just marketing content. It requires experimentation, breaking down silos , close collaboration, and a strong relationship with product teams. I've used this strategy myself as an SEO manager for companies like Zoom and SolarWinds, where I currently work as lead SEO manager. With this approach at Zoom, we saw a 53% increase in top-10 rankings for product pages, and 18 of the 35 feature gaps identified were addressed in a single year. How to use SEO data to improve products and services Learn everything about the products you’re supporting Connect with product managers Conduct a competitive analysis  Find the product gaps Compile search volume data Share your findings Measure your growth 01. Learn everything about the products you’re supporting In this initial step, you need to gather comprehensive information, both internally and externally, about your products and services. Start here: Landing pages Product reviews Product specifications Current offers Service roadmap Target audience Regions where the product or services are sold Languages offered While I’m sure you’re already quite familiar with your or your client’s products or services, make sure you're aware of any planned additions or changes. I recommend starting with newer products or services, as they often have more flexibility for change than more established products. Talk to your marketing managers and sales teams; they often have valuable insights into what's missing with the current offerings. Most importantly, build a strong relationship with your product managers as soon as possible. More on that next. 02. Connect with product managers While most product managers don’t have much experience with SEO or other aspects of digital marketing, it’s important to remember that you want the same things. You both want: Customers to find your products Customers to use your products Customers to love using your products Customers to recommend your products to other people At the end of the day, product managers want to make sure they can offer the best product possible with the most efficient amount of effort put into developing it. So, if a certain capability would require extra work, but there’s 5x the interest in it, it’s worth the extra effort. If you’re working at an agency, see if your contact would be willing to introduce you to a member of the product team, or at least pass along any questions you have so you can start building a relationship with them. With that in mind, make sure you frame the organic search data and organic competitor research as insights into what the customer wants. This is a language product managers can understand. And when you’re recommending pushing up features or product changes on the roadmap, always back up your recommendations with data. Also, keep in mind that product teams may have a knowledge gap when it comes to SEO, so education is often necessary. For example, show them how many Korean speakers are interested in your product as a reason to accommodate the language. Or, how many people in the education industry are interested in your services, so it makes sense to create capabilities that cater to that audience. The product managers who get it will want to work with you in the future. And be sure to connect with them regularly to stay up-to-date on changes or plans for future releases. 03. Conduct a competitive analysis  Next, create an exhaustive list of your SEO competitors . As you identify them, begin to gather the same types of information about their products and services that you did for your own. (Current and planned features, target audience, regions, and so on.) This will serve as a crucial reference for comparison. Don’t just look at the ones with the biggest market share or the most well-known; look at any you can find. Sign up for email lists so you can keep a running tab on new competitors. Check sites like G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra Image via Capterra 04. Find the product gaps Here, you'll cross-examine the information you've collected about your products and services with that of your competitors. These gaps could be all sorts of things, so get creative. Common gaps include: Features Compatible integrations Regions sold to Audiences & use cases Languages offered If possible, try your competitors' products to understand their functionality. I like to create a list of competitors with links to pages or assets that illustrate the gap. Something like: Offers Swedish language in the app (Competitor 1) www.competitor1.com/example Integrates with Amazon Echo and Google Home (Competitor 2) www.competitor2.com/example Provides content specific to the education industry as an audience (Competitor 3) www.competitor3.com/example 05. Compile search volume data With your identified product gaps, compile search volume data for them. Use your keyword research tools to find out how many people are searching for these missing features or solutions.  For example, a past product I worked on had a huge audience of podcast users, but the product lacked features tailored to podcasting, while their niche competitors were quickly innovating in these areas. We were even beginning to lose customers to these niche competitors. So, I noted that there were about 4.3k global searches behind “podcasts on ___” each month, in an industry with over 7 million monthly global searches that was growing 177% each quarter. Also include search volume for competitor-branded queries related to the audiences or features you're proposing. For example, if you were suggesting a new feature for your calendar app, you would include searches for your competitor, like “Shared Google Calendar.” If one of your gaps is an untapped region in a different language, pull the data for search volume in that language and region. I like Ahrefs for researching non-English keywords. And for comparing non-English use vs native language use, I like using BrightEdge’s Instant: Bulk Keyword Volume tool because you can compare multiple keywords across multiple countries at the same time. Here, I was looking at the French version and English version of a number of terms across French-speaking countries to see which version the native speakers searched for more often. 06. Share your findings It's essential to identify the right team within your organization to present your findings to. Clearly demonstrate the volume potential of the identified gaps and help them prioritize addressing these areas.  Crucially, ensure they keep you informed about future changes or new product launches that stem from your research. Ask them: "Why wouldn't we offer something our customers are actively searching for?" Find the right team (product managers, marketers, engineers, etc.) to present your findings to Explain the volume potential of the gaps you’ve identified Help prioritize adding new features, expanding to new regions, or targeting new audiences, based on your data Make sure they keep you in the loop for future changes or new launches so you can do the same gap analysis. Show them your gap analysis so they understand the importance of including you in the future. If you’re in-house, the easiest way to do this is to ask to be included in product update meetings and to have regular monthly syncs with the product managers. You could also set up a chat channel with them. If you’re on the agency side, try to meet with someone on the product team regularly or get added to a chat or product board with them; that’s the dream scenario. The other option is to ask your client contact to relay information from the product team when they share updates. You could also create a short presentation to share with them. It only takes one team to agree to pursue your strategy, then you’ll have data to back up the approach with other teams. 07. Measure your growth Measuring success is key. Once the identified gap in a product or service has been addressed and  relevant content has been added to your website about that new addition, you should begin tracking the target keywords you've identified. Provide regular updates, either monthly or quarterly, to the teams you collaborated with, reporting on both rankings and conversions. Keep in mind that some implementations will naturally take longer than others; if you’re working with a physical product, it might take longer to address the gaps than it would for a software product.  With multiple variables at play, accurately measuring direct impact can be tricky. But if you've launched a new feature or service, and see organic traffic increase from content about this addition, that’s 100% the result of your work. Ultimately, search interest is marketing gold, and it’s been underutilized for far too long. Use these insig hts to the fullest, and you’ll be able to showcase how essential SEO is—not just to the website—but to the business as a whole. Jennifer Long - Lead SEO Manager at SolarWinds Jennifer has more than 11 years of SEO experience working in-house and in agencies. She's worked on SEO strategies in a variety of industries, including B2B SaaS, eCommerce, healthcare, and more. She's a firm believer that SEO touches most aspects of marketing and can be a valuable research tool for other teams. Linkedin