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Updated May 24, 2023 Author: Chima Mmeje While meta descriptions aren't search ranking factors, they are an on-page SEO element that can entice clicks that generate more organic traffic for your website. In fact, an Ignite Visibility study found that meta descriptions had the largest influence on whether visitors would click through on a search result. So, how do you create a great meta description that is readable, compelling, and optimized for search ? In this guide, we cover: What are meta descriptions? Using meta descriptions as part of your SEO How to update meta descriptions on Wix Meta descriptions in Wix Apps What are meta descriptions? A meta description is an HTML element that summarizes and describes the content of a page to help users and search engines understand it better. The meta description snippet contains approximately 160 characters on desktop and around 125 characters on mobile. The goal of a meta description is to get a user to click through to your page, where you will have more opportunities to market to them and help them along their customer journey. Where are meta descriptions used? In the search engine results page (SERP), you’ll find the meta description below the headline. For pages with multiple keywords ranking within a SERP , Google may pick a snippet that contains the search query to tell visitors what the page is about before they click on it. Let’s look at what comes up when we search “Wix” on Google. An example of a meta description in Google search results. An example meta description where Google selected a snippet that contains part of the keyword. In both instances, notice that Google shows the keyword in bold in the meta description. That’s because Wix used the keyword it wanted to rank for in the meta description as a way to show relevance and encourage searchers to click on the result. Using meta descriptions as part of your SEO A well-written meta description can mean the difference between a searcher visiting your page and potentially becoming your customer, or selecting one of your competitor's pages instead. Here are seven best practices that can help you write more effective meta descriptions: 01. Think optimal meta description length While a meta description can be any length, Google shortens snippets to around 120–160 characters, depending on the type of device (desktop or mobile) visitors are using to view your site. You want to keep it short and punchy to have the most impact. However, your goal should not be to write for the sake of character count but to provide value and encourage click-throughs. Obsessing over character count defeats the goal of creating content for your potential visitors. A Semrush experiment found that meta descriptions that exceeded the character count actually performed better and ranked higher, with a 36% increase in click-through rate ( CTR ). However, some pages will have shorter descriptions while others will be longer, and that’s okay. You should also note that Google won’t always show your meta description in the search results. Sometimes, it will grab words from your content that relate to the user’s search, instead. 02. Use the active voice No one wants to read a dull description because it doesn’t drive action. Writing in the active voice makes your copy more interesting and engaging. Think of your meta description as a piece of ad copy—you’re drawing the reader from a search result page to your website. Your meta description should be compelling, readable, and active. Directly address the need the user has and make a promise to solve it. 03. Avoid duplicates Thinking of writing one meta description and pasting it across all your web pages? Don’t do it! While Google has sent mixed messages about this, there is agreement among SEO professionals that unique descriptions are more effective. If you have a lot of pages, focus on writing meta descriptions for your most critical URLs, such as popular pages, best-selling product pages, and your homepage. If you’re not sure which pages perform best or have the highest ranking, you can refer to Google Search Console and Google Analytics . For the less important pages, you’re better off leaving it blank and allowing Google to generate a snippet from the page containing the search query. 04. Use the primary keyword Even though meta descriptions don’t impact rankings, it's still important to add them because they tell Google and the reader what your page is about. Cap: An example meta description with a clear primary keyword. Although an Ahrefs study showed that Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time, it still makes sense to write a description that will speak to your audience. 05. Add a CTA Make your meta description work harder for you with a call to action . It’s a great way to get the reader to take action and increase your click-through rate. An example meta description with a CTA. Notice how Wix introduces the offer to “get started today” in the meta description? Other examples to explore include “Try for free,” “Learn more,” and “Download now.” 06. Include your value proposition Using the same example from above, can you tell Wix’s value proposition from the meta description? Wix makes it easy to build a website in six simple steps. Example of meta description with value propositions. You can sign up for a free website, customize templates, drag and drop hundreds of design features and drive traffic to your site. When writing meta descriptions for your product pages, think of how you can convey specific details that show the benefit of your product. 07. Match your meta description to your page content Don’t write meta descriptions just to drive visitors to a page. Clickbait is not only annoying and unprofessional, it can also make you lose potential customers. While it could increase CTR, you’ll likely experience a spike in bounce rate , and the visitors that bounce are not likely to return to your site because you’ve lost their trust. How to update meta descriptions on Wix Use the SEO Setup Checklist The Wix SEO Setup Checklist analyzes your website’s content together with your chosen keywords and gives you suggestions to create relevant and unique meta descriptions for each page. Main Page settings You can also set the description from your Wix site editor. Open the editor, then navigate to Pages in the left-hand navigation bar. From there, select the desired page and click the “ Show More ” icon (the three dots within the circle, next to the page's name). Select SEO Basics from the menu and, under the section that says “ What’s the page’s meta description? ,” add your description. Customize meta descriptions at scale with Wix SEO settings Wix SEO tools allow you to customize SEO settings for a particular type of page all at once, rather than editing every individual page. This comes in handy when you have dozens (or hundreds) of blogs, product pages , or other content that you need to optimize. For example, you can create a template for all your product pages and the meta description will generate according to the specific product that is being viewed. You can use this feature to template meta descriptions for your: Site pages Blog posts Product pages Event pages Pro Gallery Forum posts Bookings Group pages To customize your meta descriptions this way, head over to your site’s dashboard, select Marketing & SEO - SEO Tools and choose SEO Settings . Select the page type you'd like to add meta descriptions to and click SEO basics & social share . To undo changes or revert back to the default SEO settings, delete the content in the meta description field and press Save . Note that changing your settings for a page type will affect all the pages that you haven’t already customized SEO settings for. Meta Descriptions in Wix Apps Many Wix apps, such as Wix Stores and Wix Events, automatically tag meta descriptions based on the information you’ve entered on the app. Here are a few ways to update a page description when using Wix Stores and Wix Bookings. Wix Stores By default, Wix adds default meta tags to each of your store’s products based on details you’ve entered, such as name, description, and price. You can edit meta descriptions in Wix Stores using the same page settings mentioned above, or via the Edit-by-Page feature. Wix Bookings To change your page description in Wix Bookings, navigate to Pages in the Wix site editor's left-hand navigation menu. Select the relevant page and click the Show More icon. Click SEO Basics and add a description under What’s the page’s meta description? Add a description . Chima Mmeje - Senior Content Marketing Manager, Moz Chima Mmeje is a content marketer and strategist at Moz, where she positions the company as the authoritative source of truth in the SEO industry. She's also the founder of The Freelance Coalition for Developing Countries , a UK nonprofit providing free resources and training for marketers of color. Twitter | Linkedin

In this 1-hour session, you’ll learn how to maximize Wix's advanced SEO tools using the example of client site migration. Find out how to map content and run traffic analysis, maintain link equity with group redirects and use Wix SEO Settings to instantly update meta tags sitewide. Read the Transcript Transcript: Migrating sites with advanced Wix SEO Tools Speakers Adam Fainaru, Product Manager, SEO, Wix Brett Haralson, Community Manager, Wix 00:00 Brett: I think everybody's ready. So first off, welcome, everybody to this workshop. Today we're going to be talking about migrating sites with advanced Wix SEO Tools. This is a hot topic. And joining us to talk about it is Adam. Adam. Welcome. And tell us a little bit about you and what you do at Wix. 00:19 Adam: So hi Brett. Hi, everyone. My name is Adam, and I'm a technical product manager for the Wix SEO team. What we care about and what we do in the team is we make sure that Wix sites are optimized for search engine success. And we make sure that Wix users have the SEO capabilities and features that they need in order to apply their skills and optimize their website. 00:42 Brett: So like I was saying, and kind of you and I were kind of talking earlier, this is such an interesting topic. And this is a hot button topic that we see a lot in the Community. SEO really has to do with your business's success, being found and what happens when you migrate. For those who are attending this, Adam, what are some takeaways? What are some things we're going to cover? 01:06 Adam: Right, so we're going to cover the entire process today. And I'm going to break it down into what you need to do in order to prepare for the site migration. And we're going to talk about how you can plan and build your Wix site and [how to] save some time when building out the new website. And then we're going to talk about some best practices and some post-migration tips and frequently asked questions. 01:34 Brett: So this, as we talked about—this is a tough subject, how should we start with this? Where should our mind be? Where do we go from here? 01:44 Adam: Right. So before we actually dive in, I do want to kind of talk in general about site migration and kind of explain what that is. And basically, when you think about site migration, it's kind of like moving your local business to a new location, right, to a new address. So when you have a business and you're considering moving it, you want to expand it, and you want to make changes. But you also want to make sure that everyone who's already familiar with your existing business, and its current location, is aware of this move. And, also when he goes to your new location, that he still finds the same thing he's used to, and gets the same, let’s call it value out of your business as he used to get. That's what's going to keep him coming to your new business, right? So when you do a site migration, you do things a little differently, but the goal is the same. You want to make sure that everyone, whether it's humans or bots, like Google bot. You want to make sure that everyone still gets the same kind of experience and the same value that they got on the old website that contributed to the reputation you already had. And you want to make sure that this is carried over to your new website, and that transition is smooth. So when you do site migration, you don't have to do things like put up a sign or send an email or a notification to your visitors. Instead, what you're doing is—you are creating redirects and redirect tools and what these are more accurately and technically, it's a 301 redirect. And what these do is basically—they not only notify the person of the new address, but they also take them there. So this is what allows for a smooth transition for both visitors and bots. 03:31 Brett: So, when you talk about these, the three things we're gonna cover, I guess the first is preparing. How do you prepare? 03:40 Adam: Right. So that's a great question. And let's kind of understand. So basically, when we prepare the migration, we want to make sure that we know what are the assets that we have in our existing website that we want, that we care about. These are the things that our visitors care about, that they're used to, that they're going to be looking for when they come to our website. So we want to make sure that we have a list of all of these because when you talk about a website, it's just a collection of URLs. So we want to check what are the URLs that we care about, and make sure that we have a list of them so that we can make sure that our new site knows how to handle them, right? So when we get a request for any of these pages, we want to make sure that the visitor has a smooth transition to the new URL. So in order to do that, one of the cool resources that we can use to do that is Google Analytics. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do a quick run through of what you can do in Google Analytics in order to prepare this list. So let's quickly jump into Google Analytics and what you see here. This is a demo account by Google. So the numbers here are from Google's demo account, and what we're going to do is we're going to look at—this is going to be the same for every account. So we're going to go to the Behavior tab. And then we're going to go to Site Content. And we're going to look at the landing pages. So the landing pages are the pages that visitors landed on, right? This is where they started the visit to your website, right? So these are the pages that we know are getting traffic and pages that are getting traffic are pages that we care about. We want to make sure that this traffic grows and doesn't go away. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to export these pages so that we can have a list, right? Because here, it's not that convenient. So in order to do that, first, we want to make sure we have all the pages that we want. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to say maybe we prefer to actually see the pages that are getting traffic from Google search results, right? These are called organic traffic pages. So we're going to go to the Segment option in Google Analytics and we want to remove all users and instead, we're going to go to Organic Traffic, then we're going to apply it. And now the list below that we just saw is going to change. And it's going to only show the landing pages where the referral was Google search results. Now we're going to do another thing before we're going to click on the Export button here. We want to make sure, first of all, that we can capture all pages, so we can show more rows, right? This is again going to affect the table, then we're going to pick the timeframe, right? Because we want to make sure that we capture it from a recent time. So I'm going to just stay, let's say around six months. 06:41 Brett: Why six months? Why would you not want like, four years worth of data here? 06:47 Adam: That's a good question. And the reason I am choosing six months is because this is my decision for this site, right? This depends on your client's website and on the website’s need. So maybe the website is very old, and you have a lot of data that you want to capture. So in that case, you might say I want to take a year's worth of data, right? Or maybe you have a new site, or maybe the client [made] some changes. And the only thing that's relevant is like stuff from the last three months. So this is not an obligation, you can choose based on the business's needs, right? If the site was getting a lot of traffic, you can maybe do three months, six months, a year, this is up to you. And this is a decision you should take after consulting with the client and understanding from him how the website performed throughout a recent period of time. So again, once we have the timeframe, and once we make sure we have enough rows, we can just click on the Export [button] here. And this is going to download a CSV file with just a simple list of URLs that we are going to care about. So this is very briefly the Google Analytics demo. 08:05 Brett: Adam, so just to showcase that again, that was Google Analytics. And I'm assuming they have their data there. And a lot of people don't. But assuming they do, it's a great place to start. What if a client does not have any metrics at all? 08:23 Adam: Right. So this is very common, actually, some websites don't install Google Analytics. So in such a case, if your client doesn't have Google Analytics, there are some alternatives. Some are better, some will take more time. One of the better alternatives is also Google Search Console, right? So in Google Search Console, you can actually see and export a list of pages that are already indexed and are already getting traffic. And you can export it very similarly to the way we just saw in Google Analytics. But if that is not an option, as well, there are some additional alternatives. One of them is to collect all of the URLs from the sitemap file. The sitemap basically is just a file that most websites have. And it lists all of the URLs of the website. So there is a very quick trick on how to use Google Sheets or any platform actually in order to automatically input the sitemap URL. And it will automatically create a list of all of the URLs that are listed in that sitemap. So we're going to share that trick with you later on in the Partner’s Forum. I'm not going to get into that now. But that is another option that you always have if you have a sitemap file. But if that doesn't exist as well, which does happen, what you can do is, you can do a search. And as you can see here on the last line, you can do a search on Google that starts with “site, colon”, followed by your domain name. So that search is going to bring up all of the pages that are currently indexed under that domain that you put in. And now this is a little more manual. But this does give you some sort of understanding of what pages are already indexed, and that you should carry over to your new website. 10:16 Brett: It makes a lot of sense. So it's good to know that if they don't have something in place there, that we still can find this information. 10:24 Adam: Exactly. So now that we kind of have an understanding of what we need to prepare, and how to get the list of these assets, which are pages or things that we care about. Now, let's talk about preparing the client’s new website, right? And we want to make sure that the new website provides the same or even better value than the old one, right? So we're going to talk a little bit about using Wix SEO Tools to prepare your new site for migration. So I'm going to talk about a few of the tools and there’s much more that you can do, but we don't have enough time. So I'm just going to briefly go over some of these tools. So the first one I'm going to talk about is the SEO Patterns tool. SEO Patterns is a really, really cool tool that allows you to save time, by basically changing the default meta tags, as you can see here, the default title or description, and you can change them for a specific type of page. So the page that we're seeing here is a product page. So any product page under your website, you can modify its meta tags here. And you can use as you can see static values, like 20% off. And you can also use variables so that each one of your product pages when it's loaded, we're going to use for example, the product name, pipeline site name, right? So if you want to make changes, if you want to replace your site name with your business name, if you want to add some static sections to your patterns, you can do that from the SEO Patterns tool, instead of going one-by-one in your SEO Panel and making the change there. Of course, if you want, you can override for a specific product, the meta tags. But this kind of allows you to easily match the meta tags that you had on your old website to the meta tags that you need on your new website. And a lot of the time, these should be kind of the same, because again, we want to communicate to visitors that they're going to find the same experience and the same value they’re used to on the new website. So keeping things like the title similar is going to help them familiarize themselves with the new website. 12:37 Brett: And to get to this, this is within the dashboard and it's under, I think I can see at the top there SEO Tools, SEO Patterns, and then that's where you would get to it, correct? 12:45 Adam: Exactly. So this is the new SEO tool section. 12:49 Brett: Is this relatively new? How long has this been out? 12:54 Adam: So we are constantly improving it and adding more types of pages and more variables. And this is a relatively new offering for this year. So we think that this is a really exciting product that's going to evolve a lot. And it's super-easy and convenient to use. 13:13 Brett: Yeah, and I'm not 100% sure that everybody is aware that you can do this because I know there's a lot of Partners that have been asking how to do this and change this. So you've actually answered a question by showing this. This is pretty awesome. 13:28 Adam: Great. Alright. So this is the SEO Patterns tool. But I want to also talk about creating a custom 404 page, this is another feature that you can [use]. And basically a custom 404 page is the page people are going to land on if they ask for a URL that doesn't exist. So let's say when you do a migration, that there are a lot of pages that might be missed or overlooked, right? And you want to make sure that even if someone lands on a page that doesn't exist, he still can find his way to go to your main pages to go to the main place you'd like to send the visitor to. So using this custom 404 tool, you can actually create a customized experience and make sure that even if someone does land on a page that doesn't exist, he can still find his way to your relevant pages instead of just leaving the website. In addition to that, there’s important stuff that you need to do. And this is connecting your website to third party tools. So just like we mentioned that it's important to set up analytics and to check it on the old website. It's also important to make sure that Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook pixel, make sure that these things that you already had—that you still have them on your new website. So we made sure that it's very convenient and efficient to connect to Google Analytics. You just paste your ID. We also handle enhanced eCommerce events and we do a lot of things out-of- the-box, we import leads automatically. So basically, all you need to do is pretty much plug and play. Of course, you can also customize using Corvid (now Velo). But that's for a different session. So we talked a little bit about the tools. And there are of course more, but I want to kind of talk about like the best practice in terms of creating the actual URLs. Because this is what we're going to talk about when we're going to create the redirects. So when you move your client, and when you build out the new website, you wanna, if possible, try to preserve the same URL structure. So if you had an old page called slash about, and you can also call your new page slash about and that's great, it saves you the time to redirect, right? Because anyone who's visiting the old page is just going to end up on the new page. So that doesn't require a redirect. However, there are some cases and these are totally fine, where you do want to make a change to the URL, you want to optimize it. And in that case, you do need a redirect. So you need to remember to put that on your list. And the final option is that, and this is a very common scenario, what happens if a page no longer exists, right? So let's say I had a page about a blue dress, right? And that page doesn't exist on my new website. So what do I do? So one thing I can do is, I can try to redirect to the best close match to that page. So for example, if I had a page about blue dresses, maybe I can redirect to a general category page about all of my dresses, right? That would still be relevant for a visitor. The main thing you need to understand is that you need to think about your visitor. If you're creating an experience and a redirect that takes the visitor to a page that still meets his intent, then you're okay. What you don't need to do is—you don't need to redirect him for example, to the homepage, right? Because that confuses the person clicking on the link. And it will also confuse Google. Google's going to say, the page about the blue dress accumulated a lot of reputation over the years. But now I'm not going to move that reputation to the homepage, because it's just not the same thing. So you can either redirect to a close match, or you don't need to redirect at all. And in that case, as we saw earlier, he’s gonna land on a 404 page, and he's gonna be able to find the places or the other things and other pages that do answer his intent. 17:28 Adam: So these are the best practices for creating the URL structure on the new website. And now, I kind of want to talk about creating 301 redirects and show you how to actually use the Redirect Manager in order to do that. But before we get into that, I want to talk about some of the automatic redirects. So I talked earlier about how it's important for us to make sure that if there are things—that there are technical tasks that are required, then Wix can optimize them for you, then we're going to do that. One of these things is that we have automatic redirects that will consolidate all of the URL signals to one specific URL. And this is very important, because for Google, if you have a page, and you show it with www and without www these are two different pages for Google. So what we're going to do is an automatic redirect, make sure that everything goes to one version. So the types of automatic redirects that we do any request that comes in for HTTP, we redirect it to the HTTPS equivalent, which is the secure version. Any request that starts without a www, we're going to redirect it to the www version. Same thing, if you have a free site URL, and then you upgrade and connect your custom domain. We're going to make sure that these requests for the free Wix URLs are automatically redirected to the custom domain. So these are things that are handled automatically. And finally, another popular use case is when you not only rebuild the website, but you also want to connect another domain, right? So in that case, most of the work is already handled for you. Because all you need to do is, you need to make sure that all of the domains are connected to Wix’s named servers. This is just— you go and make sure that domain is connected. And then you select one domain to be your primary. Everything is automatically taken care of. So these are the things that we do automatically. 19:36 Brett: That's a lot though. And I don't think a lot of people really are aware of that specifically, non as you say www, an HTTP to HTTPS. A lot of people don't know that. I think that's really awesome. 19:50 Adam: Yeah, these are things that we want to make sure [happen] and these are best practices we apply automatically, wherever we can. But now, we know that the migration process has some manual parts. And I want to show you how to go about them. So we're going to look at an example. And the example is going to be yournextfitnesstrainer.com. This is a test website that we have. And we want to show you the redirect process and how you do it. And I'm going to show a quick demo. But before that, I want to explain what we're going to go over. So we are going to try out all of the different redirect options that we have. The first one is going to be from one URL to another, the second one is going to be a group redirect. And then we're going to show you how to upload redirects in bulk. So this is another time saver. 20:40 Brett: That's a huge, that's gonna be huge. 20:44 Adam: Yeah, that's a really big time saver. And it's going to help us use all of the things that I showed earlier, and actually combine them and complete the process in no time. So I'm actually going to go over here to the Wix dashboard. And I'm going to go to Marketing and SEO. And I'm going to go to the SEO Tools section. And as you can see here, I have the URL Redirect Manager. And when I go to the Redirect Manager, I have—this is the empty state. And I have a few options. So let's start with the most basic one. I'm going to add a single redirect, right? And I'm going to add the redirect from the free session. And when I'm going to pick the destination, it's going to make my life easier, because I already see here a list of all of the pages that exist on my current website. So it's easy for me to find the page I want to redirect to. So all I need to do is add it here, save and close. And then it's very easy for me to also check that this is working. So you see when I click here, it's gonna go to my old URL to this one, free session. And I want to make sure and I want to look at the URL and see here, oh it changed. And I landed on the correct page. So this means the redirect worked. But sometimes I have a bunch of URLs that all have a similar URL structure, but that URL structure is going to change. So when this happens, I can create a group redirect. A group redirect actually also saves me a lot of time. So let's say I want to do [it] from class locations, right? And I want to redirect any requests to the Wix website that starts with yournextfitnesstrainer.com, slash class location, something, any requests like that, I want to automatically redirect it to location, because location is the URL structure I'm going to use on the new website. So I'm going to save and close. And I'm going to show the example here later because it requires the actual page. So these are the two options, the two available options here. But we also talked about bulk redirects, right? So I'm going to delete this for now. So it's super easy to see. And I'm going to go and I want to import redirects, right? But how do I know how to import them? So you can see here that I have an option to download the template. When I download it, what I'm going to see is this template, this is very straightforward. Old URLs, this is a list here, you just put in all of the old URLs. And here you put the equivalent destination URL. That's basically it. Now I can actually take all of the URLs that I had, put them here, and then match them to the new URLs. So I'm going to do that. Here is an example I already pre-filled. And this is going to do pretty much what I showed you earlier. But it's going to do it in one move. And you can see here, I already also edit them in a few different variations, because we know how to handle everything here, right? So it doesn't matter if you put your full domain with a slash, without a slash, we're going to handle it. Okay. So I'm going to go back now to the Wix dashboard, and I'm going to upload the CSV file. So you see here, I'm going to click on it. I'm going to open it, and then it's going to upload, but wait. I have two errors here. So the errors are basically us, Wix saying, hey, you made some mistakes in this redirect file and mistakes, especially when this file gets [larger]—that's a huge hassle because it's very hard to find them. That is something that can break. So we report these errors, but we also make it easy for you to find these problems. So you can see that as soon as I download them. I can also see the reason for each error, and you can see the redirect status. And you can see that these two are invalid. And the reason they're invalid is because I created a redirect loop. So you can see that the URL here is like I'm taking someone from page A to page B. And then I'm taking them from page B to page A. So that's kind of a loop. And we want to avoid that because that breaks your browser. So instead, we're going to upload a version that doesn't include this mistake, right? So it's going to just look like this. It's the same file just without the mistake. 25:36 Brett: But Wix caught that, right? So there's a bit of a safety net there. If Wix detects something, like you said, it'll show the error. So it's less complicated or harder to make a mistake there. 25:49 Adam: Yeah, exactly. That's the goal. And we want to make sure that when you upload, we go over everything. And if there is a problem, we're going to notify you and you can do it just here by clicking on this report. You can download it, see the errors, fix them and upload again. So now I'm going to upload the correct file, I'm going to open it and bam—four new redirects were added. And now I can actually go and check these as well, clicking here, and you can see that the URL changed to location. So now I know that everything works correctly. 26:27 Brett: I'm going to—there's a couple questions, I think that are relevant specifically here that I'm going to jump on. Specifically about the loop, when you're adding these URL redirects, does it only detect a loop if it's being imported in the same spreadsheet? Or if you already have a redirect on your site, and you're trying to upload something that may interfere with that redirect that's already there, will it also detect that one? 26:53 Adam: Sure. Yeah, it's supposed to also detect that as well, because what we're doing is we're going over all of the redirects. 26:59 Brett: And Sam, yes, when he was going to the spreadsheet, Sam asks, “How did you correct the errors that Wix identified? And he just went into the spreadsheet and removed those errors?” 27:12 Adam: Exactly. So you can see here that I can actually, before that, we saw that, I was told that each redirect is going to have the rejection reason or the request status here. And it's going to actually say valid or invalid. So as soon as you find the invalid ones, and you can also create a field that’ll only show you the invalid ones, and then you're also going to see why it's invalid. So you're going to be notified of the problem, you're going to be notified of the reason for the problem. And then you can easily fix that. So you can see that many times the problems are just like typos or show duplication again, because these are large scale processes, then some mistakes can occur. And usually it’s okay, so that's why we want to make sure that our tools actually save you some time debugging, right? So you can spend less time on debugging and more time on building. 28:08 Brett: I know there's a lot to cover here. But there are some really good questions that I'll ask real quick. And then we'll keep going. Wendy has a great question here, she has, and I think this kind of hits the nail on the head for a lot of Partners. Sometimes they—we have clients that want to have a rebrand, right? So it means they're going to come up with a new domain name. Is it possible to create redirects from the old site name to the new site URL? 28:33 Adam: Right, so this is what I talked about earlier. When you do that, and basically you have, let's say, domain A and domain B, right? So let's say the old website was on domain A, and the new website is domain B. And basically, what you need to do is in order for this to work, it's very straightforward, you still need to do the same process as I showed you, this doesn't change. The only thing you need to care about is that both domain A and domain B have to be connected to Wix, right? That's any request, right? Someone is already familiar with domain A and you need to make sure that domain A is connected. The request comes to Wix servers. And then you need to make sure that domain A and domain B are both connected to the same Wix website. 29:22 Brett: That was one of the ones that you showed us earlier, that was automatic, right? Wix automatically does that. 29:26 Adam: Exactly. As soon as you connect the domains—when you do that, you're actually being asked which one is your primary because you need to select one domain to be the primary one. And then you can connect several other domains, all of them are going to be referred to as secondary domains. So they are not going to actually load and they are not relevant anymore. All they do is—they funnel requests to your primary domain. 29:53 Brett: In that scenario, Adam would you even need to use the URL Redirect Manager if you don't change your page structure? 30:02 Adam: So again, the specific redirects are not related to the domain, they are only related if you make a URL change to a specific page. And as I said earlier, if the page stays the same, if it's about and about, then it's going to work. If it’s about to about us, then you would need a redirect, you would still need this redirect. 30:24 Brett: So if I understand, and tell me my small brain gets this, right? So if I have a page brett.com, and have an about and maybe a forum, or whatever, and then I wonder, and then one of our wonderful Partners convinced me to brand out of Brett and make it something else. And I just changed that domain. If I don't change my page structure, meaning it's still slash forum and still about, I don't need to worry about the URL, because it's all the same. There's no page URL changes, is that correct? 30:56 Adam: Yes, if you keep your website, if it's the same Wix website, and you only switch, you change, you’re saying, basically, I don't want this primary domain, I want a different primary domain. Then all you need to do is make sure that they're both still connected to the same website, you just replaced between the primary and the secondary. And that's it. 31:18 Brett: And Wix handles multiple domains in the background and moves it to the primary. Exactly. I'm perfectly clear Adam. Let's keep going. Sorry about that. 31:27 Adam: Alright, no problem. So going back to the deck. So we talked about using the Redirect Manager. And now, basically, [to] kind of recap, before we go into that, we talked about repairing the old site, understanding what are the assets that we care about. Then we saw how to build out the new website, how to save time doing it. And then we saw how to use the URL Redirect Manager in order to actually achieve this redirection. Now, I want to talk a little bit about what to do after you do this migration. So once you complete the migration, you need to continue monitoring the success of the website over time, because this is a process. As we said earlier, what you need to do is mainly focus on continuing to use Google Search Console as a way of checking your rankings. Check that your ranking stabilizes after a while. This is very important, and you need to also monitor 404 errors. So Google Search Console can also report when Google encounters a 404 page. He says, “Hey, you have some pages that are not found, is this intentional?” And if it is, then it's not a problem. But you might say, “hey, this page is actually important. And I do want to add a redirect for it.” So if you go to the Search Console report, you can easily see that. Another thing you can use is again, I didn't mention it here. But you can continue using Google Analytics, right? And monitor the traffic to these same pages as you had [done previously], make sure the traffic stabilizes and make sure no pages are losing out or seeing a weird drop. So these are the general best practices for monitoring after the migration. So now we're going to go over, I think, a few of the questions that we hear a lot. Do you want to— 33:26 Brett: Yeah, we get a lot of questions. This is a hot, this is a really exciting conversation that the Partners have quite often. And there's three [things] that we've sort of identified here, Adam, and I'm going to toss them at you pretty quickly. How long does it take for Google to process or redirect? Meaning you put a redirect in there—how long until you see how long until you see those results on Google? 33:52 Adam: It's a great question. And this question really does come up a lot. But the answer is, and this is a very popular answer for SEO. The answer is it depends. And it depends on a lot of different factors. And basically, Google is going to want to see how reputable this website is? How big is this website? How valuable is this page/website? And how frequently does the content change on this website? All of these are factors that are going to impact the time it takes Google to actually process all of the redirects. So until the redirects are processed, sometimes you might see that your old URLs are still ranking and are still being indexed alongside your new URLs. So that might be a little bit alarming. But you should remember that as long as you follow the process, and you set up the 301 redirects correctly, then even if the old URL is still indexed, it doesn't matter because anyone clicking on it is going to have a smooth transition to the new version. 34:59 Brett: That doesn't hurt your Google standings for an old URL to still rank as long as it's not going to a 404. Is that what I'm understanding? Adam: Exactly. Brett: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you, Adam. Here's another one. Are my clients' pages guaranteed to keep their rank after migration? This is a big question that I see a lot. What's gonna happen in the migration? Will they lose their rank? I see this daily, Adam. 35:27 Adam: Yeah, and we also get this a lot when talking to clients, talking to Partners, this is something that comes up a lot. And the thing is, just like when you're moving—then let's go back to that restaurant example. Just like when you're moving on, let's say you're visiting a place that you already know but now it's at a new address, right? When you go in, you want to evaluate, is this as good as I remember? Can I find, can I get all the stuff that I know and love from this new place the same as the old place? So Google does a similar process, right? He looks at all the redirects, and he's saying, “Okay, I know these old ones. I know these old pages. And I know what I think about the value. Now, do the new ones provide the same value?” And this process takes time and during this time, and this is something that Google stated, often, there are fluctuations. So you might see a temporary drop or temporary rise in the ranking. But over time, and again, this depends on how long it takes to process, over time, as long as you continue to offer the same value. And you should measure that by the visitors’ eyes. If a visitor can find the same value on the new page, then the traffic and the ranking should stabilize. And if you even added value, it can even increase in ranking, right? And of course, if you see that you're dropping in ranking, the first thing you should ask yourself is, “Am I providing enough value on this new URL?” Maybe the new page isn't as valuable as the old one. So the [answer] is no, nothing is guaranteed. But if you follow the process, and you follow the best practices, and you invest in your client, and in your visitor intent, then you should be okay. 37:14 Brett: So, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I like your restaurant analogy, right? So this makes a whole lot of sense to me. And again, sort of to gauge whether or not it's going smoothly, I want to reference back to something else so I understand. I would use Google Analytics to see if my new migration is increasing, and if it's stabilizing [traffic], is that correct? 37:41 Adam: Right. So Google Analytics is going to show you traffic coming into your website and how people interact with your website. So if you drill in, and if you opt to like dive into Google Analytics, you will be able to see that whether visit or how many pages do they see for each visit, you can actually kind of summarize from the Google Analytics reports, whether your users, whether the visitors are still getting the same experience, whether they're interacting with the website in the same way. But for rankings, you need to go to Google Search Console. So Google Analytics is traffic, Google Search Console is ranking. Both places should show these fluctuations. These are expected. And [there] a lot of Google official replies saying that this is something that takes time. But yeah, as you said, Google Analytics, you can look at traffic and Google Search Console for ranking. 38:33 Brett: I asked that because it's interesting and because it kind of ties into the last question that we sort of put together here, which is, a lot of times what happens if someone sort of does a migration without really planning and mapping it out? How do you get out of that? What are the steps? 38:51 Adam: So basically, if you do that. Then first of all, it's not the end of the world, right? You need to understand that the only thing—if you didn't do a migration plan, you're still going to have all of these new URLs that are going to be indexed. But you, you will probably have less benefit, you can—like the reputation that you already accumulated and established for your business might not be carried over. So there's a little point where you might start over on a few pages. But if you—the important part is that, even if you didn't do the migration, even if the new website is already live, and you still get traffic, you can do the same process [that] like we showed earlier, right? And then you just have some pages that are more relevant or less relevant depending on how long is the new website already live, right? So if you're still getting a lot of traffic for 404 pages, or you still have a lot of pages that you know, that people are already familiar with, but don't have a redirect, you can still add the redirect at this point. So it's going to still move your visitors to where they want to go and still provide this smooth experience, even if it was broken before that. And again, not having a redirect doesn't prevent the new URL from ranking, right? The new URL is its own URL, it can rank just as well. But it is, yeah—recommended to do the migration as part of the process of moving the website. 40:21 Brett: And, you know, I think a lot of times there are clients that come to Partners, because they have a site, tried to do it themselves, or put it somewhere else and didn't really do anything with it. And it has a very low footprint on the internet anyway. So there's really not a lot going on with that site. And that's what the Partners bring—it’s that expertise, really getting it ranked, showing them what to do with content, etc, etc. So, like you said earlier, it's kind of distilling what's happening on that side, understanding, and then mapping out the right plan there. So it makes a lot of sense, Adam, makes a lot of sense. Adam: Yeah. Brett: I have some questions for you. Is now a good time for Q&A or is there something else? So we've got some amazing Partners with great questions. By the way, if after this presentation, Adam didn't teach you something you need to know. Or if there's something relevant, you want to question, now's the time to drop it. Adam, I’m going to rapid fire, are you ready? Adam: Yes sure, go ahead. Brett: So Reuben has a good question. “When migrating pages, does the meta tag title, description, does that migrate too or do you need to manually add that?” 41:33 Adam: So this is what we—this is a great question. So when you build out your new website, you have the full freedom to basically build it as you please. So this means you can build out new meta tags, new titles, new descriptions, these are things that you customize on your new website. And a lot of the time, it makes sense, as we talked earlier, to kind of make sure that at least for the pages that are really popular, and that you really care about that, to try and make sure that visitors get the same experience. So if you have like a prominent title, or an H1 tag, you can keep it the same, or you can write the same title. These are decisions that you make on your new website. The redirect itself, the only thing it does is, it changes the URL. That's it, that's technically speaking. 42:21 Brett: Perfect, perfect answer. Thank you very much. Here's a great question. Federico asks, “Will it be possible to have more domains for different pages? Is that possible? Or is that planned if not?” 42:36 Adam: So there are a lot of different scenarios I can think about. But in theory, if you want to have different pages on different domains, you can simply create two websites. But if I understand correctly, so, if you want to have like, basically, you need to understand that when you have a website, like each page is judged by its own merits. But there [are] some holistic, let's say score, evaluation for the domain. So if you want to split and have two domains, that's perfectly okay. Some use cases do support and do require having multiple domains. But in most cases, you can have just all of your pages under a single domain. If you want to have multiple domains, you need to create another website and connect that website to a domain as well. You can of course link between them. But yeah. 43:36 Brett: Good. Good answer. Thank you. And [a] great question. Thank you. So okay, actually, I grabbed that one. I answered that one. So let's say for a second that someone creates a 301 redirect. And this is actually Rajesh’s question, after creating a 301 redirect, is there anything else that they need to do inside the Google Webmaster account? 44:05 Adam: So no, the Google Webmaster account basically just gives you feedback about what Google sees from your account. So as long as the process—like the Google Search Console, or Webmaster Tools in its former name, this is the place where you go to see if what you did is okay or not. And you can also get some insights about what Google thinks about your website. But you don't need to actually actively do something when you have a simple migration. 44:39 Brett: Okay, okay. That was a good answer. Thank you. Naeli’s got another question here. Here's a good one, right? “How do you handle redirects from subdomains?” And she—how do you do that? 44:55 Adam: So, again, as long as you can—if you want to do a redirect from a subdomain, you need to connect that subdomain to your Wix website. So as long as the sub when you connect, like when you connect a secondary domain, you can connect domain adam.com. But let's say you want to connect a subdomain, you simply make sure that en.adam.com is the secondary domain, and then any request to that domain will be mapped out to your primary domain. 45:26 Brett: Is it possible to take that again, this kind of I think, this kind of dovetails back into the other question is—if you do have that subdomain. Is it possible to redirect a subdomain to a specific page or a slash URL? 45:45 Adam: So, I'm not sure I understand. But if you have a subdomain, you can connect, you can redirect to an external— 45:55 Brett: For example, for example, if I have a store within Wix, and I wanted it to be shop.brett.com, can I redirect that URL to a specific page or a specific URL? Is that possible? 46:10 Adam: So yes, it's not straightforward. But given the specific scenario, I'm guessing that you can work around and find a way to do that. If you want to use both brett.com and shop.brett.com, it might require some workarounds. But generally speaking, since you can do a redirect from one domain to another, even you can redirect to an external domain, which, by the way, is a new feature that we also added support for. Then if you do that, you're probably able to achieve this set-up. But maybe we can even follow up on that, if that's a specific scenario to question we can follow up on after this webinar. 46:50 Brett: Sure. Sure. I'll grab one more on there's been some really, really, really great questions, Adam. And I thank you a lot. Question, how, tell us a little bit about dynamic pages and SEO? How are those handled? And is there anything special to do to get those ranked on Google? Or is it all out-of-the-box? 47:14 Adam: So first of all, as you [saw] earlier, the website that we showed your next fitness trainer does have some dynamic pages. And these pages are just like any other page, basically, so you need to just, you need to understand the URL structure that you're using on that dynamic page, whether you're using Wix Data, Wix Stores, Wix Blog, these are all dynamic pages. So you just need to make sure that the redirect that you create takes into account the URL structure of these dynamic pages. So a lot of the time, group redirects are going to work very well, for dynamic pages. Assuming of course, that you use the same collection and have the same URL slug, then you can set up one group redirect, and that's going to take care of the entire redirection process. But aside, if I understand it's a little general question, of course, dynamic pages can rank just as well as any other page. It all depends on how much you optimize them, and how much they actually answer your visitors' intent. 48:15 Brett: Copy that, makes a lot of sense. Okay, so this concludes our workshop on migrating sites and the SEO tools that Wix provides for you to make this successful. And Adam has been an amazing expert here. And I want to thank you, Adam, for showing us, walking us through. This has been super informative. And we'll probably have, I think we'll probably take this conversation into the Forum Adam, and maybe if we can twist your arm, maybe sometime in the future, we can have, like a Forum AMA and we'll announce that when it gets closer. So again, thank you for being here, Adam. 48:48 Adam: Thank you. It was a pleasure. It was really fun. 48:52 So thanks, everybody. Thanks to all the Partners for attending and Adam, and we'll see you out there. Be safe, stay healthy. Bye, everyone. Adam: Bye !

In part 1 of our SEO workshop series, eCommerce SEO for Beginners, you’ll learn how to set up and optimize Wix SEO tools for your product pages. Get a hands-on tutorial from Wix product specialists on using SEO to boost organic traffic to your store and start growing your discoverability on search engines like Google. Read the Transcript Transcript: eCommerce SEO for beginners Speakers Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com Asaf Rothem, Head of Marketing, Wix Stores 00:02 Asaf: Hi everybody, and welcome to today's workshop: eCommerce SEO for Beginners. My name is Asaf. I lead Stores Marketing at Wix. I'm super excited to be here, and with me is Matthew Kaminsky-Shalem from the SEO team. Before we jump in, feel free to say hello and connect with me on LinkedIn. You have the URL for me and the handle for Matthew’s Twitter. One last thing before we start—this is the first of two workshops that we are doing on SEO. Today is for beginners, mostly on setup. Here’s what we’ll cover today. It’ll be the basics—intent and keywords—and most importantly, how to optimize your product pages with SEO tools. After that, we’ll do Q&As, and we'll throw some of them at you, Matthew, as you speak, just to make things more interesting. So without further ado, I'll hand over the mic to you. 00:58 Matthew: Alright, sounds good. Thank you, everybody. I'm so excited to see such a large turnout. This is really exciting for me. Like Asaf said, my name is Matthew. I'm a Product Marketing Manager here at Wix, not just for SEO, but specifically for SEO education. My role here is to [support] users like you—who want to learn more about SEO, who understand that SEO is important, and have heard it helps bring more customers and traffic to your site, but who don't necessarily know how to get started or what to do. That's what I'm here to help with today. So before we can get into the Editor, and dive into all the great tools and features that we have to help you gain more traffic from Google and other search engines, we need to start from the beginning. What is SEO? So, SEO is search engine optimization. That's what it stands for. And what that means is, it's basically a process of enhancing a website so that it appears higher in organic search results. Organic being the key word—I'll explain what that means in a second. But why is SEO important? It's all about getting people through the door. Just think about your day-to-day life. Even myself, just today, I think I Googled stuff 50 or maybe 100 times. All of us, whether we're looking for more information—if we're going to buy something for our house, like a new fridge or a new big purchase, or even if we're just arguing with someone over lunch or at dinner and we want to settle the score—we go to Google to get the answers, right? So all over the world, everybody uses Google. It's even a verb and we say we “Google this, Google that.” It's become just a part of life. So that's a great gateway for your business and your website to be seen. Automatically, all of us when we go on Google, we search—and it's important that your website be there. Otherwise, you know, what's the point? It's a great traffic channel for you. So think about this. Right away, when we go to Google, we usually type something in, right? That's normally what we call a search query. And after that, we see something like this, which is a search engine results page, or the SERP as we like to call it. It can look a bit different depending on what you're searching for. In this case, I searched for “building blocks for kids”. I have two and a half year old twins at home and I wanted to buy some more blocks, so this is what I looked for. And this is what the results came up with. In the purple box, we see actual product pages. That's Google Shopping, those are paid ads that you can run for specific products. Below that in the red box, you see paid search ads. They're text based, but those are also paid campaigns. You have to pay for that. What search engine optimization focuses on, and what we're going to focus on today, is the organic posts. And that's in the green box. As prominent as the ads are on this page—and I'm sure you're asking, “Why shouldn’t I just run ads? Why am I focusing on that?” It takes so long to get down there. Well, the ad campaigns are like a water faucet. When you turn it on, the water flows, right? So when you're paying for these campaigns, you're paying a lot of money, and the traffic will flow. You'll get traffic to your site, but the minute you stop, and the minute you turn off your campaigns, the traffic will stop. Organic search is not as easy as starting a campaign. Search engine optimization takes time. It will take time before you begin to see your pages rising up and seeing results. It's long term. It's an investment in the long term. The minute you rank number one, it's really hard to get knocked down. And also, there's a thing called banner blindness, where about 70-80% of people who even look at the ads kind of gloss over them and look right past them. They don't even see them, and they’ll go straight to the organic part. Why do they go to the organic posts? Because we all understand that when we search for something on Google, we all inherently trust Google to show us the results that are the most relevant and the most trustworthy on the internet. So when I search for “building blocks for kids”, I see the first organic search is probably the best, most accurate, most authoritative place where I can learn about building blocks for kids. I know that they didn't pay to be there. Google decided that they were there. We're all store owners, right? So let's talk specifically about our eCommerce sites and our businesses. 05:49 I looked at some research out in the world and 44% of people start their online shopping journey with a Google search. That's a huge number. And also, 37.5% of all traffic to eCommerce sites specifically comes from search engines. So if you're not investing in your search engine optimization, and you're not taking the time to really optimize your site, you're really missing out on a big chunk of sales and a big chunk of revenue. So it's super important. Let's talk specifically about Wix sites. We looked at our data from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and this is what we found. We found that direct traffic was the most popular, but behind that, 20% of traffic came from organic search. And not only do we see a higher conversion rate than Facebook and Instagram, but we see a higher average order value than even direct. So investing in search engine optimization really can have a positive effect on your sales, and we see it in the data. 06:58 Asaf: Matthew, let me jump in and say that this data—and we're going to share data soon, not only from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but even at the height of the sales season, when you are bombarded with ads and sales from everywhere—still, organic search counts for a large chunk of your traffic, and maintains a high conversion rate in your store with a high average order value. And I think it speaks to how important it is to understand the shopper’s intent. I think Google is probably the best way for you—and not only Google, by the way. There are Bing and some other ones where people actually search for products that could be yours. But the fact that [shoppers] do this sequence of actions shows how much they want it. And this translates into high conversion rates and high average order value. 07:54 Matthew: Exactly. And we'll talk more about intent very soon. It's very important when it comes to search engine optimization. But for now, before we can even get to the point of the sale, we need to start with the ranking. The ranking is the means to an end. Obviously, the goal here is to get visitors to your site, which will ultimately make a purchase. But first, they need to be able to find you on Google. When we look at this graph here on the left side, you can see the click through rate. The bottom shows the rankings on organic traffic. So, this site is ranking first, second, third, fourth, and so on, on organic search. When you look at this, you can see that the top three positions on organic search take about 60 to 70% of all the click-throughs. Most of the people who are searching on Google click the first, second, or third ranked site. Even if you're in the top 10, which is the first page or even the second page, you might not even be seen. So it's really important that you try to get high up in organic rankings, because otherwise you're basically invisible. So we're going to talk a lot about how to get started and how to do that. And like I said, we're going to talk about search intent. It's really the first step. We're going to show you a lot of things to do today in the Wix Editor, and specifically within Wix Stores. But there's a big step that you need to do first, and that's research. You really need to understand who your target customer is, what their needs are, what their desires are, and why they’re coming to you to buy your product. You need to understand what they want so you can understand what they're searching for. When it comes to search intent, there are four main types of search intent. I'm going to quickly go over them, and actually in the next session, in part two, we're going to talk more about all these different intents. Today, we're going to focus on one. Really quickly, informational is a majority of what search is. It's because you want to know something, like in this example—names of flowers, types of flowers, which flowers are red. You want to know information. Navigational means you know where you want to end up, so you search for that. So instead of having to type in the full link, gmail login—I know the name of the business, and I know I want to go to their website. You put that in and that's how you end up there—or the return policy for so and so store. That's navigational. And commercial is when you know that you want to buy something, but you're still not sure where or what. So that's like “best online florists,” “PC versus Mac”—all types where someone's doing their research, and they're trying to investigate a bit more. And then the last one, and this one is very important, is transactional. They already know that they want to purchase, they want to buy, they want to book, they want to contact. Obviously, for eCommerce, we're going to focus on buying. So things like “coupon,” or “buying building blocks,” or “free delivery”—things like that show there's an intent to purchase. That's why, when it comes to eCommerce stores and product pages, you really need to think a bit differently than the typical SEO advice that's out there on the internet. Most sites are focusing on informational intent, like blogs. Most websites out there are informational. Even other pages on your store are informational too, like the About Us pages, and the policy pages. Those are very informational. But your product pages specifically should focus on transactional intent. Focus on those people who are already ready to buy, and focus on those keywords. I want to give you a good example. This is a screenshot of two different searches. Continuing with the toy blocks, cause I’m a dad, the first one on the left is informational. So I typed in “types of toy blocks”—and you can see how different the SERP page is compared to the transactional on the right. You can see it's a list. There's a lot of information and right away the top organic result is Wikipedia. There’s a People Also Ask box with a featured snippet, with other types of questions that may be interesting to answer. And on the right side, you can see I put “wooden blocks for kids sale”. I'm looking for the things that are on sale. You can see how, right away, we see a bunch of different ads. On the right side, we see Google Shopping. And the first organic search result is for eBay. And the second one is for Amazon. So in this case, Google understands that when someone is searching for “wooden blocks for kids sale,” they're interested [in buying], and they want to buy wooden blocks now. They want to find a deal. That's why it looks so different, because there's a different intent behind the search. It's really important to think about when you're doing your research and looking at different keywords to target. Like I said before—before you even start to go into the Editor and optimize, you really need to identify the high value terms that your customer might be using. This is a perfect example that Asaf mentioned earlier. I can't tell you what those keywords are—it varies from business to business. Depending on the location, the type of product you're selling, and the needs of your audience and customers, it can be very different. When it comes to SEO, optimization is so unique to every site and every business that it's super important that you speak to your customers, speak to your employees, if you have employees. Just try to understand and put yourself in the mindset of your potential shopper. What makes them tick? What would make them want to come to your site? A great place to start with this kind of research is a totally free tool. You don't even have to pay. You can just go and use Google. Google has so many features. I already mentioned one, the People Also Ask box. Google is also trying to understand what people want. So they have created a lot of different features as part of the SERP results page that allow us to better understand exactly what someone's looking for. So right away, use autosuggest. If you type in just one keyword—”building blocks” or anything—you can see that Google is automatically suggesting a few different options. One word can go multiple different directions, so they try to create longer phrases to understand exactly what you want. Also, at the bottom of every search results page, there’s a Related Searches [section]. Basically, Google understands, “Okay, people who also searched for what you're searching for, they search for these things, too.” It's a really great way to understand and look at what's going on. The People Also Ask feature is the same kind of thing, but in question form, because people are usually asking questions to Google. So, sometimes you want to put things in the form of a question. But because we are store owners and we want to focus on transactional content, we want to mine the mindset of our biggest competitor, which is Amazon. When people go to Amazon, they're already in the mindset with intent to buy. So, look at Amazon's autosuggests. Amazon is also a search engine. I looked for blocks there, and you can see a lot of different ideas for keywords for targeting blocks. I can see “toddlers ages one through three” or “for kids ages four to eight”. That's something I didn't think of—that people are searching by age or by group. It’s really clear to me that somebody who's looking for blocks is looking based on age. Also, you can use Amazon subcategories. Amazon structures their website very well. They're the masters when it comes to structuring their site. So I went into their toys and games, and I found a few different subcategories that building blocks would fit in. You can see under toys and games, there's preschool building sets. There's also a separate department for building toys, which has stacking blocks. And also, under “baby and toddler toys” there are also “stacking toys.” So there's even a subcategory for one type of product. 17:09 There are multiple ways to structure your store, and multiple ways for somebody to search for the same product. You can use all of these as ideas to understand exactly what your customer wants. So those are [some] free options—and those are great for getting keyword ideas. There are also a lot of paid tools out there that don't just give you ideas, but also give you more information about competitiveness, how hard it is to rank for these keywords. As well as allow you to do more competitive analysis and understand what your direct competitors are doing, what their products are ranking for, and what keywords they're trying to target. So a lot of these provide a free plugin or free tools that you can add to Chrome, and provide free trials as well. You don't have to do this right away, but if you're really going to be serious and take the time to invest in your SEO, it's worth it. Even if you do $100 for one month, it might be worth it. I'm not sure about all the pricing. So, let's start talking about why you're really here. You want to see it in action, right? Let's optimize some product pages. We're going to go into the Editor in just a second. I'm going to switch over to that screen soon. But before we do, I want to list off all the things Wix does automatically for you. The great thing about Wix is that we try and take as much of the load off in terms of the technical side of SEO, so you don't have to worry about it. We do a lot of things to make sure that all of our Wix sites are up to best practices when it comes to SEO. SEO changes constantly. Whenever we can, we try to make it as easy and automatic as possible to update your site. And when we do update something, all websites are updated as well. A good example of this is canonical tags. I'll explain a bit more about what those are, but that's something that we automatically do for all of our product pages. We self-canonicalize. I’ll show you an example in a second. Our sitemaps and robots.txt are automatically generated and updated. A sitemap is just like it sounds. When Google comes to visit your site for indexing, they need a map to understand what pages are here, and what pages are there. That's what a sitemap is. We automatically update it and generate it for you. So you don’t have to worry about—if you unpublished a page or deleted a page—that it's still on your sitemap. Nope. We automatically remove it for you. If the sitemap is Google's map, the robots.txt is more like the police officer blocking off certain areas. You can tell Google, “No, don't visit this section, it's not ready yet,” or “This page was just updated, come take a look at it and see how great it looks.” Those are automatically generated and updated. I'll show you a bit more about that. For all of our product pages, we automatically generate title tags that are optimized according to best practices that include your product name and your store name. So even if you don't automate, or you just update your product information and you don't actually edit your SEO information, we automatically add it there for you. It's better to have it, so we automatically do it because then there's something there, rather than Google seeing nothing there. Cause that’s not good for SEO. Also, when Google crawls pages, they use what's called structured data to understand what's on the page. Structured data is a way to tell Google, “Not only is this a URL, but this page has products listed on it. And here's the price. Here's everything.” I'll show you how it looks in the Editor. We also automatically structure with header tags, and we do image optimization. So, if we do all of that for you, what are you supposed to do? Well, just like I said, there are a lot of things that you can do. While we do automatically create title tags and meta descriptions for you, you should optimize them to include the keywords that are based on your research. Also, while we generate the URLs for you, you can edit the URLs to be more concise. I'll show you that in a bit as well. While we do optimize the quality of the images so that they are as small and load as fast as possible, you should optimize the image file names and the alt text to include your keywords. I'll show you that as well. And also, write in-depth product descriptions. 22:02 Asaf: Matthew, let me jump in for a second. Matthew: Of course. Asaf: The first question that I saw was, “How can we appear in searches without using Google Ads?” I think this entire workshop will help you rank on that first page and be there without using Google Ads. Matthew will show you in a second what we’re doing in the Editor and on the Wix Dashboard, on the product pages. 22:34 Matthew: Let's go into the Dashboard here. Before I get into the actual product page in the settings, I want to show you here in the marketing and SEO section that we have all of our SEO Tools. I mentioned a few things that I'll come back to. So I want to show you that here. Like I said, the sitemap. All the sitemaps are automatically created. We recently made a huge update, and we totally restructured it to follow best practices that were recently updated. All of our sites automatically come with the sitemap. You don't have to worry about it. We get a lot of questions, like, “I can't find my site map. Where is my sitemap?” Here in the SEO Tools section, all you have to do is click and it will open and you can see your sitemap as-is. I told you about robots.txt. This is actually for more advanced SEO, so I'm not really going to go into it, but you do have the ability to tell search engines what pages to crawl, and how long. You can do that using the robots.txt editor, but we don't need to show that today. SEO Patterns I'm going to get into very shortly. It’s a way to apply a logic across all of your product pages so that you can automatically update your SEO settings for all your product pages in one click. It's a really powerful tool. Now let’s talk about site verification. Even though Google is the most popular search engine, there are plenty of other search engines out there. The site verification allows you to easily add—all search engines [have this]—a little snippet of code. You can add it directly in here to verify your ownership of your website on that system. So you can do it for Pinterest, Bing, and Yandex, which is more popular in Russia and that part of the world. You can also do it for Google Search Console. But there's actually an easier way to do it. You can see here using our SEO Wiz, you can connect to Google automatically without having to copy and paste the code snippet. The great thing about the SEO Wiz is that it creates a customized SEO plan based on your site. It’s a great place to start with your SEO setup. You can go in and you can put in your name. So let's just say “Matthew’s toy box.” Do I have a physical location? No, I'm online only, I ship all over the world. And then, how would you describe your business? This is a great place to add your keywords. “Educational toys”—let's just put something here. This, I would really recommend you do keyword research for—”educational toys”, “wooden toys”, “toys for toddlers”. Try that. Then, I click Create. And using the keywords that I put in here, it creates a personalized plan. The first step of that plan is to connect to Google. So once you complete the first few steps, which are updating the title, description, and text, you can in one click be connected to Google and your site will be indexed almost immediately. For most other platforms, if you do it automatically or do it using the code, it can take a few days or up to even a week for Google to come and recognize and crawl all the pages on your site. With us, you can do it almost instantly. And it's super simple— 26:14 Asaf: —and critical to do immediately after the keyword research. So once you have the information, right, this is where you start your setup. Make sure you go over it step-by-step. Wix does a lot of the heavy lifting here. But not all of it. 26:29 Matthew: No, not all of it. This is a great place to get started. SEO is a continuous process. It's ongoing. It takes time, and it's experimental. There's no cut and dry way. SEO isn’t rocket science. It’s not super complicated, but it’s also not plug-and-play. I can't give you specific rules on exactly what to do. But there are guidelines. And that's kind of what we're talking about today. So I said I would talk about canonicals really quickly. You can see here, this is the URL for my page, right? Google looks at this as a unique version of the page. But I have filters here on this site. So let's say I want to filter by price, and I want to filter it to between $3 and $28.50. See how the URL has changed? How it’s added a question mark and a little price parameter at the end? Now, even though it's the same page with the same content, and maybe just a few different products removed, Google looks at this URL as a totally different page. But that's what the canonicals solve. No matter what happens after this question mark, whether we add more filters or change more things, Google will look at this with our canonicals. And I'll show you how that looks in the pages section. 27:56 When I go to the shop page, that's the page it's on. 28:05 There we go. If I go into this SEO Google settings—it's actually in the advanced SEO section. You can see that the canonical is automatically added. So rather than having the same exact page with just a few different parameters at the end competing against each other for rankings, this is a way to tell Google that this is the master version of this page. So, no matter how many different types of this page there are, this is the master one. This is the only one you should look at. All these other versions should count as this one. That’s something important. But I— 28:42 Asaf: That is done in the Editor, right? As opposed to the Dashboard, where we'll show in a minute the actual pages. Matthew: Yes— Asaf: This canonical is added from the Editor. 28:52 Matthew: So that's for the Shop page. But we have it on the product pages, too. So let's go into our products, and let's see here. Alright, so I have all my products here, and I'm looking for my building blocks. Okay, that's the product we're going to work on today. We've done a little research already and saw how to optimize this. Alright, so—just so I don't forget, I'll show you the canonicals. We're going to go to the Edit SEO Settings. And you can see here, like I said, it’s advanced so it's automatically done for you. So I don't want you to dwell too much on this. It's done for you so you don't have to worry about it. That's the main point here. Alright, so right away, based on looking at my competitors' pages and on Amazon, I noticed that nobody calls them building bricks. They call them building blocks, right? That's what people are searching for. So right away, I'm going to change the product name to building blocks. I also added a picture here. I just want to show you here in the Media Manager, this is where you can change the file name. You can see I already did it, but I optimized the file name to be “building_blocks_toddlers”. Google can crawl content, they can crawl code, but they can't see images. So a way to tell Google—to inform them of what's in the image is to name your file name of your image. You can change it here, and if I want to say instead of toddlers, let's just say “kids_and_toddlers.” There we go, saved. 30:45 Asaf: Matthew, what other information can you provide about the image to help Google or other people learn more? Just from the image, before we even talk about the description. 30:58 The other information you can provide is something called alt text. Alt text is short for alternative text. It's primarily used for accessibility purposes. People who are visually impaired and are unable to see images use devices like screen readers to browse websites. These devices read what the alt text says in place of the image. When someone comes to your site, instead of seeing the image, they’ll be read this. Even though that's the primary use, it's very useful for SEO because, you know, screen readers are machines reading websites. Google is also, you know, their crawlers are machines that are reading the websites just the same way. They take that information and they use it to inform what's going on. Let's edit the alt text for these images. We've optimized the file names. Now let's edit the alt text. I'm going to click the three dots here. You can see, I can edit the alt text for my images. So I have two images here, but if I had 5, 6 or more, all of them would appear here. And here, you can edit the alt text. Here I’ve put building blocks for toddlers. It's important that you don't overuse your keywords in alt text. You want to be as natural as possible, and also be as descriptive as possible. So I put “building blocks for toddlers.” Here I put “building blocks for toddlers stacked by color” because if I were to close my eyes and you were to explain to me the image, that's what it is. And I could actually put “multicolored” here. Perfect. Done. 32:40 Asaf: And one more thing, Matthew. I see a lot of the questions here are asking, “Where is that feature?” One way, obviously, is to watch this and pay close attention, and you can then watch it again. Another way is to either search using the search bar on top, or just go to Google and say “Wix how to edit image alt text” and get to our extensive knowledge base. And you can do it there. We have a knowledge base article for practically anything that Matthew is saying right now. So just be aware, this isn’t a secret or something. Just Google it and you'll see it there in the first result. 33:19 Matthew: We're focusing on Wix stores today. There are different ways to edit alt text in different page types of Wix. I really recommend using the knowledge base because they have multiple articles on how to edit alt text. Depending on whether it's a main page or a bookings page, or a background of a strip—there’s a few different ways. So that's a great question. But here in Wix Stores, we can see it right here. Edit alt text by clicking the little three buttons. Alright, so I changed the name to Building Blocks. Now I'm going to go back into the Edit SEO Settings here. Let's save and continue. Very important. Now, let's take a look here. You can see here the SEO Settings, and it shows a little preview of what the page will look like on Google. But you can see the URL slug still says building bricks, it doesn't say building blocks, even though I changed the name. Google also uses the URL to understand what's on the page. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to change from building bricks to building blocks. Perfect. Notice there's a little pop up here. We're going to link our old URL to the new one. Now, we'll talk a little bit about redirects—we'll come back to it in a second. But whenever you change a URL, if Google has ranked the previous URL—if that page gets changed, and the customer tries to come to that page, they're going to get an error message saying this page no longer exists. A 301 redirect is kind of like when you go to the post office and tell them you’ve moved houses, and this is the new address and they forward all your mail. This is the same type of concept. The 301 redirect tells Google, “Hey, this URL is no longer live. We actually moved to this URL.” And it's really easy to do in the URL Redirect Manager in the Dashboard. I'll show you that in a second. 35:28 Actually, let's actually show that now. So I'm going to go back to Marketing & SEO, back to my SEO Tools. Here we have the URL Redirect Manager. Now, this is a very powerful tool. It's really helpful. Obviously, I'm using a free site, so you probably won't see this message. But you can see I already created this. I'll recreate it. So I changed the URL from building bricks [to building blocks] and you can see it shows a list of all the different product pages that we have in the store. This is the one that I want to redirect to. Now we're telling Google that whoever goes to this old URL, send whoever goes to this old URL to this new URL. Save and close, we're done. Now, that is just for one URL. You can do it for groups of URLs. For example, if you're moving from a different platform to Wix, and all of your product URLs are structured in a certain way, you can say: domain/products/product name to product page/, and you can do all your products in one go. You can also import and export redirects if you have up to 500, because sometimes they get pretty extensive. You can easily import and export all the redirects that you've done. That's a very important tool, especially if you have products that are out of stock, or they were available for part of the season and they're not available now. If someone still has that link, you want to redirect them to a similar product or a similar category page, as opposed to just having them get to a dead end. 37:31 Asaf: And I'm jumping in for a second. We have a lot of questions, and the teams will answer as many as they can. However, one repeating question is: will we share this video? We're recording this session, and we'll share it after the session. So it's better to understand the approach and how to do it, and then the step-by-step will be shared. And you can run the video on your own after we're done today. 38:00 Matthew: Okay, two final points and then I'll stop and we can answer as many questions as we can. Your product page. Typically, product pages are relatively thin on content, right? You have the name, the price, and the shipping and return policy info. The best thing for you in terms of SEO is to write as much as you can in your product descriptions. Go into detail. Give as much information as you can, because the more information you can provide in your description, the more context Google has to understand what the page is about. But it also just provides a better experience for your customer. You know, when you're shopping for something, you want to understand exactly what you're getting. When you're deciding whether to buy something, you want to have as much information as possible. So put as much information in your product info section as you can. You should use this real estate to your advantage. And you can create additional info sections, which is also really great depending on the product, and you can structure it how you want. Let's talk about the SEO Patterns. So, some of us have really extensive stores, right? We have hundreds of products. To do this process for each product page, to go through and find keywords and find all this information—it can take a lot of time to update and change all this stuff. So that's why we created SEO Patterns. It's a way to really streamline the process of updating your SEO settings. So you can see the SEO Patterns. You can automatically update different types of pages. Apply a logic and it will allow you to automatically update. You can see here we have, in the SEO Patterns > Product section, Search engines & social media. So I'm going to go there real quick. By default, like I said, Wix automatically structures your SEO title with product name, and site name. It also includes the product description. But let's say we want to optimize it. A great way to optimize this is to use modifiers. Like, if you're having a sale, “big sale now” or adding something like “free shipping.” But I don't want to have to do that one-by-one for every single page. So, let's do this. I know Valentine's Day just passed, but let's say we want to update all our product pages that we're having a Valentine's Day Sale. 20% off. Product Name. Great. So what I do here is click Save. And now, when I go back into my products page, you'll be able to see that all the SEO settings were updated with that information. Now, let's say most of our stock is part of the sale, but there are a few products that we don't want to update with this information. So if we go into the Abacus, you can see when you go into the title. 41:40 Not sure why it didn't work, but it should have worked. Let's go back and just double check. Pretend it worked, that's supposed to work. 41:49 Asaf: Matthew, let me ask you a quick question here. In the eyes of Google, when we run sales and we change the titles or the description, does it dramatically affect how they see the product? Or does Google know already that in certain periods you can expect more sales techniques on the title? 42:16 Matthew: That's a very good question. I think at this point, the SEO title and description is less about rankings—because if somebody sees it at this point, it's more about getting the click through. It's a way to increase click through rates. At this point, it's not about Google. Google's goal is what their end user wants, right? So their goal is to provide us with what we're looking for. Rather than thinking about what Google wants, try to think about what your user wants. What your customer wants. At this point, you want to entice them to click on your link on the results page. So when you're talking about the SEO title and description, that's what you should be thinking about—okay, so they're seeing my page, let's focus on trying to get them to click through. Let's talk about all the value that we provide on this page. That's what you should be optimizing for. 43:17 Asaf: And that's great advice, because it's not only how high you rank. I mean, we obviously all want to rank high. But we also want people to click on it. You have to see how the one above you and the one below you speak. You want to make sure that you get those clicks to your site, as opposed to them, because that's what the browser is going to be looking at—the nearby results. 43:43 Matthew: Exactly. Rankings are important, but they're a means to an end. Ultimately, you want to get sales, right? It doesn't matter if you're ranking number one for a keyword if that keyword isn't generating or bringing you traffic that ultimately ends up in a sale. So you really need to be thinking about that. And let's see if it worked now, hopefully. I don't know what's going on. 44:08 Asaf: Might be an experiment. 44:10 Matthew: Sometimes—yeah, maybe. Sometimes things happen. Bugs happen, but I'll take a look. What it should do is automatically update across all of our products. I think I maybe overrode this one. What’s nice is you can manually edit the settings. Yep, that was it. I manually edited that one. So here you can see what I put in SEO Patterns. It shows up here. But this product doesn't have 20% off. I can just go ahead and delete that one, and now all my products are updated. It doesn't matter what I put in the SEO Patterns, I can just override it here. 44:59 Asaf: So just to wrap this up, the SEO Patterns will go product by product for all of your products, except the ones that you manually override, right? 45:10 Matthew: It will automatically apply logic to all your products. It'll change all of your products in one click. If you want to override that and you don't want to apply this logic to specific products, you can override it yourself by manually going into the SEO Settings and changing it. 45:26 Asaf: Which is what we've done both here and in the previous page. Matthew: Exactly. 45:36 Matthew: I think that's all the time we have in terms of covering this. There's a lot going on, we just barely scratched the surface. We mainly talked about transactional on our product pages. In part two, Mordy is going to come and talk a little bit more about advanced content strategy for SEO, and how to create other types of content that will drive traffic to your product pages. In the meantime, I think it's time for Q&A. 46:07 Asaf: Many, many questions, obviously. Let's start with some of the more basic ones. How to measure results after setting up the SEO. Let's say somebody watches this in an hour, they start doing their research, they do all the SEO Patterns, they override whatever they do, they put a ton of work into it. What should they be expecting? 46:28 Matthew: In terms of measuring results and the very first steps, we have Wix Analytics, which is really great when it comes to tracking—especially for Wix stores. We have a lot of sales information. You can track and see which sales came from organic traffic. I also recommend you integrate—we also have an extension with Google Analytics, you can integrate there. And there's a way that you can really drill down by keyword and see: Okay, this keyword brought this many sales, and so on and so forth. That's a whole other topic. I could spend a whole hour on that. But even if you just integrate—there's a marketing integrations section of the Dashboard, and you integrate Google Analytics. Also, like I said, Connect to Google creates a Google Search Console account for you and indexes your site. That has a lot of information in terms of which keywords, which search queries your pages are showing up for, and which ones get click through. There's a lot of information out there and it's really important that, ultimately, it ends up in a sale. So just track how many sales you get from your organic search. 47:49 Asaf: Absolutely. And one more link here to connect. Obviously, when you start ranking higher, you will see the traffic coming in. However, you will still need to optimize your pages for conversion. Google typically drives quality traffic, but make sure you have all the right indicators to build trust and help people. Another question, “How long should it take until I see results?” 48:17 Matthew: That's the biggest question. For most SEOs, the favorite response is: It depends. It really depends on your store, how competitive your market is, how many people are trying to go for the same keywords as you. But SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. It takes time. It might take months before you begin to see true, meaningful results. It’s not—I would love to be able to give you a strict timeline. But I think at least once a month, you should be checking and reviewing your store analytics, checking your search results, and seeing where you're ranking. SEO is a process, so there are always little tweaks here and there. It's ongoing. You should never stop doing SEO. It's not something that’s set it and forget it. You should be always checking, and always seeing after a change if there was any meaningful result or not. 49:19 Asaf: And Matthew, we spend a lot of time on the product pages. How often should we update them? On a daily basis? Every month? Every week? How would you approach it if you were just setting up your store right now? 49:41 Matthew: I think that depends. If you have a product that you're selling and the information about that product changes on a daily basis, then by all means you should be updating that daily. But if it's something that's typically the same and doesn't really change that much, as long as your pages have the most up to date information at the time, that's what's important. You know, one of the things that Google looks at is what's called freshness. Content freshness—not just quality, or that it's correct, but freshness, meaning you're not still selling something from last year when there’s already a new model. Things like that. So, it really—like I said, it depends. It's what's right for your product. Don't make changes just because you're supposed to make changes. That's not going to help. 50:39 Asaf: We’ve also been asked a couple of very important questions. One thing people have said is, “This is a lot to take in. So what is the start?” I think we kind of structured it, but how would you start now, if you had a shop? 50:56 Matthew: Yeah, what would be the first step. Like I said, the first step in anything—you know, SEO is just one channel in your overall marketing plan or your overall marketing strategy. So just like with any marketing that you do, you should start with your customer. Start with looking at who they are, and doing the research and really trying to understand who you're going after. I understand SEO feels so overwhelming. There are so many pieces, so many aspects. Especially if you've never heard the word canonical before, it's like, what does that mean? I've been there. I started out SEO just like anybody else. It takes time. It’s something that—you know—little by little you start to learn and the more you start to see things, it just kind of starts to click. So I really think of it as a journey. You may have just started your SEO learning journey today. And I'm really happy if this is the first time you've heard a lot of this stuff. It can be overwhelming, but don't don't take it to heart. It takes time. And over time, it will get better. 52:07 Asaf: That's about it for today. Matthew, I want to thank you. I know it's such a huge topic and sometimes the most difficult thing is knowing where to start. I think you've given us and our merchants a ton of information and a great way to start. I hope to see you here at future events. Don’t forget—in the meantime, if you want to follow us and connect with us, definitely go to the Wix eCommerce School. There's a ton of information and all the previous workshops are there. Go to Facebook also and join us in the Wix Stores community there. Thanks again for your time. We hope this gave you a lot of value. And we'll see you next time.

In part 2 of our SEO workshop series, you’ll learn everything you need to know about your shoppers’ intent — how to identify intent, and how to analyze intent to find new opportunities for your store. Our Wix SEO experts will help you understand the importance of your sites identity in making your products rank higher on search result pages. Read the Transcript Transcript: Advanced eCommerce SEO Speakers Liat Karpel Gurwicz, Head of eCommerce Marketing, Wix Mordy Oberstein, SEO Community Liaison, Wix 00:04 Liat: Welcome to our Wix eCommerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking about advanced eCommerce SEO. My name is Liat. I lead eCommerce Marketing at Wix. And joining me today we have Mordy. Mordy, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? 00:22 Mordy: Sure. I'm the SEO Liaison here at Wix, which basically means that it's my responsibility to keep the SEO community abreast of what we're doing here at Wix, to evolve the platform for SEO—and in reverse, to keep Wix updated on the latest and best practices in terms of what's going on within the SEO industry. 00:41 Liat: Very cool. So you guys don't know this, but Mordy is a real SEO expert. It's a real privilege for us to have him here today. And you can ask him all the hard questions, please do. I will enjoy hearing him answer you guys. Mordy: Thank you. Liat: So on the agenda for today, we really want to talk about how you take your eCommerce content to the next level. Understanding the role of intent in SEO. Learning how to identify intent on the SERP. Using intent analysis as a means to find new opportunities. And finally, understanding what site identity is and why it even matters so much. And as I said, we'll be taking questions throughout the session today. And we will try and answer as many as we can. So without any further ado, Mordy, I'm going to hand over to you. 01:34 Mordy: So we're going to be talking about understanding the role of intent in SEO. And what I mean by intent is the reason why a searcher searches for something. And there's many reasons why the same query or the same keyword might mean different things. So it's a really hot and broad topic in SEO, it's a really important topic. So let's get started. At this point in the SEO journey, or in the SEO process, I'm assuming that you've already optimized your title tag, which [are] the titles that appear on the Google results page, product descriptions or service descriptions, product names and titles, page headers, link structure, meaning internal linking. And that means that you should be linking to the really important pages throughout your site—so if you've a blog post, let's say that talks about whatever it is that your product does, or your service does, you should be throwing links to your products into those blog posts, as they are in a natural way, so that Google can understand which of your pages are really, really important. And I'm assuming you've done things like alt text for images, and so forth. Even if you haven't done them yet, and it's a continuing process, this presentation assumes those things have been done. The question is, now what? I've done all the basic things. What do I do next? I've gotten into the ballpark. So, you know, how do I get onto the field? That kind of thing. And to do that, one of the ways to do that, and there's many ways to skin a cat in SEO. But one of the ways to do that is to reverse engineer the SERP. And that means to uncover user intent and to find new opportunities by doing that. I'll explain exactly what I mean by “reverse engineer the SERP”. So I think at this point, we have some questions to go over. 03:09 Liat: We do already have a few questions that we'd like to ask you before you dive into the details. So the first question that we have for you today Mordy is from Crystal. And she says, “I've been told that Wix websites rate low in Google. How true is this? And can it be bypassed?” Yeah, we're not going to take it easy on you today, Mordy. 03:32 Mordy: Oh, I like that question, by the way. I recently did a whole presentation about this on Semrush on the SEO tools. So let's go back to 2017. Google's John Mueller, who's Google's main advocate in the SEO community, was quoted as saying there is nothing preventing a Wix site from performing really well in search. And just maybe last week, the week before, I was having a whole conversation with John, who again, is Google Search advocate, about CMSs and about Wix in particular. And John said, you know, one of the things he sees is that the CMSs like Wix, in particular, do a really good job of handling the technical SEO aspects. And he likes that because it allows you as a business owner to focus on where he sees the lack, which is content. The main thing, the main, the most important thing you can do in terms of SEO is write really, really good and really targeted content. And Google was telling me look, we really see business owners, there's a gap there. And that's where the issue is. And you can use a platform like Wix, to not have to worry about those other technical things, so you can focus on creating great content. Now with that, we have an absolute plethora of advanced SEO tools, if you want to do more advanced things. Those things are totally open to you, but there's absolutely nothing preventing you [from] ranking when you use the Wix platform. 04:47 Liat: Amazing. So you guys all heard it from the experts. Now you just need to do the work to make sure that your store is ranking. So Mordy, someone else asks, “How long does SEO actually take to work?” 05:02 Mordy: Oh, that's a great question. There was a study, I think Ahrefs did a study on this, I can't remember exactly the timeframe they gave. But I think it takes six months to really start ranking. I don't want to put a timeframe or a number on it, but it's a long process. And think about it like dating. You wouldn’t get married after the first date, you wouldn’t ask Google to marry your website after the first day that it's up. Google needs to understand, and it takes time for Google to understand, what your what your site is, what it's doing, what these pages are, what the pages are trying to do. And as you're more active, as you're updating more content, as you're creating more content, and you're showing Google, hey, I'm alive, we're a live active site, those things will be helpful to you in terms of getting Google to crawl your site more often, in terms of getting Google to better understand your site. So it does take time. Just keep creating that content, keep doing the work, and slowly, but surely it will get there. 05:55 Liat: Right, yeah, it's definitely a long term effort. And I can say we ourselves are always investing in that long term goal. So you definitely want to take your time and put in the effort. So Justin wants to know, he says, “Google's description of my site has words that I did not add in my SEO Settings on Wix. Why?” 06:17 Mordy: That's a very good question. In fact, most of the time, Google won't use your own words. This is referring to the meta descriptions or the description that you see underneath the title in the results page. And studies have shown that most of the time, Google will create their own. Now, it's still a best practice for a few reasons, it's still a best practice to write those meta descriptions yourself. One, on the off chance that you do appear, you control the narrative. However, Google did say while meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they do not determine how well you do or don't rank. One of Google's advocates, Martin Splitt said at one point that they do kind of look at it to get a general sense of what the page might be about. So back handedly, you're kind of helping Google better understand your page. Now, what's really important to also understand is where Google takes that content, when it rewrites the description, and is rewriting it based on the search queries trying to match the description to the search query itself. Google usually pulls it from the very, very top of your page. So when you're thinking about content, when you're writing content, and you want to consider what's going to happen as you appear on Google, consider that Google is going to pull those meta descriptions or rewrite those meta descriptions, usually from the top part of your page. 07:29 Liat: Gotcha. So I think you partially answered this. But Sweta is asking, “How does metadata help SEO?” 07:37 Mordy: Right, so there's metadata that has nothing to do with SEO that some people think has to do with SEO like meta keywords, those don't apply anymore. That's way back when Google was first getting started. The major factor in terms of metadata that you need to think about are your meta titles, or your title tags. And those are the titles that show up on the results page. Google does use that to get an understanding like any reader would looking at a title to understand what your page might be about. It's not going to necessarily move the needle one way or the other if Google gets a general understanding of your page. But it can and it does help Google better understand what your page is about. 08:17 Liat: Great. So Richard says that,“My product names don't tell you exactly what the product is, how do I not confuse Google?” 08:27 Mordy: So the product should at some point mention what the product is, the product name. For example, so I was looking at throw pillows the other day, and you have the name of the throw pillow, you know, Stars and Stripes throw. It'll say Stars and Stripes, and there'll be like maybe a space, or colon, say, throw pillow. So you can have the particular name of your product there, you can, you know, jazz it up a little bit. And then after that, maybe throw in a throw pillow, the name of the product. So Google does and that should be in an H1, usually, if it's on a product page. So that's really important for Google to understand what exactly it is because if we just put the fun name that you give your product, Google won't be able to really understand what it is. 09:07 Liat: Gotcha. So we're saying, you do want to be straightforward and specific, like alongside the branding and the fun, but make sure that you're actually including that product info in there. 09:15 Mordy: 100%. Yes. 09:18 Liat: Cool. So while we're talking about H1s, Assaf asks, “What is the difference between H1 and H2? And should we just put all the product information in H1?” 09:31 Mordy: That's the very essence. So SEOs will like that question. Okay, so there's different structures to your page. Think of it like a college essay. Maybe you have, you know, you have a title for the essay. You have the various headers, you have your H2s, maybe your H3s, it gives structure to your page, it helps Google, it helps your reader really understand what's on this page. So maybe the product name or the service name would be in the H1. You might have some content there. And then you have some H2s like, you know, shipping details or product specs or a product description. And then you might even have an H3. But you know, the H3 is meant more for your blog posts, even go to H4 and H5 and H6, you don't need to go crazy like that. But it does, it's really important to Google like it is for a reader, it gives your page structure. It tells Google okay, this page is about this, this section is about this, the next section is about this. And Google can look at those headers and say, okay, we understand what this page is more or less about without really having to understand every word. 10:31 Liat: Gotcha. Okay, great. So I think that for now, those are the questions. Let’s continue. 10:35 Mordy: Awesome. Those are really good questions. We're talking about intent—understanding intent, identifying intent. The question is, how do we actually understand what Google is showing us in terms of intent? How do we pick up the various intents that Google is showing us? And my clicker is not working. Now it is. So I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole with this. But in 2015, Google released its first machine learning property, called RankBrain. It's not exactly AI, it's technically machine learning. And there's a slight difference to it. You don't need to know all of the nitty gritty details about it because it's really interesting. But what you need to know are these things, RankBrain and the further developments Google has made along the way since then, have shown Google the ability to understand what exactly people are searching for. And Google kind of realized, you know what, for this very same keyword, one user might mean this, and another user might mean something totally different. And Google said, you know what we should do? We should show results that speak to both of those user intents, to both of those users. On the same results page. By the way, the SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. 11:41 Liat: Hang on Mordy, I'm getting some requests here from the audience. They're saying, “please, please, Mordy, this is complicated. Go slow”. 11:50 Mordy: Sorry, sorry. Okay. The Search Engine Results Page, which is basically the Google page, has many, many purposes, or is trying to cater to many different users. And users are searching using the same search term, but they might mean very different things. And since 2015, Google has been really good at figuring out the various meanings to a search. And I'll show you in a second exactly what I mean. But that means overall, that there's some very unexpected things that show up in the results, some very unexpected pages that you wouldn't think should really show up. And that also means there's some really unexpected opportunity. 12:29 Mordy: Here's a concrete example of this. So “buy life insurance” was the query I ran here. Now, five years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, whatever it is, all you would get here are pages where you can buy life insurance. And it seems pretty straightforward. If I type in “buy life insurance”, don't you think I mean to buy life insurance? Well, the answer is no. Because the very first result, if you scroll past all of those ads, and you'll see why in a second, all those ads are there. If you scroll past all of those ads, the first result is how to buy life insurance, you can't actually buy life insurance on the very first result for this query. Now you know why people who sell life insurance want to advertise and get above that result. Liat: Right. Mordy: So the moral of the story is, commerce sites really need to create informational content, because it opens up a whole new set of doors for you. And that can increase your chances of ranking. Let me show you exactly what I mean by this. So let's take a look at the entire page one results page for “buy life insurance”. And what I’ve done here was I color-coded the results page for you. In red are all of the pages to talk about information, how to buy life insurance, where to buy life insurance, the best life insurance. And all the results in yellow are places where you can actually buy life insurance from—Geico and Allstate and all the other insurance companies. What you'll notice is, there are six slots for informational pages. And there are only four slots for commerce pages. In other words, if you're a commerce site, if you sell life insurance, for example, and you want to rank on the SERP here, on the results here, you only have four opportunities to do that. And no matter how amazing your content is, how great your page is, how amazing your website is, you are limited to just four slots, where if you have an informational page, you have six opportunities to rank. Now if you have both pages, now you have ten opportunities to rank. So the math kind of works to make sure that if you’re a commerce site, you do also have informational pages on your website, like a blog to make sure you capture the most opportunity possible. Also consider, and I know we've talked about ranking a lot in SEO, but consider who ranks first on this results page. Let's jump back for a second. If I want to buy life insurance, I have already done all the research. I know everything about life insurance. I know the whole spiel, and I go and type in “buy life insurance”, which is the first result? It's not Policygenius. I don't need that result. I'm going to skip over and to me, Geico was the first result. So when you look at your rankings, you look at your data, and you're trying to figure out what's going on, you have to really qualify things a little bit. And I'm saying this as somebody who used to work for a rank tracking software company. I know a lot about rank tracking. You have to really go to the results page once in a while and see what's happening there. Because you might rank number three or four, but you might be the first result for the users that you're targeting. So be careful about ranking, you should be thinking about it as ranking for the intent that you are targeting. Now, you sort of can have your cake and eat it too. You can have an informational, I'm sorry, you can have a transactional page, a commerce page, a product page, a service page, whatever it is, and add a little bit of an informational touch. What you see here is basically an FAQ, it is an FAQ. What did Allstate do here? They have a page where you can buy life insurance. And they added an FAQ to it. And then they told Google, hey, Google, you know what we have here, we have an FAQ here. It's called structured data markup. And it's basically code that you can add to your site. And I'll get to it, don't freak out because I said the word code. It's code that you can add to your site to tell Google really quickly so Google doesn't have to scour your page and figure it out themselves, what's on the page. Like, if you have reviews on the page, you can tell Google, hey, Google, there's a review on the page, there’s a product on this page. Here's all the information, we could also tell Google there's an FAQ on this page. And Google might, it's not a guarantee, but they might pull it into the result itself. If you jump back again, look at that result from Geico on the left. That's a really big, hefty piece of real estate that you're occupying. Because Google is pulling in the FAQ questions into these tabs. And when you expand the tabs, you see the answer. Now, how do you actually add this to your Wix site? It's pretty easy. There's a lot of free tools. Rank Ranger has one, Seoclarity has one, Merkel has one, you just need to Google “schema markup generator”, “schema markup creator”. And you'll find these free tools. All you do here—in this case, you hover over to the type of schema you want to create, I clicked FAQ Page, and you just fill in the fields, you put in your question, you put in the answer, and you're literally copying and pasting the content from your page. The tool will create the code you need. You just click copy, you go to the Wix Editor, you go to Advanced SEO, where it says structure data and it says paste your JSON LD code here. You paste your JSON LD code here. And that's it. And you've added FAQ markup to your pages. 17:31 Mordy: Now, all of this sounds really simple. I have to go to the SERP. I have to check the results, I have to see if there's information or results showing. And if I see that, I should probably create a blog post to try to target that. Really simple. But it's not that simple. Because there's multiple kinds of informational content. There's informational content where you can buy something. There's informational content where you can learn how to buy something. There's general FAQs, there's also comparison and reviews. And if you notice, I switch queries here, this is no longer “buy life insurance”, it’s “buy a laptop”, and you have a comparison of the other 15 best laptops and reviews. Why did I switch queries? Because this kind of informational content did not exist for “buy life insurance”, meaning for whatever reason, Google didn't think that this type of informational content is relevant. So what you really have to do is not to just see if there is informational content. Should I write a blog post? Should I write whatever I need to write in order to target that opportunity? But you have to break it down and see what exactly is Google showing, what type of informational content is there. By the way, I know I'm using more complex products like “buy life insurance” and “buy a laptop”. But I did a study back in 2018 about this. And I ran a whole bunch of queries. I did anything from “buy toilet paper”, literally “buy toilet paper”, which by the way, does show an informational result when I ran it last week, believe it or not, I promise you I'm not being facetious about this. For simple products, the first page of the Google results, 25% of the results are informational pages. When you go more complex, something like “buy life insurance” or “buy a laptop”, that number jumps up to 40%, meaning four out of the ten results that generally appear on page one of the results are not pages where you can buy something, even though the word “buy” was in the search term. Like “buy a laptop”—40% are informational pages. That number, and this is anecdotal, I haven't really done the study. If that number is gone up, and you saw it here with “buy life insurance”, right? The number now was 60%, or six out of ten results were informational, and only four were commerce pages. So there really is a real need to focus on informational content even if you're a commerce website. It also means you need to know your results and you need to check the queries, the search terms that are really important to you. Because you might think okay, I sell forks, I'll search for “buy forks”. What possible informational content can there be for buying a fork? Well, believe it or not, there were three results about buying forks, “the best flatware for 2021”, “buying guide to flatware”, “the eight best flatware silverware sets for 2021.” So believe it or not, there could actually be a nice amount of informational content that you might want to be able to target. But you need to know what your specific results page looks like. You can have a lot of opportunity, you can have a little bit of opportunity, you can have one type of opportunity, it all depends on your keywords that are important to you. So run these through Google, check it out and see what's there for yourself. By the way, doing this also points out the limitations to you. And limitations are really, really important because it can make your life much easier. For example, I searched for “buy dress shirt”. And what I got at the top are a bunch of ads, to the right of the main results are called PLAs—they’re Product Listing Ads. They're just more ads, there's a lot of ads here. Then there's this whole weird map thing Google is showing me and then if you go all the way down, there's a one little itsy bitsy organic result from Amazon. What happened here, that box I have highlighted in red for you. That's called a local pack. And Google thought, you know what, when you typed in “buy dress shirt”, we really think you want to actually go out even though it's a pandemic, and actually buy the shirt in a store. Now, Google could show this all the way at the bottom of the page, which it does sometimes, but showing it at the top means Google thinks that's the primary reason people have come here. They've come to the results page, they typed in this query to find a physical place to go and search for their shirts. Is that keyword really worth your time, if you don't have a physical listing? If you don't have a physical store? I'm not saying you can't win that keyword. I'm not saying you're not going to get traffic or you're not going to get conversions from that keyword. All I'm saying is if you have a whole bunch of things to do, in theory, that might not be the best place to start. Because Google's telling you, the main intent that people are coming here for is local, is to actually go to a store. 22:05 Mordy: Which by the way, it brings up the SERP features. SERP features are all these box things that you'll see anything but the actual organic results. I'm a big baseball fan. And I love the Yankees. And when you type in “Yankees”, you get above the fold, zero traditional organic results. You get a sports box, you get a knowledge panel to the right, you get a whole slew of actual articles from big name publishers. So understanding SERP features is a major part of doing SEO. And that's a whole lecture unto itself. But for our purposes, what you can do is reverse engineer those as well. So if I search for a new garage door, and I get this little slew of carousel images, it's called an image box, that kind of tells me something is oh, you know what? Google thinks that users—and Google's using machine learning to figure this out, so Google's pretty good at this—they want to see a whole array of visual images related to garage doors, they want to survey what are the various styles or sizes or options for garage doors. And that means on your page, if you want to rank, you should also try to rank a page here where you can show a lot of images about all the various garage doors that you sell. Maybe a collection page where you have a good page to target with this kind of keyword. And I've seen this a million times over. For example, if you search for like, “New York Yankees jersey”, and even though it's not a place where you can buy a New York Yankees jersey, it’s just, you know, about the Yankees and the history of their jerseys. Every single one of those pages has prominently featured very large images showing off those uniforms. Google put a big old image box on that results page. Whenever you see that image box shows up, that tells you there's an intent to view images. So try to cater to that somehow, if you can. Also, it means exploring other media formats. If you see a video box show up, a list of videos. First off, that tells you one thing right there, Google's telling you, users might not want to read anything you write, they might want to watch a video instead. By the way, seeing this, even if your page is ranking, you should go after the video because Google's telling you the user might not want to read a page. But even if you're not ranking for this particular keyword, and it's impossible to rank for every keyword you want to. There's so much content out there and Google talks about this, and there's only limited space on the results page. If you see that you're not ranking, maybe create a video and try to get onto the results page with your video instead. That's a great way to try to manipulate your way onto the SERP. Manipulate is a terrible word. At this point. I'm going to turn it back to some questions that we have. 24:36 Liat: Right. So Bradley is asking, “Is it realistic for a small business to organically rank on the first search page without a large budget? 24:47 Mordy: That's a really good question. It all depends. Everything in SEO depends. If you're creating a site and it's your first day out there, no, you're not going to compete with the big brands. And when Google wants something a little bit more authoritative, let's say for a health query, it's very, very hard to compete. It can be hard to compete in general. Again, think of it like a marriage. Google knows these sites, they have many, many pages. It's not about the budget per se, if they have a lot of links pointing to them, Google is very familiar with them. If you see you're having a hard time, that's entirely possible. It means you might want to try going after some long-tail keywords, or some long-tail terms, meaning those kinds of things happen for very broad terms you want to try to rank for “buy a laptop”, you know, there's Amazon and Best Buy and Overstock and eBay, it's very, very difficult. It's very true. That means you might want to go more specific, what's something unique about the laptops that you sell? Or whatever it is that you sell, find something unique that you do differently, that sets you apart, and go after that target audience. Because it's not about getting a lot of traffic, it's about getting the right traffic. 25:54 Liat: Right. Okay, that's really good advice. So Ashley is asking, “How do you do free keyword research? And you know, what would be the best way to start doing that?” 26:08 Mordy: That’s a really good question. So keyword research, I just want to say something about keyword research to start off with. Be careful with keyword research. Keywords have sort of lost their significance in a way. Google's not focused on keywords. Google understands synonyms. Google understands your page is semantically-meaning , Google understands what's on your page, whether you use the target keyword or not. What you should think about more is topics, right? What topics do I want to address? There's a topic that's really important for my business to address. I should create content for that. Now, there's a lot of ways you can do this, you can go to the Google results page. At the bottom of the page are related searches. And that'll help you see some other things people are searching for. There's sometimes a box called People Also Ask which shows other questions that are related to people looking at your query. There's a bunch of free tools out there, I think, I don't know if they still do or not, but Moz, their Keyword Explorer, offered some free access. Rank Ranger, their Keyword Explorer, just you know, Google Moz, Keyword Explorer, they might give you a couple of free searches every day. There's a tool and I like this tool a lot, it's called [Answer the Public], and it doesn't give you the traditional kind of keyword results that you're looking for, so the search volume and keyword difficulty and all that kind of stuff. But it breaks down the topics. It'll take a topic and show you all the questions people ask around that topic. And that'll give you some really great keyword ideas. And there's another tool, it's also very similar to that it's called, AlsoAsked, you can Google that one as well. 27:34 Liat: That's really great. So I love this event, Mordy. I'm kind of focusing on the topics and also focusing on the intents, right? Like, what are your customers really looking for, and then kind of trying to match those two to each other? 27:46 Mordy: Look, it's really hard if you're writing really well not to use the terms that Google naturally understands as what your content is about. 27:55 Liat: So in that way, actually, Google is making our lives easier, because you don't have to be so mathematical about the keywords, you just need to meet the content that people are looking for. 28:05 Mordy: Correct. And it's a best practice not to get too hung up on the keywords. 28:10 Awesome. So Adam asks, still on the keyword topics, “But then what makes a good keyword? And why are some more powerful than others? And how long should a keyword be?” 28:24 Mordy: Okay. So try to take all of them in order. What makes a good keyword? A good keyword is something—think about it like this, think about it as a match. People are searching for something and you offer something you want to be, you want to have the content available for what you offer, you offer something really unique. People are searching for things that are related to the unique thing that you offer, you want to make sure that you have the content to match that. A good keyword is a keyword that reflects what you offer, and that people who are interested in that will understand. You're going to want to target your audience with the content that you're writing, don't think in terms of the keyword per se, but think about, “What topics do I want people to come to my site for?” and create content for that. I think I'm skipping over one of them. But how long should a keyword be? So I think there's a little bit of confusion there. There's two ways to think about a keyword. One is a keyword that you enter into Google, that’s the search term, that's a keyword. And then there's the keywords on our page. Really don't think about it like the keyword people are entering, you want to have content on your page that matches up to that. So there's no length of a keyword because you're just writing content to match your user's intent. And there was one in the middle. There's a question in the middle. I totally forgot. 29:40 Liat: Yeah, so the other one was, “Why are some keywords more powerful than others?” 29:45 Mordy: So that depends what you mean. If you mean certain keywords get more more searches every month. Like for example, if you search for “buy a laptop”, that's a very high search volume keyword, getting probably thousands upon thousands of people searching for that every single day. However, there are keywords that are maybe, you know, less powerful in the sense of the number of people searching for them. But they may speak to what your business offers. For example, if you offer, you know, really slick, awesome, you know, cool artistic laptops. So when people search for cool artistic laptops, so that's not a keyword that'll get thousands upon thousands of searches every single day. But it's a keyword that can generate a lot of traffic to your site, where people will buy the product. And it's not about traffic, it's about making money. So a powerful keyword to me, is a keyword that helps you make money. 30:38 Liat. Right. So basically, sometimes going more niche or more specific, even though you might have less volume, you might end up ranking higher and finding the most relevant audience for your product. 30:51 Mordy: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And Google, by the way, is encouraging you to go specific and go niche in a lot of different ways. I'm not going to get into it here. But that's the trend that Google wants to create. Align with Google, that's the best thing you can do. 31:05 Liat: Alright, cool. So I think those are the questions at the moment Mordy. 31:08 Mordy: Awesome. So let's get back. So where do we get started with content? Now we understand user intent, we understand how to, you know, get a better understanding of the various subcategories of user intent or of informational content. But there's, you know, there could be a couple of snags. How do you actually get started with content? It's really more than user intent, I don't want you to think of—okay, let me go and analyze user intent on the results page and that's how I'll start my journey of creating content. User intent, or analyzing user intent, the way we're talking about it, really fits into another, more broader and really more powerful thing, which I'll get to in a second. It's also not keyword research, which we just spoke about in those questions. Keyword research is not, it's really not a good place to start in terms of creating content. It's good at helping you maybe refine that process, or maybe refocus you, or maybe helping you find some new opportunities. But the one thing, the best place—the only place in my mind—to start with creating content, is understanding your user. And it's being empathetic. It's understanding what your users are going through, understanding what's bothering them, understanding what's helpful to them, understanding the situations that they find themselves in, and creating content to meet that need. That is the one place, you want to understand the user, and you want to create content for that. And if you want to refine that process and get ideas, understand that in more concrete terms, so then yes, you can go and you can look at [that] results page, and you can break down user intent, and so forth, and so forth. But it all starts with understanding the user. I don't want you to think this is where… It starts with user intent, it starts with targeting your audience by understanding yourself and understanding your audience and understanding the product that you offer, and how that fits in, or the service that you offer, how that fits in. And using things like breaking down user intent to help guide you a little bit along the way. And with that, we're going to turn it over once again, for some more questions. 33:04 Liat: So Shanika wants to know, “How do you go about targeting a specific audience?” 33:11 Mordy: That is like the million dollar question, right? To me, it starts with understanding yourself, like understanding your product. Every product has an identity, every business has an identity, every service has an identity that makes you stand out and makes you different [from] all the other people doing this. And understanding yourself and who, what is my product? What's its identity? What's my service? What's its identity? And saying, who does this speak to? What kind of person does it speak to? What problems might the person who's interested in this have? What problems does this solve? So you're understanding yourself, and you're understanding yourself in the context of understanding your audience, again, being empathetic and understanding where they're coming from, what their situation is, so that you can create the content to meet that. And so you can showcase your product and service in the context of helping people solve their problems. 34:03 Liat: Right. And I think here, like some of those other tips you gave before, in like, looking at other brands or products that are appearing in those search results and looking at the kind of content they're creating. You can also go and look at their social channels, see what their customers are talking to them about. Look at common questions your customers ask you. There are a lot of ways for you to get deeper into your customer mindset and really understand what you know, what's bothering them, or what do they need? 34:33 Mordy: 100%. 34:37 Liat: Cool, so Kwan is asking, “How can I optimize SEO for blogs? And does putting YouTube videos on my page help or hurt SEO?” 34:48 Mordy: In all likelihood, it probably helps and that's what your users were looking for. I mean, if you're speaking to your audiences, you know, who are visually impaired that maybe a YouTube video is not the best thing to show. But all things being equal, if you understand your audience, and it's helpful to them, then yeah, YouTube videos are great. In terms of optimizing your blog, so there are some basic things you can do like the page structure that I mentioned before—having a title [on] your page, using H2s, using H3s, bullet points, lists, tables, images, all these things to offer structure to your page to make it really easy. Think about [it] like this, whatever makes it really easy for a user to understand your content, also makes it really easy for a search engine to understand your content. And the best thing you can do is just write, I'll quote Google here, “write really helpful content for your users”. And you know, look, put effort into it. If it's a matter of writing, spending an extra hour writing, an extra couple of paragraphs, do it. Write something that's really authoritative, and really substantial. 35:53 Liat: Right. So Dale says, “My industry, which happens to be a florist, is very competitive online. So how do I actually get myself listed in the top searches?” 36:05 Mordy: So again, I mean, so if you're a local business, and you have a physical listing, or your service area, business, please make sure to set up a Google My Business profile. That's an absolute must, you won't, things like the local pack that I showed you, that map with the three listings, you won't be able to get into that unless you have set up a Google My Business listing. So please definitely do that and fill it out completely. There's a lot of features there, explore, do some research, there's all sorts of features you can take advantage of to really fill out that listing. And definitely do that. If you're competing in a really competitive industry, it's the same advice across the board, I'll say. Find the thing that you do better. Find the thing—10x it, find the thing that you do differently. Find the thing that differentiates you, find the thing that makes you stand out, and push that to the max. Target that, showcase that, be proud of that, put it out on social media, put out content, whatever you can do to promote that aspect of your business, do that. 37:01 Liat: Awesome. So I'm gonna say Dale here for talking about florists, definitely stuff that's super helpful is anything around how you're doing shipping and delivery. Maybe the kinds of bouquets or flowers that you're offering. Again, going back to what Mordy is saying, figure out like, what your specialty is, and focus on that. So Felicia wants to know, “How do you find your targeted audience?” 37:29 Mordy: That's a very good question. Firstly, like I mentioned before, it really starts from your own brand's identity—what do you do? Like what again, what differentiates you? And who does that speak to? Right? If once you understand who that speaks to, now you've sort of have a really good starting point, who is this helpful for? Well, there's your audience. And then you can do things like go to the results page, see what your competitors are doing. Do keyword research, investigate the questions that relate to the topics. Like if you go to, let's say, [Answer the Public], that's a free tool that I mentioned before, and you see all of the questions related to the one question you put in, you can really start getting a sense of: What's the profile of this person? What's the pain points of this person that I'm trying to target? And then take it from there. 38:13 Liat: Great. So we have one more question here. And that's from Alan, and he wants to know, “we're getting a decent amount of traffic. But I feel like nothing is converting or people are not adding products to the cart.” 38:30 Mordy: So that speaks to you know—SEOs love talking about ranking and traffic. And none of those things actually matter. What matters is, you know, dollars in your wallet or whatever currency you're selling in. That tells me off the bat without looking at the site, because I can't say without looking at the site, but most probably, you're getting the wrong traffic. You're ranking well. You're showing in the organic results. For people who are—you're not really speaking to, they get to your page and the product doesn't speak to them for whatever reason. That's what I mean, like if you have a million people coming to your site, and none of them are interested in buying your product, is it really worth having a million people come to your site? Versus hey, I can have 100 people come to my site and all of them are interested in buying my product. So it might mean refining your content offering and trying to target the people who will actually buy like your target audience, or finding your conception of your target audience. 39:25 Liat: That's great advice. So yeah, I would definitely dig in deeper there. I think try and talk if you can to some of the people coming to the site. Maybe add, like a live chat to your website so you can engage a little bit with the people who are visiting, and then try and understand, like, what's off there, what's not meeting their expectation once they're getting there. 39:44 Mordy: That could be, that could very well be a UX issue. This happens all the time because we make the site we think it's very intuitive. But I've heard examples of time and time again, when the user actually goes to the site and they try to buy something. There's a hitch that you didn't really realize was there because to you it all makes sense. 40:02 Liat: Right. So we do have other courses, go check out the eCommerce School about how to like optimize your product pages and optimize your store for conversion. That is definitely a whole different conversation. But I think Mordy gave you two great directions. So either you're bringing the wrong people to the site, or people get to the site and something on the site is not working. So try and figure out which of those two issues you're suffering from, for sure. Okay, great. So I think Mordy that's it for now. 40:30 Mordy: So actually, the last question is a great segue into this. Because, you know, you can bring traffic to your site, but it might not speak to what you're actually doing. And this speaks to some ways that you might be misusing all the knowledge that I've shared so far around user intent. Because it's a little bit again, more complicated than we've already made it. So I'm sorry to add more complication to it, but I'll explain it in a really easy to understand way. And it's all about understanding what site identity is, and why it matters so much. So first off, what is site identity? So site identity is pretty much like it sounds. It's when users or Google—in this case, we're talking about search engines—come to your site. It's their ability to understand what your purpose is. What is your site about? Who are you? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish with this site? Think about it like this. Imagine you walk into a doctor's office, and you show up, you go to the reception area, and you ask, can I see the doctor? And the receptionist says, “Absolutely. Would you like to see the doctor about your health problem? Or do you want to buy a new car?” Like, what? You sell new cars? You’re a doctor. You'd be very confused, like, what's going on here? Am I in the right place? Not only that, you might start to question how authoritative or how good of a doctor are you if you have to sell cars on the side. So when you don't have a strong topical focus, it confuses search engines just like it confuses people. It tells them well, I don't really know what your site is about. I'm not really sure what you're doing here. How am I supposed to rank you? And even if I can understand, you know, you're doing this and you're doing that, those two things don't align. Why are you doing that? Do you not understand? Are you not really understanding what you're supposed to be doing? Maybe your site's not really trustworthy. And if I'm, again, if I'm a search engine, why would I rank you? And if you don't think Google is doing that sort of complex thinking, it most definitely is. I and other SEOs have been tracking this since around 2018 when Google started doing this, but luckily for you, on February 8 2021, Google announced that yeah, we're doing this. Google said, we can tell you, we can tell rather, if you have a strong focus, if you have a good reputation around one content area or one topic. And SEOs will often complain, “Oh, an update came around, I lost all my keywords”. But when they dig into it, they'll start to realize, yeah, you lost all of the keywords around topic X but topic Y, you're fine. Because Google says, why are you writing about topic X, it has nothing to do with your site. And you don't really want to go that far. Because if Google's doing that, it's already raising red flags as a search engine. You want to stay focus on one topic. And one topic can be very, very broad. You can talk about SEO, and there's a ton of you what you could talk about SEO. But it's having a strong topical focus. And for content creation, it means you want to create content that Google thinks is really authoritative. And having a singular focus or a singular identity helps you be authoritative. Just like our doctor office example, it also in turn or the flip side of that means that Google says that you're trustworthy. If you're authoritative, that means I can trust you. And in order to do those two things—in order to be authoritative around a given topic, around the topic that you talk about in your website—you have to be disciplined. It means you have to stay focused on the topics that are important to you. So you might reverse engineer the SERP, you might take a look and say, hey, there's all this great opportunity to read all this informational content. But it might not speak to what you do on your site. If your site is about why reviews are terrible. And comparisons are terrible. And you're doing a comparison review because you see the chance to you know, grab that keyword, that clearly makes no sense. And that will confuse Google. And it'll impede Google's ability to rank you. If Google doesn't trust you, if Google doesn't think you're authoritative, it simply will not rank you. Obviously, you also have to be relevant to the keyword. I'm not saying no. But basically, what if you take anything away from what I'm telling you today—and it speaks to a lot of the questions that I'm hearing from the Q&A—I want you to think of your content and your website as your brand. Imagine a reader because they are not users, they're readers. They're real people, they have real feelings and they understand things. They're people and they come to your site, and they see a blog post that maybe you wrote. And it really doesn't have anything to do with your site. They look at the name of the site. They look at your homepage maybe, or they saw the description on the Google results page, and they understand what your website's about really quickly. You can really understand what a website's about very, very, very quickly. 45:08 Mordy: And they get to the page and they’re like, why did this website write this? What would it say about you as a brand? Does that come off as you have you know, you have it all together? Probably not. Does it come off as very authoritative? Not really. Do people want to trust you? Not really. By staying focused and by thinking of your brand, or your content as your brand and thinking, what perception will people walk away with after they come to my site and see my content, you'll automatically and naturally create the content that Google is looking for. You'll create content that's focused, you'll create content that's authoritative, and you'll create content that's trustworthy. So please think of your content as your brand. And think about the perception that users will walk away with from looking at your content because it's exactly what search engines are doing. By the way, since we're talking about writing a lot of content, it's really helpful to do audits at this point. And site audits can show you lots of different things, they can tell you, maybe you have a 404 page, those are the warning sections, the error sections, I mean. In the warning sections, they'll tell you a lot about your content. And this is one from Ahrefs, it's free, I don’t know if I will share the link, but you can Google it. It's a free site audit, it's really simple to use, they’ll walk you through it. And you can see, hey, maybe they're missing alt text. So alt text, by the way, is the text that describes your image. So it's for the visually impaired. So they have a reader, reading the page out loud. When they get to an image, it'll read what the image is about. Google uses that to understand images. It'll tell you if you're missing that, it'll tell you maybe you're missing, you're maybe your meta description is just, you know, too thin, there's not enough there or whatever it is. It'll give you a lot of information about the content that you're writing. And as I implore you to do if you're writing a lot of content, picking up on these things can be really helpful. Now, if you really get into writing content, and you take it to the nth degree, you might want to go with a tool that's really all about this, all about crawling your site and finding all of these problems. Personally, I use Deepcrawl for this. There are other tools that do a really prolific understanding or breakdown of what's on your page. For example, Deepcrawl will pull out and tell you, hey your page is too thin, there's not enough content there. Now, by the way, I want you to be careful because it might be a product page. And for this particular product, there might not be a lot of content that you can put there. Though, generally speaking, have a description, the specs, tables, all sorts of content you can put there. But take it with a grain of salt, make sure that the warning that they're telling you about actually makes sense. But they'll tell you, maybe you have duplicate titles, if you have a product page, or if you have—and then you have a product blog post, it's entirely possible that the title tag, the title, you're telling Google to show in the results page, is too similar. And that might confuse Google. It's too similar content. You might have duplicate content. Imagine this, you write a product page or service page, and you write a blog post about that product or service. It's highly possible that both of those pages rank on the results. When someone Googles something, they see your blog posts, and they see your product, your product page. If it's a commerce-focused query, do you really want your blog post showing up first? No, you really would much rather have your hey, you're happy with the blog post, but you really much rather have that product page show up first. So a tool like Deepcrawl will tell you when that might be happening. It'll tell you theoretically, when you have duplicate content. And I've totally done this. I wrote a blog post 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post last week, I didn't realize like the post that I wrote a long time ago is really similar to the one I just wrote. You might want to consolidate that, you might want to get rid of that old post, you might want to repurpose that old post. So a tool like Deepcrawl will crawl your site and find a lot of these issues for you. So to sort of sum it all up, I want you to think beyond purely transactional content if you're a product or an eCommerce website for your products or your services. Google has multiple intents that it's catering to. It's catering to people who are searching for multiple reasons. So take advantage of that. Know what's out there, and take advantage of that. Use the SERP to understand what Google wants. And don't get too hung up on the keyword research in this whole process. Really look at the SERP, look at—target your audience by understanding your users' pain points, and use that as a starting point, not keyword research. Your keyword research should maybe refine that process or find new opportunities. Give your informational content a topical focus that we talked about. Why? Because you need to create site identity with your content. And I think that sums it up for me. 49:57 Liat: Awesome. So we do have a few more questions for you Mordy. Let me pull them up. Okay. So Melissa is asking, “How can I stay on top of the ever-changing algorithm?” 50:13 Mordy: That's like the million dollar question. So yes, Google does release updates all the time. And Google, by the way, will say, there may be nothing you have done wrong with your page. And you may not rank anymore. It's just there's a lot of content out there, there's limited opportunity. And for whatever reasons, the pages that are ranking are perhaps more relevant, and you might not be able to do anything about it, depending on what your site is. Now, that said, if I can offer a best practice, and if I can talk about the overall trends of the major updates that have happened since 2018, it's to create nuance. Really, particularly for blog content, but also for your product pages, create really nuanced, really specific, really targeted content. Create content that comes off really authoritative, that Google really feels comfortable trusting, and that Google knows that you're an expert. Hey, look, if you're writing about a particular topic over and over and over and over again, and you're writing a lot of really great content, and your product pages are really in depth, there's a lot of information on there, from shipping to spec to whatever it is, Google’s going to look at that and say, that's a really authoritative website, I can really trust that website. They're an expert on their content matter. That's the general trend of where things are going. And that sort of future proof you from the algorithm updates. Of course, any given update at any given time, for any given keyword. Who knows, but in general, that's my answer. 51:34 Liat: Right. And also, I would add here, Mordy, is that all of this advice that Mordy's giving, and all of these best practices are an ongoing effort, right? Content is not a one time thing. Right? So you need to keep working on this all the time. Keep going back to the SERP, keep going back to the keywords and you know, keep doing the work. 51:54 Mordy: Imagine you're you're you're on the hunt, you're trying to figure out how do I best improve? How do I find new opportunities? And by the way, things are always changing in SEO, and the results pages are always changing. So definitely, there's no end, just keep at it. 52:08 Liat: So Richard is asking, “How do you encourage conversion or purchase from a site visitor on the site?” 52:16 Mordy: That's a really good question. Aside from making sure that your target audience is coming to your site, I will go back to what I talked about before with the UX. Look, it's really easy to mess this up. Because again, we are very familiar with the sites. But have somebody, it could be a family member, have somebody who's not familiar with your website at all, try to buy something. And do this multiple times and survey people and take back that feedback, and try to make that user experience really seamless. 52:44 Liat: Right. I agree. And like one of the things that I always point out to people is, you know, we sometimes forget in eCommerce, that, you know, people don't get to interact with you, your business or your store or your product. Right, they're really buying online. So you need to know that your website and your product pages have to do that work for you. So, imagine if somebody came to your physical store. You'd greet them, your staff would greet them, they get to see all your products, they pick them up, touch them, feel them, smell them, try them on, whatever it is. So when they're coming to your website, they don't get the opportunity to do that. So, make your pages work for you. You want to invest in images, you want to invest in product descriptions. Mordy said it before like, literally list all the relevant information that you need there, whether that's ingredients, sizes, charts, whatever it is that helps people understand what they're buying. I really love having reviews, especially customer reviews with images, like I know as a shopper, I look at those all the time, like I want to see, okay, great, the shirt looks pretty in the picture. But I want to see somebody who actually tried that shirt on, so now I know what it looks like on a real human being. So think about things like that, that can help your shoppers understand your products and what they're buying. And Mordy, JJ says, “How do you integrate SEO search with social media? Like Facebook or Instagram.” 54:17 Mordy: So as somebody who loves social media, it really works hand-in-hand, it really does. Look, you want people—you want Google to know that your site exists, Google to understand that you're, you know a player in the niche that you're in. And one way to do that is to get people talking about you. Google, by the way, not only tracks links, but it also tracks mentions—so mention your brand. So if you're out on social media, and you're sharing content, and you're showing yourself to be an authority and expert in whatever wonderful thing that you are within your industry, that will get people talking and people will create content and mention you—perhaps link to you. That’ll create buzz on social that can translate and spill over onto the web and that spillover, Google picks up on that 54:57 Liat: Amazing so Samantha says, “How do you make your website appear on the first page of Google search results, Mordy?” 55:07 Mordy: It's about targeting that content, going very specific. Again, if you're going to be very broad and try to bring in that huge audience, that doesn't necessarily work. To get to the top of the results page, you want to have targeted content, nuanced content, content that's very highly-detailed, highly-specific towards a very highly-specific audience. And I'll tell you, like, I'm trying to think when it was, maybe even a year ago, maybe less, Google started releasing this filter at the top of the results page. Let's use Google to show where to go on vacation. So Google will show a filter, fall, winter, spring, summer, and even though you will rank, you know number one for where to go on vacation, if a user has a particular season in mind, they're going to click on that filter. And they're going to go to a whole new results page about going away in the summer. So Google is pushing users to be more specific, and to go to more specific kinds of pages. So you should try to target the trend and try to write really specific, highly-targeted content. 56:07 Liat: Awesome. So actually, already, we're getting a repeating question from the audience that they would like you to please repeat the name of the auditing site that you recommended. 56:18 Mordy: Sure. So there's two—Ahrefs, they have a free site audit tool, and Deepcrawl, they don't have a free tool, but their tool is only about site audits. So Ahrefs has multiple things for SEO, they track your rank, they track your backlinks , and they do offer a site audit option. But in general, when the SEO tools do everything, that's great. And it's good up to a point. And it could be very good for your site. I'm not saying no at all. But if you want to go and take it to the professional level, that's what you're doing. That's what you're interested in. So then a tool like Deepcrawl is only about site auditing, and they offer a much more full and complete site audit. 56:59 Liat: Thank you. Sure. So Chris asks, “How effective is on-page SEO versus off-page SEO?” 57:08 Mordy: That's a good question. So just to explain, because people don't understand—on-page SEO means changing things to your content itself, like your title tags, or your titles themselves, your headers on the page, the content on your page. Internally linking, remember, I mentioned it before, you want to link to the pages that are most important to your website because that's a very strong signal to Google that, hey, this page is really important to this website. We're going to crawl it more often. And it helps us better understand the website. Off-page SEO generally means links. And I'll say this in general, the push—and it all depends on the market, in English links are less important. When you're talking about other markets where Google has a little bit less content. So those links become in general, more of a factor. But generally speaking, links are an indirect signal. That's Google saying, we don't really know what's on this page. We can't fully understand it. But so many people are recommending it by linking to it, so it must be good. But as Google gets better at actually understanding the content itself, it needs to rely less on indirect signals, like links. I'm not saying links are not important. They are very important. But content is always the most important thing. On-page is always the most important thing. Think about it like this: Is anybody coming to your website because you have a great backlink profile? No, they're coming to your site, because they want to consume your content. So your content is the product, always make sure that the content is in focus, and then worry about things like links. 58:38 Liat: Great. So we have one more question here also relating to links. So if you are doing links, what's the best way to develop backlinks for your site? 58:49 Mordy: So never ever, ever buy it. People will offer you to buy links. Never buy links, it's against Google's guidelines, it can get your site in a little bit of trouble or a lot of trouble. The best way to think about links is naturally. First off, the best way to create links is to write 10x content by running content that it's really helpful to people, really interesting to people, sharing them on social media, and getting links naturally that way. But you can also be strategic about it. Imagine you're a florist. And as I mentioned before, there are florists. And you do a lot of wedding work. Maybe there's some wedding venues or wedding halls that you often work with and say, hey, can I write a blog post about how to do the best flower colors for your wedding? I don't know. And write that post. And that will link back to your website. That's a natural way of offering some great content or just hey, wedding venue, I know we always work together. Would you mind listing me as one of your recommended florists? And you're building a natural backlink that way. But you know, the other thing is—don't worry about the number of backlinks. Google actually came out last week and said this even though it's been true for a long time, and everybody really knew it, but no one wanted to admit it. It's not the number of links, it's the relevancy of the links. In other words, if you're a florist and you have a car dealership linking to you over and over and over again, that's kind of like why, even though they may be the best, most authoritative website ever, you want other related venues like a wedding venue, a photographer, other florists, flower sites, you want them linking to you. So try to get links that are related to what you do. 1:00:19 Liat: Amazing. Thank you so, so much, Mordy. We really, really appreciate your time. Great advice. I know that people have really enjoyed the session, and we will invite Mordy to come back, don't worry. But we do have some other great news for you. Wix and Deepcrawl recently partnered to create this great eCommerce SEO guide . That's another resource that you can download and use to work on the SEO for your eCommerce sites. So please go ahead and do that. Please join our Facebook group, join our community, you can connect with each other as well as our team there. We both thank you very much for joining us today. And hope to see you again at our next workshop.

Wix and Semrush partner to give you insider tips on conducting a competitor analysis for SEO. You’ll learn how to identify your key competitors on Google, narrow gaps to boost site performance and optimize your organic traffic using advanced tools. Read the Transcript Transcript: Competitive analysis for SEO with Semrush Speakers Mordy Oberstein , Head of SEO Brand, Wix Liraz Postan, SEO Expert, LP Marketing Services Inc. 00:00 Mordy: Welcome to competitive analysis for SEO, brought to you by Wix in collaboration with Semrush. My name is Mordy Oberstein, I'll be your host today—or tonight depending on your timezone. Aside from being your host, I'm also the official SEO Liaison here at Wix. Joining me, or joining us, today is not only a dear friend of mine, she is the founder of LP Marketing Inc. She is the former director of SEO at Outbrain. She is an industry speaker. She speaks at all the SEO conferences from SMS to Brighton SEO. She's an international SEO and content consultant. She is—as she is here, a representative of Semrush at many, many, many webinars and she is considered an organic competition analysis expert which makes a great deal of sense as to why she's here today. She is Liraz Postan, hi Liraz. 00:56 Liraz: Wow, what an intro, I'm impressed. I didn't know everything about myself. 01:00 Mordy: I practiced all night. I forgot she has 13 years of experience in the SEO industry. Now I got it all. 01:07 Liraz: Oh, thank you. I thought I missed something. Really honored to be here. So I really hope that everyone will understand everything that we're going to talk about. And after this conversation, they will know how to do competitive analysis for their website. So I'm really, really honored to lecture everything that—all my knowledge away. 01:27 Mordy: Amazing. So before I hand the reins over to Liraz, and before I go through some of the procedures for this evening, or this afternoon or this morning, whatever time zone you're in, I don't know anymore. I want to talk about very quickly the importance of doing organic competitive analysis or competitive analysis for SEO. So obviously, it's really important to know who your competitors are on the Google results page or in SEO lingo—we call it the SERP, which stands for “search engine results page”, because you need to know who your competitors are. Because Google's really important. However, to me, personally, I find that competitive analysis, aside from being the starting point for doing really strong SEO, is also the starting point to offering up your brand identity, your brand presence on the results page. What do I mean by that? When you look and see what the sites Google is showing on the results page for the audience, for the users that you want to visit your site, when you see what content Google is putting in front of the very target audience that you want to come to your site, it gives you an idea of what's out there and where you might fit into this conversation, let's call it. Where do you fit in? Where is it possible for you to add added value, real added value, unique value to your target audience? So yes, while understanding your competitors on Google is really good for, you know, beating your competitors—we all want to beat our competitors, we get that—and finding new opportunities. It's also a really good place for you to start, and as ironic as it may sound, to start thinking about differentiating yourself from your competitors. Where can I be better than my competitors? Where can I offer the user, my target audience, something really unique. And that's really great for your audience, for your competitor potential consumers. And it's also that having that unique identity and the unique added value is also really great for search engines. But that's a very different conversation for a different time, hopefully. Okay. With that, I will now hand it over to my dear friend, Liraz. The floor is yours. 03:28 Liraz: Okay, cool. So I'm really honored to be here. And I want to get started with a competitor analysis. I personally have to say that I will not try to sell Semrush. Basically I’ll do everything, my best to share my knowledge of how I'm using Semrush, with just, let's say one hour of work, instead of doing just manual work, that can take me days and even weeks to do competitive analysis. So for me, it's my go-to tool, basically every single day, even a couple of times a day, this is my—I'm just doing everything on Semrush. From rankings to competitive analysis to site audits, it's my go-to tool. So let's get started. I want to understand, I want to explain what is competitor analysis. And why basically it is needed. First, hello, this is me, Liraz Postan. 13 years of SEO in the industry. I'm delighted to share my knowledge here today. I think it's a call for everyone that's basically working with Wix websites. I know how tremendously you need this knowledge in your toolkit, let's say. 04:35 Liraz: And I want to talk about it—what is competitive analysis? And why you basically need it. And how to get started. We're going to talk about each of the steps here in the presentation. And let's go and understand. Competitive competitive analysis means that you need to study your direct competitors, to see what's working for them, and how you can leverage it for your own strategy. Meaning, first I just need to understand who my competitors are. And then, I can just make a good assumption on how I can adjust my own strategy. Maybe I'm missing out on things. And maybe I can be inspired [by] things that they're doing. Because sometimes it can be, like, overwhelming. I have competitors. They're like huge brands, I don't know how to tackle it. But you can. If you're a small organization, and you have, you know, you don't need all this bureaucracy in the background, you can just launch things very fast. And so don't be afraid to just act. And so on a couple of the slides, I will show you how to act and how to create a proper strategy, and how to minimize your gap with your competitors. So why do we need it? First, we need to identify market trends and patterns. If all my competitors are doing something, and I'm not—well, it's a pattern. They're doing something and I'm missing out, I'm out, I need to understand what am I missing out [on]. And first of all, I need to understand if they ever recognize a trend, or maybe they're inventing a trend, I would want to see what they're doing. I would want to optimize our strategy. Basically, we need to optimize our strategy all the time, we have everything new here. In digital marketing, everything is new. Covid time is not the same as one year ago, it's not really the same, and it's not going to be the same one year later. And it's not going to be the same in two months from now. So we always need to adapt our strategy over and over again—or you need to close your opportunity gap between me and my competitors all the time. We need to understand how we can close our gaps and be, let's say, one step above them and whatever they're doing. So, let's first understand—who are my competitors? We have, let's say we're surrounded by competitors, right, we have lots of competitors. But let's try and tackle two of the types of competitors. We have direct competition, which are basically people that are selling a website, they're selling the same product as mine, pretty similar product. You can argue about the quality, you can argue who's doing it better, or which brand is better. But basically, it's the same product. And indirect competition, basically, it's a similar product than me, or basically they're serving a different country. Let's say I have bracelets that are just for the UK market, like really. On the bracelet, you have a UK map. But we have the same for Canadian bracelets. So these are the same product, but serving a different county. So basically, we're not competing with each other. It's not a direct threat. But I still need to take a look at what they're doing. Let's take an example. Nike, they have direct competition with Adidas, right? They're both serving the same product. Of course, we can argue who is better, which has the best shoe, the best running shoe. But in the end, this is what they're doing. They're creating running shoes for athletes for sports for people that want fashion. These are the same things. And they're basically serving the same countries as well. But if we look on the other side, we have bloggers, affiliates, we have different kinds of people or websites that are basically selling running shoes, but are not making them. But they're still my competitors on search results. So this is what I want to tackle. For example, if I'm going to look at the search results page, I'm going to have brands, I'm going to have bloggers, I'm going to have affiliate websites, I'm going to have Quora questions, I'm going to have People Also Ask—if you see this picture by Google. It's basically showing me what a user is asking about running shoes. I just chucked in, typed in running shoes as a query here. And this is what I came out with, like with the US search results. And I also have Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is also my competitor because sometimes Wikipedia is ranking first in live search, let's say living search term. And it's not you know—people are saying, oh man, how can I beat Wikipedia? You can, you can, this is a matter of—put your strategy in front and just do whatever you can and just beat the competition. So we have lots of different competition. Also this—images, Google Images. Like let's say for an eCommerce website, if I type in running shoes, and I go for Google Images, this is basically the user journey, right? They want to see first, what is the running shoe that they're going to buy. And they want to get some inspiration, if they're not really focusing on a specific brand. So they have all the options here. It's like a catalog. So if my competitors are basically doing really good work with their SEO images strategy, that's it, like I can rule this, I can rule this world. So we also need to understand how to tackle this strategy. And there are a lot of things that we can do in order to beat the competition. You can see here we have Runner's World, we can see Reebok, we have Nike, we have Under Armour, we have lots of brands that we didn't see even in the search results for the same query. So take a look at everything that you need to take in terms of beating the competition for your competitors. I think let's get to work. Let's see how it's done, right? Cool. So I took a Wix site, a really cool website, by the way, Coal and Canary, which are basically serving—they're creating luxury candles, really cool candles, great smells, great scents. And they're basically located in Canada. And this is the main market for them. So my research is going to be focusing on Canada—but not only. Okay, so basically this is what I did. I typed in on Google.ca: “luxury candles”. And in the end, I found these top three competitors: The White Company, Candle Delirium and Harvey Nichols. Well, if you look closely, some of them are not really my competitors, as The White Company is also selling bath products and things like that. And Harvey Nichols also sells bags and fashion. So they're not really my core competitors. So basically, I took Semush. If you want, we can go over to Semrush and just see, but I just took a snapshot, because I want to explain everything. So I took the Candle Delirium, which is pretty much the same product as Coal and Canary. And basically, I took here, I just typed in—this is all you need to do—just type in the domain name. And that's it, go to domain review. This is what you get, you get tons of data. And then you're going to ask me, oh my God, what is that? Yeah, exactly. This is the first time you're going to do it. And then it's going to be like super easy. Just going to type in the URL. And you go into the domain overview. And you see so many interesting things. You see that the organic traffic and Candle Delirium is getting, you see that the countries that they are serving, you see the Canada share is now really big, US is the main market. You're going to see the organic traffic that they're getting and the trend. You can see that, I don't know, from February, they have a little bit of decline in February 2020. They have a little bit of decline with their traffic. And you see they're putting some efforts with paid traffic, meaning Google Ads. So they're putting some, not much, but they're doing some Google Ads. Also the amount of backlinks, we're going to talk about backlinks in the presentation. Backlinks means how many sites are linking to my sites. Google sees backlinks as referrals, as a credit someone gives to my site. So we want more of these. The more backlinks we have, it means the more websites are linking to me, the more websites are recommending me, so we want more of these sites. And we also see that they're doing display advertising. So for me, not only Google Search ads, they're doing Google Display ads. Nice. So maybe, if I'm not doing it, maybe I will consider doing most of these things. And I also can see what are the top keywords that they are ranking for in Google. So if you take a look, we have here the—I don't know, “cactus flowers”, “Jonathan Adler”, supposed to be like a partnership or supposed to be like a specific category for candles, they may have done with them. “Cool lighters”, “boy smells”, “nest fragrances”, everything that can be really nice. They're ranking pretty nice. And here you can see the search volume—meaning how many people are searching for this specific query [on average] a month for Canada. Okay, specifically. So this is pretty nice. Here you can see the landing pages, meaning the pages the content that is ranking for these keywords. And I can take a look at this. And I don't know what to look at. I'm really not sure. So I'm looking at paid traffic. They’re running paid ads. What offer [does] their store want to promote? What is the text? What is the copy that they have on their ads? What [are] the images that they are displaying on their display media? Also, we want to check out the keywords that we just saw. What are the top keywords that are ranking? What is generating the most traffic for them? Because basically the traffic can assume to get more conversions at the end. Maybe if I'm not doing that, maybe I'm missing out on money. What is the average position that they have? If they're not really ranking, but they have tons of keywords that they rank, but they're not really ranking on first positions. So maybe they're not really generating this amount of SEO traffic, Google traffic, but maybe they're doing something different [to] others. We saw this partnership with Jonathan. Maybe it's something that I can do more [of]. Maybe it's something that I can think of a way to get influencers into my—I don't know, candles. 14:29 Liraz: I don't know, backlinks. How is their backlinks profile? Meaning, [are] there unusual links there? Is there something spammy there? If there's like huge PR, we need to understand and dig into their backlinks to better understand. We're going to do all of this together. 14:46 Mordy: Hey Liraz, can I ask you a quick question? So can I do this, I’m asking rhetorically, but can I do this on my own website? Plug in my own websites and see exactly what's going on here as well. 14:58 Liraz: Basically the domain overview—is just like you can type in any domain in the world. 15:02 Mordy: So if I wanted to see where I was ranking, or my organic traffic. And when it comes to backlinks, I just want to point out for everybody, you know, not all backlinks are equal. If you have—and you mentioned this—if you have a backlink from a site that's maybe a spammy site. That's not the best thing. We want to have backlinks from sites that are really high, authoritative sites, really reputable sites—and also really relevant to what you do. 15:26 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. We're going to see it together like what backlinks that they have, and we're going to recognize it. This is what I meant with backlink profile, basically, we need to understand what is the structure of it. And we need to understand what is the best content, we saw the landing pages that are ranking before. What is the best content? Is it blog pages? Is it category pages? Is it product pages? What is the main traffic that they're generating? If you're generating from blogs or articles and they have tons of traffic—and I don't even have a blog. So maybe it's time for me to start and write content, or hire someone to write this content for me and create a content strategy. And of course, also what kinds of blogs and products what kind of products that we're trying to sell? And what is their unique selling point? For them, we saw it’s luxury candles. How are they different from my other competitors or from me? And finally, we're going to talk about gaps—the keyword gap and the backlink gaps. And we're going to try and minimize the gap and see what are the opportunities for me to get. And this all can be done with just five clicks, which is amazing. Okay, so here we have, we're going to minimize the Zoom video. Okay, here we have the traffic analytics for Candle Delirium again. So I basically took a local competitor, which is Natura Soy. I went ahead and saw that Coal and Canary are soy blend candles. So I thought maybe that can be a really good competitor for them, also based in Canada. So Natura Soy, you can see totally, you can see their traffic share between them. You see that Candle Delirium is slightly a little bit bigger than Natura Soy. You can see also they have like the graph here how I chose like in certain terms of the trends of their traffic, you see that most of them you see Candle Delirium is in a little bit of decline. You see that Naturasoy has a little bit of take-off in January. And you see overall, they have like a little bit of a positive trend with their traffic. And you can see like, let's say like a snapshot from analytics, it's like the visitor duration here, you see they have really long duration visits. And the bounce rate is really good for those two websites. And also we can take a look at, one sec, under sources. Here we can take a look at Candle Delirium traffic, we can see both of them have similar direct traffic. Meaning people are looking for their brand name, which is really good. You see, they both don't have any referral traffic, which is interesting for me. They have good search, meaning SEO traffic and organic Google search traffic. You see here, only Natura Soy has some social traffic, which is interesting for me, because Candle Delirium probably isn't doing much on social. And paid traffic, only Candle Delirium is doing it. So this is something that is interesting for me to understand. Each of these competitors are doing something different in their strategy. And for me, this is a little bit interesting. Here, I put the traffic journey for Candle Delirium and Natura Soy. In a bit I will add in for this puzzle, my own site called Coal and Canary. So basically here you can see Candle Delirium, all the sources they have—Google.com, which is SEO content—SEO traffic, sorry—direct traffic, and the direct traffic for Natura Soy. You can also see Google paid, only from Candle Delirium. They're using Google.com and DuckDuckGo—which is a second search engine—and they are also doing Amazon. But here with Natura Soy, I have less traffic sources. I have this website, which is probably something that sells—probably an affiliate website for them. Or we have like Google SEO, and we have direct traffic. So this is pretty interesting. I will put in Coal and Canary. And let's see the whole picture. So basically, Coal and Canary is doing only SEO traffic and the Coal and Canary wholesale website. Which basically, I think—they might be missing out on things. They might be missing out on Google paid, they might be missing out on referral websites, on affiliate websites, they might be missing out on Amazon. So here you can take a look at many things that you can basically adjust. And now we can create the gap analysis with just a click, okay. So we go into the Semrush dashboard and we go into the keyword gap, which is—before we were here. We're just going into the keyword gap, inserting what we want in the domain name. This is me, this is the root domain for Candle Delirium. This is Natura Soy. And here we can just see how they overlap—meaning they have some shared keywords between them. We have some shared keywords that all of them are ranking [for] together. But you can see the tremendous opportunity they might have with just shared—with just missing keywords. So here basically Semrush is just telling you this is the top preferred opportunity for Coal and Canary. An amazing opportunity. 20:38 Mordy: Liraz. What do you mean by missing keywords? 20:41 Liraz: Huh? This is like this. So basically, all my competitors are ranking for my keyword, for these specific terms. And I don't rank for them. So that can be an opportunity for me. See here, “candle store near me”. They're all ranking for this. “Man candles”, “luxury candles”, “candle shop”, “luxury candle supplies Canada”, this is amazing money. This is money—money on the floor, guys. 21:05 Mordy: So these are keywords that you could be ranking for yourself, should you target them, in theory? 21:09 Liraz: Exactly. Let's say we have 23 missing keywords. See this is an amazing table for me, I'm always using it. So they all rank you for something, you can see their positioning here on Google. You can see that Candle Delirium is “luxury candles”, position six. And Natura Soy is not really there yet. But you can see that Natura Soy is ranking first on “wood candle” for example, and I'm not ranking on any of them. Sorry, I'm just taking a little drink [of water]. 21:38 Mordy: So while you're drinking, that doesn't mean that this website isn't ranking at all just means for these. These are the keywords I got you covered. These are the keywords that you have an opportunity, should you decide to start targeting them. I mean, that doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong, it just means that this might be a good place to focus next. 21:57 Liraz: Yeah, exactly. This is an opportunity for me, I can write content for this, I can maybe open new categories, I can do a lot more of this. Basically my competitors, my direct competition is basically ranking on these search terms. But I don't. And this is something that can help me adjust my strategy and build more content. Got it? Okay. Okay, so what do I do with this data, right? What do I do with it? Okay, action items, create content. First, we can create blog posts if I see something that is relevant to write a blog post about, for sure. Go ahead. Maybe you should open a blog. That's like a whole new deal. But maybe I can write a new post about something specific. Maybe I can create new category pages, new categories for products, maybe I can create new products, even new partnerships, new something. I can get influencers to partner with me and create a content marketing strategy around it. And the first—the second thing is just to optimize everything. We need to add more competitors to follow. Because we saw we have so many more competitors, that can be just, you know, one or two things that I want to check. We can create keyword research, and tracking and reporting all the time, and to track and see if my actions were okay. And if I got in and just keep optimizing your report about it. 23:19 Mordy: And this, by the way, because I saw somebody asked in the Q&A, this is a great way to build links, right? By building content, building really good content that people really enjoy that's really valuable, is a great way to get links as people will want to link to you. Imagine you did a study or you have a really nice guide to something. Well, somebody is talking about that in their blog posts or on their website, they'll link to your guide or link to your study or whatever content you create. And here's Liraz on backlinks. 23:48 Liraz: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to add in. That's really great. Because if we have a partnership, let's say. That's a new way for you to get an influencer, let's say, with you and just to partner with you for a new line of products or something like that. That's a new way to get it viral, to get the word out there. Or if you write a good blog post that gets really good backlinks. That's amazing for you. 24:10 Mordy: Yeah, look, even a category page—we'll call it a collection page—where you have a lot of your products and if you have a really nice list of products and you have the best list of jeans in the whole world. So when someone was running a blog post about where to find the best jeans, they might link to your collection page. 24:29 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. Also you can see that they have like a search term for “man candles”, stuff like that. That's the whole new category page or collection page. 24:38 Mordy: It’s new for me certainly. 24:42 Liraz: Okay, so let's talk about the backlinks. Let's first understand what is a backlink? We talked about it briefly. Okay, so we have like, let's say a strong website, let's say an authoritative website, let's say New York Times. Okay, and I'm doing a PR and for me, the PR is really great and it's not really linking back to me, it just talks about me. So I would love when I'm creating a PR, I would just want the New York Times to link back to my sites. Okay, basically when I'm getting another website to link to my website, this is called a good backlink. But not all backlinks are equal—when again, those authoritative sites that can really link for me that they really have a connection to my niche, or either a PR or a brand or something that I want to put my brand out there. So when I get more of those backlinks to my site. So basically what I've done, I took all the competitors that I created, and basically compared them to Coal and Canary and saw what are the best backlinks that they have that they're not linking to me. So you can totally see that what is very—let's say—shouting, here is that they have coupon sites that are linking to them. A lot of your coupon sites, it's like here, you can totally see it. So I can totally assume that my competitors are doing tremendous work with coupon sites that are really sometimes—they're really, really good. And sometimes they have authority around them. 26:15 Mordy: Can I ask you a question, Liraz? Liraz: Yeah, sure. Mordy: How do you determine that authority? How do you know what to do to determine whether or not this is a great link, or this is maybe a link I should disavow somehow? 26:24 Liraz: So first, here, you can see the authority score— AS means authority score—also Semrush has these bubbles that can also explain everything to you. But here, you can have the authority score, I just filtered it from the highest to the most low authority score. And here you can see, of course, bing.com. Of course, they have like a huge authority website. It's from 100, let's say. So this grade shows me what is a good website. And also you can take a look at the website itself. If the website itself, let's say, for those coupon pages, if those websites, you see that they're not really generating any content for them, it's like a clean website, doesn't really look good. The mobile is not really responsive. You see, like all these pop-ups coming in and destroying your experience. Okay, so you're going to understand yourself, it’s a spam website. And we want to disavow or remove them. If we can just contact the website owner and say, hey, can you not link me? But be nice. Okay, what do I do with this data? I have all these backlinks. What do I do with that? ACT—I want to earn backlinks. I want to earn partnerships. Partnerships can bring me lots of natural backlinks, I don't need to go to a lot of effort and just getting, those coupon sites, which are very good coupon sites, not the examples. Maybe you can see in the other slide that they're not really as authoritative. Affiliates partnerships, there are really good affiliate websites and publishers that can basically publish and promote your candles, anything that you're doing. And work on your brand name. Also do PR, put your brand out there. So, when you're doing your PR work, this basically can give you some more authoritative websites that can link back to your website. So what should I do? Spy. I'm so sorry. Well, you can spy on your competitors. You can create a site audit campaign on Semrush. Just create a Site Audit—I will just show you in a bit what it looks like. Just crawl your competitors, you can take a look at what are they missing out [on]. They probably have bad broken links, they have content that they're not taking care of, content that is not generating any traffic for them. And this is how it looks on Semrush. Basically, I put down just a screenshot on how site audits may look. And it can give you all the grades that you need. Basically slow pages, 404 pages, like error pages that they're not doing right. If they're doing okay with their crawlability, site performance, internal linking, all of that can give you—you know, if the site pages of your competitor is important for them, so they might take care of them. But if something is not really performing well for them, it's not the niche that they will need to take a look at, so you can see what they're not focusing on. So if something is broken and they don't really care about it, it's something that you can take in and take advantage of. Oh, I can take hold of it. Let's say if I have a backlink for them that is broken. I recognize a link. Someone is linking to their website and it's broken—you can totally contact the other website and say, hey, I saw this link is broken, you're serving a bad experience. Why are you not linking to me? I serve the same product and my link is not broken. So this is something that you can totally do as a strategy. 30:00 Mordy: Also really good as you can see, when you do a crawl, you can do a crawl on your own site and do this in reverse. But if you're crawling, you see, hey, you know, this site is ranking for this keyword, and the crawl comes back saying that page is thin—meaning there's not a lot of content there. That's a really good opportunity to say, you know what, I bet you if I create a much better, a higher-quality page, I bet you I could rank for that page, because this page is ranking and it's thin. So all these are different ways you can find opportunity. And also I find if you do it in reverse, look for problems on your site, that might be why you're not ranking. If the other side has really prolific content and your content is a little bit thin. So it might be worthwhile to, you know, spruce up that page a little bit. 30:40 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. Basically, Site Audit is an amazing tool that gives you everything that you need to know—all the problems and all the good things that are happening on your website. So it's something that I just set up like a daily crawl. And that's it, like I get in my mail alerts, hey, this page is broken. Oh, okay, I'm going to fix it. So just to be alert of everything that's happening on your website, and others. So we want to minimize the gap, right? We want to create the content and the keywords, you find the keyword gap, and we want to create better content. And then we don't want to copy their content, for God's sake. We don't want to make content that is thin content, as they are doing. No, we want to do it better than them. We want to be more sophisticated. And we want to be able to serve better experiences, even. And I can design a better landing page. I don't know, this is why I use Wix, right? Like I want to design my best website. And I can do it like that. I don't need the other developers just designing everything for me, I can do it like that. And this is the main experience that I want to choose. Also, if your website is [going] very slow—so make sure you're serving the fastest selling pages. And also, we want to tackle the broken backlinks. So we talked about it. If we see something that is broken on the backlink that is linking to my competitors, I'm gonna reach out and ask for them to link to me. We serve the same product. We don't have any broken pages. Just link to me, I’ll give you the best experience. So yeah, basically all this manual work can take you weeks, right? So all this competitive analysis can take you, I don't know, like 30 minutes. So when you're doing everything, and you're busy with your own business, and you're doing other business strategies, you know, you don't want to waste your time. This is why I use Semrush every day for site audits, for competitive analysis. Just like five clicks, I swear to God. Okay, so this is just for a summary. This [tracks] my competitors over time for staying ahead, right? Final words—analyze competitors, look for ideas, trends, and more. Close the gap, we need to make use of every opportunity we see. And you know, Semrush is just marking, highlighting top opportunities for you. So it should be very easy for you to identify it. And we need to create 10x value content for our ranking, to outrank our competitors. So just think of that as something that always needs to be on the back of your mind—do competitive analysis once a month, and you're done. That's great for you. And that's it. If you have any questions, DM me on Twitter, I'm there, and I'll be happy to answer anything that you have in mind. 33:28 Mordy: Liraz, that was absolutely amazing. Yeah, thank you for sharing that, loving the great questions in the Q&A and in the chat. One question I wanted to ask you about is—Semrush is a wonderful tool. And I personally use it all the time. There are other tools. And then you know, not every tool is for everybody. So definitely take that into account and make sure you find the tool is right for you. But also, you know, one of the things that I do and I use Semrush and use a bunch of tools, is I always end up going to the SERP itself and looking at what's there with my own eyes. 34:01 Liraz: This is how I started my slides. 34:04 Mordy: So it's important, I think to remember that, while you want to do things at scale, and you want to do things with ease, you're going to need the tool to do that. But even if you are doing that, it's always really important, I think, to go and take a look at what the results page actually looks like. What are the features that are there? What other—are there other ads, local packs, direct answers? What kind? What does this—get a feel for what's there. Take a look at it, take a look at the competitors' sites themselves. Always take a look at the competitor’s site. What's their user experience like? How does their page look? How does it feel? How are they structuring their content? All of these things are very holistic, but they're really important. And no matter what you do, the best practice is always, yes, use a tool—and always check things out at the same time on your own so you can get a real qualitative understanding of what's actually out there. So I know there's a bunch of questions about—do I have to use Semrush to do this? No. No, you certainly can go and see who your competitors are. And even if you do use Semrush, which I highly recommend, or another tool—it's very important to check that out on your own and see what it actually looks like. Anyway, every SEO will tell you this. I myself, when I look at my competitors, or I want to see how Google's changing, I always take a look at the actual page itself. 35:21 Liraz: I think the best tool is your eyes. The best tool. Like, really, you can identify everything that a bot can, you know, just something that you need to keep in [the] back of your mind. But it just simplifies my work. And I work with other tools as well. But it just simplifies my work. 35:37 Mordy: So I wanted to ask you—when you see a site, because you mentioned before that they're doing paid advertising, whether it be display advertising, or whether it be the actual advertisements on the Google results page itself. Does that mean that you should do that necessarily? What does that mean? Forget my organic content, there's ads there, how do you go about that? And let's say I don't want to spend on ads. 36:01 Liraz: If you don't want to spend on ads, that's perfectly fine. We're just going to see if my competitors are investing more in paid ads and not doing any SEO. So that's something for me to understand. Maybe that's an opportunity for me to tackle more SEO traffic, and just you know, but of course, you know, I'm not a really big fan of Google Ads, I must say I know, as an SEO person. It’s just like, I’m sorry, but it's so expensive. And you can just basically tackle everything with SEO and just like a content strategy, evergreen content that sticks. And it's the best experience that everyone is looking for—not a landing page with, you know, click an ad. The buying intent is different. With SEO, you get a really good buying intent. You’re not clicking on ads. If you search something, and then you click from your own will on something that can give you the best answer to what you asked for. 36:56 Mordy: That's really a different intent almost, right? Like, you see, I don't think—you know—don't be scared if you see an ad at the top of the Google results page, at the top of the SERP. Because people know that it's an ad, even though Google is pretty good at hiding it sometimes. It does still say “ad” there. And people in general are suspicious of ads. Like I myself, I don't think I ever click on an ad. 37:17 Liraz: Yeah, me too. So the two of us. 37:21 Mordy: I think that's about knowing your users or knowing your audience. Are they an audience that's predisposed to using ads? Whatever that demographic might be? Or are they not? And if they're not, then you don't have to worry about it. And of course, organic traffic is always considered more trustworthy, organic sites are always considered more trustworthy. I wanted to ask you about links, because I think links are really complicated. You know, it's a little bit tricky how to get links. Google has a lot of guidelines for how not to go about getting links, I think it'd be worthwhile to bring that up. You should not pay for links, ever. Liraz: Nope. Mordy: So if somebody is trying to sell you links, run. It's against Google's guidelines. 38:01 Liraz: I think everyone is getting those spammy emails, right? Hey, I sell guest posts, and that's like spam. 38:11 Mordy: It’s even against Google's guidelines to—hey, you know what, I'll pay you to, you know, write a guest post, and I'll write a guest post for you, and we'll exchange links. Now, there's certain ways that you can go about doing this naturally, right? Making a natural connection. Yeah, it's fine. Like, you know, yes. If I say, imagine I have a friend who's a photographer, and he does photography and events at weddings. So the wedding halls that he works at might listen on their website and give him a backlink. Because they want—when someone searches for “best wedding venue”, they also want to know about photographers and caterers, so they'll have a list of recommended photographers. So if you approach that website and say, hey, wedding venue site, how about you put my link with your other photographers, I work here all the time with you. They may say yes. And that's a great way to make a natural, organic connection to get a backlink. 39:01 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. There are a lot of natural ways to get a backlink. Also, if you can have a roundup with panelists, I call it, let's say, ego-bait articles. There are a lot of good strategies around backlinks. And you can earn them naturally. You can create viral content, you can create infographics, you can create a video and place it on your website that can be super, super educational and informative. And something that can be real-time marketing also really works. So a lot of ways to get good backlinks and backlinks that would stick with, you know, not something with no-follow, things like that that don’t go right. 39:40 Mordy: So that's really important to be aware of, by the way. If you get a link from let's say, Entrepreneur or Forbes.com. Google doesn't follow those links, meaning Google doesn't really crawl those links or consider those links towards your backlink profile. They don't consider that to be a full recommendation. Because there's so many of these websites giving out those links. It's not the same power. Which is another point I want to bring up. Not every link has the same power. For example, if you are a shoe store, and you have a link from, I don't know, from NASA. Well, NASA’s a bad example, they’re in high demand. But if you have a link from a business that has nothing to do with you, versus—and they’re a really big website—versus a link from a website that may not be as big of a website or, you know, have a strong domain authority or authority score. Even though they may not be as authoritative, if they're more relevant to what you do, Google might count that link [as] being far more valuable. In fact, Google just came out this week, and said, hey, we don't actually care about the number of backlinks, what we care about is the relevancy of the backlinks. So having 100 backlinks from a site has nothing to do with your business, versus a site that has, you know, a lot to do with your business. And having only five or six links in there might actually be more valuable. 40:53 Liraz: Exactly, exactly. And this is supposed to be your strategy, just start getting those connections—those real connections—to get these backlinks to your site. 41:02 Mordy: Of course, the best way to get backlinks is content. Which brings me to the content gap you talked about before. So you see that my—hey, myself and my competitor, there are a bunch of keywords they're ranking for that I don't have content for. Maybe I'll create a blog. And I'll start trying to target those topics. It's always important to think not just about the keyword itself, but think of keywords like topics you should cover. So for example, if you see—if you're a shoes website, and you see there's a lot of keywords about boots that you're not ranking for, don't try to rank for that particular keyword necessarily. But maybe you want to create a lot of content around boots that you don't have, whatever it may be. But where do you start? Because there could be a lot of gaps. 41:45 Liraz: So, okay, so a lot of people are ignoring the, let's say, if we have like a keyword gap, if we see a low volume, like 10 searches average [in the] US, some people might ignore it. You know, just like, oh, it's not really good, right? Mordy: No one's really searching for that. Liraz: Yeah, it's okay. But guess what, if you focus on these little wins. These are sometimes—they can be like a sale, like every visit can be a sale through your website, and you're missing a lot of money. So you just need to identify the buying intent. If there is a keyword that is crucial for business, “best shoes for a woman after maternity”. I don't know, I just like, I don't know, really. If someone is looking for that, she is looking to buy a shoe after she gives birth. And that's it—like you have it—this is your sale in your pocket. So just think of the business. Think of what can give you some conversions, and focus on these search terms. 42:48 Mordy: Yeah, that really goes back to what I was trying to say before in the intro. Think about where you fit into this, if there's, you know, again I’m gonna go with my shoe store example. If you're a shoe store, that's something really unique and really valuable. So see where you can capitalize on that. And, you know, I know we think about keywords and traffic, but not all traffic is equal. Let's take the pandemic, for example, imagine last March [2020] at the height of the pandemic, and I am a travel site. I might rank number one for all the keywords in the world, but no one's traveling. Liraz: Mhmm, exactly. Mordy: So traffic, and even with traffic, right, let's say bring people into my site. But maybe they're not people who are going to buy from me, at all, ever. So I know it may be enticing to go after a keyword or topic—again, you have to think about keywords topically—that has a lot of searches around it each month. But sometimes it makes sense to go after those keywords that are more about where you're going to get sales from. And also, it pays to diversify your keywords a little bit. In other words, Google is a little bit volatile, right? Well, more than a little volatile. And one day you might be winning with X keywords. And there's nothing you can do. Google says, “Hey, you know what? It just might be that you're just less relevant, or the topic has changed, or intent has changed.” All the things have changed that are really beyond your control. If you have another set of keywords that you can rely on to bring in traffic and optimize those a little bit more and up your traffic from those, that's a new way you might be able to pivot and stay agile, because Google is a changing environment. 44:20 Liraz: Exactly. You might be surprised that some keywords are just like—people are looking for informative questions. Like you can look for, I don’t know, for running shoes. For just an example. This is not the case, but just for an example. And people, users are just looking for what is a running shoe? Mordy: Correct. 44:37 Liraz: Oh, absolutely correct. But I did a study on this in 2018, if I remember this correctly. For more complicated products, something like technology—buying a laptop or buying insurance. 40% of the top 10 results, meaning four out of 10 results were not sites where you can buy that product. There are sites where you can learn about buying that product. Fast forward to now, and some of those pages have shifted to being 60%—meaning six out of 10 results are about learning how to buy a laptop or learning how to buy insurance. And that does apply to simple products. I know you might laugh at this, but check this out. If you search for “buy toilet paper”, there are one or two informational results about this, I promise you. When I checked this out two weeks ago—so we might go there now and not see it. But that just goes to show you that if you have a blog, even if you're an eCommerce site, you can bring in so much traffic by going and talking about informational things. That brings me to maybe my last question or last topic, 10x content. What is that? And how do you create that? 45:44 Liraz: Wow, I think the best practice for this is just to identify the niches, like small bites of everything. Like, let's say, let's stick with the running shoes, right? If I'll stick with the “10 best running shoes for” etc, etc. I'll go and drill down for the least searchable search terms I want to rank first for this. I don't want to compete with Forbes, I don't want to compete with super affiliates—that can be really impossible for me as a smaller website. So I'm going to tackle the least—let's say 10 searchers, 5 searches, 50 searches per month. That can be amazing for me, because really, there’s not a lot of user websites that are writing about this topic, and I can just easily rank. But I'm also looking at what search results are there in the first place. So you will see huge publishers that are ranking for this even if they don't have the specific content talking about this specific niche. So I’m going to let it go because I will not be able to outrank them. So always look at what's ranking, and don't go for the highest competitive search terms, because it's going to be like a long-term strategy for you. If you want a quick win, try and tackle the least searchable search terms for that. 47:03 Mordy: Correct. And it really goes back, you know, SEO, it's also called search marketing. And there's a marketing element to this. And that's really to be able to have empathy to understand your users, your target audience, really understand what they're looking for, what is their situation? And what would they want out of that content—and then provide that for them. And provide it really. I know content is the hardest thing because it takes time, it takes energy. But if you put the time and you put the effort in—it's a little bit slow going in the beginning, so don't get discouraged. But if you keep doing that you really understand your target audience, you can really create some amazing content. 47:37 Liraz: But don't forget conversion. That is great and can create an amazing lift, but nothing that will do any good. They will just go to other brands that you're mentioning, or you know, just eventually won't buy anything. Just remember to put CTAs, to put calls-to-action, to serve fast pages (loading time), create the best experience, the best design. It's your users, there are your guests in your home, make them feel comfortable. This is always something that you need to remember. 48:05 Mordy: And that's why Google always says—their advice is always to create great content for your users. And that's really true. 48:11 Liraz: It is, it is, it is. 48:15 Mordy: So the last question I want to bring up is keywords. And it's a really hard topic, believe it or not. How strongly do you focus on keywords when you create content? Or will you go after— you see there's a competitor and you see what they're doing? And you see what you're doing? And you see maybe there's a gap? Or maybe there's room for improvement? Or maybe there's a new opportunity here for you? How do you think about keywords? Do you put your keyword everywhere? I know you don't. 48:41 Liraz: Basically, if I'm going to, let's say I’m writing a brief to my writer to write something for me, I will never give them my, let's say my true keywords or something like that. It should go naturally. If the post is not really talking about my topic, it will mention my keyword anywhere. If they’re naturally talking about it, it's gonna be there. Google is smarter you know, it's not like, you know, like 13 years ago, 12 years ago, this is what I used to do. Yeah, I was a spamo website. Like if you asked my mom what I was doing for my career like, yeah, she's spamming Google. This is exactly what I was doing—density, you know, calculating things and everything. But today, Google is super smart. It doesn't really need everything. It doesn't really need to know the exact keywords that you're placing. So I would just tell my writers to just write naturally. Yes. I will just optimize a little bit—page titles, headings if I need to add, but not over-optimize ever. 49:42 Mordy: Right? I mean, I’ll end on this point. Look, if you're writing content, it's really good content. So what other words are you going to use besides the words that describe what you're talking about? Liraz: Exactly. Mordy: Yeah, so write naturally, think about what you're writing, and we're going to end it with this. Liraz, thank you so much. This was so informational and so enjoyable to talk to you. 50:06 Liraz: Thank you, it was my honor. 50:07 Mordy: Have any questions? Please. I'm on Twitter @MortyOberstein . For questions about Wix and SEO, I am Wix’s SEO liaison. So please reach out to me. And I really appreciate you coming, spending some time with us and learning a few things about SEO. And oh, this is just the first in a series of webinars. Keep an eye out for more SEO webinars and another webinar next month. Thank you so much, everybody. 50:30 Liraz: Thank you. Have a good day. Mordy: Bye bye.

Wix and Mangools partner to give you insider tips on conducting keyword research for your site. You’ll learn how to choose the right keywords for your business and use them strategically across your site. Read the Transcript Transcript: Keyword research for SEO with Mangools Speakers Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com Maros Kortis, CMO, Mangools 00:00 Matthew: Welcome to our keyword research for SEO Webinar. My name is Matthew, I am on the SEO Marketing team here at Wix. And my goal here at Wix is to help all of you. My focus is on SEO education. So I'm here to help all of our users learn more about how to do SEO, and how to improve your visibility on search engines, whether it be Google, eBay, Amazon, Bing, all the above. And a big part of that is keyword research. So tonight, we have partnered with Mangools, which is a fantastic keyword research tool. We are going to talk all about how to do keyword research. So I am going to turn it over to Maros. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. 00:51 Maros: Hi, everybody, wow, thanks a lot for the introduction, Matthew. I’m really happy to be part of this. And I hope that after seeing this webinar, you guys will be all set to do keyword research on your own in order to skyrocket the organic traffic of your website. Alright then, let's get started. Well, there are tons of websites created every day. Many people just put some, you know, keywords on them and wait for a miracle to happen. Yeah, most of the time, nothing will happen. And those websites won’t probably get a single click from organic search. And that's why you should do keyword research, if you don't want to end up like that. Keywords are basically the gateway that leads people to your website. In other words, to your business. It's not only about SEO. I would say that keyword research is a business thing, because you'll find information about your niche, about what people search for, and who your competitors are. Take the three [of them] and you have the basic pillars of business success, right? Yeah, well, from the technical point of view, keywords are any words or phrases we use to type into search engines to find information on the internet. So yeah, that's pretty straight [forward]. Well, now let's answer the questions why, how and when to do keyword research. As I already mentioned, keyword research is one of the most important tasks if you want to reach people with your website. So basically, that's why you should do it. How to do it? Well, we are about to find out in the next [few] minutes. But no worries. It's not rocket science, and when to do keyword research? Basically, anytime you are creating a new website, or starting with a new niche or optimizing your existing content, so it's like you can do it every time— 03:19 Matthew: So it’s never too late to do keyword research. 03:25 Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Great. Maros: Alright. Well, before we dig into how to do keyword research, I'd like to stress the fact that SEO keeps changing. And this is caused mostly by Google, and their algorithm updates. Their goal is to show the best possible results. And that directly affects how we do keyword research. While, let's say 20 years ago, it was mostly about putting the keywords everywhere and as many times as possible. Nowadays, it doesn't work just like that. Now you have to focus on quality content, cover the search intent and that exactly means doing these three steps: Finding keywords Analyzing them Using them on your website And today we are going to cover all three. So how to find the keywords or where to find the keywords. It's really connected to knowing your niche. I always say that when you know your niche, you’ll have great initial keyword ideas. Let me show you a quick example. Let's say you have a blog about hiking. I think that you don't need to be a genius to know that one of the keywords you want to rank for is like “hiking” or “hiking trails” or something similar. But the problem [with] such keywords, we call them short-tail or fat head keywords, is their high competition. You know, many websites want to rank for the website, for the keyword, sorry. But if you dig deeper, you'll find out that keywords such as “best watch for hiking” or “best hiking shoes” and you know these long keywords are super relevant keywords for your audience. And that brings me to the next example. As you can see here it's an example for the keyword “shoes.” So let's say you have an affiliate website about shoes, most probably you won't be able to rank for the keyword “shoes.” And if you would, the search intent behind this keyword is a bit different. As you can see, the ranking websites are local stores selling shoes, and of course many eCommerce websites say selling shoes. So if you have an affiliate website about shoes, no that's not the right keyword for you. So to sum up, there's a clear difference between those one word search terms such as “shoes” and so-called long-tail keywords. Typical long-tail keywords such as “the best running shoes for kids”, as you can see on the chart. Typical long-tail keywords usually consist of three or more words. It has a lower search volume, but usually also lower competition. That means that it’s more specific and then leads to higher engagement. So the conversion rates of those keywords are usually higher. Why? Why am I saying this? Long-tail keywords represent an ideal start for your website, if you can rank for the most competitive terms with the highest search volumes. So, but yeah, don't forget, when you optimize for long-tail keywords, you will rank for many other related long-tail keywords. So at the end of the day, their overall potential is higher. A very important thing I want to mention here is that you don't have to focus only on long-tails. If you find the short-tail, one word search term that is relevant and you can rank for it, then don't hesitate a second. Just go for it but we'll talk about it later. 07:50 Matthew: Okay, so it doesn't mean just because you choose one specific keyword for a page on your site, it doesn't mean that it won't rank for other keywords. But because this is a keyword that you chose as your focus keyword, so in this case, “best running shoes for kids”, it could still rank for “running shoes” and “shoes.” But no matter who's searching for those, the main keyword that we're trying to rank number one for is “best running shoes for kids.” Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Fantastic. And can you choose—how many keywords should you choose, when you're choosing to focus on specific keywords? 08:30 Maros: Well, usually, you have like one focus keyword, but it really depends on the type of the page. Like let's say if you write a blog, that will be about “best running shoes for kids”, then this will be your focus keyword. But if you optimize the content very well and your website is optimized well, then Google or even other search engines will understand that your content is relevant to even more keywords. So you should display for those keywords too. 09:06 Matthew: Okay, so what happens—this is a great question from Fabian, “What happens when two pages on your site focus on the exact same keywords?” 09:15 Maros: Yeah, well, that's a mistake. You should avoid it. There's a term for this. I guess, it's keyword cannibalization. So yeah, pick one and redirect the second to the first. As always, make sure that you target one keyword only with one landing page. 09:41 Matthew: Alright, great. Thank you. 09:47 Maros: Alright, then now the question is, where to dig deeper, where to find those keywords? There are many options to find great keyword ideas. You shouldn't stick only to keyword tools or or Google Keyword Planner. There are many other ways to find great keyword ideas. One of them is Google search. I mean, in Google search, if you know how to use it, you can find tons of great ideas. It has Google Autocomplete, as you can see on the pictures. Then you have the People Also Ask section searches related to, and so on. So really, Google search is a great place. And then of course, your Google Search Search Console is full of great data. Competitors, do not forget about competitors. It's also a great idea. And then yeah, specific stuff, such as Reddit or Quora, or other forums that are related to your niche, to the market. And, of course, YouTube or Amazon, if you have an affiliate website, usually you are selling stuff, you are pointing to Amazon to get the commission. Well, Amazon is basically a big search engine. Likewise, YouTube is a video search engine so yeah, you will find tons of keywords [with] these tools. 11:15 Matthew: Amazon is great. Also, for eCommerce websites, if your site is built around an intent to sell. Amazon is a place it's the search engine for finding—people go to Amazon because they want to buy something. So if you're selling something, Amazon's a great place. All these tools that you mentioned. They're all free. That's surprising. So I mean, I know Mangools is a great product, but it does cost money. Do I need to have expensive tools like Mangools to do keyword research? 11:50 Maros: Well, you know, you'll find a lot of ideas, even with the free options. But to be able to analyze those keywords, like to see their search volumes, keyword difficulty and other data. I guess it's worth the money to invest to buy tools. You know, there are tons of keyword research tools starting from a few dollars to really expensive ones. Try them and find out what fits your needs. But yeah, I definitely would recommend investing this money because [it] will return. 12:30 Matthew: For sure. But definitely, at least at the beginning, starting out and using these different places to generate ideas is fantastic. And it doesn't cost a cent. Maros: Exactly. Matthew: Great. 12:48 Maros: Alright. Cool. Now we are getting to the next part, which is dedicated to how to analyze the keywords. So if we have already found keyword ideas, the next step is to analyze them. I'll be honest, I've [written] a couple of keyword research guides saying that there are three most important aspects of keyword research. And then my teammate Vlado came up with The Tripod Rule in one of his guides. And I think that's the best way to describe how keyword analysis works. Anyways, you'll find many guides written by Vlad on our blog. And by the way, he is with us today on the live chat, ready to answer your questions together with guys from our Support team. So give them Hell, seriously. No, I'm just joking. But yeah, they will answer everything you need. So, The Tripod Rule . What's The Tripod Rule ? The ideal keyword must be popular, so it has high enough monthly searches. Then it has to be rankable. That means it has a reasonable keyword difficulty for a website. And relevant—that means the search intent matches your content. Why a tripod? Because, you know, it stands steady only if all the three legs have good ground. So a quick example. If you have a keyword that has a high search volume and low difficulty, but it's not relevant to your content, Google will not show your page for the keyword. Likewise, if the difficulty is low, and the keyword may be irrelevant, but there's no search volume, you will get no traffic so it's kind of useless. And if the search volume and the relevance are okay, but the difficulty is too high. You won't be able to outrank your competitors. So basically, at the end of the day, you won’t show [in] the highest positions. So that's why it's called The Tripod Rule . Cool. If there are no questions [on] this, I would like to go through everything that I just said in a real live example. 15:23 Matthew: Before—actually, I do have a good question that a few people have asked, “What do you mean by difficulty in terms of keywords?” 15:30 Maros: Sure. That's a good question. We'll get to that. It's like—really in two minutes. So we'll show you that on a real example. Alright, well, let's say we have a coffee blog, and we plan to write a new blog post. Yeah, when I was finding out what to include in this case study, I was really working with a lot of stuff, with a lot of keywords. But I'll be honest, I love coffee. Guilty as charged. So that's basically why I chose this topic. So yeah, if you write about coffee, you'll probably know that there are many coffee recipes, and one of them is v60 coffee recipe. So let's say we are going to write a blog post that will be about brewing an amazing cup of this type of coffee. Alright, to do this, we'll just take the keyword and type it into KW Finder. 16:38 Matthew: KW Finder is part of Mangools, it's part of your system? 16:41 Maros: Yep. Exactly. Mangools is a suite of five SEO tools, and KW Finder is included. Good. 16:53 Matthew: Wow, that's a lot of information. 16:57 Maros: Yeah, we'll go one-by-one. And of course, we'll answer the question about the keyword difficulty. I just get this, it's best to show it as an example. Alright, then. Alright, so on the left part of the screen, we can see related keywords that are connected to our main keyword. Then we start to do it—the v60 coffee recipe. We'll start with the search, which is the average monthly search volume. So it's the first leg of our tripod rule. And then we have the KD, which stands for the keyword difficulty. Keyword difficulty will tell you how hard it is to rank for this keyword [in] the highest positions, on the first search engine results page. So that's basically what keyword difficulty stands for. In KW Finder, we have it from a scale—from zero to 100. So yeah, the lower it is, it is easier to rank for that keyword, the higher it is, it will take a lot more work to get to it. Cool, when it comes to the right part of the screen, we'll get [to] it later. So let's focus on the last part. As I already mentioned, we have a lot of keywords here. It can be hundreds. Sometimes it can be just a few. It really depends on the keyword you start with. And yeah, but let's be honest, no one wants to see keywords with low search volumes and high keyword difficulties, right? To narrow down our research, we can use various filters. That means that we can filter the results as we want. We can set a lot of parameters. But I don't recommend [using] all of them at once because there [are] too many. And you can accidentally skip keyword ideas you might be interested in later. So for now, we want to see only keywords that have like a low difficulty, 30 is low. I will show you why. And of course we want to include the main term, right? The v60. So yeah, we click on the set filter. And yeah, now we have a bunch of keywords. That should be our target. 19:46 Matthew: Like if I'm a new site, and I'm just starting out, targeting a keyword difficulty below 30 would be a good place to start? 19:54 Maros: Yeah, everything below 30 is really easy or possible. But you know, do not take the keyword difficulty as the only metric. If it's easy to rank for, it doesn't matter that you will just write a mediocre blog post and you will rank for it. You know, it's not that easy. There are many, many other aspects, your website has to be really well optimized from the on-page SEO point of view, you know, technical stuff, the website should be up and running, no errors. And of course, the content should be in-depth. Really quality one. And yeah, last but not least, you will always need quality backlinks. So keyword research is just a part of it. But keyword difficulty always gives you a great hint [to] whether this keyword is a is a go for it or or don't go for it at all, you know? 20:55 Matthew: Yeah, I think—and if I can add one thing, I think people like you just said, people kind of like to overthink the keywords a lot and say that, you know, they're so focused on which specific keywords to include. But ultimately, it's important that you're creating valuable high- quality content that people want to read, that you or your business are an expert on. So if you're going to write an article about a v60 coffee recipe, make sure it's the best, highest-quality v60 coffee article out there, because if it has everything that your potential customers are looking for in the article. It doesn't matter exactly which keywords you use. If it's creating value for your ultimate reader, they're going to click through and they're going to—you're going to see that page rise. But this is a great way to see what are people really interested in when they look for v 60 coffee. What types of keywords are they looking for? And that and that way you can create the best content. 22:01 Maros: Yeah, exactly. Even you know, at the end of the day, if you write a post that has a low quality or your product landing page has a low quality, then it's not about the keyword difficulty anymore, you know, so it won’t help just like that. Yeah. Okay, cool. Now we have the filtered results. And the keyword we started with—”the v60 coffee recipe.” As you can see, its search volume is around 200. And the keyword difficulty is 30, which is kind of good, but you know, slightly above 200 searches per month is not that good. But what we can do here is to sort the results by their search volume. Once we do this, we can see a really intense, interesting keyword. Yeah, the first one, “v60 recipe”, we have almost 2000 searches per month, and the keyword difficulty is even lower, it is only 27. So it's like kind of a green zone for this. And now, I guess we can move to the right part of the screen to find out detailed information about the keyword difficulty, and also about the search volume. This will help us to double check whether we covered the first two legs of our Tripod Rule correctly. Just to recap, our keyword has solid search volumes, almost 2000 and the keyword difficulty is easy, 27 out of 100. If you're not sure about what score of keyword difficulty is high or low, just click on the icon and you'll see the ranges which is high, which is you know, super-low but the tags are colored so it should be pretty easy to spot the right difficulty for you, even without reading the actual number. Alright, when it comes to popularity, the search volume. I think that it's always great to check long-term data. You know, we have data from like five years ago, and this will help you to find out any seasonality or long-term popularity of those keywords. And if the keyword you are about to pick is a trending topic. In this case, it looks like it's a trending topic, so good for us. When it comes to seasonal keywords, I guess a typical example is the Christmas period, or any other holidays when there are specific terms searched in this period. But I guess there are many keywords that have their own seasons. So that's why I would recommend to check these charts. So you can prepare your content right on time. 25:33 Matthew: So we've covered the difficulty part of the tripod. We’ve passed this—keywords passed the test. We've covered the popularity. Now, how do you understand if this keyword is relevant? How do you get to that part? 25:49 Maros: Yeah, well, that's actually the third leg of our tripod. But to find out whether the keyword is really relevant, we have to check the results of the search, so-called SERP results. I’d say that the SERP analysis is kind of a final part of keyword research. And you should never skip it. Firstly, you can better evaluate the keyword difficulty by looking at the authority of ranking websites. And secondly, it helps you to discover the search intent behind the keyword. So you can say whether the keywords [are] truly relevant to your content or not. Since I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics, I'll focus only on the relevancy. Basically, the only way to find out is to check the actual search results, as I already mentioned. And you have two options for that, you can go directly to Google search and type the keyword into the search form and check the results one by one. Or you can benefit from tools that include these results. You can see the results in the SERP overview over here in KW Finder. But if you click on this button, Analyze SERP. It will open [the] SERP Checker in a new window. And it's basically a tool that is designed for SERP analysis. 27:30 Matthew: SERP. If people don't understand what that stands for—it is the search engine results page. That's the page after you search for a term on Google. And you click enter. It's the page that shows all the results. 27:41 Maros: Yeah, good thing that you mentioned it, sorry, I forgot to explain the abbreviation. Alright, then, yeah, as you can see, the results. It's kind of transformed the results from the KW Finder over here to the SERP Checker. So on the left part, it's basically our SERP. And over here, you can see the URLs of the ranking websites, and of course, the titles. This is a great hint to find out whether we are targeting relevant keywords or not. On top of that, you can check loads of metrics to evaluate the website's authority and popularity. But as I already mentioned, I don't want to overwhelm you with too many metrics at once. So I'll just focus on the relevancy now. And when I mentioned that, you can either go to Google search directly or use tools such as SERP Checker, I mentioned this. When you click on the Snapshots tab, you'll actually see the SERP. It's like this, these are the results for the keyword. So yeah, to do the analysis here, all we need to do is take a look on the ranking website. As we can see, the first website is definitely about a v60 recipe, right? The second website, yeah, we have five v60 recipes by some baristas, I guess. Then, we have videos. Yeah, those videos are all v60 recipes. And then we have other webs—. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, exactly. All those websites are about v60 recipes. So I'd say that we picked the right keyword. 29:51 Matthew: Your blog post on v60 recipe. This is a great keyword to target because it looks like all the other articles are talking about the same subject. 30:05 Maros: Exactly. Well, it can happen, it could even happen that the results over here will be totally different. Let's say, I don't know, an eCommerce website selling gadgets to prepare the v60, it can happen. If this is the case, then go back to KW Finder, try another keyword and do this again and again until you find the right keywords with the right search intent for your type of content. Yeah, well, when doing SERP analysis, there's one more thing I wanted to mention. As you can see, besides the usual website, usual results, you can see some other stuff such as YouTube videos, then we have People Also Ask and so on. These so-called SERP features [appear] pretty often. I bet that you can see them every day when googling something, you know, product carousels, Google Ads, Featured Snippets, Maps and so on, I could continue for minutes. There are many of these things. Why am I talking about this? It's because they kind of influence how people behave in the search results. In other words, they have a slight impact on how people behave. So you can check this little metric on the top, which kind of measures the impact of those SERP features on the organic search results. If there's a Featured Snippet on the top, I guess the websites below will not get that many clicks, as if it wasn't there, right? So what I'm trying to say is that—don't look at those SERP features as threats. They are opportunities for you to make your content even better and more appealing and possibly get even more organic traffic. In our case, including a video is basically a must, you know, can you imagine creating a blog post an article when you are talking about some recipe and you will not include the video. I guess not. Yeah. 32:33 Matthew: I was just going to ask that, because there's a video snippet showing, does that mean, I should make a video? And of course, I mean, it makes sense. If that shows up in the search, that means that Google has understood that people who search this term are probably wanting to watch videos on this. So if you can adapt the blog post to a video later on, that'll help. And before we continue, someone asks, are we going to show how to implement these keywords into a blog post? Yes, once we finished walking through the product, I'm gonna take a look at Maros's blog and we're gonna implement it on a Wix site. So hold on just a minute, and we'll get there soon. Great. 33:17 Maros: Okay, yeah, actually, one more thing, when you create a great video and put it on YouTube, there is even a chance that you will rank with the video in the search results too. So it can really happen that your blog post will be somewhere over here and also your video so you can get like more visits, more clicks at the end of the day. Alright, then, well, that's it, we got all three legs of The Tripod Rule covered. Our keyword has a solid search volume, a low keyword difficulty and it's relevant. Alright, once we are done with the research, there's one one thing I recommend doing—we should always keep track of our research. That means that we should save our keywords into some kind of a list. We can do this directly in KW Finder, just when we click on this little star next to the keyword. Yeah, this keyword is for our blog post—v60 recipe blog post. The keyword list is saved. You can go back to the keywords anytime. Yeah, well this will help you to keep your research organized. I would say that creating a separate list for each blog post you're going to write or each landing page or each product page is a great idea. It will just keep things organized. And yeah, well, when you have everything set and optimized, don't forget to track the positions— organic keyword positions of your website. So called rank tracking. There are many tools for this. You can even use SERP Watcher when you just click on the track keywords and it will do the job for you. Cool. And one last thing for me before Matthew is [on] the stage. If you don't know where to start with the keyword research, like at all—which keywords to start with. It's always a great idea to find out what works for your competitors. In this case, just go back to the SERP overview and KW Finder. Pick one of the ranking websites, these are our competitors. Just click on the three dot menu and choose the option Show Keywords. These will actually load up the best keywords these websites already rank for in Google search. Of course, our keyword, “v60 recipe” is included. This is just another great source of inspiration for your keywords. So feel free to play with it. We have a ten-day free trial. And as far as I know, there will be a special offer sent out to all of you in the follow-up email, right? So that's all from me. But don't go anywhere. Matthew is going to show you as he has already told you. He’ll show you how to use the results of the keyword research we just did on a real website. Matthew, the stage is yours. 36:57 Matthew: Alright, so I'm going to take over. But before I do, I can see on this list, a few people have asked, “Do I need to pick just one keyword for this blog post?” And yes, while one keyword should be your focus keyword, you can use a lot of these keywords throughout the content of your blog posts, like I wrote down just now, “v60 brewing guide”, “v60 coffee”, “v60 pour over.” While they may rank for those keywords, eventually, it will help Google to understand that there's a link to your site. And even though we have v60 recipes, our focus keyword, what we'll do is use those other ones throughout the content. So let me show you what I mean. So I'm going to share my screen. Alright, and you should be able to see that I created a blog for Maros—The Artisan Coffee Blog. And I have a post here that we started writing, that we went over the keyword research for today. And I'm going to edit it. So let's go to our dashboard. And you can see here when I click on Blog, I'll go to my Published Posts. And I'll go right into the posts here. And you can see I've started writing the content a bit. But now that we have done our keyword research, I want to optimize this content a bit. So our main focus keyword is v60 recipe, right? So, I'm actually going to change the title of this article to V60 Recipe, because the title is the most important part. And the main places you should use your focus keyword are in your title, which automatically is tagged as your H1, your first heading in the blog. And then I'm going to go over here into the SEO panel. Okay. And the SEO panel allows us to edit the URL slug, which is the last part of the URL of the blog posts. So same thing here, what I'm going to do is—I'm going to change my URL to v60 recipe. And be sure if you're going to change a live link to do a redirect to make sure that Google, if anybody goes to the old link, they'll end up at the new link. You can click to learn more about that. And also the SEO title and SEO description. So by default, Wix Blogs will automatically take the title of your blog post and add it as the SEO title and SEO description. You'll see it'll take a lot of the text from the actual post. And that's just to make sure that there's always content there if you forget or you don't have time to optimize each and every blog post. Or if you don't prioritize, and you only choose specific ones. That means that there will always be something for Google to read because it's not a good signal if you just have this empty. But we should optimize this text. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to do “v60 recipe.” And I'm actually going to add just the name of the site. Maros, artisan, coffee. And you can see there's a little preview of how it looks at the top. And then, I'm not going to do this now, but I'm going to edit the SEO description. And I'm going make sure that I use the phrase “v60 recipe” as part of the context, and I'll also use some of the other keywords. 40:41 Matthew: “This is the best brewing guide for pour-over v60 coffee.” Now, I'm doing my best not to put as much “v60” as possible, because I don't want to do keyword stuffing. I don't want to overuse this keyword. But you can see I'm over the character limit. But just we had a really nice— there we go, you should best practice is to do a lot more. But just because we don't have a lot of time left, I'm going to leave that as is for now. And, another great thing to use is—to provide a little structure, you can use the headings, you can use your heading two and heading threes to tell Google that these are the sections of your posts that provide a little more context. So we can add more relevant keywords as well to our headers. But another great thing to do is to add at the bottom some hashtags, it's a great way also to signify that there's importance to these words. So I made all the changes, I'm going to update my post, and that's it. That's a great way to use our keywords and blog posts. And what I'm going to do is show you another quick tool here in our Marketing and SEO section. And in the SEO Tools, we have our SEO Patterns, which is a great way to apply a pattern to all of your different SEO titles and descriptions depending on the page type. So in this case, because we're talking about blogs, I'm going to keep doing that. And I'm going to go into the Blog Post Patterns. And what you can see here is Search engine and social media. That's where I'm going to go in and edit that. Now you can see here, I had to add the name of the site manually. But if I want to make sure that every blog post has the name of our site across all the SEO descriptions, I can just do that here. So I'm going to add the line like I did before. And then I'm going to click add a variable. And then we'll take the site name. And make sure that it's the site name. In this case, I didn't update the site name here, but that's what it will pull. So make sure we update the name, and then Save. And now if I have a blog with hundreds of blog posts, all my pages will be updated properly with the host name and the site name in the SEO title. You can do the same thing for SEO descriptions. This is a really powerful tool and it saves a lot of time. So I am going to pass it back. I think we have some time for a few more questions. If you want to take over the screen again, Maros. Let's see if we can answer some questions live in the chat. I think this is a question that comes up a lot, especially in Wix we have our SEO Wiz which, as part of the process, you have to choose three keywords. And I think a lot of times people think that that's the only keyword that you can choose, those are the three keywords that you have to stick with for the whole site. Is that true? Do I have to just pick three keywords and I'm done? Or should I have multiple keywords for my site and different pages? 44:25 Maros: Well, yeah, I mean, the ideal scenario is to have like, one focus keyword for one landing page. So if you have more landing pages, make sure that or blog posts in this case, make sure that each of them targets different keywords. So at the end of the day, like, it's like a tree of content. So you know, you have to have pillar content. Like, let's say if we are talking about like guides, you will have like one ultimate guide that targets, I mean, like a main keyword, such as “coffee recipes”, let's say. And then you can have like tons of other blog posts, talking about the specific recipes, targeting those specific long-tail keywords. 45:19 Matthew: Okay, so the process of using The Tripod Rule , we should use for all of our pages, and every single every time separately. Wow, great. It's fantastic. So I know we talked about blogs in this—we used the main case study of a blog. But can this process work for all types of pages? Like, if I have a store, for example? How would I apply this to my product pages? 45:47 Maros: Well, basically, it's the same, the only difference is that when you have like thousands of product pages, there are some kind of automatic tools that will fill up the title tags and those meta descriptions. But in this case, you are targeting the product keywords, you know, transactional keywords. So always make sure that the search intent behind those keywords is that people [are] using this keyword in Google or any other search engine—they want to buy the goods so you have… Yeah, well, basically, it's the same, you have to check the relevancy, you have to check the search volume. I mean, if you have a great-selling product that nobody looks for, nobody searches for—I mean, it can be kind of useless. You know, unless it's analyzed, it's something you know, we don't know about, and it's gonna be the next huge thing. 46:51 Matthew: I see a lot of people are saying that there's a lot of work to do. And yeah, it is a bit of a time investment. How long does it usually take? So someone does keyword research and optimizes, you know, and I saw somebody mentioned that it took them a few weeks, you know. Initially they did optimization, and their ranking went down, and then it went back up again, over a few weeks. How long does it take to actually see results from this keyword research effort? 47:19 Maros: Well, if I would say any exact exact time period, I would be lying. It really depends on the state of your website, there is also the so-called Google Sandbox, which means that Google tries to understand your content, tries to find out whether your website is trustworthy, that you can use this time to optimize your website as best as possible. But as I said, like SEO is not only about keyword research, you know, there’s on-page factors, off-page factors, you know, link building, but keyword research itself, it doesn't have to take, you know, weeks or days. You can do keyword research for one blog post in a few hours. The longer part—is to create great content, you know, unique content, in-depth content that will rank. So yeah, but telling an exact time—no, this will be a lie. But you know, keyword research pays off. SEO is a long-term process. So it's like, yeah, you can overcome or fool it by doing Google Ads, if you know, for product pages or eCommerce, it's normal. I mean, the difficulty from an SEO point of view is insane. But when you are writing blogs and this kind of stuff, it will eventually pay off. 49:01 Matthew: Yes, and it's true. It's so true keyword, SEO is, is a marathon it's not a sprint, it's an ongoing effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of investment. And it is free, technically. But it's not like you're running search ads. Someone asked, “Should I do search ads as well as keyword research?” I think they both have their own different reasoning. Search ads are great because like you see, they show up right away at the top. But it's like running water, opening your sink. When you turn on the water and you turn on your campaigns and you're paying Google, the traffic will flow and you'll get traffic to your site, really fast. But the minute you stop paying the traffic stops. So with SEO, while it does take a bit more time to climb the rankings and eventually get to number one. It's really hard to move away from the first page, it's over time, it'll be a great investment for you and for your site. And that will ultimately result in more purchases, more visitors to your site that will, maybe more leads depending on what your site is about. So it's really great. And let me see if there's anything else that we want to cover. I think that's it. Thank you so much again Maros for coming. I think everybody learned a lot. It was really interesting, and we hope that we will collaborate again in the future. 50:38 Maros: Well, thanks a lot for having me. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, I think I think we should make something more of this. 50:47 Matthew: Definitely. Alright. Well, thank you very much, everybody, and we will see you at the next SEO webinar. Have a great day, evening, wherever you are in the world.

Learn all about Core Web Vitals in this 1 hour webinar featuring Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead at Wix.com, and Dikla Cohen, Web Ecosystem Consultant at Google. Find out how Wix prepared for the new Google page experience and gain expert advice on optimizing your site’s performance to ensure excellent user experience. Read the Transcript Transcript: Understanding Wix high performance and CWV scores Speakers Dikla Cohen, Web Ecosystem Consultant, Google Brett Haralson, Brett Haralson, Community Manager, Wix Dan Shappir, Performance Tech Lead, Wix 00:02 Brett: Hey everybody. Welcome. Welcome to this Wix performance webinar. I'm your host, Brett Harralson. And let me tell you, we have a jam-packed session in store for y'all. This is going to be a fantastic lineup. Today we're talking about how to optimize for Core Web Vitals. This is amazing. So let me introduce our guests real quick. And then we're going to jump into it. So first Dikla is joining us from Google. She is amazing. And she is also a web ecosystem consultant and she focuses on supporting Google's top partners. She helps them achieve exemplary user experiences, speed and business growth through leveraging cutting edge web technologies, and of course, the latest Chrome web capabilities. Dikla, I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for joining us. And joining us from Wix is Dan, most of you in the Partner community know Dan, he's lurking and answers a lot of your real technical questions. He's been focusing on optimizing sites on Wix, specifically for speed. And most of you know, Dan, Dan's the man. And I'm so glad to have both of you here. This is exciting. So here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to start with Dikla. And she's gonna walk us through navigating through Core Web Vitals, and then we're gonna switch tracks. And Dan's gonna specifically talk about what he's been doing to prioritize performance at Wix. And he wants to talk about also addressing performance myths, and also performance best practices. So let's kick this off. Dikla, let's talk a little bit—if you will tell, us about Core Web Vitals and welcome. 01:38 Dikla: Thanks, Brett. Hi, everyone. And it's great to be here. Thank you, Brett for that introduction. I’m Dikla, I'm a web eco system consultant at Google. And I'll talk to you a bit about Core Web Vitals. So before we delve in, let's talk about what's at the core of Core Web Vitals, excuse the pun. And that is, of course, user experience. And user experience is not something that is easy to always measure. And we've recognized three pillars of user experience that are quite distinct from one another, starting with loading, when is something happening? Is it happening? Am I seeing, on the page, what I want to see? After that we have interactivity, is the page responsive? And is it responding in a timely manner? So as quickly as possible, of course. And then visual stability, is it delightful to view the page? Are things jumping around or not? And so forth. As I mentioned, this is not an easy challenge. And therefore, we've created Core Web Vitals, we've defined Core Web Vitals and these three metrics at that. And the first one is LCP, (Largest Contentful Paint). Then we have FID (First Input Delay). And then we have CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). You can see the different thresholds here. And to ensure you're hitting this target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page load. Now, and one scenario, which you might have already encountered [with] Core Web Vitals is through this announcement by Google search, announcing that a new signal that combines corporate vitals with our existing signals for page experience, will be launching. And in fact, it has already started. So the gradual launch has started in mid-June, and it will continue till the end of August. Now let's talk about each metric. So first, we have LCP, this measures the render time of the largest content element, whether it's an image or text. And if we look for instance, at the top right corner here [for] example, the evaluation continues until the user interacts with the page. So usually, that will be for the first view, the first initial view of the page. In the beginning, you can see we recognize just a bit of text because that's what’s [on] the page but eventually, when the page fully loads, what is recognized as the Largest Contentful Paint is the image there and rightfully so. And the time it takes for that image to load will be reported as the Largest Contentful Paint. Next, we have FID (First Input Delay). This measures the time from when a page from when a user first interacts with the page until the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. So we've all been in situations where we've clicked on something on a page, nothing really happens, it takes some time. That is obviously not the best user experience. And we look here at when the page—the browser is free to respond to the first user interaction, and that will be represented by FID. And then lastly, CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). This is the sum of the strongest cluster of shifts. And this is in order to measure different shifts that are happening [on] the page, which is obviously not a very delightful user experience. So we've all encountered situations where we go to a website, and then some button or image or ad appears, and it shifts the content of the page. And those shifts clustered together capped at five seconds is what will be counted towards TLS. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to visit the different web dot dev links shared here, you can, of course, just visit web dot dev and see all the resources we have there. And you'll get more information regarding each metric. Now there are different tools that measure Core Web Vitals, some of which you might already be familiar with, some maybe not. We have Lighthouse, we have CrUX (Chrome User Experience report), we have PageSpeed Insights which actually is a combination of Lighthouse and CrUX in a way. We have the Google Search Console, Chrome Dev Tools, the Web Vitals Chrome extension, so there's quite a few of them. And each one of them offers a distinct value in order to optimize your user experience. 06:32 Dikla: One thing which is worth noting is that some of them display lab data, some of them display field data, and some of them display both. Lab data is data that is measured on a specific environment, while loading your page. And it is what a user is likely to experience in that environment. This is great for debugging. And this is great for, let's say you have a certain UI change you want to make and you want to understand what is the impact that change has on performance, you can look at the lab data before and after. And get immediate feedback on the impact of that change. On the other side, you have field data field data, also known as real user metrics. It comes from what your users are actually experiencing in the field. This is being collected from actual users visiting your website, this can be collected by you and this can be collected, for instance, Google collects and publicly shares this data from CrUX, the Chrome User Experience report. This is data that is anonymously collected from opted-in users, and it shows what experience they are having on your website. This is the bottom line. This is what you should be looking at when you assess the experience of your website. If you have any questions, and I'm sure you already do, you probably will have more questions as you learn more about Core Web Vitals. As I mentioned before, there's all the web dot dev links and resources already shared. And of course, there's also the Core Web Vitals FAQ. And it is a great place to visit and understand more. The first question here is, unsurprisingly, where does the corporate vitals data that search considers come from? And this comes from CrUX, which I've already mentioned, so [for] real user data, you can use the Search Console Page Experience report. To understand more, as I said each tool is a bit different. The user experience report, for instance, allows you to look at groups of URLs that are grouped together according to the type of page. So that's very useful. And lastly, I want to mention Wix and the great investments and progress they've made in regards to performance at large and [with] Core Web Vitals specifically. Whether it's by evolving the infrastructure as can be read in this beautiful case study published recently, or by making performance data more accessible to users by creating the Site Speed panel for the Partners. Dan will speak about this a bit later. And as a result of this investment, we're seeing really great improvements in Core Web Vitals, you can see this throughout the last year. The number of origins having good Core Web Vitals, has significantly improved for Wix websites. You can check this out at the new Core Web Vitals Technology Report. And let's hope this continues to rise. I'm sure it will. Dan will tell you more about that. And that's it for me. Thank you very much. And Brett, back to you. 10:20 Brett: Thank you. Thank you so much for that Dikla. Before we switch, and I'm really excited to hear specifically from Dan about what Wix has really done here. I did want to ask you a couple quick questions, if I can rapid fire just a couple at you here. Just for clarification, how is it determined if a page passes or fails the Web Vitals assessment? 10:43 Dikla: Yes, so this is calculated at the 75th percentile over 28 days, as mentioned from the CrUX data. So according to that, if a page hits all three Core Web Vitals, then it passes the Web Vitals assessment. 11:04 Brett: Thank you for that. And I know there's a lot of other questions. And I'll try to come back at the end and save those. But I have two more burning questions specifically for me now, you were showing us and we were talking a little bit about site speed tools and measuring tools such as I think a couple of those—there was Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights. I've seen this a few times from some of our Partners’ conversations. And they discussed the difference in the varying results between some of these tools. Can you tell us a little bit about why that may be? 11:38 Dikla: Yeah, that is a great question. So each tool is different, right? And there are various things that can influence the results you're seeing. So the first thing, of course, is the lab data versus the field data, which we've mentioned, right? So that is easily the biggest thing that will create change, just because lab data is running in a very specific environment, whereas field data is for all your users. But even if you're looking just at lab data, for instance, then you will have different results. Sometimes that can occur if the environment is different, right? So if you're running Lighthouse on PageSpeed Insights, or you're running Lighthouse on Chrome Dev Tools, that will give you very different results, because those are different environments. And if you're running it on your own laptop, then you're going to see what the page is currently displaying rather than the Lighthouse run on PageSpeed Insights, which is like an anonymous user opening the page for the first time. Whereas for field data, while it may all come from CrUX, it can differ if you're looking at the whole origin data, which is what you'll see on the Chrome User Experience report, it will be the whole origin data and it will be per month. And if we're looking at PageSpeed Insight, it can be both the origin and the specific page data. And that will be the last 28 days as opposed to a month. And then we have the Search Console report which again shows a bit—clusters together different page types. So each of these tools gives something else and has different insights. And therefore the results may change. 13:32 Brett: Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that just cleared up a lot of questions out there. So thank you, I'm going to rapid fire one more Dikla. And then we're going to jump to Dan and learn specifically about what Wix is doing to optimize here. But since the Core Web Vitals has launched, we've seen changes and updates to the metrics. So my question is, will that continue being the case? 13:54 Dikla: Yes. So Core Web Vitals are meant to be dynamic. So as I mentioned, measuring user experience is a challenge. And we are always aspiring to improve and be better at that. And sometimes that means we will have to make changes to the metrics. Those changes in the past have been communicated. And we will continue to communicate them in advance so that users can properly prepare for those changes, and hopefully, will just get better and better. 14:33 Brett: Thank you so much Dikla. And it's an honor to have you here. And I know we'll probably have some more questions towards the end. But before we do that, let's segue here into Dan. Dan, you've been a busy guy, and tell us a little bit about what you've been doing to prioritize performance at Wix. 14:54 Dan: Thank you, Brett. And thank you Dikla. That was a lot of great information. And hi everybody. Well, yes, as we've seen in Dikla’s presentation, having good performance is very important for the success of a website. It's important in order to get good engagement for the website, to get a low bounce rate. And as we've now learned, it's also important for SEO. And as a result, at Wix, we're investing significant effort and resources into improving the performance of all websites hosted on our platform. In fact, improving performance is a top priority across the entire company, and involves every part of our organization. And as a result of that, many of you are experiencing noticeable performance improvements in your websites without needing to make any changes on your end. That said, it's important to emphasize that different Wix websites do experience different levels of improvement. I'd like to say that improving performance is a journey, not a destination. And there's always more work that can be done. And it's the reality that some aspects of our offering are further along than others. But we're working very hard to push all these aspects along. So one great example of the effort that we've put in is that we've essentially re-architected and effectively rewrote much of what we call the viewer component of our platform. The viewer is that thing, that aspect of our platform, which takes the data from our servers, and uses it to render the websites, the HTML and the CSS that you view, when you visit the Wix website. What we've done is that we've moved a lot of the computation from code that used to run in the browser, onto our fast servers. That had two great impacts. First of all, it reduced the amount of JavaScript that we need to download down to the browsers, it reduced it by up to 80%. And the second thing is that it offloaded a lot of the computational effort, which is especially important for visitors who are using lower-end mobile devices, which as we know, are becoming the de facto way in which most people access the web. Another thing that we've invested a lot of effort and resources into is our infrastructure. We've created and structured more data centers around the globe, we now have numerous data centers all around the world. So whenever you need to visit to hit one of our servers, you will have a server that's closer to where you are, involving fewer hops, which means a faster response. And as a side benefit, it also means better uptime for Wix, because we just have more data centers that we can share across. We are also much smarter about our use of CDNs. First and foremost, all static assets that are used in Wix websites are delivered through CDNs. CDNs, for those who don't know—that stands for Content Delivery Networks. This is a network of servers around the world that essentially cash requests and then respond really quickly, because they're usually really close by to your actual visitors, wherever they are in the world. So all the static assets, as I mentioned, are now delivered from CDNs. So that includes the media, images, videos, it includes the scripts, the CSS, etc. And now also most of our HTML is also served by CDNs. And finally, last but not least, we've really enhanced our processes to promote performance. And what I mean by that is that it's not enough to make all of these improvements just in order to ensure that performance gets better. You also need to continuously watch out [to ensure] performance does not degrade, that it doesn't regress. And the way that we've gone about that is that we've put in processes in place, so that every time we make a change to our code, it actually checks this change. 19:25 Dan: There's an automated process that does a performance test on this change, and compares it to the current result. And if we see a degradation, well, that stops the process, and that change cannot be rolled out. In addition to that, the same as Google monitors sessions and collects the data into their CrUX database. We also monitor all sessions, all Wix sessions also obviously anonymously. We do it by the way from all web browsers, not just from Chrome and this data is also updated to our own servers, which allows us to monitor performance all the time. So that if somehow some degradation, like made it out, something, like, slipped through the cracks, we recognize it really quickly, and are usually able to resolve it before anybody, any one of you actually even notices it. So these are all things that we've done in Wix to ensure that we can provide the best performance that we can. 20:30 Brett: And Dan, I just want to point out one thing real quick, you're getting a lot of praise here, Wix is getting a lot of praise. And I know over the past few weeks or so, specifically, from Partners, they're noticing incredible speed enhancements, you've got some fans here that are attending, and a lot of people are saying, Lauren, her desktop, scores are near perfect. A lot of people are really appreciating this, because it has really changed the game for them as far as speed. So I just want to make sure that the sentiment is said to you, huge thanks to Wix, you're killing it. And you have some fans. 21:06 Dan: Thank you very much, Brett, we greatly appreciate it. So first of all, do keep the responses coming in, both the good and the bad. If you're still running into performance issues, like I said, you know, your own, your personal mileage may vary it, you know, depends on our components. Because as I said, you know, we're making a lot of advancements, but we can't advance everything at exactly the same rate. And also the choices that you make have [an] impact on the performance of your site. And we'll discuss this further along. Before we do Dikla already showed a graph similar to this, it's essentially from the same source. It's from the HTTP Archive, which is based on, it utilizes CrUX data. So this is from a Google tool or Google sponsor tool, actually. And it shows the performance data that Google actually collects, again, from Chrome sessions, for Wix sites and for info sessions of other CMSs. And as you can see the light blue line, that's us. And you can see that over the past year, we've improved by five fold in terms of the ratio of sessions that are good or green for all Core Web Vitals. That means that five times as many sessions, Wix sessions on Wix pages, actually, Wix URLs now get good Core Web Vitals. All three of them, CLS, LCP and FID for the 75th percentile, which ensures, according to what Google has said, the highest possible ranking boost, but even more importantly, from my perspective, a better experience for the people who visit these sites. Now, before we actually go into what you can do, in order to improve the performance of your websites and get the most benefit from all the enhancements that we're making, I do want to address a couple of myths and misconceptions that I encounter when I discuss Wix performance with various Partners, customers, designers, etc. So, the first myth is that well, that you can't improve the performance of a Wix website, that really, you know, only Wix can do it and you're stuck with what you have. And the reality is that the decisions that you make while designing and putting content on your website have a significant impact on the performance of the site. As you all know, Wix is a very flexible platform, you have almost unlimited freedom in what you can do, in terms of the structure and content of your website. And the decisions that you make definitely have a significant impact on the performance of a website. The next myth that I want to address and one that I unfortunately see a lot. I recently saw it again is that you guys need to optimize the images before you upload them onto Wix. For example, one thing that I recently saw somebody write is that you should resize the images, the width and the height to be as small as possible and match exactly the size that you intend to use on your webpage. And that's totally incorrect. In fact, it's essentially the opposite. We automatically optimize images and we do a really good job of it. We worked really hard to ensure that we deliver the minimal amount of information but provide the best possible experience to your visitors. So if I go again to that example of resizing the image, you should, in fact, upload the largest image in terms of width and height that you can get. And we will automatically on our servers, resize it and clip it exactly to the needed size of that particular session. And consequently, we download only the bits, the pixels that are actually needed for that particular session. So you get the optimal usage of data while providing the best image quality. Another example of the things that we do is that we automatically transform the image format into WebP, which is a new, relatively new image format, originally from Google now effectively supported by almost all browsers. 25:53 Dan: So we verify that the browser actually supports it. And if it does, then we deliver the image using that format instead, which reduces the image download size by approximately 20%. There is a difference that you can make by, you know, choosing between JPEGs and PNGs. But we'll get to that later on in my presentation. Another myth that I see is that animations are bad for performance. And if your performance is bad, you should remove all the animations from your website. Again, that's not correct. If you've got, for example, parallax animations going on, they have no bad impact on your performance. The one thing that you should watch out for, is for excessive use of reveal animations. And by that I mean, if the stuff in the initial view is automatically animated when the person visits your website, because the problem with that is that say your header flies in from the right, then until the movement of that header ends, then effectively, you could say that the page hasn't finished loading, because the visitor can't actually read the content of that header text until the animation finishes. So do take into account that if you've got a lot of reveal animations going on automatically as the page loads, you're effectively increasing your load time. And finally, the last method I want to touch on is that large videos are bad for performance. That's really not the case of videos that use streaming, which means that they are delivered really efficiently over the network and they start playing as soon as a little bit of them arrives, you know, like the same as you experience when you watch videos on YouTube. You don't need to download the entire video in order to watch it. So it's really efficient in that regard. And in most cases, it won't have an adverse impact on your performance. And now, we can finally move to the heart of my presentation, which are the things that you can do to get the most out of your Wix website in terms of performance and Core Web Vitals. So I'm going to start with almost the simplest thing, like the basic component of any Wix, of any website, not any Wix website, any website, really. And that is text. You know, it's the text to a great extent that makes the website because the text is what tells your visitor, you know who you are, what your website is about, what they can do on your website. And there are a couple of things that you can do with text to ensure good performance. First and foremost, just make sure that you have some meaningful content, text on the initial viewport, or sometimes referred to as above the fold. That's the initial area of the page that is visible before your visitor scrolls. So I've seen pages that have just an image or maybe even a gallery, and until the visitor scrolls down, there's nothing for them to read. That's from my perspective, that's bad experience. First of all, text usually loads faster than images. But beyond that, I want to know who you are before I decide whether I even want to scroll within your website or not. Also, we usually recommend limiting the number of fonts and font weights that you put [on] the site. First of all, I have to say that from my own perspective, excessive use of fonts can make a site look unprofessional and unappealing. But beyond that, in some cases, text will not actually be visible until its font downloads, the font that it uses, finishes downloading. So if you're using a lot of fonts, it will take longer for all the fonts to download, and therefore it will take longer for the text to appear. One thing that's really Wix specific, you've got this feature where you can upload your own custom font. And we've seen situations where people accidentally upload the same font multiple times, and then use the various fonts that they uploaded, even though it's the same font, multiple times, and that results in the same font, being downloaded multiple times to your visitor’s browser, which isn't great for performance. Now, we are working on having a systemic solution to this, to automatically prevent this from happening. But until we finish implementing it, please be aware of it and try to avoid uploading the same font multiple times for the same website. 30:50 Dan: And another important thing, you know, seems kind of unrelated necessarily to performance—is to ensure good contrast with your text. But let me give you a quick example. Suppose you have white text on top of a dark image on top of a white page background. Well, what happens is that even if the text loads before the image, the visitor won't see the text until the image loads, because it will just be white text on top of [a] white background. Now we work really hard to load images as quickly as possible. But still, like I said before, text usually loads faster. So you know, try to think how you can ensure good contrast in all conditions. And last but not least, avoid text in images. And what I mean by that is not text that's overlaid on top of images, that's perfectly fine. I mean text, that's actually a part of the image itself. That is embedded in the image. It's bad for performance, because until the image loads, there's no text. But it's also really bad for SEO and accessibility. Because search bots and also screen readers just don't see this text. So yeah, it's not good and you should definitely strive to avoid it. Media is the other like, big thing with modern web sites, and by media, I mean, images, videos, and whatnot. So one thing to look out for with images especially, is to check and watch out for extra large downloads. You know, if an image file is tens of kilobytes, or hundreds of kilobytes, there's one thing, but if it's a couple of megabytes, that's another. Now, I'm not talking about the size of the image that you upload onto Wix. I'm talking about the size of the image that actually gets downloaded. There are various tools that you can use to check that like the Chrome Dev Tools that's built into the browser, the Network tab, or the Web Page Test tool, there are other tools as well, if you've got really large downloads, that can be detrimental to performance. I mentioned before that we optimize images for you. That being said, and without going into too many technical details, because I just don't have the time for it. You should just take it as a given that you should prefer JPEGs over PNGs, where applicable. That will result in (usually) smaller downloads for the same size and almost the same quality of images. Usually it's indistinguishable. There are certain situations where PNGs are required. For example, if you need transparency, because for example, you're using parallax or something like that, in such cases, you just have to go with a PNGs. But when you can, definitely do [choose] JPEGs. As I said, the image size, the download size of the image will be smaller, and your users or visitors usually won't be able to tell the difference. [The] thing is and this is interesting that SVG or shapes, as they are referred to in our Editors are actually better than both. So for example, if you can get your logo as an SVG, for example, if you're using the Wix Logo [Maker], then definitely do [choose] an SVG and SVG is smaller, it's sharp from the get go. It remains sharp when the visitor lets zooms in or zooms out. It's always sharp. And like I said, it's usually much smaller than any other image format. Generally, avoid GIFs. I mean, there are, you know, certain cases. For example, if you've got this really tiny animated thing, like an arrow pointing down, but again, watch out for the extra large download, you'd be surprised. But if it's, if you're looking to create some sort of animated effect, just avoid GIFs. Use a looping video instead, just put in a video, configure it to run in a loop and just use that instead. I've seen websites that download a 12 megabyte GIF, and it's just bad for performance. So, you know, in most cases, you should definitely strive to avoid them. 35:20 Dan: Another Wix specific thing, when you set an image as a strip background, you can actually also specify the background color behind the strip, if you make—behind the image, if you make the image partially transparent, that color shows through. But even if you don't make that image transparent, it turns out that this color has value. You can set it by clicking on that tiny fold on the left corner, top corner. And the reason is that that color will show up briefly, while that image loads, potentially, especially over slower connections. So if you specify a color that matches the primary color, the background color of the image, that will result in a better visitor experience, because I have seen situations of like this jarring transition where the primary color of the image is green but somebody set the strip background color to pink, and it creates this really jarring transition. And it also can have a detrimental impact on performance measurement tools. I want to talk about mobile, because the majority of our visitors based on all the data that we collect, something like 70% of the people, even over 70% of the people who visit Wix websites, use mobile devices. So it's really important to have good performance on mobile. So if you're using the regular Editor, the Wix Editor, don't forget to go into the mobile Editor and to verify that your pages look good on mobile. We worked really hard on the automatic creation of the mobile view. But you know, it's still, it's your website, and you know, best. So do go into the mobile Editor, make sure that everything is properly organized there, and that your site looks good on mobile devices. One of the cool things about the mobile Editor these days is that you can both add and hide content specifically for the mobile. So you can hide some stuff that you only want to show on the desktop that's potentially less important because you know, what can we do? Mobile has less screen real estate, so you need to be more targeted. And you can add stuff. So for example, you can hide the less important content and magnify the more important content and make it easier to view on those smaller screens. You can also maybe reduce the number of items in galleries or feeds or repeaters. I've seen mobile pages that are 30 screens long. I mean, who expects a visitor to scroll down through 30 screens of the mobile device, you know, it probably means that the page is probably too long. And there are no free lunches, the more stuff that you put on the page. You know, we try to do things like lazy loading, we're working on making it even smarter. But again, no free lunches. Anything that you put on a page has a certain cost. That accidentally made it into the wrong slide. We'll fix it later. But—so those are the things that I wanted to say about mobile. In addition, there are several general suggestions that I'd like to make. Dikla actually showed a screenshot of our new Site Speed panel in the Wix dashboard for your site. We were really happy that this panel was also shown in the recent Google I/O Keynote. And it's a really useful tool. It has two parts. On the top part you see data from the field that we collect from actual Wix site sessions, live sessions, and we compare you based on that data to other sites within your domain. And the bottom part actually shows data that we retrieve from Google PageSpeed Insights. So it's essentially the same lab data that you would see if you ran Google PageSpeed Insights on that same website. 39:56 Dan: If you're using Velo on your pages, especially If you put in like, a site level script, which effectively impacts all pages, then you may, there's a good chance that you will need to enable manual caching for your pages. That means going into the Page Settings, going into the Advanced Settings, and then enabling Manual Caching and specifying the longest possible duration that's appropriate for you. What that does is that it ensures that the HTML of the page gets cached into a CDN for quick delivery. If you're not using Velo, then in the vast majority of cases, we will do this automatically for you. But if you are using Velo, then you know, we can't really know what you're doing in your Velo code on the server. So we can't know that we can safely cache your content and for how long. So that's the reason why you may need to enable manual caching. By the way, when content is cached into a CDN, you don't have to worry about outdated content being delivered. Because the instant you, let's say, for example, publish a new version of your site, we automatically push that update to the CDN to replace the previous version. Be careful of excessive use of marketing integrations. And by that I mean stuff like Facebook Pixels or the Google Tag Manager. I mean, you know, obviously, they're required, you know, they serve a purpose, you're running marketing campaigns, for example, but make sure to only add those marketing integrations that you actually use. And once you're done with them, please remember to remove them. It's very easy to forget them there to just leave them there, because the page will keep on working but they do have a bad impact on your site performance. Surprisingly so sometimes, I've seen Wix pages where a marketing integrations account for half the loading time of the page. It's that significant. In general, if you're using videos, I would recommend to use the Wix Video Player rather than external video players, because with external video players, we actually need to download those external video players. And for example, the YouTube video player is something like half a megabyte of a download of JavaScript. So just you know, not the video, just the player, it's pretty heavy. So in general, when you can [choose] using the Wix Video Player over the one of the external video players. I already mentioned this before, there are no free lunches, the more stuff you put on a page, the heavier the page becomes, the longer it takes to load. So if you've got really long pages, please consider splitting them into several shorter pages. For example, maybe you can move an FAQ off of the main page. Or maybe you can move, you know the blog, just have a link to your blog, but actually put the blog on some other page instead of the homepage. Again, it's up to you. It's your content. If it needs to be there, then it definitely should be there. But again, be aware that there's a cost to everything that you put on your page. Lightboxes and animated galleries can be detrimental. The reality is that the way in which Core Web Vitals are measured, and the page experience ranking in general can ding you for using lightboxes, for example. Because think about it, your content appears and then a few seconds later, a lightbox appears so effectively from the perspective of Core Web Vitals, your page really hasn't finished loading until that lightbox is displayed which creates an extra delay. Also, lightboxes often get in the way of the main content on the page, which is not great. So yeah, if you're running like a special promotion, you know, it makes sense to use a lightbox. But definitely don't put your primary content like “the who you are” in a lightbox. Put it within your page itself. And don't use lightboxes and automatically animated galleries unless they bring actual benefit to your web page or website. 44:49 Dan: And my final tip is it's so easy within Wix to duplicate either a page or even the entire website. So you can duplicate your site, and then run it through a performance testing tool, comparing the score of your current site to the replicated site. you can use our Version Releases and A/B test. Currently, you know, the A/B test, you won't be able to get separate performance data for the A/B test. But you can, let's say, create a duplicate of your page, use one version for a while and see how it impacts your site speed. And then use another version and see how it impacts your site speed. Or, again, use one of those lab tools for immediate results, you know, go which way you want. Before I conclude my part, and everybody, you can see that I really like to talk and get into the details. I just want to mention that you can follow me on Twitter, I'm fairly active there. I tweet about Wix related stuff about performance related information. I also try to occasionally write stuff on Facebook, so feel free to reach out to me there. But Twitter is where I'm most active. And I tried to follow back. So yeah, you know, hit me up there. And with that, Brett, I conclude my part. 46:20 Brett: So, Dan, I just want to say thanks so much. We have a lot of questions, and I'm gonna rapid fire three to you. But I do want to say thanks so much. And what's so amazing about this, Dan is I love that you're able to come here and show this and talk about some of these numbers and show the performance efforts that's been done at Wix to really, really move the needle. And everybody's seeing this. And I you know, it's funny, because you know, you and I spend time together, and we talk behind the scenes, and we get excited about what's coming. But to actually see it, right? And get to have these numbers and show the graphs. 46:55 Dan: First of all, it will be excellent if you can link to this presentation. But I do want to mention that most of the stuff that's here, and you know, hopefully all of the stuff that's here is available in more detail in Knowledge Base articles, many of which are linked to from the new Site Speed panel. So you can, you know, all our users can just go into the Site Speed panel, they will find links to various Knowledge Base articles about performance, and they expand on a lot of the information that I've provided here. And we're working hard to ensure that they contain all the information. 47:33 Brett: Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dan. So let me throw a few questions out here. Here's one that we wrote down, “The new Site Speed dashboard is displaying that my site's performance is good. But I'm seeing a low score in the initial view in the Google PSI. Why is that?” 47:57 Dan: So as I mentioned, the Site Speed dashboard actually has two parts. The top part, which you see initially when you load it, and then the bottom part that you actually need to scroll down to. So if you're looking at the bottom part, then that should actually show you the same scores for desktop and for mobile, that you're getting from PSI. Because effectively the values that we put there, we just send your site over, your page over to PSI, the homepage of your site over to PSI, run PSI on it, and then just put the data there. Now, as Dikla mentioned, you know, there can be fluctuations in your scores, because of you know, the web and the internet, you're not operating in a vacuum. So you may want to run both PSI, multiple times, and maybe also do a refresh within the Site Speed panel, just to see how the scores jump around a little bit. But overall, that bottom number should actually be the same. Now the top number, or the top values that you see, as I mentioned, those are actually collected from the field. So those are actually the performance numbers that we get from sessions of real people who are visiting your website. And those may or may not match the numbers that you get from PSI because as Dikla mentioned, PSI just runs, loads the site while measuring it in this one particular environment. That environment may be similar, or maybe very different from what your visitors actually have. Now, if it's different, then your users might get, you know, either better or worse experience than what you may see in PSI. Now, what actually determines at the end of the day, again, as Dikla explained, what actually determines [it] at the end of the day, is the actual experience of your visitors. That [is] what counts for the success of your website in terms of the Google ranking. And more importantly, in terms of whether or not your visitors engage with the site and don't bounce, because when I visit your site, I don't really care what your PSI score is, I care what my experience is. Now you can use your PSI as an indicator, your PSI score, you can look at what you're currently getting, make some changes, and see whether it's improving or degrading. And based on that you can kind of draw an inference of what may happen when you deploy it in the field. But that's more or less the value of those lab tests. 50:46 Brett: As always, Dan, a very thorough and precise answer. Dan: And that's a nice way to say that I'm— Brett: Very well-versed. No, no, no, very well-versed. This is an amazing, amazing panel, we have here. Dikla, I want to toss one to you. Earlier, while you were presenting, there was a little side conversation that a lot of the attendees were having regarding some of the extensions for Core Web Vitals. My question to you is, and I think actually Ryan asked this, “Is there a recommended one?” 51:25 Dikla: Well, there's only one official one from Google. It is in the Chrome Store. It's from Addy Osmani, [who] is a senior engineer for the Chrome platform. And I think we'll be able to share a link later with the recording. So we'll do that. But yeah, there's one from Chrome. You can also find more details on the Chrome GitHub page. 51:56 Brett: Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Dikla. Dan, I've got another one that I want to throw at you. So here's a question. “Google Search Console is showing me that some of my pages have ‘needs improvement’, or it's even poor CWV? How will that impact their search ranking?” 52:20 Dan: Ask Dikla, she won't be able to answer either. Look at the end of the day, ranking is up to Google. And what I can say and what I'm allowed to say is based on what Google has said, that Google ranks primarily on stuff like content and, and authority and stuff like that, you know, content is king, people like to say in SEO. And that's the case, at the end of the day, Google wants to show you the things that you want to find. The Core Web Vitals as part of the page experience signal, that's just one of hundreds of signals that are an input into the Google search engine. So if you're in a very competitive field, then it can be—sort of you can think about it as a sort of a tiebreaker. If you've got a certain quality of content, and your competitor has more or less the same quality of content and authority, then that page experience signal can be a tiebreaker. And within it, the performance can be the deciding factor. Now what Google has said in the recent Google I/O, and that's all the information that I can give, because, you know, I don't work for Google. So I don't know what happens inside search. What they have said is that if they look at each one of these three metrics independently, and so you, for example, if you've got good FID, but poor LCP, you'll still get a ranking boost for potentially, get a ranking boost for FID, but not for LCP. So first of all, each one of them is taken independently. And what they've also said is that if you get a poor value for a particular metric for one of these three Core Web Vitals, then you won't get a boost for that particular metric. If you get a Yellow or Needs Improvement, you will get a partial boost for it depending on how close you are to the good part. And the boost plateaus when you reach Good. So once you reach Good, you will get the maximum possible boost for that particular metric, and it won't improve anymore. But like I said, from my perspective, actually the most important thing is that good-performing sites have good engagements. You know, if people get to your site, but then bounce because performance is poor, you know, what's the point? But that's what I can say about it. 54:54 Brett: I think that I think that's interesting. And it was another question I think that was asked as well. “Specifically Is there a PSI score that someone would shoot for to rank well on Google? Is there like a number, a gauge? What do you recommend?” 55:12 Dan: Again, PSI and Dikla, and jump in if she wants, but PSI in and of itself is not a ranking signal. As Dikla explained what Google uses to impact—as a ranking signal that impacts potentially, your rank within Google is the actual experience of actual visitors to your website, as collected into the CrUX database. Not PSI. PSI can be an indicator of you know what you may expect. So for example, if you don't get enough traffic yet, if you haven't published it, then you won't actually make it into CrUX, you only make it into CruX if you have sufficient traffic. So you can use PSI lab scores as a sort of an indicator of what you might expect to get. Mostly though, I would use PSI as a means to see whether you're improving or regressing. So you can look at the score you're getting, make some changes, and see if you're able to push that score up. Now, how will that score correlate to what your users will actually experience? I don't know. It depends. I mean, you know, if your users are primarily coming, let’s say from Canada, where they generally have really fast connections, and people usually have fairly fast mobile devices, a lot of iPhones. Then it might be that your mobile scores will actually be dramatically better than what you might see in PSI, like two times better, three times better. Who knows? 56:50 Brett: Well, that makes sense. That makes sense. Dan, that makes a lot of sense. But I wanted to interject, Dikla, did you want to add to this? 56:57 Dikla: Yeah, I know what Dan is saying, in general about lab data is very true and we discussed it before. As for ranking, I can't comment. And also I don't know. But yeah, so also, as Dan mentioned, again, the bottom line here is to improve the user experience. And that's definitely something that's worth doing and looking both at lab and field data. 57:26 Dan: I have to mention that, again, everything that I said that's kind of related to ranking is not based on any special information that Google, you know, gave us because they haven't. It's all based on my understanding of public information that Google has released, for example, in the context of the recent Google I/O conference. 57:49 Brett: Well, I can say that this has been incredibly jam-packed with amazing info, some awesome tips. Both of y'all are absolute rockstars. I can't thank you enough for coming and sharing all of your information. I think we should probably do this weekly, I’m volunteering both of you, I'm just teasing, I'm teasing. But this has been incredible, incredible. So I want to say thank you on behalf of me, and I know the Partners that love this and everybody else that really want to optimize their sites and be awesome and get found and be successful. So huge thanks to both of you. I want to say thank you.

Wix and SEOClarity partner to give you insider tips on creating a content strategy around SEO for your site. Hosts Matthew Kaminsky , from Wix SEO Education, and Mark Traphagen, Vice President for product marketing and training at SEOClarity, as they walk you through their best practices. In this webinar, we'll cover: Industry best practices for building a content strategy Discovering content opportunities through keyword research What types of content can support your SEO efforts Read the Transcript Transcript: Content strategy for SEO Speakers Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com Mark Traphagen, VP Product Marketing and Training, seoClarity 00:00 Matthew: Hello, and welcome to our Wix SEO webinar, Content Strategy for SEO. I'm Matthew, and I'm a Product Marketing Manager for SEO Education here at Wix. I'm here joined by Mark Traphagen, who is the VP of Product Marketing at seoClarity. Alright, let's go ahead and get started. Mark, welcome. Thank you for joining us. 00:21 Mark: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be with you and with your audience today. All the people in Wix world, greetings, it's good to be with you. 00:31 Matthew: We're really excited to have you. Everybody, we have a treat in store for you. This is going to be a great presentation. Mark is a master at content strategy, specifically around SEO. So I'm going to turn the reins over to Mark. Let's get started. Throughout the presentation, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. We will also do our best to answer any common questions throughout the presentation. So take it away. 01:02 Mark: Terrific. Thank you, Matthew. First of all, I am Mark Traphagen, and I'm Vice President of Product Marketing and Training—my title is way too long—at seoClarity. Basically, I'm helping our clients on one of the world's leading SEO platforms to get to know us better, to get to use us better, and let the world know about what seoClarity does. We're very excited to be here today and excited to have this opportunity to share a little of what we've learned working with thousands upon thousands of sites all over the world over the last 12 years. We’ve helped them grow their content, grow their traffic, get the audience that they want and need—to grow your business, or whatever it is that you're trying to do with your Wix site. What we're going to be focusing on today is something that, at seoClarity, we call the content lifecycle. As website owners, we all know we have to build content. It's one of those essential things that we are going to do—not only for our users and our audience, which should be our first concern—but particularly here, we're talking about SEO. Search engines feed off of the content on your site. But often, we tend to get very isolated in that and think of content as, “What’s the next blog post I have to write? What's the next page that I should fill out?” I want to take a broader view today and lead you through thinking of your content in terms of a life cycle. Let's dig in and describe what we mean by that. We've seen on typical sites, after analyzing a lot of sites over time, a pattern that tends to repeat itself over and over again, where initially the site plants some content. You're getting started, and you think about the initial things you want to rank for. So you build some pages around that, you build some content—that's the planting stage. You get it out there. And if you've done your job well and your site is set up well, and it's optimized for SEO as a good Wix site is, then it begins to attract some traffic and attention over time. It starts to grow. You get excited because you're finally starting to get some traffic. It’s coming up there. Maybe you get so excited, you think, “We've done it! We did SEO, we did content, we're done.” Then what happens is, inevitably, it starts to decay. The search world asks, “What have you done for me today? What have you done for me lately?” There's always something new, something more relevant. There's always new content out there being produced, and the search engines never tire. They're constantly looking for what's the best, what's the latest, what's the most relevant. So you can't let this cycle happen to you. Instead, this is the overview of where we're going today. I'm going to give you a series of steps for each of those parts that we showed you before—planting, growing, and even the decay cycle that inevitably happens. So over time, this is your goal. You're still going to have these waves of planting, and then growing, and then seeing some decay. But with this webinar, you'll know what to do to build this over time. Even though it might come in waves, with a little bit of up and down, seasonality, and other things—this is going to be an upward climb. That's what we're looking to build today out of this content lifecycle. Let's dig into each of the stages of that, and let me show you what we advise our clients to do—what we've seen over the years that builds content success, builds traffic, audience conversions, the things that you're seeking. So, the planting stage, as we said, is getting content on your site. It's where you start. It comes up again and again, because there are always new areas of content. Maybe you've branched out into a new service, a new product, or new area of knowledge that you want to cover. So you begin to build content out around that, and that’s the seeding part. We call it seeding because you never get any plants in your garden if you don't plant the seeds, and your content pages are those seeds. So, the more seeds you plant in your garden, the more plants you’re going to have at harvest time. It’s a simple formula. You could say very simply that more content equals more opportunities. Now, I want to be very careful here and jump right in and say, that does not mean building content for content’s sake. You may have seen some outdated SEO advice like that—just build as much content as you can, you need more pages, and you constantly need new pages. That's not the thing you should be concentrating on. It’s very much more important to always be building quality content that's relevant for your audience, that's well constructed and shows authority, expertise, and trustworthiness. These are the things that Google is getting better and better at sussing out and looking for. You want to make that your concentration. But it's still undeniable that, over time, the more content you have, and the more focused content segments and pieces you have, the more opportunities you're creating for people to find you—and the right people to find you. That all starts with keyword research. Now, that's beyond the scope of this webinar, we're not going to go into detail on that. Wix has tremendous resources that Matthew and others can share with you about how to do keyword research properly. But it all starts there. It still starts there. I know some SEOs will say keyword research is dead. That’s because Google is getting more sophisticated about thinking about things topically. But it still starts at the root. Keywords are the basic words that people use to search, and they are the best clues that you have initially, to what content you should be creating. So, look up those resources and educate yourself on keyword research. That's your starting point. That's all I'll say for now. Another important part of that, I think, is to always think like a marketer. Even if you're a content marketer, or you're an SEO, you can't stop thinking like a marketer in general, which means you have to know your audience. Again, we're not going to go in depth on this—this is a whole other topic that we can provide resources for. But this is just good old marketing 101. First of all, who are my customers? They’re the people who already are interested in whatever my site is about. 07:07 You can find out through surveys, you can find out through analysis of traffic on your site, search queries on your site—there are all kinds of ways to find that out. Next, what are my potential audience? Who do I want to reach? What are they like? What are their hopes, fears, dreams, needs? Those are all the things that are going to inform you, along with your keywords, on your content—and the tone it should have, the level of expertise, and all of those things that make that content highly relevant to your audience. But another place you can go to discover things is the SERPs themselves, the search engine results pages. You go to Google and just type in the main keywords that you want to rank for, and see what Google is ranking. It's one of your best clues. That doesn't mean you should copy exactly what the highest ranking pages are doing, but they will give you an idea of the kind of quality, coverage, comprehensiveness, all these things. Google also provides some wonderful clues sometimes in the search features. One of the best ones that they've given us in many years is People Also Ask. They're showing us actual questions that people have put into Google, that Google sees as relevant to the topic. For example, “what is insurance fraud?” is the query that we typed in. “Can you go to jail for insurance fraud?” Somebody’s a little worried there. 08:29 All these are a little fraught with angst here, but when we’re talking about a topic like insurance fraud, it's going to be in that direction. That gives you a clue even to the tone and type of content that you want to be producing. So, do some actual research on the SERP to find out what kind of content you should be producing. And then, topical coverage. Think in terms of topics moving from the keyword level, to the topical level—the higher level. What are the main topics that we want to rank for? Not just keywords. And how can we cover those comprehensively? Here's an example. This is our blog, but we've structured it at seoClarity now as a resource center. You can see on the left that we have all types of content. You can even select based on the SEO level that you feel you're at, or based on the type of content. I show this to show that we've worked hard over the years, not just to produce all the different kinds of SEO-related content that we think we should be producing, but also to group it into topics and to think about it. Okay, we've covered this topic of the content marketing lifecycle, but what else is related to that? What else is somebody who's interested in that also going to want to learn about or see? So you start to think topically. Then you're ready to move into the planting stage. Our strategy there is to feed the content that we've been producing. You've probably heard this advice before, but it bears saying content is not build it and they will come. You've got to prompt it, you’ve got to feed by promoting via social media, newsletters, partnering. I mean, what I'm doing today—very bold-faced—me partnering with Wix to do this webinar is promotion. It's getting you to know that seoClarity is out there. Maybe you'll go after this and check out our blog and our resource center and learn more about SEO. That's all part of content promotion. It's not direct SEO, but it gets you noticed. It may start to get your content noticed, people may start to link to it, and that makes Google pay attention to you. Another more directly content, slash SEO-related tactic that we promote very heavily at seoClarity is this idea of topic clusters. Once you begin to get a certain amount of content on your site—and you see what people are interested in, what they respond to, and what performs for you—you'll start to get a better idea of the main topics of your site. And those you want to think of as your pillars. A pillar topic is a high-level topic for you. You want to have at least one really good page that’s maybe a little bit longer in content and more media rich, that covers that topic at a high level, but very comprehensively. And then you start to think in terms of—you do some research. Remember those People Also Ask questions? What are specific things within that topic that people want to know? Instead of just adding those all onto that super long article, build those out as their own satellite pieces of content. None of those by themselves are going to get as much traffic. But together, they are targeting an individual segment of your audience and they’re highly relevant to that. Let's look at an actual example of how that would work. Let's say you're a site in the travel field, and your big topic is vacation homes. We’re going to want to have a pillar page, a main content page that covers the topic of vacation homes. Just general information about it, and the main things people would want to know. But then you start to think about it. What are other things that people are wanting to know about, and asking about? It might be things like, “how to buy a vacation home” or “how to rent vacation homes”, “how to find vacation rentals”, “how to rent a beach house for a weekend.” Maybe you can get a little more specific there. “Can you rent a house for a single night” is very specific. But you start to see that people want those types of things, and if that's what they're looking for, Google is more likely to send people to a page that you have specifically about that, than to your general vacation homes page. Then, you want to interlink all of these back to that main page. Over time, Google and other search engines begin to see—this is a comprehensive site. This is a site where anything you want to learn about vacation homes and vacation home rentals or buying vacation homes—this site’s got it covered. So that's the idea of a topic cluster. Again, it's one of the best strategies we've ever seen for growing traffic with your content over time. 13:21 Matthew: Okay, so question In this case, if it's a travel company or a travel agency, maybe the pillar page would be about vacation homes? That would be the topic and then you have all the different types. Can you just do one topic as, like, your main blog? Michelle's asking, “Would a pillar page work as a whole blog? Or is it better to have multiple topics on your blog, or throughout your site?” 13:44 Mark: Yeah, I mean, blog versus site pages, you know—that's a great question. Our advice on that, from a structural standpoint, is your main topic pages—your pillar topic pages—should be high level in your site navigation. So try to create them as actual pages and link them, if you can, from your main navigation. As few clicks away—because, you know, a blog is structured to be the latest at top and your older content gets pushed further and further and further down. One way to indicate to the search engines that this is a main topic is to take these pillar topic pages and make them main resource pages, again, as high in your navigation as you can. Now the other pages, the satellite pages—they can be blog posts, they can be universal pages, whatever you want them to be—as long as you interlink them. Each of these pages you see here, how to buy a vacation home, how to find vacation rentals, would be linked to my main topical vacation homepage. And then, as much as possible—you don't want to over-clutter or overburden your main page. But for the most popular ones, the most relevant ones, link back to them. Maybe at the bottom. Like other things you've seen on web pages. Where other topics you might be interested in—[like] how to buy a vacation home, how to rent a vacation home—link back to those. 15:14 Matthew: In Wix Blogs, we have a great feature that's Other Related Posts, where when you pick up one blog post, you can link to other posts [at the bottom] that are on your blog. That's a great way to do this sort of interlinking, and it's built right into the product. That's perfect. 15:27 Mark: Please take advantage of that. You will be amazed over time, if you do that, the effect that it will have on your traffic. Because Google wants to send people to sites that are comprehensive about a topic, not just the individual query that they had. But if Google says like, you've got this covered well, we're more confident—because people that are just searching for vacation homes, they have these other questions, too. And if they can find that information on your site, that's even more useful. Okay, and “how to find homes for rent by owner”—don't want to leave them out too. Alright, the next stage is the growth stage. This is exciting. Now we want to grow our content, which means we want to use the content that we already have. And we want to say, how can we expand the traffic for that and the audience for that? How can we get more bang for our buck out of that content? Two strategies here. The first one—one's negative and one's positive. The negative one you’ve got to do, and we call that pruning. Obviously this metaphor comes out of horticulture—planting, growing, decay—as we're talking about here. So over time, if you've ever grown trees, you know that as they age they will begin to have branches or even some types of plants that are not productive. They're dying out, and they're actually sapping energy from the tree. A good tree manager will come in, and will be willing to cut off those dead branches, so that the tree will be healthier. It can produce new branches and new traffic. That's what you want to do. So let's talk about a basic strategy for that. I'm going to go through this a little bit quickly, but remember, this will be recorded and you can get this later. You can come back and find all these. We use the acronym ROT here for this pruning stage. So what is ROT? Well, first step, the R in ROT is redundant content. Looking for redundant content—what is that? That can be duplicate content. As you start to build a lot of content on your site, it's gonna happen. You're gonna discover over time that you have pages that are virtually the same. They're about the same thing, for the most part. Maybe they even have a lot of the same phraseology, a lot of the same content on them. Sometimes it even turns out that they actually are identical, but maybe you have two different titles on them or you're trying to rank for different keywords. This is confusing to search engines. There's no penalty for it. Except for the fact that you're probably not going to get as much traffic because the search engine feels a little uncertain about, you know, which page really is the page for that. Kind of related is cannibalization . People mean different things by cannibalization. At seoClarity, we talk about it in terms of—cannibalization is where you have a page and you can literally see—if you're tracking your rankings over time and you can you have a tool that shows you which URL on your site is ranking for a keyword—you can see that Google flip flops back and forth. Google seems to be uncertain. Sometimes it ranks this page, sometimes it ranks that page. You don't want to cause that kind of confusion to search engines. So the fix here—you can go and do some research and learn about these techniques if you don't know them. The first two are a little technical. There are ways to redirect the one page to the other so that if somebody goes to that page, they actually end up on the page that you prefer for them to end up on. You can use canonicalization to tell the search engine which page is the important page for that keyword or that topic. You can merge the content, just bring it together. If there are good elements from both, make one page that merges the best of each. Or redo the lesser page. Change it, make it significantly different so that it will rank for a different keyword. The second is outdated content—second of the ROT [acronym]. Outdated is just what it sounds like. It’s old content. A lot of your old content over time will just be outdated beyond repair. By beyond repair, I mean where you look at it and you realize there's nothing we can do to update this. If you can update the page, fantastic. Do that. And by the way, update does not mean just changing the date on the page. Google is wise to that—that doesn't fool anybody or it doesn't fool the search engine. Update means literally updating the content to bring it up to date and make it more relevant. That can be a good strategy. If you say like, we're an iPhone website, and nobody cares about iPhone 4 anymore, that doesn't get much traffic. The fix is, if it can't be updated, kill it. 19:48 This is a hard thing if you invested so much work and time into your content. Everybody hates to kill content, but think of that tree again, and cutting off those dead branches. It really is going to make your site healthier for SEO in the long run. And then finally, trivial content. By trivial here we mean it's not working for you. For whatever reason, it's just not. You look at your analytics and you say this just never drove any traffic, it never got attention. It's not earning any links. And maybe you've tried a few things. You tried to improve it, grow it, and for whatever reason, it's just not performing. Again, if you’ve given it every chance, kill it. You’ve got to be willing to prune your non-performing content if you can't improve it. However, there are ways—this is more positive now, in the growth stage—to take advantage of high performing content and get even more out of it. We call that splicing. You may know, again, in the world of horticulture, the world of plants, splicing is a technique—especially with fruit trees—where you graft a branch from one kind of variety of a fruit onto another and you produce a whole new variety. You get something new out of it. That's what we're looking to do in this splicing stage. So, splicing simply means figuring out where, on a really high performing piece of content, there may be opportunities to split off parts of that content into its own pages—its own blog posts, whatever—that will perform better overall than what the page is doing now. We recommend, just as a rule of thumb—you don't have to follow this religiously—we recommend to clients that anything where a page is ranking for 3x the average keywords ranking per page for your site is a candidate for splicing. Let me go quickly through a formula. Then I'll show you how you can work that out to determine that. But what you're going to do here is, you need to get the count of your ranking keywords from Google Search Console. Is Google Search Console integrated into Wix, Matthew? 21:58 Matthew: It is. If you use our Get Found on Google tool—it's also known as [SEO Tools]—if you complete the first step, and you use the Connect to Google button, it will create an account in Search Console automatically for you and automatically index your homepage. So you may already have the data there and you didn't even realize it. All you have to do is go into Search Console using your account that you connected to, and you'll have all this information in there, waiting for you to play around with and to check out. 22:31 Mark: Terrific. Another advantage of being a Wix user. So many things are set up automatically for you. It's just there, and you can do it. That's awesome. So you're going to get your count of ranking keywords—I'll show you how to do that in a moment—and you're going to get your count of ranking URLs. That means the URLs and keywords that Google is actually using to send traffic to your site, or at least showing in search. It may not be sending traffic to your site. These are at least showing on search result pages. And you're going to divide one by the other. That will give you your average number of keywords ranking per page. Let's show you how you do that in Google Search Console. So, in Google Search Console, you're going to want to go to the Performance tab. First, go to queries. Queries are your keywords. Queries are the things that Google sees your page is relevant for. It's putting them into search. Then you scroll to the bottom of that page, and you'll see a number down here. It says rows per page, and it shows you how many rows you've got. This is a personal website of mine, and I've got 1000. Numbers in Google Search Console are always kind of rounded, and that’s okay—for this purpose, that’s perfectly okay. So I have about 1000 keywords that my little site—that Google says I rank for, that I show up in search for. You write that number down: 1000 keywords. Next, for the URLs, we're going to go to the Pages tab under Performance. Same thing, go to the bottom, get that last number, 62. So, I have 62 pages that Google is showing in search results for me. Now I take those numbers and say: 1000 keywords that I'm ranking for, divided by 62 URLs that Google has indexed. That comes out to 16 keywords per page average. Using our rule of thumb—about 3x—I want to go back and look for any pages that have about 50 or more ranking keywords, or about 3 times that average. Those are good candidates for splicing. The main takeaway here is just simply any pages on your site that you start seeing, from your SEO information, rank for a lot of keywords—splicing is going to be your strategy. So how do we do that? How do we splice? Well, first of all, you identify the keywords. You can do that from Google Search Console. You focus specifically on the URL of the candidate page, and you find the keywords that aren't ranking well, that are still relevant for you. You're going to have some keywords that are ranking on page one. Those are terrific. Dig down a little deeper, and you find all these keywords that [are], you know, ranking position 27, something like that. But boy, it’s still a good keyword for us. It's still relevant. So what do I do here? Create a new piece of content centered around that keyword. Focus on it. Google is seeing that your present page is relevant for that keyword, but it's not ranking it. It's not really ranking it high enough for it to get traffic. That means you already have the relevancy. Google wants to rank you for that. Give them a page. Specifically build out a great page around that keyword, and then interlink it. As we said before, use that topic clustering strategy, with an existing piece, and sit back and wait a little bit. I bet you'll begin to see you moving up on that keyword ranking. Splicing is such a great, great strategy. We use it all the time. Alright, let's finally move on to the last stage. The sad one. Sad but inevitable in any lifecycle is decay. No matter how good a piece is, almost inevitably over time it's going to start to fall off in traffic and intention. What do you do with that, when something starts to decay? There's only one tactic here, and that is refresh where you can. So let's talk about refreshing. 26:34 As far as finding what to refresh, [here’s a] good place to start. This is back in Google Search Console, again. We're looking at our pages that we're ranking for. I've dug down here now. If you look on the right hand side, where it says position, you see these are all now 12, 13, 14. Generally, that means we're on the second page. There's a lot of variance these days, but generally we think of the first page of Google as having 10 links on it, or 10 sites that rank. So these are doable. These are almost there, you know. They're almost to the first page, which means maybe a little bit of work, of improving some of the things that we talked about already in this webinar, applying that, going in and just spicing up the content a little bit, adding more to it, making it better, more comprehensive, finding opportunities to interlink with other relevant content on your site, all those techniques. These are good candidates. You could drive these up to page one, and start getting some traffic from them. So that's refreshing. Also look for—and you can find this in Google Search Console, again—keywords or pages you have that have high impressions, but low click through rate. So something [where] a lot of people are looking for that thing, but they're not clicking on yours. One of the things that you can do is try to improve your meta description, the little description that Google includes [in] the first 2 or 3 lines after a search result. As you may know from experience, they don't always show the one that you put in and your code into your site. But they often do if it's well written, if it's very well descriptive of the page. You can't get too salesy in it—you can't say things like, “click here, please!” But give a little bit of enticement so that people are interested, because not everybody clicks on that first result. People do scan through the page, and they look at those little descriptions to get an idea of like,which of these should I click on first? So little things you can do to improve that click through rate. 28:35 Matthew: We have a few people who went into their Search Console, and they said they can see the pages, but they can't see the position column. You add it at the top of the page, right? When you're looking at that report? 28:49 Mark: Exactly, there's options that you can have to show which columns to show. Look at the top of that page, and you'll see different things you can click on to show if you want to just include position on that report. Good question. Matthew: Great. Mark: So finally, some ways to refresh. Okay, I know what pages I want to refresh. How do I do that? The simplest and most direct way? Expand the text. Do some keyword research and maybe include some more relevant keywords on the page and talk about those. Don't just throw keywords on the page. Those keywords are clues, like, “Oh, we should expand a little bit here and talk a little bit more about these related areas.” Look at the SERP again, as we said before, the search results page and see if something's changed. Maybe you got behind. Maybe you didn't realize the whole topic had shifted in some way. And other pages have moved on, but you didn't. You didn’t get a clue. Find that out. Then, of course, you know, build it into one of your topic clusters. If that page is on page 2 in Google, but it's kind of orphaned, is there a topic cluster that you can include it in to make it more relevant, more visible? So [those are] all things that you can do in that. Over time, I call it the “lifecycle lifecycle,” because we talked about the content lifecycle, or the lifecycle of a particular piece of content. But it's a way of life, it's maybe a “lifecycle lifestyle.” You want to develop this regular thing of seeding new content, feeding it, to make it begin to get some traffic and to grow the audience that it has. Being willing to prune from time to time, go back and cut out the dead non-performing or conflicting content. Where you can, splicing and taking off high-performing content that's ranking for a lot of keywords, and splitting off to more targeted long tail keywords in their own pages on your site. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. We see time and again, our clients who do this have this upward cycle over time where they're growing their traffic and their relevance. And that's your goal. So thank you so much for being a part of this. Here are the places where you can learn more and follow us. 30:58 Matthew: Alright, awesome. That was a fantastic presentation. Thank you so much. So we tried to answer as many questions as we could throughout the chat. But I do have a couple that I think I'd like to add to this. Somebody else asked early on—they provide a service, they have a few clients that provide the same service in the same geographical area. How can they differentiate their content in order to rank? If they're targeting dentists in Boise, Idaho, or you know, something? It's a very small, niche topic. And it's a very small targeted area. What can they do to kind of differentiate themselves in terms of content? 31:42 Mark: Yeah, that's a great question. Part of that is a local SEO question. We actually have a division called Local Clarity that deals with that. So local SEO is not my specialization. There's places where you can learn more about that. But from a content standpoint, this can actually be easier than you think, simply because it's a great, like—I love that you use dentists because I happen to have a friend who's a dentist in Charlotte, who's built a tremendous SEO presence in the Charlotte, North Carolina regional area with his content optimization. Because he noticed if you go to most dental sites, there's either very little real content—like real, useful educational content. Or if it's there, you can tell instantly they bought this content somewhere. It's a paragraph or two, or they had some paid writer who doesn't really know anything about dentistry just, you know, slap up a few words on a page. When you see that kind of thing in your niche, just by creating better content—by spending some time and thinking about, what are the most important educational things that my dental clients might want to know about, and being the best in your industry. It's actually easier to do content optimized ranking on a localized niche like that. Because you're not competing against huge medical sites or something that are global or nationwide. If you've done your local SEO work, Google knows you're focused on that particular area. So you're only competing against the other dentists in Charlotte, in this case, like my friend. He just looked at their sites and said, I can do better than that, and just took it one by one and caught that project. So I think from the standpoint of what we're talking about today, [the] number one advice I would have is actually go look at the other sites in your niche in that local area. And do better than them. You can do better. 33:44 Matthew: That's always—you have to take a look at what your competitors are doing. We actually did a great webinar together with Semrush on competitor analysis. So I highly recommend you take a look at that webinar that we did. It's on the Wix.com YouTube channel . We got another question. Throughout the presentation, a lot of people have been asking about different keyword tools or different free tools. Are there any tools that you recommend? Or even want to demo? Wink, wink. 34:16 Mark: Funny you should ask. Yeah, this is Spark, our free content optimizer tool. You're seeing it on the left there. This is actually a page on our own website, and it's a Chrome plugin. You can install it for free, use it for free for life. All the information there is yours. But this is also really great for competitive research—not just learning about your own site, but going out and looking, when you start to see, like, what are the sites that are ranking for a keyword I am [also ranking for]? And what are they doing differently than I am, that I should maybe be thinking about doing? It's a great tool for doing that kind of research. So it's not a keyword research tool, per se—that's a component of it—but it’s more of a great tool for analyzing both, how are my own pages doing? from a very simple level, and, how are my competitors' pages doing?. So I'll just walk quickly here through some things you can see this way. Right at the top, you see the page that I'm on right now. It tells me how many keywords I am ranking for, and the top keywords. This isn't a very aged page, it hasn't been around very long. So right now, it's ranking for just one keyword, “SEO for travel industry”. That's a really great keyword for us. That’s good to see. A quick on-page summary, like really basic information about the HTML structure of your page, or a competitor's page that you're looking at. So you can see right off the bat, what's the title that Google sees? What's the meta description that Google sees? All this kind of information A quick usability audit, which is looking at possible technical problems that might be on that page that you might want to think about getting fixed, that might be preventing it from getting indexed, or [are causing] Google to have a hard time understanding that page. A little bit of the backlink information on the page. We draw that from Majestic SEO. We get a firehose feed from them—all of their information, great information on that. You can even do a relevance analysis. This gets you inside some of our tools that enterprise level businesses pay thousands of dollars for. So you can put in a keyword here. Gosh, we wanted this page to rank for this keyword. Put that in there, hit Analyze, and we'll tell you what you should be adding to this page if you want to rank for that particular keyword or topic. And some basic information is useful. 36:41 Matthew: Teresa actually asked, “Don’t we have this info that this extension is providing on Wix?” Yes, you do have some of this information for your site, but this is a great way to see what other sites are up to. If you see another page that's ranking ahead of you for a keyword that you want to rank for, you can easily open this extension and see, okay, what's their meta description? What are the top words on their page? Who's backlinking to them? So you can kind of see what's going on in other pages. Of course, you can see your H1, you can see your meta description in the Editor. But this is a great way to kind of spy on the competition and understand what's going on outside of your site. 37:25 Mark: And our user base, the people that use the Spark tool and love it, consistently tell us that's their number one usage. Just spying on their competitors. They typically have some of this information already on their own pages. So it's a great way to do a quick comparison and see what they're doing. And this is really cool—this is giving you top level analysis from something that enterprise clients pay thousands of dollars to get in much more detail. But we can do high level topical analysis. Looking at the page that you're looking at right now in your browser, we can tell you, here are the keywords that search engines most likely see as relevant for this page. That might give you some ideas [of] where you want to maybe include more of that or talk more about that on the page. Beef that up. All these are ways that you're going to want to use that refresh strategy, or that growth strategy, that we talked about—where you're trying to expand the relevancy of your pages, get them to rank better, [and] get more traffic. If you look up “spark seoClarity” on Google, you'll find it. It's also linked from the webinar. So absolutely free. Try it out and have fun with it. 38:42 Matthew: Yep. And afterwards, when we send out an email to everybody with the link, we’ll also send a link to the extension, as well. Mark: Perfect. Matthew: Let's ask a few more questions. Someone asked about, “At the end, you showed the lifecycle lifecycle, and how you want to keep going. How long does that take for a lifecycle like that to go? What's the timeframe?” 39:12 Mark: I can give the most familiar SEO answer to that, Matthew. What is it? You know what it is? Matthew: It depends. Mark: It depends, exactly. Which is a horrible cop out answer. But in so much of SEO, it really is true. So what that's going to depend on is your marketplace that you're in. And a number of factors. It's also going to depend on your own resources. How quickly can you build content? How quickly can you pivot? How quickly can you apply the steps? In general, the more time that you can give to those steps that I showed you—going through plant, grow, decay, seeding, feeding, refreshing, all those things. The more times you can go through that over the course of a year, generally, I think the quicker that cycle is going to go. Because Google moves slowly. SEO is a process where you're seeding. That's why I think the horticulture metaphor is so good, because you’ve got to seed in the spring to get a harvest in the fall. And you’ve got to think of Google in that way. But the nice thing is scalability. So, in the beginning, it's going to be slow, and the cycle is going to be long. And the benefits are going to be long coming. But keep doing it, don't give up. Over time, especially as you have more and more to work with, because you've been applying these steps, you're going to see that you're going to begin to scale and it will become quicker. Google gets more confident about your site, gets more confident that it knows what it's about, that it's good, that it's relevant, that it's useful to the Google audience, etcetera, etcetera. You're going to find that cycle cutting down over time. So I can't give you any one size fits all answer. In most cases, though, you're looking at—over a period of months, at least. I would say every few months, try to come back, at least, and revisit and do the pruning, and the splicing, and those kinds of steps, that will then be refreshing. 41:16 Matthew: Yep, that's a great point. SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. With every change, you might not see the effects of that change for a while. So it does take time. Have patience. And that actually is a great thing you just mentioned about Google and helping Google understand your site better. Someone asked, “Does buying Google Ads help Google understand and help your site rank better at all?” It's not really related to content, but still might be a good way for— 41:48 Mark : That’s a good question. Okay, I can answer this one. It does not depend. The answer is emphatically no. And I truly believe this. And not just because Google—Google takes every opportunity they can when this question comes up to say, no, no, it's like absolute separation between ads and things. Now, I know a lot of us probably don't trust Google or say it's a huge, mega corporation. Why would we trust what they say? You don't need to just go with what they say. To me, it makes absolute sense that they keep that separate. And here's why. Google's organic search industry—its website search, organic search—is one of the most valuable things on the face of the earth. It's driven one of the largest businesses ever known. It's created untold billions for Google. That's the goose that lays the golden egg, along with the ads. So it's the thing that drives the ads. But if Google search was ever to be—all of that runs on trust. We use Google because we trust it. We trust that we're getting truly organic search results. That the algorithm has our best interests at heart. I guess I link this to my feeling about conspiracy theories in general. The bigger the organization, and the bigger the conspiracy theory—which I think you know, [the idea] that buying ads helps your organic ranking, I think it's a conspiracy theory, because there's no proof of it—the bigger the conspiracy, the more certain it is that it's going to be leaked. It's going to get out eventually. And that's the reason why I don't think it happens, because it would just take once. If somebody leaked out, you know, and somebody escaped from Google headquarters with the evidence and said, yep, you buy enough ads and we send a message over to organic to rank these people higher, that would be the end of Google. Matthew: Yeah. Mark: And so that's why I believe them when they say that. 43:43 Matthew: And also, I mean, there is a place for Google ads in your marketing strategy. It is a great way to generate traffic fast. But, ultimately, Google ads are like a water faucet. When you have it on, and you turn it on, and you're paying Google, the traffic flows. But the minute you turn off the campaign, the traffic stops. But that doesn't happen with SEO. With organic, it does take a longer time to build up. But it is higher quality, and it's more sustainable. You know, even though this process does take time, and the lifecycle does take time, and energy, and effort, you'll see you'll reap the benefits by getting really quality traffic. 44:25 Mark: Another thing, if I may quickly, that the ads are useful for, from an SEO standpoint, is paid ads are a great way to test out keywords. Before you invest in building a piece of content—with all the expense and time that takes—test out a paid ad landing page. If it's working in paid then it's probably worth investing in for organic, and building and optimizing for organic on that. Because with ads, you get very fast feedback—not the kind of feedback you get from organic. So testing is worth spending the money, especially on a new site, to begin to test the waters and see what it might be worth trying to build out organic strategy around. 45:08 Matthew: Fantastic. And going on that, especially if you're a new site, a few people have mentioned that they're just getting started. They’re not sure how to do this for a brand new site, or they're a one man band, a small team, they don't have a lot of resources. How can they go about creating this content? How can they go about creating a content strategy, if they don't have the time to write or don't have the time to do all this stuff that we talked about? 45:35 Mark: Yeah, boy, I feel for you. I know, it's a tremendous dilemma. I wish I could give you an easy answer for that. Because you've got to find—if you want to drive organic traffic, it's gonna be a great source of traffic for you over time—you've got to make [time]. It's like anything else in your business. If you're running a business, you don't have time for anything. Everything is urgent. So, if you had a store, you’d say, ah, stocking the shelves takes so much time. I don't have time for that. I've got to do accounting, I've got to do this and that, and I’ve got to do that advertising. If you don't put any product on the shelves, you're going to go out of business. So at some point, you've got to build some time and priority into this. It's okay to start slow. Like I said, in the beginning, even just my dentist friend—he's in the same boat that you are. So go out and build a few good pieces of content around your most relevant topics, and do it better than your competitors are doing it. And that's the place to start. And then the lifecycle that I showed you, I'm giving you a vision for the future. Because if you plant the seeds, even if you plant a few seeds, and slowly start to grow them, you're going to get, over time, the content library that you can begin to apply those things to. And make those more efficient, make them do more for you over time. So I wish I could tell you how to find more time. That's another miracle for another miracle worker. 47:13 Matthew: Yeah, I mean, also—getting started, you can just do an hour a week. You can set aside time to write a few things here and there. And then over time, it will build up. It’ll become a snowball. And once you see it work, and you see the results, you'll find the time. You'll want to do it. Once again, thank you, Mark. And thank you to all of our Wix users for coming out today. And have a great day. 47:43 Mark: Thank you, Matthew, and thank you Wix, and everybody that came.

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

Author: Miriam Ellis Successful multi-location local SEO is exactly what it sounds like: multiple businesses working together to elevate themselves and the overarching brand’s visibility in search results. That means keeping records of branch/franchisee data, responding to reviews, updating holiday hours, managing social accounts, and more—for each location the brand has. With a little bit of organization and communication, you can lead this effort and bring in more traffic to your locations—both in-person and online. Over my 10+ years of experience in local SEO, I’ve found that the most successful multi-location brands may approach their strategies differently, but they all follow the five steps I’ll explain in this blog post. While you’ll start these steps in order, you’ll need to revisit them regularly to ensure that workflows don’t fall victim to the many moving parts inherent to SEO for multi-location chains and franchises. Let’s get started. 01. Collaborate with location managers 02. Collect and organize branch information 03. Delegate responsibilities between headquarters and local branches 04. Leverage your locations to diversify ranking keywords 05. Analyze performance for red flags and winning strategies 01. Collaborate with location managers When launching a local SEO campaign for a multi-location brand, your first task is to acquire the contact information of everyone that will be involved in the project so that you can broadly communicate how this collaboration will benefit their branch/chain/location. Getting genuine buy-in from stakeholders at each branch of the business becomes so much easier when you kick off with an email like this: Hello [branch or franchise manager]! This is Miriam Ellis from [X agency/X department]. I’m coordinating with everyone at the company for our local SEO campaign. With some work and your cooperation, your branch on X street should start seeing better rankings, more positive reviews, and more customers/sales from this campaign. I’m writing to let you know that over the next X weeks/months, you’ll receive a few emails from me requesting some basic details about your branch. With your help, we’ll meet our deadlines, and you’ll be playing a big part in achieving important goals that should bring meaningful benefits to your branch. Thank you so much for the collaboration, and please reach out to me if you have any questions. While this may seem obvious to some, it’s easy to overlook alerting people to a collaborative effort—which can leave participants feeling out of the loop. It can become much more difficult to secure a location manager’s cooperation if they’re not already aware and involved as you kick off your campaign. This first step is easier for chains (as opposed to franchises) because a single department or agency is responsible for all marketing activity across the brand. It’s harder for franchises, not just because you need all the necessary contact information , but because you should make an effort to ensure that each franchisee is on board. If you’re working with franchise owners, request that the franchisee write back to acknowledge receipt of your message (in your initial outreach email). If you don’t hear back within a reasonable timeframe, write again or pick up the phone. This approach will limit communication gaps and delays later on in the project. Regardless of the particular multi-location business model, teamwork supports effective local search marketing in two key ways: The overall website authority , recognition, and reputation built by the brand benefits each of its branches, both in terms of rankings and conversions. The individual reputation of each branch contributes to the overall online (and offline) reputation of the brand, while also acting as a key source of content opportunities and assets for the brand in the form of pages, listings , social profiles, etc. Busy branch managers and franchisees understandably want to know, “What’s in it for me?” when asked to invest time in a local SEO campaign. That’s why you need to communicate the benefits of participation early on and build a sense of allyship around the project. Pro tip : When it comes to multi-location local SEO, you will have many stakeholders. Account for potential delays by setting very generous deadlines for yourself and everyone involved. While some participants may respond to each of your requests fairly quickly, others will require multiple forms of outreach and lots of follow-up before they deliver. It’s reasonable to predict that the more people you involve, the more time you should allot to benchmarking progress as the work goes forward. 02. Collect and organize branch information Create a spreadsheet and make a column for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and any other significant contact information for the point of contact at each branch of the business. Next, create columns for each of the following headings and outreach to each point of contact to fill in all of these fields: Business/branch name Address Phone numbers (including branch numbers, toll-free numbers, and after-hours phone or text hotlines) Fax number Hours of operation (including holiday hours) Business email address Social profile links Business website landing page URL for the branch X number of photos of the branch X number of videos of the branch Branch years in business Payment forms accepted List of main products/services offered by the branch List of amenities offered at the branch (accessibility, parking, curbside service, late-night dining, etc.) Other information you need specific to the campaign If you’re doing local SEO from the ground-up for a multi-location business, this is the minimum information you’ll need from each branch to engage in competitive analysis , local listing development, and landing page content creation . Refine this sample list based on your campaign’s objectives. Pro tip : Don’t skip verifying the name, address, phone number, and hours of operation of each branch with a person at that location. Clean and accurate contact data is the foundation of successful local search marketing. Seasoned local SEOs have a backlog of scary stories about engaging in work for ineligible businesses at fictitious locations, wasting time publishing inaccurate phone numbers, or mistakenly distributing data about non-existent suite numbers because a business owner wrongly believed adding such elements to their address would help their SEO. 03. Delegate responsibilities between headquarters and local branches Now we come to one of the key points of determination in a multi-location SEO campaign: how much control will each branch have over its marketing? Whether the business you’re optimizing is a chain or a franchise, you need to communicate all opportunities, permissions, and responsibilities clearly to your location managers/point of contact to avoid confusion, delays, and detriment to the overall brand. Ask and answer all of the following questions: Who is responsible for writing and managing the content on the branch’s website landing page? Is a central department directly managing all the pages and creating all of their content, or are they receiving some (or all) of the content from point people at each branch? Alternatively, are branch managers or franchisees given CMS permissions to manage their own pages? Who is responsible for SEO? Are branch managers tasked with doing their own keyword and link research, or are they provided with lists of keywords to target and backlink opportunities to pursue for their assets? Alternatively, is raw content delivered by branches to a centralized SEO team for editing and optimization? What safeguards will you implement to ensure that an overall SEO strategy exists for the brand so that optimization actually increases opportunities to appear in search results (rather than being duplicative)? Who is responsible for creating and managing the local business listings for each branch? Who is responsible for acquiring and responding to reviews , and for analyzing review sentiment? Who is responsible for managing the social media assets for each branch? (i.e., Is each branch allowed to develop and maintain its own social profiles, or does a main social team handle that for the entire brand?) What is the support workflow within the brand when things go wrong with a branch’s online assets? Who can a branch manager turn to when problems occur on pages, listings, reviews, etc.? Answers to all of these questions paint a picture of the marketing structure for your multi-location business. There are risks and benefits of tight, centralized brand control versus a more cooperative approach across the organization. ​ Pros Cons Centralized brand control (e.g., corporate headquarters controls the main marketing for all locations) Streamlined workflows Permissions, brand voice guidelines, etc. don’t need to be shared More cohesive messaging Less SEO work for the local branch’s staff Brands may overlook local talent at each branch More work for the corporate SEO team Cooperative marketing with franchisees/location managers Branch employees may have insights into what their local audience responds to More work for the local branch’s staff The corporate SEO team must keep track of all permissions and communicate brand guidelines Potential for poor management by participating branches (i.e., If a branch neglects its online presence, it can negatively affect the entire brand) Pro tip : Keep updated records of all login information and other permissions—regardless of whether you adopt a centralized or collaborative SEO approach. Employees get new jobs, branches relocate (or close), and these day-to-day events will send you scrambling for emails, usernames, and passwords to manage digital assets (like local business listings) unless you keep excellent records. 04. Leverage your locations to diversify ranking keywords Brands with multiple locations present an SEO challenge (because of how search engines handle duplicate content), but it is also an exciting opportunity to diversify the number of terms your business ranks for. Multiple surveys over the years routinely indicate that a major reason customers patronize local businesses is that they are looking for unique experiences. If your various branches feature offerings that are unique to the locality, then you can bake authentic diversification into both your content and SEO strategy simply because you have different things to promote. But what about when offerings are homogenous across a chain or franchise? How can you diversify your content, local business listings, and social profiles? Try some (or all) of these best practices: Improve the diversity factor of each location’s website landing page. Include customer reviews associated with the branch, exterior and interior photography of the location, staff interviews and photographs, written driving directions, customer interviews/testimonials, awards, and proofs of community engagement by local staff (at a local event or charity initiative, for example). Improve the uniqueness of local listings by diversifying non-primary categories. The guidelines for representing your business on Google stipulate that all locations of your brand should share the same primary category . However, you can parse up a large number of different secondary categories amongst several of your locations that are near each other. This SEO tactic can help the overall brand rank in the local results for more search intents than a single-location business ever could. Meanwhile, unique photos, reviews and owner responses, GBP Posts , questions and answers, and descriptions can further differentiate one listing from another. Diversify social media profiles for each branch. This is best accomplished through a collaborative approach. No amount of localization can replace the lived experience that branch staff can bring to making local social connections. For example, staff at a branch location in San Diego is on the ground, understanding city culture, weather, history, and events that are all unknown to the SEO department at the corporate headquarters in Albuquerque. You can research towns and cities, but it’s hard to scale the hometown feeling that so many local customers value. Where possible, make the most of the talents and lived experiences of branch staff to tell social stories that resonate. Pro tip : Pay close attention to Google’s guidelines to understand the number of listings your brand is eligible for. For example, service area businesses may be allowed multiple locations, but should not set a service radius of more than about two hours driving time. Google sometimes overlooks this guideline for franchises that are uniquely owned and registered, because customers cannot contact branch A to speak with someone at branch B (for example, if two branches of the same septic company are in the same town, but run by different franchisees, Google may not require adherence to their guideline on this). Study the guidelines and revisit them on occasion because they are frequently updated. 05. Analyze performance for red flags and winning strategies An example of the Google Business Profile dashboard. Source: Search Engine Land. Finally, good, sustainable local SEO depends on setting up three forms of analysis for each branch: Professional-level analytics (like Google Analytics or paid SEO software) Access to Google Business Profile Insights for each branch for more detailed information about actions users take on business listings (like clicks-to-site, clicks-to-call, and clicks for directions) Sentiment analysis software (like Sprout Social or GatherUp, for example) for capturing social mentions and assessing review language Working in concert, these three must-haves support your ability to analyze individual branch performance. If, for example, your branch in Burlington experiences a sudden drop in clicks-to-call, or your Boise branch receives multiple negative reviews, or the community surrounding your Billings storefront begins a hashtag about your brand, you need to know that these things are happening so that you can assess the situation (and potentially take action). Pro tip : In multi-location SEO, there is no such thing as being too detail-oriented. There have been well-known cases in which a lack of quality control at individual locations has led to branch closure and overall negative brand impressions, as well as bad press. Ongoing analysis provides you with the necessary business intelligence to keep all branches performing well. Multi-location local SEO: More locations, more opportunities Multi-location SEO is both more complex and richer in opportunity than optimizing a single location. Communicating the benefits that all participants can enjoy (if you’re successful) is a good way to get buy-in, and organizing people and data will be key. Beyond this, today’s array of SEO tools make it possible to keep an eagle eye almost everywhere at once to ensure maximum ROI from your work, and if you can bring the local knowledge and talents of branch managers and franchisees into the mix, you should have a winning combination! Miriam Ellis - Local SEO Subject Matter Expert at Moz Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com . Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Krystal Taing Local search engine optimization (SEO) can help businesses, such as restaurants, attorneys, retailers, and contractors, attract customers by increasing their online visibility and generating more interest in their products or services. Over 90% of consumers searched online for local businesses in 2020, according to a survey conducted by BrightLocal. This just goes to show that, perhaps now more than ever, local SEO can make or break a business. So, if you’re not optimizing for local search, you might miss out on thousands of potential customers who want to shop in your area. Optimizing for local search typically involves: Maintaining your Google Business Profile (GBP) Review management and responding to reviews Using the right keywords in location pages, review replies, and social media content Managing directory listings across sites relevant to your industry (such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.) Below is our overview of local SEO and how you can put it to work for your business. Along the way, we'll cover: Why local SEO is important The differences between traditional and local SEO Google’s local search algorithm Why local SEO matters for Google’s 3-pack Local SEO tips and tactics Local beyond Google Trends in local SEO Why is local SEO important? Local SEO is essential for businesses with physical locations that want to attract more customers. For example, a pizza chain with hundreds of locations across the country wants to show up any time a consumer searches for, say, “pizza delivery.” With this search query, Google’s local search algorithm kicks in, as it assumes local intent by the searcher, and serves up the top-rated pizza parlors near the searcher. Local SEO is also important for service area businesses , like plumbers, for example: A plumber may want to optimize for search queries like “emergency plumbing services.” Service area businesses like these serve a particular region, but not at their business address. By optimizing their online presence for local search (i.e., local SEO), these businesses can position themselves to appear in front of potential customers when they need them the most. Some other industries that commonly rely on local SEO for their visibility include: Retail Restaurants Financial services Hospitality and leisure (i.e., hotels, amusement parks, etc.) Automotive (i.e., dealerships and repair services) Health and wellness Key differences between traditional and local SEO Although companies use both to strengthen their conversion rates, local SEO is quite distinct from the broader SEO that most people think of. Traditional SEO is the process of improving your rankings in organic (unpaid) search results on search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. Some traditional SEO practices include link building, content creation , keyword research, and more. This more general branch of SEO primarily targets online customers, regardless of their location. For example, an eCommerce store specializing in gaming laptops may use the keywords “gaming laptop 2022” and “best gaming laptops” within its content as a way to increase its relevance and, therefore, rankings. For that same reason, the store may also commission freelancers to write multiple blog posts analyzing trends in the gaming laptop industry. This content may help potential customers reach a decision about the right gaming laptop to buy, and, when they are ready to purchase, they might choose the eCommerce store that helped them make the decision. On the other hand, local SEO is the process by which companies try to optimize the online visibility of their brick-and-mortar locations (or their service-area business ). Local SEO explicitly targets customers searching for services and products near them. It revolves around search queries with local intent, such as “restaurants near me” and “gaming computer store San Francisco.” Search engines, like Google, have gotten so good at interpreting search terms that they can now infer local intent even if the query does not explicitly include “near me.” In addition, users also see local search results differently than non-local search results: Local search results typically include a map and the "local pack" of business listings. While it’s important to understand what distinguishes local SEO, one is not mutually exclusive to the other—in fact, local businesses should be well versed at both for the best results. Together, organic search and local SEO drive 69% of website traffic (according to a study by digital marketing agency Milestone), with organic search contributing 46.5% and local accounting for 22.6%. The same report also revealed that: Local and organic SEO drive 67% of website revenue. Local is the best performing channel with 3.93 pageviews per session—the highest pageview to session share percentage compared to other channels. Local traffic exploded in popularity and revenue generation between January 2020 and June 2021—the local share of traffic and revenue increased by 52% and 33%, respectively. Here's a breakdown of the differences between traditional organic and local SEO: ​ Traditional SEO Local SEO Target audience Online customers from anywhere Local customers Search terms Keywords Keywords and local components like “near me” and “near [location]” Devices Desktop, mobile devices Mostly mobile devices SERP appearances Traditional results and search features Google Business Profile and map locations Search intent To find relevant information, products, services, etc. To find relevant services, products, and locations nearby as soon as possible Conversions Website clicks and online purchases Website clicks, route planning on maps, offline purchases, and phone calls Conversion rate Only high for top results Very high for results in the Google local pack since customers want to buy as soon as possible Suitable for eCommerce stores, SaaS businesses, etc. Brick-and-mortar stores, service area businesses Google's local search algorithm It’s impossible to identify every factor in Google’s local search algorithm—Google keeps the specifics under lock and key. However, Google has told us that local search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance: Google defines relevance as how well a local business profile matches the searcher’s query. Distance: Google defines distance as how close the business is to the searcher or search query. For example, “flower shop near me,” and “flower shop in Chicago,” would generate different results (unless you're in Chicago). Prominence: Google defines prominence as how well regarded and popular a business is. This includes “information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories.” Google says it does its “best to keep local search algorithm details confidential, to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.” Still, we can take some clues from what Google does publish and leverage insights from the many industry experts who test the local search algorithm with every update to better understand what Google is looking for. Here are some best practices to improve your local rank, and, more importantly, build trust with your customer: Keep your local listing accurate. Ensuring that your business details, such as address and phone number, are accurate and consistent across all networks not only improves proximity search rank (ranking based on your closeness to the user performing the search), it also helps customers find you in the real world. Complete your local profile. Filling out all applicable fields on all local business directories gives customers a more complete picture of your business while improving proximity search rank. One thing to pay close attention to is your primary business category . This refers to the most specific categorization of your service or business. Google offers nearly 4,000 categories, so choose carefully. Focus on your local ratings and reviews. To increase the likelihood that your business ranks well, maintain high customer ratings and respond to reviews. This can also help to influence the audience’s decision on which business to choose. Keywords in your Google Business reviews may also affect your local SEO. To that end, encourage customers to leave detailed reviews. The more detailed a review, the more information Google has for ranking your business or service. When it comes to ratings, try to stay above four out of five stars—Google may automatically filter out companies with average ratings lower than four stars for queries that include the word “best.” Note: Different platforms (i.e., Yelp, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.) have different review solicitation policies—be sure to follow the relevant policies for the platforms you’re using. Implement on-page local SEO. Aligning your site with Google's idea of relevant, quality content can help determine where local pages, and the associated listings, rank in local search. Accessibility considerations are also crucial to the basic health of a website. A fully JavaScript site that a bot couldn’t crawl won’t pass accessibility tests either. Note: Wix’s infrastructure is based on server-side rendering, allowing search engines to fully read Wix site content. Why local SEO matters for Google’s 3-pack Local SEO greatly impacts your position in Google’s 3-pack (also referred to as the “local pack”), the three local businesses that Google sees as best matching the user's search intent. This is important because local 3-pack listings are typically the first thing potential customers see on the SERP for local searches. An example of Google’s local 3-pack results. The better your local SEO is, the more likely you'll appear in Google’s 3-pack when customers nearby your location search for relevant queries. Showing up in Google’s 3-pack can give you a lot of exposure since it gives potential customers necessary details for making purchasing decisions, such as proximity, average ratings, and clear calls-to-action. Here are a few things you can do that may help you break into the local 3-pack for relevant queries: 01. Optimize your Google Business Profile First, you need to optimize your Google Business Profile by: Completing every section Choosing accurate primary and secondary categories Making sure that your business name is identical to the name you use on your signage Indicating your regular and holiday hours Monitoring and responding to the Q&A section of your profile, where users can ask questions about your business. You can also proactively ask frequently asked questions and answer these as the business owner. Posting events, offers, announcements, and products on your Google Business Profile 02. Improve your review response rate Make sure you reply to all of your reviews, even if they're negative . The higher your response rate, the more likely it is that you'll appear in the local pack results. 03. Add high-quality photos of your business and products The more pictures you have of your business and what customers can expect when they patronize it, the higher your chances are at showing up in Google's 3-pack. Add new photos to your Google Business Profile from time to time to showcase specialties as well as local relevance. Tips to improve your local SEO Below are some tried-and-true tactics that can help search engines increase their understanding of your business, which can ultimately mean more local visibility. On-page SEO signals Help Google crawl and index your local web pages with clear on-page SEO signals throughout your website, blog, and social media profiles. Here are a few optimizations to keep in mind when writing about your business: Content: Create keyword-rich blogs, videos with transcripts, and other content for your site, Google Business Profile, review responses, and social media accounts. Structured data: Structured data is a way of describing your website so search engines can understand it better. Use Schema.org to mark up your content with code that search engines can easily process. Note: For Wix users, local business markup is automatically added to your site’s homepage when you add a business name and location to your account. Store locations and local pages for multi-location businesses: If your business has more than one location , create subpages and location-specific content for each location. Highlight how long each location has been in business and add events specific to particular locations. Ulta Beauty’s store locator. A great example of this is Ulta Beauty , which has a locator showing all of its locations mapped across North America. It also has pages for each store, showing specific details and services offered. An individual location page for an Ulta Beauty store. Citation building for local SEO Local citations (mentions of your business) on prominent regional and industry sites (like Yelp, Avvo, Tripadvisor, etc.) can help establish your business to search engines and users. You should also include accurate business details, such as your address and website, on your social accounts as well. Local beyond Google Google tends to overshadow other platforms—after all, it dominates 83.4% of the search engine market (as of July, 2022). However, that doesn't mean you should neglect other search platforms, such as Bing or Apple Maps. Apple Maps is especially important because of its growth over the past few years. Apple may also release its own search engine , which would make Apple Maps even more relevant. As for Bing, it's the second-most popular search engine in the world and even offers the ability to pull your business data directly from your Google Business Profile. If you are interested in managing your presence and business on Bing Places, you can get started here . As mentioned above, directory sites (e.g., Better Business Bureau, Yelp, etc.) and social media platforms can also add to your online presence and enable you to reach potential customers in more places. Trends in local SEO In addition to understanding Google's local ranking factors, you also need to understand trends in local SEO if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Here are the top local SEO trends of 2022: 01. The rise of non-branded search Non-branded search for brick-and-mortar businesses continues to grow, with searches like “coffee near me” or “grocery store near me” up by as much as 23% from 2019 to 2020, according to a study from Uberall . For customers conducting non-branded searches, proximity, immediacy, and convenience are top priorities, with brand being a secondary consideration. Non-branded “near me” searches grew by 23% from 2019 to 2020 In light of this trend, it has become more important for local businesses to optimize for non-branded search queries to attract more new customers or even returning customers. Adding content that highlights the products and services you offer to your listings and pages is a great first step to capturing more non-branded traffic. 02. “Near me” searches got time sensitive As of 2022, “near me” searches are no longer just about place, but also about things and time. Google has noted an increase in “near me” searches for very specific services and items , such as “where to get a facial near me” and “diving gear near me.” The same study also revealed an explosion of queries that combine local intent with time sensitivity. In the last two years, Google has seen: Over 900% growth in mobile searches for “[service or product] near me today/tonight”—for instance, “affordable hotels near me tonight” and “open houses near me today” Over 200% growth in mobile searches for “open” and “now” and “near me”—for instance, "restaurants open near me right now" The hours listed on your Google Business Profile determine whether you will display for these time-based searches, so it’s important to keep your hours updated . 03. Google infers local intent Google has also started inferring local intent in specific keyword phrases, such as “where can I buy [product]” or “[latest movie].” To see this in action, search any popular movie title and you'll see movie theaters showing it nearby. Inferred local intent for "Top Gun." You can review your search insights in Google Business Profile to monitor which terms are leading to a local result. From this list, identify the most relevant terms so that you can begin incorporating them into your listings and content to help influence your rankings. Local SEO is an investment in your business’s online reputation Local SEO is a long-term game—hacks won't suffice. To get into your local Google 3-pack and attract the customers you deserve, you need to stay on top of best practices and local SEO trends. You also need to avoid the following mistakes: Leaving listings neglected or unclaimed Ignoring reviews and your online reputation Stuffing keywords into your business name and/or content Inconsistency with your business name, address, and other information that may be important to potential customers Just like traditional SEO, building up your local search visibility requires long-term dedication and patience. Start small and make sure to track how your key business metrics change as a result of your optimizations—that way, you can tell when something is working or when it might be time to try a new approach. 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

On May 24, Google Search advocate Daniel Waisberg presented a live webinar where he gave insights into how to use Google Search Console to identify and fix issues that will help you optimize your website to succeed in Google Search. He also discussed how to leverage Google Trends to understand traffic patterns and benchmark your own data against industry trends. Explore webinar highlights and learning resources Meet your hosts: Daniel Waisberg , Search Advocate, Google Daniel is a Search Advocate at Google, working on the Search Relations team. He educates and inspires the Search community, and works with the engineering team to develop new capabilities. Before joining Search, he spent 6 years in Google Analytics, focusing on data analysis and visualization. Twitter | Linkedin 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. He also hosts the SEO Rant Podcast and Edge of the Web’s news podcast. Twitter | Linkedin Webinar highlights and learning resources Optimize content with insights from Google During the conversation, Daniel explained that SEOs should consider optimizing content using Google’s live data about the kinds of content that are in high demand across their networks. The top resources which were mentioned were Question Hub and Google Trends. Question hub Question Hub is a tool that provides a series of questions which are not answered on Google search results. It uses aggregated data from search results to provide content recommendations. Google explains that the tool is designed, “to identify content gaps online” which can be instrumental in making SEO gains. Google Trends Google Trends shows the trending topics that people are searching for and gives anonymized data on the growth or decline of user interest in a given topic. The geographical filters and related queries function provide additional insights and inspiration. Through Question Hub and Google Trends, Google gives you the opportunity to access their primary information to satisfy the needs of users. Creating content in this way is great for SEO and your business overall. Increase visibility with structured data Structured data is a means of giving Google and other search engines standardized information which can be used to create Rich Results in the SERP. Daniel shared two resources to help SEOs improve their visibility with structured data. Rich Results Gallery For those interested in using structured data to appear in Google’s Rich Results, the Rich Results Gallery is a fantastic tool. As well as showcasing all of the Rich Results which Google uses on the SERP, there are links to the the documentation for each result and examples of valid markup . In the session, they explained how you can use the Wix SEO Tools to create and modify structured data and how Wix’s built-in SEO defaults are enabled to support rich results for all users. Rich Results Testing Tool With the Rich Results Testing Tool you can validate your code in real time to identify any issues with regards to your structured data implementation. This tool is specific to Google, so it will show you what is eligible for their Rich Results, and give you previews of what the content may look like in the SERP. Pairing this with the Google Search Console Enhancements report can help you address issues with structured data that is eligible for Rich Results. Improve performance with Google Search Console Daniel explained that Google identifies three drivers on the web: users, publishers, and Google. He explained that as Google sees it, the users are looking for information, publishers are making information, and Google is trying to organize the information from publishers for users. According to Daniel, Google Search Console sits between the publishers and Google to help publishers to create better content for users. Google Search Console enables website owners and publishers to improve performance in a number of ways: Alerts and checks As a Google Search Console user, Google will send you an alert to let you know when there is a new issue on your website. These notifications can help you address issues as they arise and make changes before they cause disruption. Daniel reminded us that site owners should log in to GSC regularly to monitor overall performance because notifications will not continue if the issue gets worse. So having an SEO plan can help your overall performance. Fixes and validation If you have an issue you can make changes to your page by using tools for Coverage Status, Page Enhancements, View Crawled Page, and Test Live URL. Each of these elements will give you further details on how to address your errors. Once you have corrected the issue, you can click Validate Fix, and GSC will update you when they have checked the page and registered the improvement. Monitor and optimize In the Performance Report you can understand your performance on topics, queries and more. This data can help you to create new content or improve content that you already have. In the session, they discussed how Wix site owners can connect directly to Google Search Console to get indexed and access some of these tools for their sites. Additional resources from Google Search Console Google Search Console Training from Daniel Waisberg Google Search Console Query Analysis Data Studio Template Additional Wix resources for Google Search Console Connect your Wix website to Google Search Console in one click Understanding Google Search Console Errors Understanding Your Wix Sitemap