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Watch the replay of the March 2025 webinar Google's Helpful Content Update (HCU) was an algorithm update that demanded a new approach to content creation. In this webinar, you'll learn how to develop a long-term SEO content strategy that prioritizes user intent, unique perspectives, and genuine value in response to these content requirements. Learn ways to work smarter, not harder, by optimizing existing content, identifying high-potential topics, and building authority in your niche.  Hosted by Ashley Segura, head of content at ContentYum, alongside Wix Studio’s Crystal Carter and George Nguyen, the session offers practical tips and recommendations. So whether you're a professional marketer juggling multiple clients or a small business owner with limited time and resources, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge and skills to achieve lasting SEO results. Learn sustainable SEO strategies for your content Join this webinar to learn about: The role of E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) within a content strategy. How to showcase expertise and experience to build brand authority and trustworthiness. Why having a unique angle can make or break your content’s rankings. Meet your hosts: Ashley Segura - Head of Content, ContentYum With 15+ years in content marketing, Ashley Segura is a Top 100 Content Marketing Influencer and host of the "Content in the Kitchen" podcast. She’s launched four marketing agencies and led global marketing teams, driving growth through impactful content strategies. X   | Linkedin Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal Carter is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, Lumar, Semrush and more. X  | LinkedIn George Nguyen   Director of SEO Editorial, Wix George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works and how to use Wix SEO tools. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. X  | LinkedIn

Author: Tamara Sykes For eCommerce brands, hitting the ‘publish’ button at the right time can mean the difference between getting strong conversions and hearing crickets. In our everyday lives, for example, it’s the difference between a successful Cyber Monday sale and your products sitting in inventory while competitors cash in. Whether you’re an agency SEO or part of an in-house eCommerce team, content timing is non-negotiable because understanding when  to publish content can be as important as the content itself. Here’s what you need to know: Publishing practices vary for eCommerce content types When to publish your eCommerce content: Key considerations Notable industry and calendar events Seasonal trends Product launch timelines Trending topics and cultural moments Customer lifecycle timing Evergreen content Data-driven publishing for eCommerce Publishing practices vary for eCommerce content types Before we start mapping out your publishing schedule and content calendar, let’s clarify what ‘content’ refers to. While blog posts are important—key to your brand authority  and content strategy—in the eCommerce world, content isn’t limited to blog posts. eCommerce content also includes: Buying guides  — These are a great trust-building tactic for your target shoppers; they can inform audiences of other relevant products you sell. Ikea has an entire buying guide library, covering every product category that’s important for the furniture company. Category pages  — Your store will have regular category pages for your main product types, but you can also create seasonal or promotional categories as well (e.g., Cyber Monday, back-to-school). Landing pages  — These pages focus on specific products and campaigns. Product descriptions  — This text is crucial for every product on your site, but especially new products in particular. Each content type has its own purpose, which influences when you should publish it. Sure, it may seem obvious: It makes sense that a category page for holiday gift ideas needs to go live before people start their holiday shopping season. But when exactly  are consumers making this type of shopping decision? More specifically, when is your target shopper thinking about what to buy for holiday gifts? These types of considerations are the next step that should always guide your eCommerce publishing strategy. When to publish your eCommerce content: Key considerations Timing your content for the most performance comes down to understanding your audience, your products, and search intent .  That said, here are some key factors to keep in mind: Notable industry and calendar events Seasonal trends Product launch timelines Trending topics and cultural moments Customer lifecycle Evergreen content Notable industry and calendar events Make note of key dates that matter to your business or industry. If you’re unsure about those key dates, do your market research . Tools like National Today  or Meta Business Suite’s Planner also offer a convenient way to discover notable events in your industry. For example, if your eCommerce brand focuses on school supplies, it would be wise to publish your category or landing pages prior to back-to-school season (typically in August) so you can capture eager shoppers during a critical buying period. Or, how about this more specific use case? If your eCommerce brand is:  Located in Columbus, OH Has a loyal local consumer base  Will launch a back-to-school collection  Then publishing your category and landing pages before the annual sales tax holiday  would be crucial.  In 2024, this holiday occurred between July 30 and August 8 . That would’ve meant you should have these pages published before the July 30 start date because if you’d waited until the generic August back-to-school season anecdote, you would’ve missed the boat. Seasonal trends Always think about when your customers will begin shopping. Publish seasonal content  well before the season actually starts.  The back-to-school season example above applies here, but let’s analyze two different seasons for more practice. If your brand plans to launch a Christmas collection , keep in mind that your audience will probably start searching for gift ideas in late October or early November. I know it seems crazy, but this is why your favorite retailers stock their shelves with holiday items so early. They aren’t reacting to the calendar timing—they’re planning for their customers’ behavior. If you sell travel accessories and you’re preparing for the summer travel season , you should know that: (a) People may start looking for vacation products as early as April because the weather is usually getting warmer, and (b) Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. That tells you that you should publish blog posts, buying guides, etc., within the April to mid-May timeframe for stronger conversions. Ultimately, customer and market research will be crucial for your timing here. If you’re not able to conduct your own market research, keep an eye on your competitors and when they launch new pages, products, or campaigns. Product launch timelines New product releases require a layered content approach. This is a valuable lesson from the public relations industry that’s widely applicable, especially when prioritizing timing. You need to build momentum. You need to prime your customers. To do that: Create teasers and share announcements before your launch. Follow it up with promotional landing pages and educational blog posts closer to the release date. Let’s use the summer travel example again—this could apply to a travel product or package launch, or sale.  Since your ideal window is April to mid-May, you can ‘content drip’ (i.e., signal the upcoming product launch, campaign, or sale) on your website with banners or ‘coming soon’ images. As the official summer travel season draws nearer, you could write blog posts discussing travel industry trends and share listicles about must-have items for that year’s travel season. Each of these offers you a way to build buzz around your product. The first is an indirect, top-of-funnel approach, and the second is more promotional. Trending topics and cultural moments Relevant trends can be a content gold mine. Find ways to capitalize on cultural moments or trending topics , and most importantly, make sure that they align with your brand.  For example, if the term [sustainable shopping] is trending, publishing a blog post about your eco-friendly product line or creating a dedicated landing page can resonate with consumers in that moment. Or, if ‘ Mocha Mousse’ is the color of the year , publishing a product page with all your mousse-colored items in January or early February (at the latest) will help you tap into a unique opportunity. Test out content related to trending topics and measure the ROI—if you see an uplift, it may be worth reserving some extra bandwidth monthly (or space in your publishing calendar) to maximize your ability to obtain the first-mover advantage when a relevant trend emerges. Customer lifecycle timing A gentle reminder: Different customers are at different stages of their buying journey.  These stages include: Awareness  — When shoppers first learn about or discover your brand and products Interest/Consideration — When shoppers like or trust you enough to start evaluating what you offer and how it compares to competitors Decision  —When shoppers commit to a purchase or specific action Make sure you create content that addresses each of these stages. Here’s a quick guide: Awareness  — Publish educational blogs or guides. Interest/Consideration  — Focus on comparison content or product demos. Decision  — Ensure your product and category pages are optimized and live. As for the timing, you must base this decision on your ideal customer. For example, divorce lawyers know that divorces spike in January, right after the holiday season, so their decision stage content (mostly CTAs  and testimonials) should be up-to-date and ready for their potential clients. As a member of an in-house eCommerce team or an agency SEO working with eCommerce brands, you’ll want to think along those lines. Evergreen content Last but not least, while time-sensitive content is important, evergreen content  may be the foundation of your strategy.  Why? This content type is reliable and essential to your business’ SERP  visibility. Basically, without it, your target audience can’t find you. Publish this type of content during quieter seasons. Refresh and optimize your evergreen content regularly to keep it relevant and maintain performance. Data-driven publishing for eCommerce In addition to timelines, calendar events, and the customer lifecycle, publishing content for eCommerce isn’t just about guessing when people might be interested.  Remove the guesswork and use data to guide your decisions. Here are three tried-and-true places to start: Website analytics : Review your traffic patterns to identify when your audience is most active. This enables you to gather timing insight that includes the best days and times to capture shoppers’ attention. Search trends : Tools like Google Trends  or Exploding Topics  can help you understand when people are searching for specific products or topics. Even reviewing Google News can be eye-opening. Content gaps : Perform a competitor analysis  to identify what your competitors are ranking for as well as opportunities they don’t rank for. Then, create and publish content to fill those gaps. Again, make sure they align with your audience; or, as I love to say, don’t copy their strategy—adapt it to your brand. Publish with purpose for maximum ROI For eCommerce content, it’s not just about creating great content; it’s about delivering it at the right moment to capture your audience’s attention and drive conversions. By planning around key events, trends, and customer behaviors—and using data to back up your decisions—you’ll set your eCommerce brand up for success. So, put what you’ve learned here into action. Whether you’re an agency SEO or in-house eCommerce team member, take five minutes to evaluate your content calendar for the next month and make sure you’re not just publishing content, but publishing it with purpose. Tamara Sykes - Head of Client Content Strategy, Stacker Tamara Sykes is a Caribbean-born PR pro who shapes brands through impactful content and communication strategies. With 10+ years of experience, she is a brand consultant and the head of client content strategy at Stacker.  Linkedin

Author: Ashley Segura A lot has happened since Google’s Helpful Content Update (HCU) back in 2022, causing publishers and brands to rethink how they approach content. Some websites lost so much traffic they closed their digital doors. While other brands, like Reddit, saw huge traffic increases.  And for the rest of us? It’s been a rollercoaster of algorithm updates , strategy pivots, and endless debates over what helpful content  really is. Here’s a quick look at how HCU has evolved since its official launch: With each update, specific industries, like gaming, product reviews, and travel took hit after hit. Many brands saw their traffic nosedive and others pivoted, changing their content strategies in an attempt to bring back traffic.  For some, the answer was clear—Google had finally cracked down on thin, keyword-stuffed, and/or AI-spun content. But for others, the question remained: What exactly does Google consider helpful?  Now that we’re three years in, we can more concretely define what helpful content means to improve visibility on Google and genuinely help potential customers.  Table of contents: The true definition of ‘helpful’ content How to optimize content after the HCU Create content for users Identify topics based on your audience, not volume Guide users with internal links Optimize your author bios Prioritize updating content over producing volume Go beyond keywords: It’s all about unique takes The true definition of ‘helpful’ content  Google was kind enough to provide a self-assessment  full of questions to help you determine whether your content is helpful.  Google’s self-assessment for helpful content (truncated). Source: Google. Some argue the true benefit of this assessment, but it does highlight a clear standard for content that performs well. It’s content that: Truly addresses the intent behind a search Offers a unique take on the subject Is written by someone who has the expertise and authority to contribute to the conversation That’s where E-E-A-T  (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) comes into play and is the defining characteristic of helpful content in 2025. Expertise Helpful content is written by someone with subject matter expertise. For example, a food blogger that specializes in creating baked goods recipes should probably stay away from creating a new recipe about unrelated types of cuisine, like salmon skin hand rolls.  Instead, focus on creating pillar pieces of content  around your subject matter expertise (in the case of our food blogger, that might be artisan breads and pastries).  What if you’re an expert in multiple subject areas? You can still create helpful content that successfully demonstrates your expertise. The key is to niche down and create dedicated content for each topic, while reinforcing your multiple expertises through your author bio (more on this later), social media presence, and guest posts on websites relevant to each niche.  This is where a well-planned strategy that encompasses pillar content around topics that represent your specific knowledge across multiple niches comes into play.  Experience It’s difficult to showcase your expertise on a subject without sharing your experience. You don’t need decades of experience for Google to recognize your credibility. What matters is how you share your first-hand experience and apply it to the content you create.  Lean into real-world examples when creating content . Share those personal insights and hands-on experiences instead of only sharing generic facts and data.  Tell a story that includes:  Your personal experiences How you resolved the issue What others can learn from your experiences to demonstrate your firsthand knowledge Authoritativeness To cultivate brand authority , it’s incredibly helpful to have the reputation to back your expertise. As part of your marketing strategy, prioritize securing brand mentions on:  Relevant websites Guest spots on webinars and podcasts Speaking opportunities at events If your palms are sweating just by reading that, then there are other ways to establish credibility without getting on camera or on stage. You can dust off those link building skills  and secure links on relevant,  trusted websites.  Head to forums like Reddit  and Quora and start responding to comments. Avoid only dropping an emoji (that might come off as salesy or spammy) and instead add an informative comment to a conversation, actually contributing to the topic/thread. Between this, securing relevant backlinks  within your niche, and collaborating with relevant brands, you can gradually build authority—helping your content stand out and rank higher. Trustworthiness Lastly (and perhaps most importantly), include honest and well-researched information in your content. If I started this article off by telling you the HCU rolled out in January 2020 (years before it actually did), I would likely have lost your trust moving forward.  If you have a technical subject matter or worse, a controversial one, include sources with any facts or data you provide. Do your due diligence to vet each source, ensuring they have the credibility to produce such data.  Trust isn’t only about sharing accurate information—it’s also about creating a smooth, user-friendly experience . If intrusive pop-ups keep interrupting as I try to read your content, it doesn’t just feel frustrating—it makes your brand seem pushy and less trustworthy.  Before we move on, it’s worth emphasizing that each aspect of E-E-A-T complements one another. If you put effort towards establishing your authority within a niche, you’re naturally going to share your expertise and experience while establishing trust. How to optimize content after the HCU From the HCU, we’ve learned that prioritizing E-E-A-T in your overall content strategy is more likely to produce content that is genuinely valuable and helpful. Yet, there’s still some confusion about how to optimize this helpful content to ensure it’s not seen as spam.   So, let’s break down some of the best ways to optimize your content post-HCU: Create content for users Identify topics based on your audience, not volume Guide users with internal links Optimize your author bios Prioritize content updates over content volume Create content for   users The HCU has helped us break away from traditional (and sometimes spammy) optimization tactics, like keyword stuffing and over-optimizing content. Instead, the aftereffects of the HCU encouraged us (now more than ever) to put the user at the forefront of our content and understand keyword intent .  To do this, you first need to understand why a user is searching for something.  User intent Description Informational Researching a topic (oftentimes before making a purchase) Commercial Looking for a specific product or service Transactional Trying to complete an action (e.g., newsletter signup or purchase) Navigational Searching for a specific brand Before you create a new piece of content or prepare to update an existing piece, ask yourself what a user wants out of this topic . Why are they searching in the first place? The answers will help guide your content optimizations and ensure you’re providing exactly what the user is searching for.  This results in a better user experience and a much more natural way of making your content helpful.  Identify topics based on your audience, not volume While we’re on the subject of users, let’s rewind a bit and identify topics that they are interested in. Instead of focusing your entire content strategy on keyword research, let’s identify topics that users actually want to learn. If you have a sales and/or customer success team, connect with them to identify questions that potential and existing customers are asking . These make great new topic ideas!  You can also perform a content gap analysis  to identify new topics that your demographic is actively searching for. These are great topic ideas that are more likely to generate traffic because the demand is there, and the competition isn’t delivering exactly what the user wants out of the topic.  Take these new topic ideas and go into forums and Facebook groups to see what the real conversation behind the topics looks like. What kinds of questions are people asking, what is the sentiment, and what do they really want to know?  While you’re listening to the conversation, consider what kind of content medium will best deliver the message the user is looking for. A 3,000-word blog post might be too long when the user just wants to know why your SaaS product is better than Joe’s SaaS product.  Instead, package that information into something easily digestible, like a 30-second video that shouts exactly what makes your product unique. Add a short, 750-word blog post with a table chart that highlights the differences between the products. This article  explaining Jasper.ai’s features and benefits does a great job of showing and telling in a format that fits a user evaluating AI tools.  When you think of how to optimize your content, making it easy for the user to get exactly what they want should be your top priority.  Guide users with internal links You can’t talk about optimizing helpful content without talking about internal links. These link opportunities tell a story and guide users to their next logical step on the customer journey, while also addressing primary and secondary user intent.  Provide links on pillar content (primary intent) to supporting posts (secondary intent) to keep users engaged and help further establish your authority on a topic.  Having secondary topics that you can link to (in the case of our baking example from earlier, brownie toppings and the best brownie pans) helps strengthen your site’s topical authority  and reinforces its E-E-A-T. Here’s an entire guide  on how to improve your internal linking.  Optimize your author bios So many bio pages don’t explain the full story of who the author is and why they contribute to the conversation. Flex your expertise and authority with well-optimized author bio pages for everyone who authors content on your website. An example of an author bio on the Wix SEO Learning Hub. To create an authoritative author bio page, include things like: Relevant certifications Any honors or recognitions  Number of years of professional experience with the subject Links to industry contributions and published work Hands-on experience (e.g., “Tested over 10 coffee brownie recipes” or “Baking for 4 years”) If it’s a bit difficult for you to talk about yourself and highlight all that greatness, put the above information in bullet format and drop it into ChatGPT.  Give ChatGPT  a very specific prompt, like this: “I need to put together a bio for my author bio page. I want to emphasize how I’m an expert baker and have personal experience creating baked goods recipes. Act like a professional copywriter and write an author bio in my tone using fun and catchy phrases and lots of imagery that a baker would use. Here is the information I want to highlight [paste bullets]. Write at least 500 words and let me know if you need any additional information about me to create a well-rounded, optimized author bio that showcases my expertise as a baker.” Once you have copy you’re proud to publish, make sure it’s accessible site-wide, connected to each blog post you publish, and on the About page or Team page.  Prioritize updating content over producing volume Instead of churning out a ton of new content, go back to the drawing board and analyze which pieces of content could use a refresh . I have a 60/40 rule that I like to stick by and recommend to most brands.  You should focus 60% of your time and resources on updating and optimizing your existing content, and the remaining 40% should be spent creating new helpful content. To figure out which pieces of content to update, I like to start with a mini content audit. Here’s my process: Crawl the site and collect data  — I use Screaming Frog  and Google Search Console  to extract all content-related and organic performance data from a client’s website. Analyze social engagement  — After understanding content from an SEO perspective, I want to know how content is performing on social media. For this, I’ll grab social media performance data using BuzzSumo . Sort and identify Opportunities  — Once I have the data, I sort the content from highest- to lowest-performing and focus on the middle-tier pieces (i.e., those that have potential but aren’t ranking as well as they could). These are typically articles with good search volume , meaning people are actively looking for information on the topic, but the content itself is buried on pages 2-5  of search results. Now that you’ve identified the pieces of content to update, it’s time to make some changes. Here’s how:  Use tools like Answer the Public , Semrush’s Topic Research Tool , or Google’s People Also Ask  to find new, related questions your audience is currently searching for. You can add the questions to the content as new headings, FAQs, or additional information within paragraphs.  Semrush’s Topic Research tool showcasing the top ten current ranking article headlines and the most common questions asked about the keyword. Update the content with your latest personal experiences on the subject matter. If the topic falls within a specific period (e.g., The Top Gluten-Free Brownie Recipes of 2024), make sure to update any relevant content to today. This includes updating all data and sources with the most up-to-date facts. Check current search results  to see what kind of content Google shows. Is it long-form, primarily videos, etc.? Is it shorter articles, videos, or something else? Use that info to adjust your content format and give users what they’re gravitating toward. By strategically updating mid-performing content, you’re not only optimizing it, but also making it more helpful by adding new, relevant information. There’s even more you can do, though, to optimize your helpful content and connect with potential customers… Go beyond keywords: It’s all about unique takes Traditional content optimization meant sprinkling keywords in every other paragraph and the icing on the cake was stuffing the headings . Let’s take the apron off and not do that anymore.  Instead, focus on optimizing your content by offering unique perspectives. If you’re truly an expert in your field, you should be able to offer a fresh perspective or a new angle to drive traffic to a helpful piece of content. Let’s take that baked goods food blogger and consider how we can create new content for a traditional brownie recipe. Brownie recipes are a pretty saturated topic. A lot of people are searching for it, and there are even more published recipes out there. So, how can you stand out and publish a  helpful brownie recipe that drives traffic? Try adding a variation! Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder tool  is a great way to come up with variation ideas for a specific keyword and  sub-topics to create secondary content around. Instead of creating yet another general brownie recipe, our baker friend—who loves coffee-flavored baked goods—can develop a unique twist: an instant coffee brownie recipe. To build on this even further (and deepen their authority as a baker), they can create secondary content that supports the instant coffee brown recipe, such as: A blog post on the best brownie toppings A brownie cake recipe featuring FAQs, like: The best pan for baking a brownie cake How to reheat a brownie cake Best ways to store a brownie cake By internally linking these posts between each other, our baker friend is able to: Expand on a popular topic with a fresh angle, giving users something unique. Establish expertise within their niche by publishing secondary topics. Increase opportunities to attract organic traffic. If you don’t have Semrush or an SEO tool , you can do this by Googling the primary keyword (or topic) you want to create a new piece of content for. Take a look at the search results and ask yourself, how can you add to this conversation in a unique way?  For example, the search results for [braised chicken] feature a variety of ways to cook braised chicken, from drumstick recipes to garlic and ginger, and even mojo sauce—each of the top three results offer a unique take on the recipe.  Originality beats repetition when it comes to a saturated topic like braised chicken, and it will do so for your saturated niche topics as well.  Moving forward: What you can learn from the Helpful Content Update The HCU has shaped how content strategies are created in 2025. To be helpful, we need to truly understand why users are searching and then create content that demonstrates our expertise, showcases real experience, establishes authority, and builds trust—all while providing genuine value. To ensure you’re creating helpful content (and optimizing it correctly), your content strategies should look a bit like: Conduct topic ideation  — Identify unique topics based on search demand and content gaps rather than just volume. Define the user intent — Take a moment to understand the primary and secondary intents behind the topic. Pick the right content format — Match the content medium (blog post, video, infographic, interactive tool, etc.) to the user's intent. Showcase E-E-A-T — Share real-world experience and unique insights. Back claims with credible sources and data. And, optimize your author bios to highlight expertise and authority. Add internal links —  Connect related posts to build topical authority and guide users to discover other relevant content. Optimize for engagement & readability — Your content should be easily digested, scannable, well-structured, and free of annoying, intrusive ads. Build trust & authority with digital PR  — Get brand mentions, contribute guest posts, and build high-quality backlinks from relevant websites. Regularly audit and update content  — Pinpoint and update those mid-performing pieces with new insights, secondary intent optimization, and a better structure. As long as your content strategy follows the practices above, you can sleep easy knowing that what you publish really is helpful, optimized, and provides value to users.  Ashley Segura - Head of Content at ContentYum With 15+ years of experience, Ashley Segura is a Top 100 Content Marketing Influencer and host of the Content in the Kitchen podcast. Currently the Head of Content at ContentYum , she has launched four agencies, leading global marketing teams and driving growth through impactful content strategies. Twitter  | Linkedin

Updated: February 28, 2025 Author: Crystal Carter Structured data markup can influence how your pages appear in search results, enabling Google to showcase your products or content within a dedicated search feature that often appears above the traditional listings. In addition to potentially enhanced visibility in Google Search, structured data can also impact how well search engines (and other technologies, like generative AI) understand your content. Since you’re already creating content, tagging that content with the appropriate structured data will help you get more value from it and further bolster your technical SEO .  Let’s take a look at what you need to know to get started with structured data for superior SEO. Table of contents: What is structured data? Structured data vs. Schema markup: What’s the difference? Why structured data is important in SEO The benefits of structured data for SEO Rich results eligibility Entities in generative search Better search data Does all structured data qualify for rich results? Should you add structured data that doesn’t yield rich results? What is structured data? When SEO experts talk about structured data (AKA Schema markup), they are referencing a type of script tag that you can add to your website’s HTML. Implementing structured data helps web crawlers quickly understand the most important content on your webpage (using predefined categories and definitions).  Used strategically across a website, structure data can: Make your site eligible for rich results . Illustrate a network of relationships between pages, authors, and named semantic entities . Structured data vs. Schema markup: What’s the difference? “Schema markup” is the common name for the structured data framework and vocabulary maintained by Schema.org . Developed in conjunction with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, Schema.org ’s structured data classification documentation is constantly growing and includes over 1000 properties and types to define unique semantic entities and content types.  Many data science and tech-related fields use the phrase “structured data”   to describe any method for organizing data . And when you use on-page SEO HTML attributes, like heading tags  and bullet-pointed lists, or even open graph on your site, you are technically using a type of structured data. But typically, when SEO professionals discuss “Schema,” “Schema markup,” “structured data,” or “structured data markup,” they are talking about the structured data markup (usually in JSON-LD format) as outlined by Schema.org and endorsed by Google. Why structured data is important in SEO Structured data for SEO helps make content more standardized across the web because it applies the same guidelines across websites of various platforms and configurations. This enables Google to choose different elements from each web page and generate unique, enhanced SERP (search engine results page) features  called “rich results.” These enhanced results are much more eye-catching, more mobile friendly, and provide more information than a standard search listing. That’s why having your content show up in a rich result can improve your click-through rate (CTR) and drive more visitors to your site. Each piece of structured data you add to a page will tell Google and other search engines about the most important parts of a page. For example, there is structured data that tells Google that it’s looking at a(n):  Recipe  Product FAQ Job posting Event The benefits of structured data for SEO Structured data tells search engines what the information on your page means—not just what it says. Clearly defining the content on your site with structured data can yield a competitive advantage in SEO, allowing you to: Make your content eligible for rich results Better define your website entities for semantic and AI-powered generative search Access more search results data via Google Search Console Rich results eligibility Though structured data is not a Google ranking factor, rich results for collections of certain types of content (e.g., events or recipes) can show at the top of the SERP, before the traditional text results.  Consequently, sites that earn a spot in these features can drastically improve CTR and potentially outperform the “number one” listing at the top of the text results.  This means that configuring your site with structured data that makes you eligible for rich results can make your site more competitive.  Entities in generative search Beyond rich results, structured data also makes your content easier for machines to read, which has implications for today’s AI-powered search engine algorithms  and generative  search tools like ChatGPT ’s SearchGPT.  Does structured data matter in generative search optimization? Large Language Models (LLMs) like these use entities to discern the relationships between words and what they actually mean. When you clearly define semantic entities , they will be more accurately reflected by generative AI tools. The statements that you declare in your schema should always be reflected in your on-page copy, so in this way, the definitions and relationships between entities that are outlined in schema.org offer guidance that can inform semantic on-page copy optimization. Does structured data directly influence LLM responses?  This depends on the type of LLM. Search-enabled LLM models, like Google’s Gemini, use search results to ‘ground’ their responses and therefore can be influenced by rankings and data from SERPs with rich results. For example in the query below for [how do I make a vegan cake?], a Google search yields nine rich result recipe cards. For the same question in Perplexity and SearchGPT, we see many of the same schema-enhanced websites shown in the results. For Perplexity, seven (of eight) of the sources match Google’s rich results. And for SearchGPT, two of five sources align. This suggests that structured data markup that influences rankings on Google and Bing’s search engines and the knowledge graph may impact responses in generative search tools, like SearchGPT, CoPilot, Perplexity, and Gemini.  And though, at the time of writing, structured data markup is not parsed during LLM pretraining (for static LLMs that do not use search grounding), optimizing high-value pages for rich results with structured data and entity-informed, on-page copy should contribute to your LLM search optimization and visibility  over time. Better search data Many of the structured data types that are eligible for rich results also receive dedicated Enhancements reports in Google Search Console . These reports tell you which pages have valid markup and can provide valuable insights to help you find out why structured data markup is invalid. For instance, if you are implementing image structured data, you can include a property for Creator  to specify the person or organization that created the image. In the example below, I have done this by modifying the Wix’s built-in blog article markup. For this project, all of the images were created by “Wix,” so rather than using a variable, I used a static value. Within about a week, I was able to see the Image Metadata report in my Google Search Console Enhancement reports. Since this report shows images that have been crawled and valid structured data, I can use this data in my SEO reporting  to illustrate technical SEO implementation progress to my team. Does all structured data qualify for rich results? There are hundreds of different Schema types, but not every Schema type is eligible for a Google rich result. However, since all structured data helps search engines understand your content, implementing it is still beneficial to your site as a whole. From a strategic perspective, including schema markup that is not currently supported by Google’s rich results can help future-proof your site. Google adds new rich results all the time, so if your Schema is already in place, then you’ll get a head start on your competitors.  Product structured data can enable your products to show in Google merchant listing experiences. For example, in 2022, Google announced updates to product rich results to display multiple images alongside the primary image. For Wix users, who had this structured data built into their Wix SEO  configuration, there was no need to make updates as they were already optimized. Should you add structured data that doesn’t yield rich results? Yes. Valid structured data helps to organize your content and make it more accessible to search engines and other programs (like ChatGPT).  When Google announced that it was significantly reducing visibility for FAQ rich results in 2023, some SEOs suggested that it wasn’t worth using this markup anymore. I would argue, though, that where FAQs are genuinely helpful for users, you should include markup to support them because: Structured data helps to prioritize high-value content for search engine crawling. Structured data can help you draw connections between entities across your site and the wider web. Google embraces structured data—so should you As Google continues the trend of showing more information directly on the search results page, it’ll keep relying on structured data to populate its SERP, which means the role structured data plays for your business/website will keep growing from here.  Don’t miss out on all the opportunities structured data offers—after all, if you’re going to create content for users, you might as well get the most value from it by making sure it’s eligible for rich results and easy for search engines to understand.  Crystal Carter - Head of SEO Communications, Wix   Crystal is an SEO & digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Amanda Milligan Authority is a fundamental component of search engine optimization. Because searchers (and thus potential customers) are constantly seeking trustworthy sources to satisfy their queries, it is search engines’ main objective to provide the most authoritative answers to those queries. Authority is even covered at length in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines as a component of trust: So, brands must prioritize building their authority in the eyes of both readers and Google in order to rank well and garner high-quality site traffic. In addition to the search visibility benefits, building authority also helps potential customers feel more comfortable interacting and transacting with your brand. Without authority, it’s an uphill battle to convince someone to trust you—you need to earn people’s attention (through search) and their trust. So, the question is: How? Let’s look at a few methods that have proven successful for brands of all sizes, whether you’re working with practically no resources or the budget of a Fortune 500 company, so that you can improve your brand’s authority and, over time, fuel your organic growth. Table of contents: Building authority with little time and/or money Building authority with some time but still no money Scaling your brand authority with access to budget Building authority with little time and/or money If you’re a bootstrapped entrepreneur who needed authority yesterday, here are a few strategies you can take advantage of in the short-term to give yourself a boost. Tap into well-known industry directories Respected directories, like G2 and Clutch, can help elevate your brand awareness and authority because they allow customers and clients to leave objective reviews, which others can read before working with you or buying your products/services. If you’re a relatively new business, it may take some time before customers start leaving reviews. In the meantime, you can at least establish a profile in these directories to build out your branded search results. Some of these directory sites consistently rank near the top of Google’s results for branded queries, meaning the search engine result page ( SERP ) for your brand can feature these authority signals. As an example, I work for Stacker Studio, and our Clutch profile is the second organic result when you search our brand. The five gold stars in the result help instill confidence that we know what we’re doing—you can leverage this tactic for your own brand without spending a cent. While establishing a presence on relevant directory sites is already advantageous, there’s more you can do to make the most of the opportunity and build out your authority: Manage your reviews — Respond to reviews left for you (if possible), whether they’re positive or negative shows that you’re attentive, that you’re listening to your clients/customers, and that you’re always striving to improve. Transparency always helps build authority. Share your ratings/reviews — Oftentimes review sites provide widgets or images that showcase your reviews; add these widgets to your website so prospective customers won’t have to dig around to find these authority signals. Publish testimonials/case studies If you already have an existing customer base, you can ask your customers (or clients) for testimonials. A couple of sentences strategically placed on your marketing materials and landing pages can translate to more conversions , more customers/clients, and more revenue. Successful testimonials tend to highlight the following elements: What you accomplished for them What they enjoyed most about your product/service Why they’d recommend your brand to others If you have a bit more time and you’re a services-based business, create case studies that showcase how you helped your client. Your case studies should include: The problem or challenge your customer/client was facing How you helped them surmount that problem/challenge Data to back up the claims you’re making Ideally a quote from the client to provide their direct perspective And, if your business sells directly to consumers, you can build out the review sections of your site and also monitor third-party review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and so on. Managing your presence and responding to reviews across these platforms requires dedication, but it’s an excellent way to shape your reputation and convey authority when you’re working on a tight budget. Building authority with some time but still no money Have more time to invest in building authority but working with a limited budget? In this case, a few more options are available to you. Build trust with your current customers/clients This suggestion may seem a bit odd, but it’s advice I’ve read time and time again , and I wholeheartedly agree: Shadow your customer service or client experience teams. This powerful tactic provides you with direct access to your audience’s complaints and challenges, allowing you to create content that better serves them (as well as prospective clients/customers) and thus has a higher chance of ranking well for relevant queries. It’s also worth noting that high-quality customer service can be a huge authority builder in and of itself. It’s not enough to get people to trust you just long enough to give you money; you have to maintain their trust so they remain a client or become a repeat customer. To that end, here are a few types of content you can create to foster more authority and supplement your customer service team’s efforts: Troubleshooting documents Frequently asked questions Expert blog posts on topics related to your offering If your customers/clients have these questions, others are likely to have them as well. Answer the product- or service-specific questions, but don’t be afraid to tackle ones that are a little more tangential but still helpful . Earn digital PR so others “vouch” for you Digital PR is an excellent strategy for simultaneously building authority and awareness if you’re newer to the industry or are up against powerhouse, ubiquitous brands. However, it’s not easy to execute well. Only pursue this option if you accept that earned media is just that—earned. While digital PR can come with some incredible benefits when done correctly (such as backlinks and/or exposure via trusted publications), it takes a lot of time and effort to do well. If you’re up to the task, start by identifying who at your organization will serve as the expert. If this poses a challenge, seek out people who enjoy personal brand building and sharing their knowledge. When you have at least one person who’s willing and able to speak on behalf of the brand: Pitch them to be a guest on relevant industry podcasts that your audience listens to. Tools like SparkToro are useful in identifying these podcasts. Ask if they’re willing to be a source for news articles. Sign up for HARO and reply to relevant queries with expert quotes. If they’re very enthusiastic, pitch them to speak at industry conferences and events or have them write guest posts you can pitch to industry publications. As an example, I pitched to speak at SearchLove in 2022, got accepted, and spoke at both their San Diego and Philadelphia conferences on behalf of Stacker Studio. Not only did I earn authority for myself and my brand by speaking at a respected event, but also through promoting my acceptance, because other marketers know my pitch had to be vetted in order to be invited to speak. It’s a lot of effort, but the reward is getting your expertise featured on a third-party site, which automatically adds credibility to your brand. Plus, there are amazing SEO benefits, like earning backlinks and brand mentions, which are signals Google may use to assess your domain’s authority. Co-market to align with like-minded brands Partnering with a well-respected brand that complements what you’re doing can immediately elevate your reputation among their audience (who hopefully are good candidates to be your audience, too). To create this sort of co-marketing campaign, though, you have to have something to offer the other brand. If your plan is to leverage their community and clout, then you’ll probably need to do the heavy-lifting of putting the campaign together. They’ll be more likely to sign onto something that’s little work for them, but provides value to their audience. For example, since my company is newer in the industry, I wanted to partner with brands that are respected and complement our service offering. I reached out to Verblio, MarketMuse, and Seer Interactive about creating a piece of content together that spoke to each of our strengths and would help us drive leads. Together, we created an epic 3,000+ word guide about how to scale your SEO efforts, and it’s something that benefits all of us. Ask yourself: Which brands do you want to be “friends” with? What value can you provide them in order to work together? Scaling your brand authority with access to budget If you have more resources to work with, you can add fuel to the fire. Almost every one of the techniques I’ve already talked about can be amplified to have a greater impact. But, let’s focus on the approaches I think can most significantly move the needle. Partner with a trusted influencer There’s a reason influencer marketing was such a hot topic in the 2010s. Articles like this one from Adweek were saying that influencers had a major impact on purchasing decisions. When done right, it makes sense: As buyers, we often know influencers are paid to talk about a product or service, but we also hope they’ve vetted these options and picked out the ones they actually like. After all, they’re only considered influencers because they’ve already earned their audience’s trust. Seeing folks online whom we trust talk about a product or service favorably not only impacts buying decisions, but can very positively impact your authority. The more invested an influencer is in what you’re offering, the more organic their promotion feels because they genuinely do support what they’re promoting. I took this into consideration when sponsoring a podcast on behalf of my company. As someone in the industry who’s respected SEO consultant Dan Shure for a while, I knew he was generally regarded as an expert in the field. So, I reached out with intent to sponsor his podcast, and we had conversations about what our company was and answered any questions he had. Now, he talks about our brand authentically on the show despite us being a sponsor; he truly likes what we do. The more it’s set up like a paid partnership rather than a one-and-done ad, the more it’ll improve your brand’s authority. Invest in content marketing “Content marketing” is a behemoth term, because it refers to any content that your brand creates for any marketing goal . That could be brand awareness, organic traffic, customer retention, and, of course, authority building. There’s often a lot of goal overlap, but when focusing on authority building, ranking in the SERPs goes a long way. This has a direct overlap with SEO efforts to increase organic traffic, but consider the authority building ramifications, too. If someone searches for something, and your site is the first result, that signals to the user that Google identified your page as the best resource to help. It reinforces that you know what you’re talking about. But, the content itself can also communicate authority. When you take the time to sit down and write genuinely useful content , and you invest in adding useful graphics and promoting the article so it reaches the right audiences, and that article starts to rank, people will read your piece and (hopefully) remember that you helped them out. Ahrefs is great at this. It has built a ton of authority thanks to its comprehensive blog posts that either dive into data or offer a ton of context to help users perform SEO ( like the example below ). Content is the best way to show your expertise (rather than merely talk about it). You can say you’re an expert in anything, but without having the content to back it up, how can potential customers be sure? Level-up your digital PR After you’ve pitched podcasts, conferences, guest posts, and so on, it’s time to think about how to scale this effort and build even more trust with the widest possible audience. Earned media is excellent in this regard. When a respected publication or blog chooses to cover your content or brand, that sends a significant trust signal to readers. Sometimes, when a press release for a significant update about your company/product/service goes out, you can get some good coverage. But usually, when things are business-as-usual, you have to offer value to a writer’s story in order to earn that coverage. I mentioned HARO previously, and that works here, as well. But if you want to be more proactive (rather than reactive) in order to earn media consistently, you need to create newsworthy content. There are many elements of newsworthiness to use for brainstorming, including timeliness, proximity, and significance. Obviously, as digital marketers, we can’t exactly dive into the world of breaking news. So, we have to either create or complement it . The best way to do this is with data. Why? Because when you’re the first to analyze or illustrate data in a certain way, it often reveals new, interesting insights that haven’t been published or talked about yet. That makes it much easier to pitch your content/report/study/survey to publishers and get their attention! If you have internal data that you can make publicly available and that would be insightful for readers, this is a great way to start. Look, for example, at how GasBuddy tracks gas prices and receives media coverage since it’s so relevant for readers on the local level. If you don’t have internal data, there are a ton of free, publicly available datasets out there. Government sites are a great place to start, like the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics . It’s a lot of work to put a data report together, but you can get some of the most high-quality media coverage possible using this method, and that builds significant credibility. Building authority means building a foundation for all your marketing efforts SEO (and any sort of marketing) involves crucial decisions about what to prioritize. Authority is one of those elements that uplifts all other efforts, so it should be high up on your priority list. No matter how much time and money you have available, building authority will help you move the needle and set up a good foundation for your other efforts, like going international or launching a new line of products for a new audience. Amanda Milligan - Head of Marketing at Stacker Amanda Milligan is an inbound marketing expert with more than a decade of experience in content, growth, and brand. Her knowledge has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, TechCrunch, and more, as well as conferences like SMX, MozCon, SearchLove, and Pubcon. Twitter | Linkedin

Tuesday, January 28, 2025 | 1PM ET Get ready for 2025! Join 10 SEO experts for a panel discussion on top trends to watch for in the coming year , with insights from in-house, consultant, PPC, and agency professionals. From Google updates to AI-driven SERPs and everything in between, we’ll cover it all. Wix Studio   hosts Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein will be joined by SEO experts from across the industry: Naomi Francis-Parker, Charlotte Tilbury Paul Andre de Vera, Stripe Aleyda Solis, Oranti Mark-Williams Cook, Candour Rishi Lakhani, Consultant Jamie Indigo, Cox Automotive Anu Adegbola, Search Engine Land Greg Finn, Cypress North In this webinar, we’ll cover:  How SEO trends impact in-house, agency, consultant and PPC marketers Fresh insights to inform your planning for the upcoming year  New tools and techniques to help you deliver SEO wins  Meet your hosts: Mordy ObersteinHead of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. X  | LinkedIn   Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. X  | LinkedIn Paul Andre De Vera - Global SEO Content Strategy at Stripe Paul Andre de Vera (Dre) is a B2B digital marketer with over 15 years of experience in creating video content that ranks. He hosts the weekly SEO Video Show and serves as a speaker, online educator, SEO consultant and as an organic growth strategist for companies like SAP and Workday. X  | LinkedIn Aleyda Solis - SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti Aleyda Solis is an SEO speaker, author, and the founder of   Orainti , a boutique SEO consultancy advising top brands worldwide. She shares the latest SEO news and resources in her SEOFOMO  newsletter, SEO tips in the Crawling Mondays  video series, and a free SEO Learning Roadmap called   LearningSEO.io . X  | LinkedIn Greg Finn - Partner at Cypress North Greg is co-founder at Cypress North, where he serves as head of performance and innovation and co-manages the digital marketing department. He also co-hosts the Marketing O'Clock podcast , providing updates, insights, and hot takes on the latest SEO, PPC, and social media marketing news. X  | LinkedIn Naomi Francis-Parker - SEO Manager, Charlotte Tilbury Naomi is an SEO expert with over 5 years of experience working with eCommerce brands. Her passion for SEO stems from a holistic approach to digital marketing that promotes growth by leveraging a combination of content, PR, social media, and SEO. X  | LinkedIn Mark-Williams Cook - Digital Marketing Director, Candour Mark Williams-Cook has over 20 years of SEO experience and is co-owner of search agency   Candour , founder of AlsoAsked, and owner of a pet category eCommerce business. In addition to sharing his knowledge at conferences, Mark has also trained over 3,000 SEOs via his Udemy course. X  | LinkedIn Rishi Lakhani - Digital Communications Strategist Rishi Lakhani is a seasoned digital marketing strategist with over two decades of expertise. Since launching his career as a marketing executive in 2000, Rishi has been at the forefront of developing SEO models and best practices. He has contributed extensively to globally renowned SEO blogs and speaks at numerous industry events. X  | LinkedIn Jamie Indigo - Technical SEO Expert Jamie Indigo  is a technical SEO who studies how search engines crawl, render, and index. They love to tame wild JavaScript and optimize rendering strategies. As a marketing-dev hybrid, Jamie is skilled at solving riddles and overcoming boundaries. X  | LinkedIn Anu Adegbola - Paid Media News Editor, Search Engine Land Anu Adegbola has been Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land since 2024. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media, video and more. She is the founder of PPC networking event PPC Live and host of weekly podcast PPCChat Roundup. She is also an international speaker on stages including SMX, Friends of Search, brightonSEO, AdWorld Experience and more. X  | LinkedIn

What is the “It’s New” Video Series "It’s New" is a daily video series delivering the latest SEO news hosted by Barry Schwartz.  The show keeps you up to stay up-to-date on the ever-changing landscape of SEO, covering topics such as Google algorithm updates, industry trends, and actionable tips for improving website search engine performance. The web series includes each day’s search marketing updates, presented by a panel of four PPC and SEO experts: Barry Schwartz:  Founder of Search Engine Roundtable and news editor at Search Engine Land Mordy Oberstein:  Head of SEO Branding at Wix Studio Greg Finn:  Partner and head of performance and innovation at Cypress North What topics are featured on “It’s New”? Viewers can expect to see a well rounded view of the latest happenings in new SERP features, Google SERP tests, SEO data studies and industry events on most episodes. But the individual topics are curated daily by the panelists based on their expertise, specialisms and value for the audience.  Barry Schwartz brings over 20 years of experience covering Google news to every session. Trusted by both Google and the SEO industry at large, he is often the first to report on announcements for Google Algorithm Updates  and volatility in search results. Schwartz confesses,  “I have a weird passion, the passion is for tracking how Google is changing across ranking and user interface. Google Search can make or break some companies and websites and being able to create content that helps these companies cope with these changes has been a true privilege in my career.” With a keen interest in how SEOs can impact LLM searches , Crystal Carter often explores the latest updates from ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, Gemini and other AI-powered search engines. “I love covering a new product release or update in AI search,” she explains, “AI in search is a fast-evolving space so it’s important to stay abreast of the latest features releases, partnerships and use cases. News from Google is still extremely valuable for SEOs but offerings from Open AI will influence our activities in the very near future”. As a long time champion of leveraging SEO tactics to manage brand equity , Mordy Oberstein often selects news items that illustrate industry trends and contribute to a pattern of how brands are best positioned online. "To me, it’s about tracking all of the things. It gives you a sense of where Google is headed and perhaps more importantly where the entire web ecosystem is heading. To an SEO and marketer that’s invaluable information.”  And while SEO is a strong focus for every episode, many editions of It’s New feature coverage of developments in search advertising as selected by PPC veteran, Greg Finn. From Google Ads to Microsoft Advertising, you’ll discover everything that’s new and how the platform changes may impact the SERPs.   About the show, he says “I love that we can hit on all search engine news in a very bite-sized (~10 min) daily format that is light and fun. I love the feeling of having experts chatting about the news in a water-cooler format that brings listeners along for the ride!” When are new episodes available? Episodes are published Monday - Thursday around 10am ET. You can watch them here and also on the Rusty Brick YouTube channel . Past episodes are also available for free on the channel. Who are the hosts of It’s New? Barry Schwartz CEO, RustyBrick Barry Schwartz is the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable  and has covered search for over 20 years. He is also a news editor at Search Engine Land and is a speaker, moderator, and coordinator at many industry conferences, including SMX, PubCon, and many other marketing and technology events. Twitter  | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up , as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter  | LinkedIn   Greg Finn Partner, Cypress North Greg is one of the founders of Cypress North and its head of performance and innovation. He co-manages the digital marketing department and works to ensure clients achieve the best results. He also co-hosts the Marketing O'Clock podcast , providing updates, insights, and hot takes on the latest SEO, PPC, and social media marketing news. Twitter  | LinkedIn

Author: Gus Pelogia Have you ever had a client who wanted to rank their commercial page for a broad, highly competitive keyword? You can’t exactly fault them—common sense says to go after the biggest opportunities with your best-converting page.Unfortunately, much of that choice is not up to you (or the client). It’s up to Google and what it thinks searchers really want to see for that keyword. The question you should then ask (and what you should actually prioritize if you want long-term success with SEO) is:  “Do I stand a chance at ranking for this keyword?”  In this blog post, I’ll show you, step-by-step, how to run a search engine result page (SERP) analysis to answer this question as well as how to adjust your strategy to increase your chances of ranking. Table of contents: What is a SERP feature? SERP analysis: What it is and why it’s essential Example 01. [hotels in NYC] — An aggregator’s paradise Local pack Traditional blue link results People also ask (PAAs) Related searches Example 02. [double bed mattress] — Categories, filters, and shopping results Refinement chips Shopping Google Shopping & Wix Example 03. [registered nurse] — Broad intent, mixed results Knowledge panel How to incorporate your SERP analysis into your content plan How to run SERP analyses at scale Counteract AI overviews with information gain What is a SERP feature? SERP features  are, as the name suggests, special results displayed on Google, Bing, and other search engines. (This makes more sense when you consider that, back in the early days of search, Google’s results would consist primarily of just a few ads and ten blue links.) An example of a modern SERP, with paid elements, SERP features, and traditional ‘blue links.’ As years passed, search engines added new elements to their results. Google started providing users with additional information before they even clicked through to a website. SERP features are how this additional info gets organized and displayed. Just as there are many different types of searches a user can conduct, there’s a long list of Google SERP features designed for those particular results, which is why they’re so helpful in reverse-engineering what it takes to rank for a given query.  Common SERP features include: Featured snippets Local pack People also ask Top stories Image carousel Video snippets Sitelinks Rich snippets You don’t need to pay attention to (or optimize for) all of them, but you do need to get familiar with the ones that show up regularly for keywords that you want to rank for. SERP analysis: What it is and why it’s essential Understanding whether you can realistically rank for a given keyword is easy once you can read the hints the SERP gives you. These hints vary by sector/industry, and that’s where your SERP analysis starts.  When analyzing a SERP, ask:  How is the search engine displaying results relevant to your business? What SERP features are relevant for your website? (I.e., local packs, knowledge panels, product listings, etc.) Do you have the right assets (pages, images, videos) to compete in this space? You may run into a situation where a client wants to rank for a competitive keyword with their commercial page ( product page , sign-up form, etc). Before you can commit resources to optimizing that page, you need to analyze the SERPs for how Google interprets the intent users have when searching those keywords. Broadly speaking, searches have one of four keyword intents : Intent Explanation Example queries Informational keywords Searchers are seeking information or answers to certain questions, so these keywords often contain phrases like what is  or how to . [how to become a nurse] [how to choose gym shoes] [best exercises to lose fat] Navigational keywords Searchers are looking for specific sites, pages, or places (in the case of  local search ) that they already know about, so these terms often include the names of brands, places, or things. [wix] [asana login] [doordash] [madison square garden] Commercial keywords Searchers are edging closer to converting and want to research the service or good, compare products, read reviews, and look for offers to help them make a decision. [iphone vs google pixel] [hotels in London] [gutter cleaning service] [car insurance comparison] Transactional keywords Searchers have made up their minds and intend to make a purchase or complete an action, so these terms often contain phrases like for delivery , for sale , and buy XYZ online . [buy iphone 15 pro] [denver bus tour] [superbowl tickets] We’ll go into examples below, but essentially:  If all results on a SERP are informational, you’re very unlikely to get a commercial page to rank for that term. This is less about what you or your client think is right or ideal, but rather about what Google (or another search engine) has decided. If you want to stand a chance, you need to play by their rules. Let’s dive into some examples that represent various scenarios and industries that you might have clients in. Example 01. [hotels in NYC] — An aggregator’s paradise An example of a SERP for [hotels in NYC]. This example has been truncated for length. Which hotel in the city wouldn’t like to rank for this keyword? [hotels in {location}] tends to be the highest search volume  keyword for visitors looking for a hotel in the city (which is why it’s our first example). However, similar to any other large city, there are only a few opportunities for hotels themselves to rank—there are hundreds (if not thousands) of hotel websites and the search is so broad that, even as a human, it’s difficult to assess what to rank. Let’s analyze this SERP, feature by feature. On page one, we have: Local pack The local pack is a widget that shows Google Maps results; in this case, highlighting three hotels. Clicking on this result leads the user to the hotel’s Google Business Profile (GBP) , listing their reviews, website, directions, operating hours, and other details. For most search results where a local pack appears (e.g., hotel, tourist attraction, restaurant), there’s a high chance that users will continue their research using the local pack, sometimes never reaching your website. To rank in this SERP feature, businesses should follow local SEO best practices . Wix has a wide range of local SEO articles and guides  that dive deep into these techniques. Pro tip:  While this is true for a lot of results with local packs, hotels have a unique feature—Google displays a list of online travel agencies to book the hotel through, allowing travelers to choose dates, see nearby attractions, and so on. You still have an opportunity for visibility, however, bookings might happen through a third party. Traditional blue link results The traditional search listings (i.e., the blue links) are usually the arena in which SEOs fight hard to rank, but in this specific case (for hotels in large cities), most SERPs are packed with online travel agencies (not websites from individual hotel brands). Most page one results for [hotels in denver] are online travel agencies For this particular SERP, all page results are large aggregators (such as Booking, Expedia, and Trivago), except denver.org . In this scenario, not only are you competing with large travel brands with huge budgets, but also with a certain type of page: aggregators with hundreds of hotels, a high volume of user reviews , tons of filters, and many more details. If you’re a hotel chain, creating a similar experience might give you a chance to rank. List all of your properties in NYC (or your target city), add filters, price, etc. If you manage just one hotel, the chances that you can rank for this type of query are very low and it’s unlikely the effort would pay off. Having worked with hotels in the past, I found the most success with blue links when targeting smaller areas, such as [hotels near {city}] or hotels in small cities, where the results are more of a blend of travel agencies and local hotels. People also ask (PAAs) PAAs are common follow-up questions from the initial search. Google already displays them expecting users to consider that as a next step. The results shown in this feature tend to be informational, which means they’re a step further from conversion. In this case, after a broad search ([hotels in NYC]), travelers are likely to narrow their search to the best areas to stay, average hotel cost, the cheapest areas to stay, and where celebrities stay in NYC (as shown below). If your hotel has a potential answer for any of the above, then you stand a chance to rank in this feature. Long-form content tends to rank here and the PAAs are not dominated by a handful of websites, meaning that the barrier to entry is lower (given that your website is relevant to address these searches). Related searches Despite its placement all the way at the end of the SERP, this is a relevant feature for hotels. Google knows that users will narrow their search with more criteria until they find their ideal hotel. Smoke-free, great views, fireplaces, and bars are listed as related searches for this query, but any attributes a hotel has can appear here. The ‘Related searches’ box loads at the bottom of the SERP and is another opportunity for hotels Similar to the local pack, you should focus on local SEO (e.g., earn user reviews mentioning this amenity) and highlight these attributes on your website. One important distinction from the local pack is that if a user clicks on a hotel, the next SERP is about the hotel itself and features your website front and center, making it a larger opportunity to get a conversion straight on your website. Example 02. [double bed mattress] — Categories, filters, and shopping results The first traditional blue link is already below the fold. The experience in the US (left) is also considerably different from Ireland / Europe (right). Google SERPs change completely for this keyword. To start with, you get a shopping experience with filters, such as: Price (e.g., Under $150) Type (e.g., Memory foam) Features (e.g., Water resistant) On this SERP, nearly all traditional blue link results are to eCommerce websites’ mattress category pages, so the obvious hint here is to create a similar page listing all your products in this category.  Refinement chips Refinement chips are the little bubbles that appear below the search bar to help users refine their query. Similar to other SERP features, Google is trying to guess what search you’ll need to do next. For a broad keyword like this one, it’s likely that customers will have more requirements before they make a purchase. If you click on a filter (such as ‘memory foam’), the results become more specific, suggesting that, if you want to rank here, you should have unique pages for ‘double bed mattress’ and ‘memory foam double bed mattress’. Shopping results have extra refining features directly on SERPs. Shopping Above the traditional blue links, this SERP is packed with shopping results. To be eligible for shopping results, create a Google Merchant Center  account and upload your product information. Shopping results are visually different from traditional results. Product images are highlighted next to price, discount, and delivery details. Google Shopping & Wix Wix users can integrate their Google Merchant Center account with their Wix store  to be eligible for relevant Google Shopping results. Example 03. [registered nurse] — Broad intent, mixed results Same keyword, different location. Google added specific results based on user location. The SERP on the left is for NYC and the right is Los Angeles. Sometimes the intent of a keyword is not explicit (i.e., implicit intent ) and Google guesses what people want by serving a mix of results. In this example, I searched [registered nurse] from NYC and the top 10 blue links are a mix of: Government website to check and renew registration Job definitions Open positions Career statistics Considering 40% of results were New York State-related, this tells me there’s a local factor in play (doing the same search from Los Angeles, I found the California Board of Registered Nursing ranking instead). This means you could rank locally from a certain region or city if you target your content to that audience. Knowledge panel Knowledge panels may credit several sources of information. For many broad queries (such as this one, [registered nurses]), Google shows a knowledge panel . Since the user didn’t specify what they want to know about registered nurses, Google gives you a rich SERP with a touch of everything. This is often the case when people search for established definitions or entities  (people, locations, things, etc). In the example above, the knowledge panel cites sources (beyond just Wikipedia) and pages have a chance to rank both as an answer in the panel and within the traditional blue links. How to incorporate your SERP analysis into your content plan At this point, you know what type of content Google likes for your target keywords and topics. After you identify the keywords you want to target, the next step is to start creating content that matches these intents. You can start with a table like this: Target keyword Search volume Funnel stage Content type [how to choose a mattress] 5400 Top Guide [double bed mattress] 1300 Mid Product research [walmart queen mattress] 110 Bottom Product page A mix of content in each part of the funnel allows you to expand your coverage and be top of mind when potential customers are most open to giving your brand a chance. You can map the opportunity size based on what the SERPs are telling you instead of just hoping search engines will display your pages. A product page will naturally convert much better than a blog. If you have an average conversion rate per page type, this helps you estimate how many more sales, trials, or leads you can get and avoid missing the mark by just looking at search volume. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumers, who often need to research options (resulting in searches like [phone with best cameras]), and refine their queries (e.g., [iPhone vs Google Pixel 8]) before making a purchase (e.g., [buy iPhone 15 Pro]). This is also an important time to remember that search volumes are estimations and each tool will return a different number. Take these as a directional indication, not as exact science.  How to run SERP analyses at scale People search for the same things in different ways. For instance, how many ways do you think people can search for [how to boil an egg]? There are 1,700+ keywords with a total search volume of nearly 180K searches per month in the US alone, based on Semrush data.  Do you need a separate page for ‘soft,’ ‘medium soft,’ or ‘hard’ eggs? Is it different to cook using a generic air fryer vs. a Ninja? Again, our personal feelings and conjecture don’t really matter here. If your intent is to rank on Google, a SERP analysis will tell you what type of page you need. If you’re analyzing a small group of keywords, do it manually. However, when it gets to 50, 100, or thousands of keywords, this becomes a tedious task. It involves searching every keyword, seeing what types of pages rank, and counting them one by one to define what page type is more likely to rank before creating your content. To add to the considerations, there’s a good chance that many of the same pages rank for a lot of keywords, which means you could just create one article and be eligible to rank for all of these keyword variations.  This is a heavy lift just to know what content to create—and you haven’t even written a single line yet. Fortunately, many SEO tools can tackle this part of the process for you. I like to use a combination of them. After you do keyword research using your favorite SEO tool , you can go to Semrush, upload your desired keywords, and use its clustering feature (called Keyword Strategy Builder, fully released in the US and in beta worldwide). You can also just add one keyword and let Semrush come up with a cluster, but I prefer to do all my research first and cluster  based on what I defined as target keywords. Ahrefs has a similar feature: Every keyword has a ‘parent topic.’ In Ahrefs’ own words, to identify the parent topic, “ We take the number one ranking page for your keyword and find the keyword responsible for sending the most traffic to that page.” However, the first SEO software I saw with this functionality was Keyword Insights. At the time, I was having the exact problem that inspired this post: my client wanted to increase product trials and had pages for several product features, but in a lot of cases, Google was only showing listicles, reviews, or in-depth blog posts for these keywords (that we believed were commercial; e.g., [project management software]). To do this process on Keyword Insights, you upload a list of keywords (based on your own research) and can adjust the similarity level as desired to fine-tune your clustering. For example, if there’s an overlap of pages ranking in the top 10 for a group of keywords (e.g., the same five URLs rank for all the selected keywords), that’s a strong signal that you only need one page to rank. The tool also includes what type of page you should have to target the cluster. Keyword Insights allows users to fine-tune clustering options. Counteract AI overviews with information gain There are two important topics in SEO right now that influence both your SERP analysis and the content you’ll write. The first are Google’s AI overviews , where Google often answers a user’s query straight on the SERPs. This is relatively new and full of unknowns: Will people use them? How often does Google show them? How do you optimize to become a source for AI overviews?  On the back of this discussion, a lot of SEOs are talking about information gain (while this patent  was filed in 2018 and made public in 2020; it’s becoming more relevant now). This article by Sarah Taher  provides an explanation that’s easy to understand. Essentially, your article should provide something new (on top of what has already been written on the topic). It could be more information, how it’s displayed on the page, a new angle, new data, quotes, visual assets, etc. For a lot of topics, so much has already been written that Google doesn’t have a reason to rank a new page—unless it can provide more than what’s already available. This is the power of information gain in SEO right now. For informed SEO, make SERP analysis second nature SERP analysis is an essential starting point for your content strategy , but it’s also a great way to learn SEO. Google gives hints on what it wants to show searchers and this can open many doors. Look at what refinement bubbles are in place. Would creating a video be more effective than a product page or blog post? Can you create content for the next logical step your consumer would take? If you do this regularly, it'll become a natural analysis you even notice it’s happening.  Gus Pelogia - SEO Product Manager Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO since 2012. He’s currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, the top job site in the world. Every day, he writes tickets for small and large initiatives and works in a cross-functional team with writers, UX, engineers, and product managers. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Chima Mmeje While header tags do not directly influence search rankings, they do serve an important function for SEO and your site visitors: Headers make your content easy to read and engage with. And, for search engine bots, they also provide vital context around the keywords on the page. It makes sense when you think of how readers and search engines interact with your page. The header is the first thing that gets the reader’s attention. It tells them what to expect when they click on a link or visit your web page. As they read through the page, each header tag (H2, H3, etc.) carries the reader along and makes it easier to engage with your content. At the same time, search bots use it to understand the primary keyword for the page. This can affect where your content is displayed in search results. What are header tags? In simple terms, header tags are headers in your page. Use headers to show the flow of your content and break up large chunks of text so that it's more digestible for readers. Headers also highlight the important aspects of your content. Where H1 headers are used for main headers (what the page is about), follow with H2 for supporting headers and H3 for less important headers. For example, here’s a sample structure for a blog post about “Choosing a smart watch”: H1: Qualities to look for when choosing a smart watch H2: Basics H3: Smartphone compatibility H3: Price H3: Battery life H2: Features H3: Fitness tracking H3: Music H3: Bluetooth & NFC connection H2: My top recommended smart watches Depending on how you format your content, most pages usually have H1, H2, H3, and up to H6 tags. When writing content, remember to craft headers and use them to guide your users—if it makes sense to users, chances are search engines will be able to make sense of it as well. The benefits of header tags In addition to providing a logical structure for your content, headers give visitors and search engines hints about how the page is organized. Oftentimes, users skim page content to find the information they came for. The right headers makes it easy for your visitors to scan the page and decide on which sections to read. Scanning becomes harder without headers—it’s worse when you have long blocks of text that hurt the eye. Search engines, like Google, also look at headers to better understand the content on the page. But, that's not all Google uses them for: If you look through search results, you’ll notice that Google sometimes picks out H2 tags to compile answers or display them in search results. The links in the red box above were generated from the content's header tags. In the example above, the links shown under the title of the result (which are generated from the page's header tags) indicate how the content is organized. This may make it easier for searchers to navigate to the exact information they're searching for. Additionally, these kinds of search result features may increase your listing's real estate in the search results page, making your content more eye-catching for searchers. 6 tips to improve your SEO with header tags Header tags are important for both your content and SEO. Here are six tips to ensure your header tag optimization is follows best practices. 01. Use one H1 header tag per page A common mistake on some homepages and other conversion-focused pages is to have multiple H1 headers on a single page, but it does more harm than good. You only need one H1. While search engines will crawl multiple H1s on a page, it dilutes the effectiveness. The H1 header is the first thing the reader sees on the page. Take time crafting an H1 header that is engaging and persuasive, as it plays a role in determining if the visitor will go on to read the content or not. 02. Stick to the traditional header hierarchy It’s important to use an easily understood hierarchy structure when applying header tags. That means you shouldn't jump from an H1 to an H4 header, for example. So, if you want to explain something beneath an H2 header, the logical step would be to use an H3 header. If you were diving deeper within an H3 header, the next header would be an H4. Deviating from a hierarchy structure affects user experience and causes confusion for both the reader and search engines. 03. Match search intent to headers It’s important that the header matches the search intent of the page. When users type in a query or keyword in the search bar, there's specific information they want to see. Your content has to provide that information or Google won’t display it on Page 1. For example, let’s say you want to create content targeting the keyword “best website builder,” but you don't know whether to format it as a review, long-form blog post, or a landing page. To get a better idea of what's likely to rank, reference the search results for the keyword. In this example, it's clear that you’ll need to write a review, based on what’s already ranking. The header will also follow a similar pattern. Optimize your header for the user’s search intent and you’ll have a higher chance of driving more traffic. However, avoid using clickbait headlines that don’t deliver the promised content. 04. Avoid keyword stuffing Don’t use multiple keywords in a headline. A great way to avoid keyword stuffing is to use long-tail keywords that have lower search traffic but high purchase intent. For example, the keyword “buy glasses online” has an average monthly search volume of 33,100 monthly searches. It would be impossible to rank for that keyword with a new website. But, you have a significantly higher chance of ranking for “buy glasses online with VSP insurance”—this keyword has a lower search volume of 260, it’s longer and users are specifically looking to buy glasses with VSP insurance. Don’t use H1 tags like “buy glass online: best online glasses.” That’s two keywords in one header tag, which signals to Google that the content on the page may not be relevant or provide much value. Keyword stuffing hurts your ranking and prevents you from showing up higher on search results. Rather, integrate additional keywords between the H2 to H6 headers of your page. 05. Use headers to break up text People love scannable content. In fact, Forbes calls it the most overlooked content marketing factor . Research from the Nielsen Norman Group also found that scannable content has a 58% higher chance of performing better with readers. When writing landing pages and blog posts, it's best to keep paragraphs short (roughly three lines of text). Keep H2 and H3 subheaders no longer than four paragraphs. 06. Use secondary keywords in your subheaders Conduct keyword research to determine the primary and secondary keywords for each page. These can be short or long (e.g., “Link building” or “What’s the best link building software”). Use the primary keyword in your H1 tag and spread out secondary keywords in H2 and H3 tags. This signals relevance to both Google and your potential visitors. However, the priority should be to write naturally, not simply forcing keywords for the sake of ticking off an SEO checklist. How to update header tags on Wix Now that you know what headers are and how to use them, let’s add headers to your Wix website. Wix provides a few ways to update your headers , either through the Wix Blog or Wix Editor. Text settings It’s possible to change the hierarchy of header tags without affecting the design or content of that particular the page. Highlight the text and select Edit Text . Next, click SEO & Accessibility and choose your preferred header tag from the list. Wix Blog When writing a blog post with the Wix Blog editor, you can edit headers by selecting the text. By default, the H1 header is your post title in the editor. Highlight the portion of text you want to turn into a header tag. Next, click the text style menu and choose the appropriate header from the drop-down menu. 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

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.