Search Results

Author: George Nguyen The relationship between news publishers and Google has long been contentious. For news SEOs, the opportunities for traffic only seem to erode, and when traffic is up for grabs, the search engine has been known to make publishers jump through hoops (e.g., AMP ) to be eligible. To share experiences and help peers in the industry navigate optimizing news for Google Search, some of the top SEO experts from across the news industry gathered on May 20, 2024, for New York’s first-ever News for SEO meetup, organized by Newzdash  and Wix Studio . Below are key takeaways from the event’s panel discussion, including: Embedding yourself into the newsroom Providing initial and ongoing SEO training Optimizing the stories that really matter for your audience AI adoption across news publications Tactical tips for increasing writer E-E-A-T Embed yourself into the newsroom “Good SEO and great journalism are not mutually exclusive.”   — Jake Becker, Sr. Director, SEO at New York Post During the panel, the experts agreed that embedding yourself into the newsroom and learning how journalists operate is crucial to prove your value and earn buy-in from the reporters actually writing (and potentially optimizing) the stories.  “Take a step back and see what the journalists are doing, how they’re doing it, and learn a little bit from them. But at the same time, also think about where the opportunities and the gaps lie that you can actually assist with.” — Binti Pawa, VP, Audience Growth at Forbes Successfully embedding yourself with the news team makes them more receptive to your ideas and SEO guidance, enabling you to scale SEO for your publication without asking for more resources. Opportunities to collaborate with your news team might come in the form of daily standups or Slack channels where they discuss what’s on the publishing calendar. In these meetings, you can offer ways to optimize upcoming content or pitch your own story ideas, which might be exactly what some reporters need on a slow news day. “We’ve been able to very quickly get integrated and then pitch those ideas,” said Binti Pawa, VP, audience growth at Forbes . “When they do get picked up, they actually perform. Now, this is where the key is: Showing those results, the performance—that’s huge because that’s where you’re going to get a buy-in.”  Embedding yourself with the news team, however, can be tricky. “I’ve never come across a reporter who’s been like, ‘Okay, I’ll make that change. You’re not my editor, but right, that sounds like a great idea,’” Gabriella Iannetta, deputy head, SEO at The Sun , said. One way to sidestep potential friction is to be flexible with your approach.  “If you’re the reporter with the exclusive and you know it’s going to blow up, then let’s test it. Let’s try it out and then we can work on what that result was. Did it actually blow up the way you thought or was there something we could have done better?” — Gabriella Iannetta, Deputy Head, SEO at The Sun “It’s easy being on the business side, but I think you have to absolutely be on the editorial side to get things done,” Iannetta added. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with your publication’s editorial workflows and embedded yourself with the news team, the next step is to find ways to scale your success. “My approach is to empower as many people as possible as thoroughly as possible to adopt SEO. Also when you think about it, the reporters are handling the coverage, they know the most crucial facets—the most important things and terms. If they’re the ones who hold the SEO knowledge, they’ll be able to optimize better than I can if I’m jumping in to write a headline really quickly with whatever I can get from the draft that they have.” — Maddie Shepherd, Director, SEO at CBS News Another common approach is to relegate all SEO duties to a dedicated team. However, not only does this create silos, but “for the people in the non-SEO writing roles, it may give them an implicit pass to not optimize,” Jake Becker, senior director, SEO, at New York Post  added. This dynamic can lead to even greater friction between teams (reporters may be unhappy with how the SEO team adjusts their articles, teams may try to ‘claim’ their wins, etc). Provide initial SEO training and reinforce it To become the most visible, reputable publication in your niche, you need to ensure that everyone who touches the website understands the impact that they can have on its SEO. “I work with the HR team to give me the names of every new hire that will touch the company’s content. And I made sure, from the top, that it’s mandatory for any new hire to go through SEO training within three months—that changed the whole game.” — John Shehata, CEO and Founder at NewzDash Quarterly SEO training for new hires allows you to shape the relationship early on and communicate that everyone who works on the website also shares responsibility for the publication’s search visibility.  The education shouldn’t end at training for new hires, though. You’ll need to keep everyone updated on the latest best practices (which is easier if you’ve embedded yourself with the newsroom) and remind reporters of the SEO guidance you’ve provided. “Repetition is the most important thing. That could just be if you see even a small mistake—a kicker at the front of the headline that shouldn’t be there [for example]—send individual Slack messages or individual emails. Explain to them, ‘Okay, Google sees the first 60 to 70 characters of a headline, we want to put this higher up in the headline because it’s more likely to get crawled and more likely to be seen.’” — Jeremy Layton, US Head, Editorial SEO at Daily Mail The potential pitfall here is that you’re relying on people who aren’t necessarily accountable to SEO KPIs to implement optimizations. To motivate your reporters, Jeremy Layton, US head, editorial SEO at Daily Mail , recommends putting the results of your recommendations (and their implementation) front and center. “If we change a headline, I’ll highlight the minute the headline was changed and lines will go up,” Layton said. “So if you just show them how important it is, people will slowly start to buy in,” he added, emphasizing that it’s best to get personal with your approach to motivating your reporters and journalists. Optimize the stories that really matter to your audience News publications are distinct from marketing blogs or industry publications, for example, because of their breadth. So, news SEOs need to decide whether they’ll divide their attention evenly across all the news content or concentrate their efforts on certain categories or types of stories. “I would love to hit every single story, but that’s just impossible.” — Edward Hyatt, Director, Newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal When deciding where to focus, the panelists largely agreed that the publication’s audience and branding should guide the way.  “Rather than advising and recommending optimizations for every headline, we’re targeting what we think will do well,” Becker said. “We’re not trying to reach everybody—we’re trying to reach people who will read the Wall Street Journal  for this topic that they care about, so we stay as focused as possible on that,” Edward Hyatt, director, newsroom SEO at The Wall Street Journal , said. “That means we don’t touch every single story, but we stay sort of narrow on those key topics and those key stories of the day.” AI adoption varies across news publications News SEOs have started realizing the potential of AI in the workflows leading up to a news story draft, but attitudes about the technology and levels of adoption vary. “The way our SEOs have been using AI, it’s been more about prompting them, helping them with headline optimization or building out content briefs—again, guided and not simply like, ‘Here’s what’s getting pushed out to us, so I’m just going to push it back to our writers.’” — Binti Pawa, VP, Audience Growth at Forbes During the panel, “guided content” was a term used to describe ethical and reliable uses of AI in content creation. The panelists agreed that AI is suitable for basic (albeit time-consuming) tasks, such as: Outlining Meta description  creation Summarizing bulk content (e.g., SEO competitor analysis  or court records for reporters) Outside of news stories, AI has the potential to scale your publication’s reach via more traditional SEO strategies, like directly answering user questions. “No matter where this AI era takes us, I know that it will only be valuable to us to continue to tap into that and to serve those utility needs, whether it’s ‘How to watch (keyword),’ or ‘What does (this) mean?’ or ‘How does (blank) work?’” said Louisa Frahm, director, SEO at ESPN . Even with AI’s potential benefits, some of the panelists emphasized caution as part of their roles. “For the company I work at, we’re happy not to be pioneers in wholesale changes into AI workflows,” Becker said. “I think my first rule is to be cautious as well,” Hyatt added. Tactical tips for increasing your writers’ E-E-A-T By now, everybody has author pages ( including this publication ) as a means of conveying their writers’ E-E-A-T . When asked how they help their authors showcase E-E-A-T, the panelists responded with the following examples: Helping one of their premier columnists set up a Google knowledge panel . Instilling a sense of ownership over particular news beats to motivate journalists while centralizing their expertise on one topic. Highlighting reporting location in the byline (e.g., “Jennifer Cannon reporting from TD Garden in Boston, Mass.”) to take advantage of the priority that Google gives to local reporting. Hiring an editor with deep subject matter expertise (depending on your publication) to ensure a high standard of trustworthiness across all content. Creating “roundtable” content or articles where multiple authors can come together in one concise resource. Encouraging your journalists and reporters to share their news article via social media platforms. More takeaways from the latest SEO events Stay up-to-date with the latest guidance from experts at live industry events: Agency takeaways and tips from BrightonSEO (April 2024) Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix In the second half of this year, you can look forward to recaps from MozCon, BrightonSEO in San Diego, and more SEO meetups hosted at the Wix Playground in NYC. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen For SEO agencies, client website optimization is just one aspect of the job. If you want your agency to actually thrive throughout industry shifts (and challenges from competitors), you also need to keep a watchful eye on upcoming changes to the SERP and algorithm, opportunities to leverage novel multi-channel strategies, the client relationship, as well as the satisfaction of the employees that carry out all that work. At BrightonSEO in April 2024, some of the SEO industry’s top experts shared their experiences on these topics and the approaches that have worked best for their agencies and clients. Table of contents: Why social & SEO are multi-channel MVPs in 2024 How to report on SGE’s potential impact to stakeholders Why honesty is the best client relations policy How agencies can go from employee turnover to tenure Why social & SEO are multi-channel MVPs in 2024 SERP’s Up at BrightonSEO, April 2024, featuring Sukhjinder Singh, Carmen Dominguez, Crystal Carter, Grace Frohlich, and Barry Adams. In the age of TikTok (and other social platforms and formats, like Reddit), social media can work in tandem with SEO better than ever, according to the experts on the live session of the SERP’s Up  podcast at BrightonSEO. While the experts did mention the well established benefits, they also highlighted novel ways to discover emerging search demand or potentially even rank pages. “I was just thinking about social media bolstering E-E-A-T ,” said SEO Consultant Sukhjinder Singh, referencing the now-commonly evangelized practice of including links to authors’ social profiles as a way to convey real-life experience and authority. “But it’s also a good research tool,” he added, citing an earlier BrightonSEO session by Ray Saddiq . “You need to be different to stand out—to do that, you need to look outside of Google (at organic social channels). But looking outside of Google often leads to terms or phrases with low search volume . Stop being afraid of zero SV keywords. Using these keywords might get you first-mover advantage, helping you to serve a search intent when it emerges. This is also an opportunity to show Google you are covering topics as whole and in depth by targeting topics your competitors may not have even thought about.” — Ray Saddiq, SEO Consultant “If the phrase or topic is popular on two social platforms, I’ve found it will pick up search on Google.” — Ray Saddiq Beyond using TikTok for keyword research , Carmen Dominguez, head of organic at Hallam, noticed that inbound links from the platform may help move the needle on the SERP: “I recently did a test on TikTok and Instagram with one of my eCommerce clients and getting lots of links coming from TikTok got people to click on my products and they now rank, even though I no longer have people coming from TikTok—just because the clicks made Google recognize my product.” “But also, my brand is now much better recognized on TikTok because of that, so people come from brand much more often,” Dominguez said, reminding attendees that time invested into social can pay dividends all on its own. “So I think it’s all related to making sure that we do an organic strategy where we look at all the different channels all at once, rather than just single points in different areas.” How to report on SGE’s potential impact to stakeholders “Stakeholders who sign contracts, who sign checks—they still think ChatGPT equals AI; they think all they have to worry about is the content” said Dan Taylor , head of technical SEO at SALT.agency , during his session on communicating SEO risk potential to stakeholders . “The fact that SGE  is around the corner, they’re completely blindsided by.”  While some stakeholders will focus on how they can put generative AI to use in their own campaigns, SEO professionals must also assess and communicate how search engines apply generative AI to reshape content on the SERP—potentially affecting all the businesses that rank on that SERP. Dan Taylor’s modified Torino scale for SGE threat assessment. The blue dot is an example of where SGE might land for eCommerce businesses. To communicate both the likelihood and severity of SGE’s potential impact on clients, Taylor adapted NASA’s Torino scale (shown above). And to further aid your stakeholders’ decision making, Taylor recommends a PESTLE analysis  to provide strategic context. A PESTLE analysis includes a review of the following macro-environmental factors: Politics Economics Society Technology Legislation Environment The final step to communicating the risks associated with SGE is to organize all the information in a simple, easily referenceable format. “The easiest way to explain this to stakeholders is using this one slide—it’s a little four-box that can essentially be tailored to anything or any business,” Taylor said. “It gives [the client] an idea of some key aspects of the project, so they feel involved, they feel like they know what is happening,” Taylor said, adding that this also creates a paper trail that you can reference later. Why honesty is the best client relations policy “When you’re working as part of a collaborative SEO venture, sometimes there’s awkward conversations,” said Crystal Carter , head of SEO communications at Wix. “Like somebody takes credit for something that you’re pretty sure was you or sometimes you’re working with a client and they say ‘Hey we want to bring in this other agency,’ and you're like, ‘who are they?’” The live recording of SERP’s Up at BrightonSEO. “The most important part when building relationships is being able to have the hard conversations at the very beginning. If you don't have the hard conversations, trust breaks and if trust breaks, you’re going to have a competitor coming in and that is actually your own fault.” — Carmen Dominguez, Head of Organic at Hallam Whether they were trying to maintain a client or on the client side (hiring the digital marketing agency), the “hard” conversations that the expert panelists provided as examples shared one important thread: honesty. “My old boss was really honest with people, [she would say] ‘This is what we’re good at,’ and they would appreciate that and stick with us,” Singh said. While the addition of a second SEO agency could certainly catch you by surprise, the expert panelists were quick to highlight the opportunities and positive experiences they’ve had. “The client’s website is on the line, so it’s their right to bring in a second opinion. In that sense, I think I’m more okay with it, especially if that other agency proves my point. So it's more like an opportunity to do that.” — Grace Frohlich , SEO Consultant at Brainlabs “This exact thing happened to me where I was brought in to do a specific piece of work for a client and they told me there was another agency who’s also doing the exact same piece of work,” said Barry Adams, SEO consultant at Polemic Digital and co-founder of the News & Editorial SEO Summit, explaining that it was a fairly big agency and that he was a freelancer at the time. “It turned out that other agency took a slightly different angle and our work complemented each other really, really well—it gave the client the whole holistic view they were looking for so that turned out to be fantastic,” he added. How agencies can go from employee turnover to tenure “We were a very small agency, clients came through the door, we needed to get things going,” said Miguel Varela, managing director at Unik SEO, during his session on talent retention for agencies .  So, Varela’s agency started hiring SEOs , but the lack of process and support for these new employees created issues for the culture of the agency: Senior SEOs did not have time to train newer SEOs because they were busy with client work, processes were skipped, and talent started to leave. The need to “get things going” for clients is often at the center of decision making, and while results ultimately drive agency retainers, you also need to support the staff that delivers those results if you want your agency to survive over the long run. To retain top talent and keep your agency competitive, Valera recommends that agency managers: Monitor motivation  — Understanding why people leave is only a piece of the picture. Valera recommends that employers schedule regular “ stay interviews ” (in addition to standard exit interviews when employees leave) to find out what you can do to improve. “Maybe [the employee] wants to move somewhere and be remote because they’re from outside the country—many things can change, so you should be aware of what’s going on,” he said, adding that the interviews should be conducted by the HR department or a neutral party. You can also take anonymous “pulse checks” (Valera’s agency uses a Slack integration for this) to monitor motivation across the company. With the recent prevalence of “ quiet quitting ,” these tactics can be a crucial boon for talent retention. Prioritize your employer brand as much as your consumer brand  — Labor trends are constantly evolving, with more people turning to social media to help them choose where to work. There are many ways you can revamp your image to appeal to the professionals you want to attract, but Valera recommends bucketing your employer brand content into three categories: Entertainment, education, and inspiration. Entertainment-related content includes your office pizza parties or all-hands/happy hours, for example. Education-related content includes in-depth articles, white papers, and thought leadership. And, inspiration-related content includes in-person events (like SEO conferences), charitable events, pro bono work, etc. “Sometimes this last one [inspiration] is the most important for people to want to work with you,” Valera said. Diversify the age of your workforce  — SEO is a younger marketing discipline and so it naturally attracts a younger workforce. However, a mix of both younger and older employees can balance fresh perspectives with experience, facilitate retention (as older employees may prioritize stability over career growth), and empower all parties involved through mentorship programs. Recognize performance  — There are many ways agencies recognize employees, including performance reviews, feedback sessions, bonuses (or other compensation), etc. Instead of focusing on the reward component, Valera focused on recognizing employees based on KPIs for individual performance. “KPIs are important because people can understand where they’re going and what they need to do to excel,” he said, adding that this helps distinguish what success looks like at your particular agency.  More takeaways from the latest SEO industry events on the Wix SEO Learning Hub In addition to our regular tactical and strategic articles on SEO (and related digital marketing disciplines), the Wix SEO Learning Hub will be on-site for live events throughout the year, including in-person industry meetups at the Wix Playground in New York, MozCon, BrightonSEO in San Diego, and more. To keep you updated with the latest challenges and how the industry’s experts are addressing them, we’ll publish takeaways from these events shortly after they occur. If you didn’t catch our first edition of this series, you can read about in my article Google’s SGE: Insights from SEOFOMO x Wix . 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Nearly a year ago, Google unveiled its AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE)—the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers Microsoft Bing. And although Google has been tight-lipped about its plans for a wider SGE rollout, it’s clear that generative AI will be a key component of search results in the near future.  This means major brands and SEOs need to pay attention to SGE and its AI overviews if they want to maintain a competitive edge—especially in industries like eCommerce and publishing. On April 16, 2024, Aleyda Solis, SEO consultant and founder at Orainti, hosted the SEOFOMO Meetup at the Wix Playground in New York.  At this event, some of the industry’s top SEOs discussed SGE’s impact on their strategies, how Google’s business model may need to adapt, and their new priorities in this AI-powered search environment. Insights: AI overviews disincentivize top-of-funnel content creation Google needs to bridge AI overviews and ad revenue SGE or not, capture low-hanging fruit for SEO clients Despite uncertainty, you can still position your clients for SGE Structured data is more important than ever AI overviews disincentivize top-of-funnel content creation “If people don’t have the incentive to create this content that [Google has] been learning from, at some point, it will stop and they won’t have access to information to learn from.” — Aleyda Solis , SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti “[Google] is, let’s say, ‘bridging’ all of the product reviews, et cetera, from publications, but also all the PLPs  and category and facets from actual merchants, because they recreate that experience directly in the [SGE] snapshot,” Solis said. Google’s SGE summarizes information, decreasing the need to click through. For many shopping-related queries, Google’s AI overviews summarize content so that users don’t need to click through to the original publisher’s domain. At the same time, Google can show links directly to product pages, effectively disincentivizing top-of-the-funnel content creation by appropriating it for the SERP. But, “if you cull a blog because it’s not generating revenue, well, you don’t know what revenue that was generating further on down the line,” Chris Green , senior SEO consultant at Torque Partnerships, cautioned attendees.  Naturally, Google’s changes will impact businesses differently. “I think investing in really understanding what traffic is commercially valuable—even if it’s not absolutely important to conversion—is super important,” Green said, adding, “So find out what’s actually a risk, but present some scenarios [to your stakeholders],” so that you can map out some potential ways to adapt your strategy. Google needs to bridge AI overviews and ad revenue The question of “If no one’s creating top-of-funnel content for Google to train its AI on, then where will the data come from?” isn’t the only dilemma the search engine has to solve—it also has to offset any potential ad revenue losses associated with SGE. “There is also the other part in Google, which feels that they’re going to be losing a ton of revenue—especially in display ads,” said event attendee John Shehata. “Imagine you are a parent with two kids looking for a trip in Florida, in a place that’s family friendly and so on, and it takes you two weeks to find the right hotels. SGE—good or bad—can solve it for you in a couple of days in a journey with like three or four different questions. So, you reduced a hundred pages full of display ads into like three, four SGE questions.” — John Shehata, CEO and Founder at NewzDash Google will need to recoup any lost revenue as a result of fewer ads shown to users. There are many levers that the company can pull to do this, including only showing AI overviews when it doesn’t show ads and even putting its generative AI features behind a paywall  (which poses another question: Are users willing to pay for what they’re used to getting for free?). At any rate, this situation lacks a clear solution and, without one, SGE is less likely to roll out globally (at least not in the implementation that Google has tested so far). Source: Google. SGE or not, capture low-hanging fruit for SEO clients “There’s still so much fruit that is just left to die on the tree. Case in point: I’m constantly encouraging clients, ‘Let’s do some linear regressions  to see which of your data points predict increased revenue!’ Google can’t take that from you.” — Annie Cushing, Senior Marketing Analyst at Annielytics Generative AI  opens up a world of possibilities and a universe of questions to go with them—many of which are just distractions given how often businesses and clients overlook the basics. And, while these possibilities and questions are exciting, they don’t overshadow existing digital marketing and SEO best practices when it comes to moving the needle for your business (or your clients’). “The beauty of machine learning is that you just take all of your data columns—throw all that spaghetti against the wall—and see which are most predictive,” Annie Cushing, senior marketing analyst at Annielytics, recommended. “Sometimes it may be gender, age group, location, the category of your website, but there are data points out there that you can use very simple, linear regression [to predict increased revenue],” she said, adding, “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask [Chat]GPT —you can take the first 10 rows of a dataset with 50–60 columns and ask it to generate Python code for you. There’s no excuse not to learn this.” Even for larger businesses/clients, low-hanging fruit can make your work more impactful while you assess the opportunities that generative AI may bring to your brand in search results. “I don’t know about you, I work a lot with enterprise-level clients that still have ‘Home’ for their homepage title tags,” said event attendee Nick LeRoy, freelance SEO consultant and owner of SEOjobs.com . “There’s so much that we can still do to bring them from their current state to something higher, despite SGE and the level that it rolls out,” he added. Despite uncertainty, you can still position your clients for SGE “For the first few months, your traffic is frankly going to drop. And so what we’ve been telling our clients is, ‘Do you actually show up in these AI overviews?’” — Michael King, Founder and CEO at iPullRank  Google has yet to fully reveal if, when, or how SGE’s capabilities will roll out to users. But in its current implementation, the presence of AI overviews for your target keywords may fundamentally impact the value of those keywords for your SEO strategy.  Without SGE, users can click on traditional search listings, ads, or SERP features . With SGE, while Google still shows the aforementioned search elements, they all currently appear below ads and the AI overview, meaning that your traffic will likely decrease unless you’re featured in the AI overview (or you’re close to the top of the results).  “We’ve been doing these things that we call our ‘SGE threat reports,’ where we take all the keywords that are driving the most traffic for you and then we scrape what SGE is doing right now (as far as what it returns),” said Michael King, founder and CEO at iPullRank, explaining that the threat reports include the AI overview and how long it takes to load. Source: iPullRank. “[The loading time] has changed dramatically since we started doing this,” King said. “When we first started, they were taking up to 30 seconds to load—now, they’re all taking less than a second.” That substantial load time improvement is a threat to website traffic, according to King, because (in the event of a wider rollout) users will be intrigued by SGE’s novel capabilities. “For the first few months, your traffic is frankly going to drop,” King said of queries affected by SGE, “And so what we’ve been telling our clients is, ‘Do you actually show up in these AI overviews?’”  If so, that’s the best case scenario, since appearing in such a prominent spot is a valuable branding opportunity and you’re likely to attract some traffic (akin to earning a featured snippet ). “If you don’t appear in the AI overviews, then you need to think about which keywords don’t show AI overviews—then, let’s focus our efforts more there so we can get the traffic from those keywords,” King said. Structured data is more important than ever “In the large language model environment, it uses all of the available vocabulary. So I would encourage all of you to mark up all your sites. We [as SEOs] all just look at Schema like, ‘Oh what’s going to show up in Google?’ No—use everything.” — Michael King, Founder and CEO at iPullRank “So we all think of structured data as like, ‘I want the reviews snippets, the star ratings, the how-to results , or whatever,” King said, emphasizing that Schema markup has wider implications now that search engines are augmenting their capabilities with generative AI. “All large language models leverage structured data.” This is also why King does not advise that businesses block large language models (LLMs) from their websites. “If I go to ChatGPT and your brand is not there, then I’m not necessarily going to consider your brand,” he said. For eCommerce brands, structured data  will continue to be a cornerstone of your strategy. “In a year or so, I’m pretty sure we will be seeing a completely different experience and search results for shopping—independently of SGE or not,” Solis said. “If you take a look at the releases in The Keyword blog  [Google’s official blog for product and technology updates], when they do all of these announcements every three months or so, they announce a new experience—more support of structured data to provide new search features, a rich result, deals, dedicated page—they’re pretty much creating a new layer, a UI experience to become a competitor of Amazon,” Solis said, recommending that eCommerce marketers strengthen their focus on structured data, especially to take advantage of the types and properties Google supports. SGE is just the beginning We don’t know exactly how Google will implement and roll out generative AI to its users beyond the current SGE experiment. Even so, as Google learns how users respond to its AI overviews, we, as SEOs, also learn. Whatever shape it ultimately takes, we now have a preview of its impact on SEO. Use this knowledge to help your colleagues, clients, and managers understand how Google is evolving and what you recommend they focus on to stay visible as AI permeates the search results. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen SEO and product-related education are at the top of the marketing funnel for nearly every business and agency in our industry . It’s why your company probably has a blog and organizes webinars or even conferences for potential clients/customers. Much of your educational content is likely available on-demand (video, podcasts, blog posts, etc.), which is accessible and convenient, but limits your audiences’ interactions with your brand. The Q&A section of your conference session or webinar is unique in that attendees can engage directly with you, making it one of the most overlooked opportunities available.  If you can provide your attendees with a genuinely helpful, pleasant experience, then you’ve given them a taste of what it’s like to be a customer—moving them closer to that goal. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to run a seamless Q&A session that promotes high-quality engagement and elevates your audience’s experience, while making the session easier to manage and providing you with user-first content ideas . Table of Contents: How a superior Q&A helps your business 01. Meet and brief your expert guests Understand your expert guests’ goals Provide guidance on how to answer questions 02. Address common questions and ground rules 03. Screen your questions Prioritize your questions 04. Direct the discussion 05. Share your assets via links 06. Track the questions for better Q&As in the future Note:  The guidance below largely applies to both online (i.e., webinars, live streams, digital conferences, etc.) and offline events (in-person conferences, meet-ups, etc.), but I’ve also included format-specific advice. And, while I’ve written this from the perspective of businesses and agencies within the SEO industry, the advice will translate to just about any industry that has online and offline educational events. The benefits: How an engaging Q&A improves your marketing The Q&A portion of your SEO webinar, conference session, etc. is the only part of the event in which attendees can actively engage with your brand and expert guests. If you make it a welcoming, helpful experience, then you stand to: Add value by directly addressing a pain point for your audience. Strengthen your branding and the reputation of your online or in-person event. Increase the chances of moving attendees further down your sales funnel. If you want to reap these benefits, then you need to align with your expert guests (regardless of whether they’re internal or external to your company). Have a clear conversation to find out what they’re looking to achieve—failing to do so can result in disappointment on all sides. During this conversation, you should also provide them with some basic guidelines to cover the bases and ensure everyone has a positive experience, which I’ll discuss in the next section. 01. Meet and brief your expert guests Hold a logistical meeting or rehearsal well in advance of the event (at least enough time for your experts to make changes to their presentations, if needed). This meeting should cover: Format, flow, and timing  — You may not need to do a full rehearsal, but at least go over the agenda and timing so that everyone has a clear idea of how your SEO webinar or conference session should unfold. Tech/equipment checks  (online only) — Online viewers tend to be very vocal about poor audio quality. Potential hiccups  — Let your participants know how to behave and what to expect if, for example, the moderator’s internet connection cuts out or the presenter before them runs over on time, etc. Promotion  — Set clear expectations for how participants will promote the event and how they will promote their own brands/products during the session. This can be an especially important element if the goal of your event is to tap into one another’s respective audiences. If it’s not possible to sync with all your expert guests at the same time, add a second, alternative orientation so that everyone is on the same page on the actual day of the event. Writing these details out in an email is the least you can do, and while it’s better than nothing, emails don’t offer your guests the opportunity to ask for clarification on the spot.  What’s more, if your experts are meeting each other for the first time right before the event, there may be some initial awkwardness to overcome. That may not sound like much of a risk, but consider the opposite scenario: familiarity between your guests paves the way for banter and an upbeat atmosphere, which can show your audience that your experts (and by extension, the brands they represent) are human and can relate to their pain points. Understand your expert guests’ goals Your expert guests are far more likely to put forth their best effort if they know you’re also putting in your best for them. To that end: Find out what your experts want to achieve during your event.  It could be as simple as a canned (“softball”) question at some point during the Q&A about their product or service. Find out what they don’t want to discuss.  This can include certain subject matters, current events, details about their company’s upcoming plans, etc. Ask about (and address) their concerns.  Give your guests a chance to bring up any concerns they may have. In my experience, this conversation typically involves contingency planning (like how to communicate when an expert could use a helping hand to answer a question). If it’s a paid appearance (or perhaps you’re giving them leads for their business), you’ll still want to make it a pleasant, well-organized session that engages the speakers and the audience—asking your experts the questions above gets you one step closer to that. Provide guidance on how to answer questions You know your audience better than anyone—use that knowledge to guide your experts so that they can provide the appropriate level of detail in their responses. It may be second nature for some experts to speak in highly technical terms or answer tersely. Tell your experts about your audience and their level of familiarity with the subject matter so that they can tailor their responses. And, regardless of audience proficiency, remind your experts to keep their responses respectful (belittling a question reflects poorly on your brand and event—I’ve seen experts do that, and attendees will talk about it, turning this misstep into gossip about your event). Pro tip: During your Q&A, you may receive multiple related questions. Select the most representative, well-rounded question to ask your expert, but also prompt them to provide more context. This can enable you to answer multiple questions with one response. So far, I’ve covered the elements you need to plan for ahead of your Q&A session. Let’s move on to the other half of the equation: what you need to manage during the actual event. 02. Address common questions and ground rules If you’ve moderated SEO conferences, webinars, etc. then you probably noticed that some questions will always get asked; my favorite examples are: “Will this webinar be recorded?” “Where can I download the presentation?” Track these frequent questions (more on this later) and answer them at the start of the event, before you transition to the speakers/experts. New attendees might join late, so repeat the answers to these questions during your transitions between experts and sections (between the main content and the Q&A, and if applicable, again at the end of the Q&A). Alternatively, you can also display this information on-screen. If your webinar or conference session contains multiple experts/sections, inform attendees about the order of events so that they know what to expect. This also helps to ensure that everyone involved in running the event is on the same page before things fully kick off. And, finally, frame the Q&A for your audience by telling them what types of questions will (and won’t) get selected.  For example, during our Wix SEO Learning Hub webinars , we remind attendees that only questions that are relevant to the topic of the webinar will be answered. This helps us reach the objective of the webinar, instead of bogging it down with, for example, general SEO questions that our experts didn’t necessarily sign on to answer. If possible, try not  to ignore irrelevant questions (this is easier for online webinars than in-person SEO conferences or meet-ups). Instead of answering them “on stage,” have your moderator or staff answer them through the webinar platform with a polite response, such as, “Sorry we can’t answer this right now, our experts want to prioritize questions that are closely related to the webinar topic.” This is also an opportunity to share a link that could answer their question (and drive a potentially high-intent user to your domain). Pro tip:  Ask your experts if they’re willing to connect with attendees after the Q&A via social media. If your audience still has questions at the end of the Q&A, then you’ll be able to provide them a path to answers. 03. Screen your questions If you have an “open mic” format (common at SEO conferences) where attendees queue up behind a microphone, then you’re trading control over the session—and, by extension, your control over the audience’s experience—in favor of direct engagement with experts and fewer responsibilities for your on-site staff.  That may sound like a reasonable compromise, but in my experience (across about 20 online and in-person SEO conferences, and dozens of webinars), it’s more risk than you should take. If your guests are well-known experts, attendees are more likely to ask them questions on a variety of topics. These questions may be controversial, too niche, or just irrelevant. Choose a Q&A format in which you can screen questions—for your experts and for the rest of the audience. For in-person Q&As,  you can screen audience questions by introducing audience interaction software. This solution does pose other challenges, but you can still ask your experts to hang around the venue after their session to answer questions off stage.  For online Q&As, it is much easier to screen and resolve questions. Platforms, like Zoom, have a dedicated Q&A feature where you can identify the most valuable questions to answer live for the audience, while your staff answers the less relevant questions through the platform (instead of on-air). Organize audience questions and highlight the ones that are appropriate to answer live during the Q&A. Create a spreadsheet to organize your questions and coordinate with your team (as shown above). This way, you can maintain brand safety and empower your moderators and experts to focus on their roles (instead of filling up time as they skim the chat for viable questions). This does, however, mean that your event staff must be knowledgeable about the subject matter to properly support the experts and the audience. Prioritize your questions The questions attendees submit will not all be valuable for your SEO conference or webinar objectives—a fraction of them will be nearly worthless (i.e., off-topic, too niche, etc.) and potentially distracting. Screening your questions allows you to vet them for quality but also to prioritize the flow of your Q&A. After all, it makes more sense to answer the most frequently asked questions first. I’ve found that it’s best to prioritize questions by: Answering the ones with the biggest impact for your audience, brand, or your expert’s brand first.  Tell the audience ahead of time that this is how the Q&A will operate so that they don’t get frustrated if their question doesn’t get answered on stage or on-air, and remind them that they can get in touch with the expert after the session. Cluster related questions together.  If multiple questions share a common topic, phrase the question in a way that prompts the expert to resolve them all with one response (like in the example below). Related Q&A questions Combined question for your expert “Can you generate images with ChatGPT ?” “Can I use ChatGPT for keyword research ?” “Can ChatGPT create content in my brand’s tone of voice ?” “What are the limitations of ChatGPT for SEO and content creation?” 04. Direct the discussion Even though the Q&A occurs between your expert guests and your audience, your moderator still has a critical job to perform. As the Q&A progresses, make sure to: Clarify confusing questions/answers.  Your audience may include non-native language speakers or your experts may have difficulty improvising answers (as opposed to presenting slides). Rephrase or reiterate as necessary to improve clarity and make the Q&A run more smoothly.  Involve other expert guests.  If your SEO event has more than one expert on stage during the Q&A, then you need to consider how to engage them all; this is especially true if one guest is more notable than the others. This can be as straightforward as asking, “I know this question was for Expert A, but Expert B, do you have anything else to add based on your own unique experiences?” Intervene if an attendee or expert goes off-topic.  Be polite, thank everyone for their questions and engagement, but do not let your Q&A get off track because of a few stray comments.  Ask for follow-up questions.  If a particular Q&A topic is generating a lot of interest, lean in by asking your own follow-up questions or asking the crowd if they have a relevant follow-up question. This can also help you out if you’re trying to hit a certain time marker for the event but are light on high-quality questions. 05. Share your links If you’re running an online Q&A, take this opportunity to market your content and offerings. This can also save you time since you’ve already answered the attendee’s question on your website. However, do not answer questions with just links—it’s impersonal and may leave the attendee wondering if you even read their question. Instead, address the question concisely and tee up your link.  Here’s an example for the question, “What updates did Wix make to its SEO products this year?” Generic answer with link Robust answer with link “Thanks for your question, you can read this article we wrote: https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/resource/wix-seo-updates-2023” “We released our page-level and sitewide auditing tool, the SEO Assistant. We also integrated GSC data into the Wix SEO Dashboard and within Wix Analytics. We partnered with Microsoft Bing on IndexNow. And, we recently launched our AI-powered meta tag creator. You can read about how they all work here: https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/resource/wix-seo-updates-2023” For in-person Q&As, it’s better to select one particular asset/URL to share and showcase it with a slide that includes the naked URL and/or a QR code that attendees can check out later. You can (and should) also include links from this destination to all other relevant resources. 06. Track the questions for better Q&As in the future Screening your questions with a spreadsheet or audience interaction software has an added benefit: you can save and review those questions later to improve your future Q&As. This enables you to: Identify more potential SEO webinar/conference session topics. Develop templated responses for greater efficiency and higher audience satisfaction. Create content that answers frequently asked questions , so that you can drive traffic to your domain. Provide useful feedback for your product team. Etc. Your SEO Q&A session is an investment in your marketing funnel The Q&A section of your event provides insights and value that you would otherwise have to conduct focus groups to uncover. You’re able to listen to your audience’s candid questions, and if you’re able to address them, then you’ve shown them that your business cares about them as an individual—a strong signal that you will continue to support them just as well if they become a customer.  The workflows and considerations behind a successful Q&A can be quite nuanced, as I’ve described above, but the spirit of these recommendations is simple: Satisfying your audience (in this case, their curiosity) enables you to further your business and move users closer to conversion. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen   Get started by: Creating a website → In 2023, Wix SEO  focused on two things:  Empowering website owners and SEOs to act by making tactical data easily accessible within Wix Automating core aspects of SEO via AI and integrations from partners like Microsoft  This has led over 1.8M websites to our SEO tools this year, with over 3.1M websites enjoying rich results from our predefined structured data markup—one of the many out-of-the-box features  we offer. From AI-generated meta tags and on-page auditing to Google Search Console and IndexNow integrations, this is how our SEO tools and features have advanced to cater to the needs of all websites and their owners in 2023. Table of contents: Optimize on-page with the AI SEO Assistant Wix puts Google Search Console in your dashboard The Wix SEO Dashboard Wix Analytics GSC reports Improve your SEO at scale: Automation and efficiency IndexNow integration AI-powered meta tag creator Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product  for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. X  | LinkedIn Shira Amit SEO Product Manager, Wix After working in marketing at a fintech, Shira joined Wix to build products that help users promote their business. As a Product Manager for SEO, Shira’s focus is twofold; she develops products that streamline workflows for professional SEOs while also making SEO more accessible to DIY users. X  | 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. 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 Optimize on-page with the AI SEO Assistant This year, we launched the SEO Assistant , a tool that centralizes your on-page SEO efforts and enables you to audit SEO elements at a glance. The Wix SEO Assistant is accessible from the SEO Settings panel for Wix Blog post pages, Wix Stores product pages, and Wix Bookings services. The SEO Assistant provides you with a list of optimizations (broken down by importance; i.e., critical, high, medium, low) and clearly indicates whether you’ve implemented those recommendations. For quick reference, it also shows your page’s index status on Google, thanks to its integration with our Site Inspection Tool . You can add a focus keyword to your page  to enhance the SEO Assistant’s recommendations, which include : Adding your focus keyword to the title tag Adding your focus keyword to the meta description Writing alt text for all images Using your focus keyword within body text Including structured data markup for rich results Adding your focus keyword to the URL slug Etc. In addition to auditing, the SEO Assistant allows you to implement some of its optimization suggestions from directly within the panel (as shown below). You can optimize your page from within the SEO Assistant, as shown here. In November, we took the SEO Assistant a step further by augmenting it with our AI meta tag creator , enabling you to generate optimized title tags and meta descriptions based on your page content in seconds. We’ll discuss this tool in more detail in a later section. The AI meta tag creator, in the Wix SEO Assistant, can generate title tag and meta description suggestions for your web pages. Wix’s AI meta tag generator , by the numbers: – 26,204:  The number of times AI suggestions for title tags were used on Wix websites (in the first two weeks of feature launch). – 82,436:  The number of times AI suggestions for meta descriptions were used on Wix websites (in the first two weeks of feature launch). The SEO Assistant is currently available for Wix Blog post pages, Wix Bookings services, and Wix Stores product pages. Learn how to use the SEO Assistant by watching the video below or visiting our Wix Help Center page: Improving Your Page’s SEO with the Wix SEO Assistant . Wix puts Google Search Console in your dashboard Google Search Console  (GSC) is the seminal SEO tool because it provides you with data that can help you understand how your site is performing on Google and what actions you might need to take to improve that performance.  To make these insights easier to reference and act on, we’ve added GSC performance data to the Wix SEO Dashboard  and Wix Analytics reports.  The Wix SEO Dashboard You can access the SEO Dashboard  by selecting it from the left-hand navigation panel of your main Wix dashboard ( Marketing & SEO > SEO ). Note: You must first connect your site to GSC  to see performance data. Search Console data within the SEO Dashboard includes trends and performance changes for clicks and impressions. Here, you can see clicks and impressions for the last 7, 30, or 90 days, broken down by page or search query. The “Most significant changes” section (beneath the “Total performance over time” chart) includes insights on the pages that have experienced the most significant changes in clicks or impressions, allowing you to quickly identify your most valuable pages (or underperforming ones for refreshing  or troubleshooting). You’ll also find the sitewide SEO Assistant  panel  (shown below) at the very top of your SEO Dashboard . It’s the parent to our page-level SEO Assistant tool (mentioned above) and helps you identify potential issues that could impact your site’s visibility in search results, making it an excellent place to start when you’re wondering what to do next to improve your SEO. Our page-level SEO Assistant and the sitewide SEO Assistant  share the same DNA in that they both offer professional website builders and SEOs time- and budget-saving auditing capabilities, while providing less-experienced website owners with beginner-friendly guidance. You can implement a variety of recommendations from directly within both these tools as well, further streamlining your workflows. Click View all tasks  to discover recommendations and troubleshoot issues (as shown below). Select “View tasks” for a more detailed overview of issues, recommendations, and completed tasks. The recommendations you see will depend on your site. eCommerce website owners, for instance, may see recommendations for their product pages, but a blog owner would see recommendations for their blog posts. To move you from analysis to action, we’ve also centralized all Wix SEO tools  at the bottom of your SEO Dashboard (shown below). The SEO tools and settings as shown within the Wix SEO Dashboard. Watch our video tutorial below to learn more about using Google Search Console insights in the Wix SEO Dashboard . Wix Analytics GSC reports The Google Search Performance over Time report in Wix Analytics is powered by data from GSC. Google Search Console’s suite of reports contain some of the most tactical insights available to any SEO. Now, you can access those insights via Wix Analytics (by going to Analytics & Reports > Reports > SEO ). Use the following Wix Analytics reports to get a better understanding of whether Google is ranking your pages (and if so, which ones), how often those pages are showing up in search results, and how frequently people click on them: Google Search Performance over Time Top Search Queries on Google Top Pages in Google Search Results Average Position in Google over Time These reports are viewable as a chart or table. You can customize your table columns to include query date, device type, country, CTR, average position, etc. And, you can also compare performance over two periods (as shown in the image above). Improve your SEO at scale: Automation and efficiency Managing SEO for larger site owners can be a time-consuming process. Last year, we launched our Edit by Page  feature , making bulk optimization a breeze and empowering small teams to efficiently manage SEO for even the largest websites. This year, we expanded that feature to nearly all of our page types (including Main pages, Products, Events, and Blogs). We also sought to cut down on your time spent manually optimizing by introducing:  Near-real time indexation on Microsoft Bing via our IndexNow integration AI-generated title tags and meta descriptions IndexNow integration Our IndexNow  integration automatically notifies Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam.cz in near-real time whenever you make a change to your pages (e.g., new, updated, or deleted content). “Without IndexNow, it can take days to weeks to get content changes reflected in search engines. With IndexNow, this is more like seconds to max two days.” — Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing As IndexNow is automatic for premium Wix users, there are no additional menus or settings. Note:  Separate from IndexNow, Wix also offers instant homepage indexation when you verify your site with Google Search Console . This flexibility presents an entirely new realm of potential options for SEOs. For example, websites in highly competitive industries can use IndexNow to enable faster SEO testing  by seeing the impacts of specific optimizations on performance in a much shorter timeframe.  AI-powered meta tag creator Every page on your website should have an optimized title tag and a meta description that entices users to click through. Manually optimizing these meta tags across hundreds or thousands of web pages, however, can be tedious (and challenging, if you’re not experienced with SEO). The AI meta tag creator can generate optimized title tags and meta descriptions. As mentioned above, our AI meta tag generator  creates optimized title tag and meta description recommendations based on your web page’s content. The tool generates three options for each, and, for Blog pages, you can add an optional focus keyword (like you might on the page-level SEO Assistant ), which the tool uses to inform its suggestions. You can access the AI meta tag generator by opening the SEO panel of the page you want to edit * or by going to the Edit by Page  section  of your SEO Settings  within the Wix dashboard. The AI meta tag generator within the Edit by Page  section of your Wix dashboard (shown below) is especially useful for bulk optimizations, since you can easily generate and apply suggestions and move on to the next page (without having to open each web page and its individual SEO panel). *The AI meta tag creator is not  available within the Wix Editor. If you want to create title tag and meta description suggestions for Wix Editor pages (e.g., your homepage), go to Marketing & SEO > SEO > Main Pages > Edit by Page  within your Wix dashboard. You can generate title tag and meta description suggestions for all your pages of a certain type via the Edit by Page section of the Wix dashboard. You can apply title tag and meta description suggestions from within the AI meta tag generator, or you can select Refine suggestions  to customize the suggestions by providing a description of the topic of your blog post and a desired tone of voice. It’s easier than ever to optimize Wix sites for search engines and visitors SEO isn’t the end goal; it’s just the means: the means to connect with your audience or community, to share your insights and expertise, and drive revenue or customers to your brand (or your client’s brand, for that matter).  At Wix, we understand that means our role is to support you by maximizing your impact as an SEO or website owner and minimizing time spent fumbling across platforms, implementing manual optimizations one at a time, and so on. That’s why we integrate with the most popular SEO tools (like SE Ranking’s competitor analysis app  also released this year, available in the Wix App Market ), so that Wix can work in tandem with the workflows and efficiency you’ve developed with other platforms.  That ethos is what informed our industry-leading SEO updates in 2022  and what continues to guide them into the future. We hope you use these tools and features to great effect for your business or website, and that you’re also looking forward to the advancements we’ll bring in 2024. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Updated: January 29, 2025 Get started by: Creating a website → SEO title tags and meta descriptions are crucial aspects of your online search visibility, but creating the perfect ones can be tedious—especially if you’re working with numerous clients, on larger websites, or just don’t have much experience with SEO. Now, Wix and Wix Studio Premium site owners can cut down on the time and effort involved with optimizing title tags and meta descriptions by using the Wix AI meta tag creator, our first AI-powered SEO tool. This tool creates title tag and meta description suggestions based on your site content, enabling you to generate numerous suggestions and use the one that’s right for your brand and audience. You can even fine-tune the suggestions to match your desired tone of voice by adding a few simple inputs. Here’s everything you need to know to get started. Table of contents: What the Wix AI meta tag creator does How we built the Wix AI meta tag creator The benefits of AI-generated title tags and meta descriptions How to generate title tag and meta description suggestions on Wix Set your focus keyword (optional) Create AI-powered title tag and meta description suggestions Refine suggestions to suit your brand and audience Provide feedback What the Wix AI meta tag creator does The AI meta tag creator, in the Wix SEO Panel, can generate title tag and meta description suggestions for your web pages. Wix’s AI meta tag creator can suggest SEO-friendly title tags and meta descriptions for your web pages, based on the content of the page, your business information, and so on. Title tag and meta description optimization are fundamental SEO tasks—they exist for every page and may be seen by potential website visitors as well as search engines. The title tag and meta description for the Wix SEO Learning Hub homepage, as seen in Google search results. While these elements provide crucial context for your web pages, it can take time for site owners and SEOs to come up with text that’s unique, attention-grabbing, and meets SEO best practices (including keyword usage, length, etc). To cut down on this friction, Wix’s AI-powered meta tag creator helps you work more efficiently by providing three optimized suggestions that you can refine to fit the desired tone of voice. Now, let’s take a look at how we built this feature and its benefits before moving on to how to put it to work for your business or clients. How we built the Wix AI meta tag creator “We use a lot of data [from the user’s website] to create text that is as accurate and relevant to the page as possible—without the user having to tell us about it themselves.” — Shira Amit, product manager at Wix AI integrations have proliferated to just about all niches of the digital marketing industry, but many are nothing more than API calls. The Wix AI meta tag creator was built from the ground up and is powered by OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT ). As part of this process, we wrote hundreds of prompts to find results that: Adhere to SEO best practices Work well across different Wix page types Address different search intents Offer a wide enough variation for SEOs and site owners to choose from “After initially disqualifying prompts based on the percent of results that adhered to our strict definitions of a good suggestion (length, has keyword etc.), the SEO team, together with our SEO experts, did a qualitative check on hundreds of results to ensure that they were viable for the content of the page they were generated for,” said Shira Amit, product manager at Wix. To create title tag and meta description suggestions, the AI meta tag creator generates suggestions based on your site data, such as: Page content Page type The page’s target keyword Your business’s name Your business’s location Etc. Before release, we tested over 100 prompts and evaluated almost 60,000 responses across 70 different page types. “Throughout all these tests, we found what the common errors were and we made sure to filter those out so that we’re comfortable with the results users get,” Amit said, “It made us more sure that we’re doing something good that people will be happy with.” Responses that get filtered out (not shown as a suggestion) are ones that don’t meet our requirements (due to length, omitting best practices, etc). Additionally, we use broad matching ( stemming ) to enable flexibility and create suggestions that are more aligned with how search engines work. In January 2025, the AI-powered SEO meta tag generator upgraded its model from ChatGPT 3 to ChatGPT 4.0. This means tags will draw from: 1 trillion data parameters (instead of 175 billion parameters) Knowledge cutoff as recent as Dec 2023 (instead of Sept 2021) Improved language reasoning and creative capabilities This update allows users to continue to improve output quality as they optimize their pages. The benefits of AI-generated title tags and meta descriptions Wix’s AI-powered title tag and meta description suggestions provide SEOs and site owners with three key benefits: Efficiency: Create search-optimized title tag and meta description suggestions in seconds. This helps SEOs and site owners across the board—those working with clients or on sites with many pages can quickly generate ready-to-use suggestions, while owners of smaller sites that are newer to SEO best practices may benefit from these already-optimized recommendations. Search visibility: Sometimes, a relatively minor title tag optimization can result in big performance gains . Our title tag and meta description suggestions include important information, like your page’s target keyword, your business’s name, location, etc. This context can help you rank better and attract more visitors via search results. Branding and customization: Select from three primary suggestions or refine suggestions to better match your brand and audience by providing your own description of the page and selecting a tone of voice (Informative, Conversational, Formal, or Transactional). How to generate title tag and meta description suggestions on Wix The AI meta tag creator tool is available to Wix Premium site owners. To access this feature: Enter the SEO panel of the page you want to edit *. The AI meta tag creator is available within the Basics tab of the SEO panel as well as within the SEO Assistant tab. Go to the Edit by Page section of your SEO Settings within the Wix dashboard (this option is better for updating title tags and meta descriptions in bulk). For the purposes of this explainer, I’ll show you how to use this feature in the SEO panel of a blog post—one of the most common page types. Once you’re familiar with this workflow, it’s pretty straightforward to apply it at scale via the Edit by Page section (as shown below). You can generate title tag and meta description suggestions for all your pages of a certain type via the Edit by Page section of the Wix dashboard. *The AI meta tag creator is not available within the Wix Editor. If you want to create title tag and meta description suggestions for Wix Editor pages (e.g., your homepage), go to Marketing & SEO > SEO > Main Pages > Edit by Page within your Wix dashboard. Set your focus keyword (optional) The AI meta tag creator pulls in content from the page itself, enabling you to begin generating suggestions as soon as you’re done creating the page. Optionally, for Wix Blogs pages, you can input a focus keyword (in the SEO Assistant section of the SEO panel), which the AI meta tag creator will use to inform its suggestions. This typically corresponds with the keyword you want to show up for in search results. For this example, I’m using [AI content] as the focus keyword: Alternatively, you can also proceed without setting a focus keyword by selecting Create suggestions without keyword (as shown below). Create AI-powered title tag and meta description suggestions Next, head to the Basics tab within the SEO Panel (shown below). Create AI-powered title tag and meta description suggestions Next, head to the Basics tab within the SEO Panel (shown below). Click Create AI text above the title tag and/or meta description fields to generate three suggestions. In the example above, you can see that the focus keyword I designated ([AI content]) appears in all three suggestions. From here, you can either select Use Text to apply the text to the corresponding title tag/meta description field or you can Refine suggestions to customize the content and tone of voice (we’ll discuss this in the next section). For now, let’s assume I’m happy with the first suggestion so we can move on to what AI-generated meta description suggestions look like: An example of AI-powered meta description suggestions in Wix. Notice that the second suggestion mentions the name of the expert guest (the page for this example is a podcast episode landing page), which helps make your meta description more unique to your content. At this point, you can: Apply these suggestions straight from the AI meta tag creator panel, Use them as inspiration and refine them manually, or Further refine the suggestions using the AI meta tag creator by describing the topic of the post and the desired tone of voice (more on this below). Refine suggestions to suit your brand and audience You can select Refine suggestions in the AI meta tag creator panel (below the generated title tag or meta description suggestions) to tweak the outputs to fit your needs. The “Refine suggestions” box will open and automatically populate with your page’s title (as shown below). Let’s say, for example, that I’d like to get more granular about the target audience (SEOs and digital marketers) and the manner in which AI is used. And, I also want the meta description to sound more informational. I’d describe the topic and tone of voice as follows: Next, click Create to generate the new suggestions that reflect this information: You can see that the audience I mentioned is called out explicitly in this new batch of suggestions. And, the element of using AI in workflows is alluded to in each of the new suggestions as well. Next, select Use Text to designate one of the suggestions as the page’s meta description (or title tag, if you’re using this workflow to refine title tags) or explore more suggestion refinements. Provide feedback You can provide feedback on all title tag and meta description suggestions using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons towards the bottom of the AI meta tag creator panel. “Since only the user sees the final suggestions, it was important for us to get direct feedback about its quality, so we implemented a feedback section inside the product to allow us to easily monitor the quality of the results users get.” — Shira Amit, product manager at Wix Selecting the thumbs up icon opens up an optional field where you can tell us what worked well. Selecting the thumbs down icon also reveals additional, optional feedback options (as shown below). Save time and work at scale with AI-generated title tags and meta descriptions Like all of our Wix SEO tools , the AI Text Generator is meant to work in tandem with your knowledge of title tag and meta description best practices . Remember, this feature doesn’t take into account user search intent, what’s already ranking for your target keyword, and so on, so do your research to ensure that you’re adopting the best suggestions. To learn more about Wix SEO tools that help you save time and work at scale, bookmark the following resources: Wix’s on-page SEO audit tool: The SEO Assistant Wix’s SEO Dashboard makes GSC data available at a glance Monitor organic performance with GSC data in Wix Analytics Wix SEO updates: What we’ve done in 2022 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Title tags are one of the most accessible ways to begin local SEO for your business. After all, they are akin to titling an article or video you created. Even so, many website owners overlook this potentially high-impact, low-effort optimization. To help you shake off any SEO inertia and make the most out of the web pages you’re already creating and maintaining, I’ll showcase easy-to-implement tips, examples, anecdotes, and (where possible) the performance impact of these title tag optimizations. Table of contents: What title tags are Title tag tips for local businesses (w/ examples) Your business’s main offerings/services The localities you serve The page’s top queries The year you published or updated the page Your unique selling point Call to action Bonus: Pages and titles to rank for local events Title tags: One of many optimizations at your disposal Before we get started, understand: Title tag updates aren’t going to make up for poor overall SEO. If search engines aren’t ranking your pages highly for other reasons (e.g., poor performance, inaccessible or low-quality content, etc.), an optimized title tag is unlikely to change that. Additionally, the data shown below is for illustrative purposes. While the data represents real-life performance gains, other factors (such as how competitive your industry is, for example) are likely to influence your results. What are title tags? A title tag is an HTML element that designates the title of a web page. Users can see your title tag in search engine results, on social media feeds, and (if the page is open) in browser tabs. Website owners and SEOs use title tags to convey what a page is about for both users and search engines. Title tags can help convince users to click through on your content from search results and social media feeds by giving them an idea of what the page is about, encouraging them with a CTA , providing additional relevant information, and so on (as I’ll explain in the examples in the next sections). Title tags are a confirmed Google ranking factor (although they are not as important as other considerations, like content quality). In the image below, you can see the Wix SEO Learning Hub ’s title tag in the search results for the keyword [learn SEO]. The Wix SEO Learning Hub’s homepage’s title tag is “Learn SEO | Wix SEO Hub”. Note : In certain cases, Google may rewrite your title tag in its search results (referred to as the “title link”). Here’s a link to Google’s best practices for influencing your title link , which is an excellent basis for the optimizations I’ll discuss next. How to change your title tag: The exact method and menu options for changing your title tag depend on the platform you used to build your business’s website—refer to the appropriate documentation. Wix site owners can learn how to add/update title tags here. Pro-tip: Chrome browser users can install the SEO Pro Extension by MarketingSyrup to spot-check the title tag of individual web pages. This is useful for auditing your existing title tags as well as assessing the title tags used by your competitors. Title tag tips for local SEO (w/ examples) Optimize your local business pages’ title tags by: Including your business’s main offerings/services Including the localities you serve Adding the page’s top queries Including the year you published or updated the page Showcasing your unique selling point Including a CTA The right tactic (or combination of tactics) will depend on factors such as the nature of your business, its products/services, your industry, etc. Note: This page will be updated as more local SEO experts contribute best practices and examples, so consider bookmarking this page for future reference. 01. Include your business’s main offerings/services The issue: The initial title tag for the homepage wasn’t informative. At a glance, potential visitors wouldn’t know what products/services the site offers. The brand’s homepage’s title tag was initially: Home - [brand name] The approach: “As the client wasn't ranking for some of the bigger head terms for the industry, we had the thought that the homepage was the best page to rank for these terms,” said Jack Chambers-Ward, marketing and partnerships manager at Candour . “These keywords cover the vast majority of the client’s products, plus the homepage is the page with the most backlinks on the site, so it’s also the page that would be able to compete for these more competitive terms,” he added. While this optimization is informed by other SEO concepts (namely, how backlinks work ), the title tag change was simple: Wholesale dried flowers & preserved flowers UK - [brand name] “This, combined with adding some basic introductory copy to the homepage, transformed the homepage’s performance,” Chambers-Ward said. The performance impact: The Ahrefs organic traffic estimate for the site’s homepage. In 12 months (October 2022 to October 2023), the homepage’s average organic traffic increased 393%, from less than 400 visits monthly to nearly 1,900 visits per month. Position 1-3 rankings increased by more than 1200% from 3 to 41. 02. Include the localities your business serves The opportunity: Some SEO publications recommend a title tag between 50-60 characters. This length is supported by Google on desktop and mobile devices, and results in the fewest title tag rewrites, according to Moz . “Major SEO tools in the space consistently recommended limiting title tags only to the visible area on Google,” said Joel Headley, VP at Rio SEO and co-founder at Leadferno, who conducted a study to see whether longer title tags would diminish search visibility. In his own words, “The initial study was to debunk that premise and prove that longer title tags had a positive impact on ranking.” The approach: For his title tag study, Headley added five unique, surrounding localities (around the business’s primary zip code) to the title tags of thousands of web pages. Here’s an example of what this might look like: San Jose Junk Removal | Evergreen | Silver Creek | Little Saigon | Willow Glen | Japantown Evergreen, Silver Creek, Little Saigon, Willow Glen, and Japantown are “localities” within the San Jose metropolitan area. “The localities were inner localities to the area codes. That’s somewhat a surprising result given that most are trying to expand their reach to a broader area. This showed improvement by doubling down inside the current postal code you’re already positioned in.” — Joel Headley, VP, product management at Rio SEO The performance impact: At the Whitespark Local Search Summit, Headley shared that the test resulted in a 16% ranking lift. “Don’t worry about the character length whatsoever,” Joy Hawkins, owner at Sterling Sky Inc , advises local business owners, “It’s fine to exceed it.” 03. Add the page’s top queries The opportunity: “Whilst this wouldn’t necessarily be classed as an ‘issue,’ we did potentially think we were leaving traffic on the table by not adding the queries that the page is actually ranking for into the page title,” said Ryan Jones , marketing manager at SEOTesting . When Google indexes a page , it may start ranking for queries you do not expect it to. Some of these queries may come from language differences (between the wording used in your content and what users are searching for), but they can also come from contextually related queries. While this tactic may not be right for all page types (it really depends on the page’s content and purpose), including these queries in your title tag could help you attract additional traffic. The approach: “We used SEOTesting to establish what queries the page was ranking for,” Jones said. “SEOTesting has a report for this built into the tool. However, you can also use Google Search Console to find this information —you do not need to be an SEOTesting customer.” The page in question ranked for two queries that weren’t directly mentioned in the title tag. Those queries were added to the page’s title tag; everything else on the page remained the same. The page’s initial title tag was: Premier Inn Deals - Rooms from £19 The optimized title tag: Premier Inn Deals and Discount Codes 2023 (Rooms from £19) The performance impact: “Following a completed single-page test, in which we changed the page title to include these top queries and nothing else, we could see a considerable performance impact on the page,” Jones said. Clicks per day increased by 59.65%. Impressions per day increased by 34.82%. The page’s average position improved from 18.07 to 15.51. Click-through rate increased from 1.8% to 2.13%. 04. Include the year you published or updated the page The issue: The client’s site runs an annual event and creates a new, corresponding web page for that event each year. The title tag included the name of the event, but not the year and date of the event. This meant that there were multiple results returned for a Google search for that event name. The page title tag was initially formatted as: [Event name] [event location] * *The actual original title tag is not shown to preserve client confidentiality. The approach: “Since there were a number of pages on the website about that event through the years, we wanted to make sure that Google and users could clearly disambiguate those pages,” Claire Carlile , local search expert at BrightLocal , said. “We also found that there was search volume for the name of event + year modifier, with even the past years attracting searches (for example, [event name 2015]).” Carlile and her team identified 15 event pages and updated the title tag according to this structure: [Event name] [Event date (month, year)] [Event location] As this optimization was part of a larger effort, Carlile’s team also: Updated on-page copy to reflect the changes in the title tag Added internal links between the pages in case users wanted to read the details of the previous events Retroactively added information from past events to those pages (event photos, design-led assets, and performer lists) Changed URLs of past events so they sat in a subfolder of historical events. Pro-tip: “In some cases, with a recurring event you might choose to keep just one URL and update the title tag and page content accordingly,” Carlile said. A common example of this is annual eCommerce sales pages (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc). In that case, you can “make the URL ‘evergreen’ and don’t include the date in the URL,” Carlile said, “This would suit an event that had less historical significance or interest, where people would not need or want to read about previous iterations of an event.” The performance impact: Website traffic did not increase overall—however, traffic was not necessarily the objective behind this title tag optimization. This change helped make it easier for users to find event pages from years prior (by searching for the event name + year modifier). “We also saw more visits to the older past event pages, as people could more easily navigate through those historical events,” Carlile said. 05. Add your unique selling point(s) The opportunity: If your business differentiates itself by offering special services, niche products, etc., it’s a good idea to feature those unique selling points (USPs) within your title tag. This enables you to set yourself apart in the search results by appealing to certain types of customers without them having to even click through to your website. The approach: In the example below, Optima Pet Care highlights its USP by mentioning emergency and 24-hour veterinary care within its title tag. While the title tag could be even more informative (by perhaps mentioning the types of animals the clinic serves, for example), it does serve to immediately differentiate itself from the other search results. Here are a few examples of USPs local businesses can highlight within their title tags: Rush, emergency, or 24-hour services Remote services Delivery Dietary options (i.e., vegan, gluten free, etc.) Free quotes Value (affordability) Specialty (e.g., a mechanic specializing in imported or electric vehicles) 06. Include a CTA The opportunity: A well-written CTA can help potential customers see that you understand and can satisfy their needs, which should help you increase conversions. “Sticking to title tag best practices [ primary keyword | CTA ] is a great foundation,” Blake Denman, president and founder at RicketyRoo , suggested. The approach: Here’s an example for a round-the-clock emergency plumber in Phoenix: 24/7 Emergency Plumbers of Phoenix | Techs Are Standing By While you don’t need to use the “|” character, it’s generally a good idea to use some sort of separator in your title tag to make it easier for users to understand. “If you're having a hard time coming up with ideas, look at the results Google displays for inspiration or to help remove ideas you may have surrounding your call to action. If every ranking result has a similar CTA, try something different that speaks more towards your ideal client.” — Blake Denman, president and founder at RicketyRoo Pro-tip: You can also add variants of the primary keyword, additional locations, near me queries, etc. after the CTA using another separator, Denman said. “Going from a standard 50–62 character title tag to 250+ characters looks really spammy but you’re counting on truncation or Google deferring to the H1 tag ,” he said. “If you're going to do a test like this, make sure that your H1 tag reads like a good title tag and not simply just the primary keyword; that’s boring, add some brand panache to it.” The performance impact: “We’ve tested this multiple times and there is always a decent lift with the additional keywords you’ve added after the second separator,” Denman said, “Lifts range depending on various factors but there has always been a lift.” Specific client data was not available for this example. Bonus: Create pages and titles to rank for local events The opportunity: “The website for this particular business mentions local events where the business exhibits,” said Mordy Oberstein , head of SEO branding at Wix. “We thought pulling in traffic around these events would be a great way for the business to get eyes on their site and products.” The approach: “The execution was incredibly simple,” Oberstein said. “The site created a simple page for the events they would be exhibiting at—and, we created a title tag that listed the event followed by the name of the site.” In this particular case, the event was the Hoptown Summer Salute. The business’s event page’s title tag is: 2023 Hoptown Summer Salute | FoxFudge.com The performance impact: The net result was that the site outranked nearly all sites for keywords related to the event. “When the event had some search volume around it, the site would bring in associated traffic due to its ranking,” Oberstein said. Title tags: One of many optimizations at your disposal The purpose of this resource is to show you how a little effort towards your local SEO can mean more visits to your website (and, ultimately, more customers). Even so, title tags should not be the end of your efforts—I’ve simply highlighted a good place to start for those with little time and/or experience. After you’ve built comfort with title tag optimization, instead of immersing yourself in multiple aspects of local SEO, consider choosing just one to focus on (I recommend your Google Business Profile or your Google reviews ). This will help you better understand the value each element of local SEO brings to your business, which can help you save time when marketing your local business online. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Get started by: Creating a website → It could take days (or even weeks) before traditional search engine processes pick up on your website additions or updates. And in the meantime, your thoughtful content and optimizations may not generate any improved search performance. With Wix SEO ’s IndexNow integration (available to premium Wix site owners), you can dramatically reduce the time between publishing and search engine indexation . This means that your content can compete in the search results sooner—and not just one search engine, but several, including Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, and Naver. Let’s take a look at what, exactly, IndexNow is, how it benefits site owners, and how it can potentially change the way online search works. Note: At the time of publication, IndexNow participating search engines include: Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam.cz. In 2021, Google began testing IndexNow but has not announced whether it would adopt the protocol. What is IndexNow? Simply put, IndexNow is a protocol that enables website owners to notify participating search engines about changes to their web pages (e.g., new, updated, or deleted content) in near real time. This is a significant departure from how site owners must typically wait for search engines to crawl their content before it can show up in relevant search results (more on this below ). This protocol allows participating search engines to index your content additions/changes more quickly and reflect the effort you put into your SEO (and your website at large) in the search results in less time than the traditional method of crawling, indexing, and ranking pages. “IndexNow aims to make web indexing faster, more efficient, more open and more accurate for both web publishers and search engines,” Fabrice Canel, principal product manager at Microsoft Bing, said, adding that potential benefits include reducing crawl load and bandwidth usage, which can help your site perform better. How IndexNow works Based on an open protocol and announced by Microsoft and Yandex in October 2021, IndexNow allows website owners to take a more proactive approach to indexation (the process in which search engines store and organize website content to eventually show in search results): “Instead of relying on periodic crawls or sitemaps, which can be slow or incomplete, IndexNow enables web publishers to send HTTP requests containing the URL or set of URLs they want to index or update. The requests are sent directly to one of the IndexNow endpoints of participating search engines, which can then process them and reflect the changes in their indexes. Each search engine notifies other IndexNow search engines for each IndexNow notification.” — Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing Among other benefits (that I’ll discuss below ), this functionality lets SEOs and website owners communicate content updates, additions, and removals with participating search engines, which should translate to seeing faster results on the search engine results page. And, when you ping an IndexNow endpoint to notify it of a new, updated, or deleted URL, participating search engines alert other IndexNow search engines about your content as well, so that they can also update their indexes with the most up-to-date version of your pages. How IndexNow helps Wix site owners For Wix Premium site owners, Wix automatically notifies IndexNow participating search engines of new, updated, and deleted URLs. That means that requests are made to Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz (and all future participating IndexNow search engines) to reflect these changes in their index. This way, your new or updated pages can start working for you across all these search engines much sooner. “We’re excited to release the integration with IndexNow as part of our collaboration with Microsoft Bing. This marks yet another step in our dedication to providing users with exceptional out-of-the-box SEO solutions, simplifying the process of promoting their websites quickly and effortlessly.” — Einat Hoobian-Seybold, Product Lead at Wix Note: Separate from IndexNow, Wix also offers instant homepage indexation when you verify your site with Google Search Console . As I mentioned, greater efficiency and quicker results are IndexNow’s primary benefits. But, how much more efficient? How much quicker? “Without IndexNow, it can take days to weeks to get content changes reflected in search engines. With IndexNow, this is more like seconds to max two days.” — Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing Here’s how these advantages can play out when it comes to your SEO workflow and user experience: The benefits of IndexNow Near real-time notifications to search engines The faster you get your pages indexed, the sooner they can start attracting visitors from search engines. Greater indexing efficiency ​You can “tell” participating search engines exactly what URLs you changed, so that they don’t waste resources crawling pages that haven’t changed. This can potentially help your business’s revenue, as your landing pages can start appearing in search results sooner (than waiting for a search engine to crawl your site). ​The latest content for site visitors Since you’re actively informing search engines of page changes, potential site visitors will be able to access the freshest, most relevant information at the time of their search. For websites in highly competitive niches, this flexibility is especially valuable. For example, faster indexation facilitates better SEO testing by enabling you to see the impact of your optimizations much sooner. This means you can implement successful techniques and optimize your performance at scale to see returns on your efforts sooner as well. IndexNow…and into the future “ We should be at 50% of websites by 2025. As more CMSs adopt, more top websites will adopt, and more search engines will adopt IndexNow, including some in the following months.” — Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing IndexNow represents a fundamental change in how search engines work—and a shift in priorities for SEOs if it supplants traditional crawling and indexing. “With IndexNow + a sitemap refreshed at least once a day, we really don’t need to crawl far more,” Canel said. While this can be interpreted as essentially having on-demand access to more crawl budget, clever digital marketers and site owners will find ways (like the above-mentioned SEO testing example) to go beyond this convenience and leverage it for more significant insights and advantages. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen Interaction to Next Paint is Google’s latest Core Web Vitals metric, replacing First Input Delay as a measure of web page interactivity. Ahead of that change, technical SEOs will need to estimate the impact of the shift for their website(s) and make recommendations to stakeholders. To help you chart the best course for success (as well as avoid overpromising and under delivering), I’ll walk you through the factors you need to consider, including: What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)? INP scoring criteria Defining “interactions” How to check your pages’ INP Tools for measuring INP FID vs. INP: What’s the difference? Will INP affect rankings? How to approach optimizing for INP Good FID doesn’t always mean good INP How to communicate the change to stakeholders What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)? “The goal of INP is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted is as short as possible, for all or most interactions the user makes.” Source: Google. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vitals metric that evaluates a page’s overall responsiveness to user interactions by measuring the latency of all click, tap, and keyboard interactions over the course of a user’s page visit. The final INP value is the longest interaction observed (ignoring outliers). “INP is calculated when the user leaves the page, resulting in a single value that is representative of the page’s overall responsiveness throughout the entire page’s lifecycle. A low INP means that a page is reliably responsive to user input. ” — Jeremy Wagner, Senior Technical Writer at Google INP replaced First Input Delay  (FID) as a Core Web Vitals metric on March 12, 2024. Google first teased that it might replace FID with INP at Google I/O in May 2022, and the official announcement came a year later in May 2023. INP scoring criteria Source: Google. Google qualifies INP latency as follows: Good — Under 200 milliseconds Needs improvement — Between 200 and 500 milliseconds Poor — Longer than 500 milliseconds Defining “interactions” As far as the INP metric is concerned, interactions include: Clicking with a mouse Tapping on a device with a touchscreen Pressing a key on either a physical or onscreen keyboard Hovering and scrolling actions are not included in INP. However, scrolling with a keyboard (e.g., space bar, page up, page down) involves keystrokes, which can trigger other events that INP does measure. How to check your pages’ INP Many SEOs first learned of the transition to INP via an email sent to Search Console users . Naturally, INP data is available within GSC. You can access your INP data in GSC by going to Page Experience > Core Web Vitals , then selecting the Mobile or Desktop reports. Another way to evaluate INP across your site(s) is to collect field data via a Real User Monitoring (RUM) provider. Contextual data from a RUM provider can also help you identify the particular interaction responsible for the page’s INP value, as well as other insights that can help you improve your INP. Below, I’ve listed some additional tools you can also use to check out your INP. Tools for measuring INP The PageSpeed Insights results for Google.com (mobile), showing INP. You can use the following tools to assess your INP: Google Search Console — GSC can provide you with an overall (or folder-level) INP report, and you can also use it to verify fixes. PageSpeed Insights — Although the insights here are limited (likely not enough to troubleshoot INP issues), PageSpeed Insights is helpful in that it tells you whether there’s a problem to begin with and how close (or far) you are from “good” performance. Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report — You can collect real user INP data for your pages and build it into a Looker Studio dashboard for easier analysis and decision making. Lighthouse in Chrome Dev Tools — This method is particularly useful if you want to test the responsiveness of specific elements. Web Vitals Chrome Extension — This browser extension shows whether a given page passes CWV at a glance as well as specific metrics for each CWV, making it convenient for evaluating on a page-by-page basis. FID vs. INP: What’s the difference? While INP and FID both assess interactivity, there are crucial distinctions: FID only speaks to the delay portion of the input event. It doesn’t account for the time it takes the browser to process event handlers. Source: Google. “The time between steps (1) and (3) above is an event’s delay, which is what FID measures. The time between steps (1) and (5) above is an event’s duration. This is what [INP] will measure.” — Nicolás Peña Moreno, Annie Sullivan, and Honbgo Song, Google As its name suggests, FID only cares about the first input delay —it does not reflect the entire amount of time a user waits for a response after an interaction while they are on the page. “Chrome usage data shows that 90% of a user’s time on a page is spent after it loads, Thus, careful measurement of responsiveness throughout the page lifecycle is important. This is what the INP metric assesses.” — Jeremy Wagner, Google “First Input Delay (FID) was always a problematic metric, as it stops measuring after the first interaction, and is relatively easy to pass,” said Alon Kochba , head of web performance and backend group manager at Wix. “In CrUX, 93% of sites worldwide have a passing FID on mobile. Interaction to Next Paint is a much more complete metric, measuring the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page.” INP is an aggregate value (whereas FID refers to a single measurement). This may enable some site owners to use INP more effectively when evaluating against other performance metrics or forming correlations to business metrics, for example. Will INP affect rankings? How your site is built (among other criteria) can influence whether the move to INP ultimately affects your search rankings. I’ll speak to some of those factors in the next section of this blog post, but various experts agree that Google continues to prioritize content relevance and quality over user experience signals. “The Page Experience ranking signal has been folded into the larger Helpful Content pipeline . A page still needs to be usable for humans, but ultimately, Core Web Vitals is a tiebreaker in the rankings . Instead, consider that changes to improve site performance impact every medium, channel, and device type. The ROI is better viewed in overall macro and micro conversions.” — Jamie Indigo , Technical SEO Consultant, Not a Robot That having been said, if your website/business operates in a highly competitive niche, you’ll typically look for every advantage you can gain to improve your search rankings. Let’s now discuss prioritization for INP and what you should keep in mind as you formulate recommendations for stakeholders. How to approach optimizing for INP Before you start planning ways to improve your INP, contextualize your proposed optimizations with respect to the tasks that will make the largest impact on your SEO. Remember that: A poor performing web page can still be relevant and useful. An irrelevant web page is useless even if it performs very well. “You should not freak out on every page that does not have a passing INP score,” Kochba said, adding, “Even Google.com doesn’t pass INP on mobile for the entire domain, with only 66% of visitors having a good INP currently!” “[I’m approaching optimizing for INP] the same as any other Core Web Vital metric—only looking at these if: 1) Traffic is not a problem, 2) Content is useful and well targeted to user intent, and 3) UX improvements will bring in revenue. Interactivity is mostly related to conversion metrics, so this will be a main reason to optimize this.” — Sophie Gibson , Technical SEO Director at StudioHawk While every website operates under a different set of circumstances and has a different purpose, there are certain types of websites that should heed this change. “I would say that the sites that would need to pay particular attention to this change are those built on Javascript frameworks (such as Next.js), but also those that rely heavily on third-party scripts and plugins,” said SEO consultant Natalie Arney . As a starting point, you can look for low page performance patterns to help you narrow down the issue. “I start by looking in Search Console at the representative groupings,” Indigo said, “If I can identify a shared script (or functionality) across a grouping, then a single fix can improve all pages containing this element.” “Sites using a single page application (SPA) frontend framework warrant a heads up, because interactivity is about to become accurate,” they added. “I’m building [INP] into my audits and recommendations , and where necessary, recommending that a CDN is used effectively. If a CDN is already being used, then recommendations are given depending on whether a RUM provider is being used, and also if possible, giving recommendations to remove unnecessary scripts.” — Natalie Arney, SEO & PR Consultant Good FID ≠ good INP The Web Vitals Chrome Extension shows all CWV for a given page. “Your website may very well be in the 93% of sites that have good FID performance on mobile devices; however, you might be surprised to learn that only 65% of sites have good INP on mobile devices.” — Rick Viscomi and Annie Sullivan, Google If you thought your stellar FID metrics would translate to INP, there’s a reasonable chance that they won’t. Even so, Google says that the following optimizations apply to both: Avoid or break up long tasks Avoid unnecessary JavaScript Avoid large rendering updates If you’re looking for more tactical guidance that you can hand off to your web developers, refer to Google’s web.dev page on optimizing Interaction to Next Paint . How to communicate the change to stakeholders If the shift to INP has potential consequences for your business, you’ll need to communicate the situation to stakeholders. You may even need to request resources to implement a solution. Getting buy-in and resources can depend on your stakeholders’ familiarity with how search works. For more mature businesses, this may be easier because of familiarity with SEO but also because of resource availability (compared to smaller/newer businesses). It may also be more necessary as well, because there would presumably be greater competition in the search results. “Our overall SEO strategies will not change. If the resources required to work on CWV metrics are not going to bring any measurable results for a business, then it’s not a big priority. However, I think it’s dependent on how widely their Web Vitals results are affected by the change—it may pull up a previously unknown template issue across large swathes of the site, and in those cases, that may make sense to address sooner.” — Sophie Gibson, Technical SEO Director at StudioHawk Smaller businesses may need to focus more on content to begin with, meaning that diverting resources to improve INP would likely make an insignificant difference in search visibility. But again, the situation is different for each business/website—what’s key is that you give stakeholders a clear understanding of the potential costs and benefits, as decisions like these can determine your site’s success with SEO (and by extension, your success as an SEO). “I speak openly and honestly with all stakeholders and try to explain the implications and what the plus is if we start preparing now. If we need budget, I try to evaluate how much so that it is included in the planning.” — Veronika Höller , Global SEO Lead, CompuGroup Medical INP represents evolution, not revolution INP improves on many of the shortcomings and criticisms of FID as a gauge of web page interactivity. But like FID, a snappy INP value isn’t usually the primary aspect of a page that users care the most about—that’s the content. While INP is the future, it’s not a distant or unfamiliar future (you can already measure it via PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console and prepare your pages for the shift), and it shouldn’t have an outsized influence on your overall SEO strategy. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: George Nguyen You, as an enterprise SEO, are responsible for making recommendations that improve your brand or client’s search visibility. The problem is that—even though you’re held accountable for the site’s visibility— you don’t control all of the levers that actually move the needle in the right direction. At the enterprise level, other teams play a big role: aligning with the content and development teams, for example, is non-negotiable. But, those teams have their own priorities that they’re also accountable for—how do you get them to shake off the inertia and add SEO to those priorities? At Wix, Nati Elimelech , our head of SEO, devised a scoring system that aligns our platform’s SEO product roadmap and compliance standards with the 30+ product teams responsible for implementing them—while keeping those teams motivated and minimizing time spent in unnecessary, repetitive meetings. At BrightonSEO , Elimelech presented the lessons we learned in creating and implementing the SEO scoring system. While our exact process may not be suitable for every situation, it can serve as a compliance system or framework for others and showcases creative problem solving at scale. Table of contents: The Wix SEO scoring system How the Wix SEO scoring system works How to make an SEO scoring system work for your organization 01. Keep your system simple and actionable 02. Select the right criteria for your system 03. Keep the admin simple 04. Create a competitive environment 05. Don’t rock the boat The Wix SEO scoring system At Wix, teams are organized by product (e.g., Wix Blog, Wix Events, Wix Bookings, etc), each with their own goals and KPIs. Separate from those goals, they also have SEO updates that they need to implement in order to build search engine-friendly products and deliver capabilities to our users. The Wix SEO scoring system was inspired by the need to prioritize enterprise SEO issues and criteria across these dozens of relatively autonomous teams. The benefit of such a system (compared to working directly with each team and developer) is that it’s scalable. This allows us to bypass: Knowledge gaps, which are common when working with colleagues that don’t do SEO for a living, Prioritization bottlenecks, which can occur when teams and stakeholders don’t know which issue to approach next, And, meeting fatigue, which could cause friction at every step along the way to success. “This is a system used by over 30 product teams across Wix. That means hundreds of engineers, product owners, product managers, and even upper management. So, even senior management looks at the scoring system.” — Nati Elimelech, head of SEO, Wix How the Wix SEO scoring system works Keep in mind that the Wix SEO scoring system (or any similar system) is not simply a report card—it’s a collaborative tool that helps colleagues prioritize and understand what’s important and what’s not. It allows them to see the road ahead so that they can plan to resolve SEO issues throughout the year—without sacrificing their own goals. An actual slide from Nati Elimelech’s BrightonSEO presentation. The centerpiece of our scoring system is a user-facing Google Looker Studio dashboard that displays scores for each team. These scores reflect their progress in implementing a spectrum of SEO criteria and capabilities (such as the ability to manage SEO settings by page type , for example). The scores are calculated within a Google Sheet that feeds the Looker Studio dashboard. And, the scoring system is weighted, so resolving important issues will increase a team’s score more than a simple fix would. This means that, at any given time, any team member can reference the SEO scoring system to evaluate their progress or the progress of other teams. Company-wide, teams have a mandate to meet a certain score threshold by the end of the year. While delicate to balance, these elements can come together exceptionally well to create a culture of SEO across the entire organization. How to make an SEO scoring system work for your organization Our scoring system successfully motivated teams to prioritize SEO in product development. However, we had to carefully balance a range of factors—some of which we didn’t encounter until after the system was launched—to ensure that the competitive environment it had fostered was also a healthy environment to work in. 01. Keep your system simple and actionable Your dashboard should embrace simplicity and action items to help management make informed decisions. This will help you get around the potential conflict of interest that can occur when appealing solely to teams: “When SEOs ask for other teams to fix something in their product. That ‘ask’ is not really about asking them to do something: It's about asking them to not add a new feature to their product or not fix a bug or not make their own product better. So, you're basically asking them to stop making their own product better and take care of SEO.” — Nati Elimelech Most people would agree that improving SEO capabilities makes for a better product, but even so, that reasoning rarely influences decision making at this level. “But when management knows about it, and when management can know where everyone stands and can prioritize, then things happen,” Elimelech explained. Our scoring system dashboard provides three views (simple, page breakdown, and detailed issues list) to help management and practitioners prioritize SEO. Our scoring system is ideal for this purpose because it provides a simplified score for a top-level overview as well as more detailed information (as shown in the image above) to enable the teammates responsible for resolving issues. Another benefit is that it’s a self-serve system, which helps minimize unnecessary meetings and repeated explanations. And, since the score calculations all occur on the backend, that helps us further manage time spent on upkeep. 02. Select the right criteria for your system Select widely applicable criteria for your scoring system because you’re looking to create the largest possible impact by setting goals that apply to everyone (or nearly everyone). For us, as a website builder, that meant scoring teams by page type. “[Fixing] a specific product page won't change much. But if you perform fixes or improvements to all of your product pages, that’s scale.” — Nati Elimelech You’ll also need to balance the quantity and diversify your criteria: Limiting criteria to 20-30 items over the course of the year helps you ensure that each fix still moves the needle for individual teams. An overabundance of requests diminishes the value of each individual fix, which could create inertia and demoralize teams. Including both basic and advanced criteria empowers teams to plan appropriately for more time-consuming tasks. 03. Keep the admin simple The SEO scoring system exists to save us, as SEOs, time. “If we created an overly complex system that we always have to maintain, and that breaks easily, that time will just be reallocated to maintaining the system,” Elimelech said. To that end, our system uses Google Sheets for calculations and as a data warehouse. Each page type appears as a column and is flagged as “true,” “false,” or “not applicable.” Then, calculations are performed based on the other page types that the team is also responsible for. “That means that I have created some of the most obscene formulas ever put on a Google Sheet.” — Nati Elimelech Whether you use Google’s tools or another platform, make it easy for your team to manage the system so that it’s reliable for your other colleagues who need to take action based on it. 04. Create a competitive environment When asked to fix SEO issues, teams would largely play along, but there was still an atmosphere of “Well, should I improve my own product or should I listen to the SEO recommendations?” To create a lasting culture of SEO across teams, we had to motivate them, so we made the scoring system viewable by everyone at Wix. Everyone can see how their team is doing and compare that to the performance of other teams. While this created enthusiasm for improving their scores (some even sent celebratory emails), there were some potential downsides to consider, which I’ll discuss next. 05. Don’t rock the boat Once your prioritization system starts gaining traction with teams, you’ll still need to strike a delicate balance to keep that momentum going. “I think that the biggest lesson we've learned was that once they're hooked, if something— anything—is not in the scoring system (which means if fixing it won't raise the score), they will not do it .” — Nati Elimelech Stakeholders will get upset and frustrated if their scores change when they haven’t done anything to “deserve” the decrease, which can be troublesome because you’ll need to add new requirements. This is especially true when Google announces a change to its requirements. So, your system needs to be fair and transparent. Fairness leads to stability, which stakeholders crave. This means that you’re not going to suddenly change score weighting or introduce or remove criteria. And, when you eventually need to do so, it also means that you will communicate those changes far in advance to ensure that teams can continue to trust and follow your system. You can’t beat the system As you create and implement your own system to scale SEO across your organization (or your client’s), remember that the system’s purpose is not to eliminate your personal workload—it’s a tool to help you direct and collaborate with other teams. You’ll still need to focus on and maintain your system, especially with regard to the greater search ecosystem as Google updates will force you to adapt. You’ll still need to engage with teams to ensure that the system is working for them. If you can do so effectively, you’ll be able to move SEO forward for the entire business. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter | Linkedin

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

Updated: May 18, 2023 Author: George Nguyen Knowing whether your pages have been crawled (discovered by Google) or indexed (stored in Google’s index), or whether your structured data markup is valid, for example, can help you fine-tune your online presence and make large leaps in search visibility. For years, Google has provided this information via Search Console, its platform for measuring search traffic and performance. To make those insights and tools more accessible to all business owners and SEO professionals, Wix now offers an approachable way to monitor and understand your site’s issues and indexing status at scale. The Wix Site Inspection tool enables you to keep an eye on your site’s technical health, mobile usability, rich result eligibility, and more, without having to pull the data manually or leave the Wix dashboard. In this article, we’ll discuss: How to get started with the Wix Site Inspection tool How to read the Site Inspection dashboard Ways to use Site Inspection data What to know before you get started The Wix Site Inspection tool Our Site Inspection tool enables you to monitor the status of your pages in Google’s index from within your Wix dashboard. The data within the Site Inspection dashboard (shown below) comes directly from Google via its URL Inspection API . The Wix Site Inspection dashboard. The Site Inspection tool is organized to show you: The proportion of your pages that Google has indexed and excluded The most common status details associated with your pages An overview of your site’s usability on mobile devices The index status, status details, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility for each of your URLs This can be very valuable information because URLs that aren’t indexed aren’t eligible to show in Google’s search results, meaning that your potential clients, customers, and visitors will never discover those pages in Google Search. How to get started with the Wix Site Inspection tool To access your Site Inspection dashboard , first, go to your Wix dashboard. In the left-hand navigation panel, click on Marketing & SEO , and then SEO Tools from the dropdown menu. Finally, select Site Inspection . If this is your first time accessing the Site Inspection tool, then you’ll be prompted to inspect your site (as shown above). Because the data comes from Google, your website must first be published and connected to Google Search Console (GSC). Once you’ve run the inspection, you’ll be taken to the Site Inspection dashboard . The Site Inspection dashboard at a glance The top of the Site Inspection dashboard includes a Highlights section that can help you understand your site’s overall health in terms of Google indexing and mobile usability (how well your site pages work on mobile devices). Let’s take a closer look at each of the three sections that make up your Site Inspection Highlights . Index status overview This section tells you how many of your pages Google has indexed or excluded from its index. Pay attention to the number of pages that fall into the various status categories, as they can indicate whether pages have issues or don’t appear in search results, for example. Indexation statuses include: Valid — The page is indexed and can appear in search results. (This does not guarantee that it will appear in search results.) Warning — Google may or may not have indexed this page depending on its specific warning status. This means that the page may not appear in search results. Invalid — Google did not index this page due to an error on it. Excluded — Google crawled this page, but decided not to index it. Unspecified — Google doesn't currently have any information for this page. As you plan your optimizations based on this information, it’s worth remembering that not all your pages should be available via search engines. “Thank you” pages and gated content, for example, may not provide value to users coming from the search results. Top status details The top status details provide additional context for the information in the index status overview (discussed above). Essentially, these are the reasons why pages couldn’t be indexed or haven’t yet been indexed. Below are explanations of some of the status details you may see: Submitted and indexed — You submitted the URL and Google has indexed it. It can appear in search results. URL is unknown to Google — The URL has not yet been found by Google. This may be because it’s a new page or it has no links directing to it. Crawled - currently not indexed — Google has crawled the page, but decided not to index it for search results at the moment (it may or may not be indexed in the future). Discovered - currently not indexed — Google found the page, but decided not to crawl it for search results at the moment. This is usually because Google decided that crawling this page would overload your site and rescheduled crawling for a later time. Indexed, not submitted in sitemap — Google indexed this page, even though it's not included in your site’s sitemap. It can appear in search results. Mobile usability This section provides an overview of how well your site pages work on mobile devices. While this does not specifically pertain to indexation, it does relate to mobile-friendliness, which is a Google ranking factor . Additionally, mobile-friendly sites make it easier for users to access content and convert. Here is an explanation of the details listed in this section: Valid — The page meets a minimum level for mobile usability and should work well on mobile devices. A page may still have some mobile usability issues even if it displays this status. Issues — This indicates that a page has issues that will prevent it from working well on mobile devices. Invalid — Google did not index this page due to an error on it. You may be able to request that Google index the page after you fix the error. Unspecified — Pages for which Google currently has no information. This may be because Google couldn’t retrieve the page or test its mobile usability at the time of the report. Within your Full Report section (more on that below), “No data” may also show as the mobile usability status of an individual page. This means that Google has not indexed the page and that it doesn’t have any information about the page’s mobile usability. Full Report section While the Highlights section presents information that’s useful for understanding the overall health of your site, the Full Report section provides page-level details, which can help you make specific fixes and optimizations. In this section, you’ll see: Page name Type of page (e.g., Main Page, Blog Post, etc.) Index status (e.g., Valid, Excluded) Status details (e.g., Submitted and indexed, Unknown to Google, etc.) Mobile usability status (e.g., Valid, Invalid, No data) Rich results eligibility At the top of the Full Report , there’s a search bar that allows you to search any of the fields within the report. There are also filtering options (shown in the image above) that enable you to view data for pages of a certain type (blog post, main page, product page, etc.), index status, mobile usability status, and/or rich results status. Use the search bar and filters together to quickly look up a page or scan for issues. You can learn more about an individual page’s status and details by selecting it in the Full Report . Doing so launches the page result information panel (shown below) for the associated page. Here, you can review more details about a page’s coverage status, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility. The Learn more links direct you to the Site Inspection tool’s Wix Help Center page , where you can dig into specific statuses to correct errors that may be hindering your search visibility or mobile user experience. Additionally, you can view the URL inspection report within GSC for the associated page by clicking on the Google Search Console link at the bottom of the panel. There, users with owner or full user access can request that Google crawl that particular URL . Ways to use Site Inspection data Site Inspection data can act as a portal into how Google sees your site, which is invaluable for troubleshooting and planning your optimizations. Below are a few scenarios where the Site Inspection tool may be particularly helpful. Identify and troubleshoot content that hasn’t been indexed The Full Report displays a list of your site’s URLs. You can scan the index status column to quickly identify pages that haven’t been indexed (these pages won’t be eligible to show in Google search results). For pages that should be indexed, you can reference the status details (coverage) column to learn more about the page’s status . For example, a “Crawled - currently not indexed” status could indicate that Google thinks the content is thin or identical to content on another URL, while the “Unknown to Google” status likely means that Google has yet to discover the content. Improve your mobile usability In instances where a page shows an “Invalid” mobile usability status, the mobile usability section of that page’s result information panel may explicitly tell you why. This can enable you to quickly identify the issue and implement a fix. Our Site Inspection Help Center page includes a detailed section about the various mobile usability statuses. For an even more comprehensive review of a page’s mobile-friendliness, paste the URL into Google's Mobile Friendly test tool . Verify rich result eligibility Rich results , which are generated via structured data markup , are search listings that contain information beyond the standard URL, page title, and description. Since they’re visually distinct from traditional results, they may make your listings stand out. An example of an FAQ rich result. The rich results column of the Full Report may indicate that your rich results are valid, the availability of optional fixes, or that there are issues preventing your rich results from rendering properly. When an optional fix is shown, the rich result will still render. However, implementing the optional fixes suggested in the page’s result information panel may help you add more information to your rich results. An “Issues” status indicates that the given page’s structured data is missing one or more required fields and will not render properly. Again, accessing the page result information panel can reveal more actionable details—in the example below, the missing field is explicitly highlighted. When a rich result is valid, you can open up the page result information panel to view the type of rich result that page is eligible for. The rich results section whether the structured data applied to a page is valid, along with the rich result type the page is eligible for. Note: By default, Wix adds preset structured data markups to some of your site’s pages. Before you get started with the Wix Site Inspection tool To get the most out of this tool, it’s important to be aware of the requirements and limitations associated with it. When using the Wix Site Inspection tool, keep in mind: The Site Inspection tool displays information about the most recently indexed version of your site. This may not be the same as the current, live version of your site, as it takes Google time to crawl and index site changes. Google has a scan limit of 2000 pages per day—if you exceed this limit, you’ll need to wait 24 hours before you can scan your site again. It may take some time for Google to index changes on your site. If you see issues in the report that you've already addressed, you can ask Google to recrawl your pages . Evaluate your technical SEO with Wix’s built-in tools The Site Inspection tool can open up a world of potential optimizations, but even so, there are likely other aspects of your site’s technical health to monitor and improve. For those concerned about Google’s ability to efficiently crawl their sites, Wix’s bot log reports are an excellent place to start. 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. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event. Twitter | Linkedin