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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

Author: George Nguyen Your site’s technical health is a crucial part of your search visibility. If you don’t maintain it, search engines like Google may not properly crawl and index your pages. This means that the content you’ve worked so hard to create might never make it to the search results, which can mean fewer potential customers for your business. Server logs can help you avoid this by highlighting areas to troubleshoot and better ways to optimize your site. With the help of Wix’s log data reports and some familiarity with server logs, you’ll be able to remedy problems that could be affecting Google’s ability to efficiently crawl your site (i.e., crawl budget). What are server logs? How search engine bots work Server logs are records of every request a server receives, including requests from bots (automated programs that sites like Google use to crawl your pages) and human visitors. These requests represent attempts to view a page on your site. Each time a user or bot makes a request, the server records: The page that was requested The request date The response the request got Server responses are shown as status codes, which are grouped into five classes: 1XX – Informational response. Request received and understood. 2XX – Success. Request received, understood, and accepted. 3XX – Redirection. An additional action was taken to complete the request. 4XX – Client error. There was an error; the request could not be completed. 5XX – Server error. The server could not complete the action. What server logs can tell us For SEO purposes, we’re going to focus on the log data from bots, which can reveal insights you can use to improve your organic visibility. These include: Which pages are or aren’t getting crawled by search engines Which pages may be getting crawled too often or not enough Errors on your site that search engine bots are encountering For example, if you’ve created a new product page but it’s not receiving traffic, your bot log reports could tell you whether search engine bots have crawled it. If they haven’t, that may explain why no users have visited the page. Wix’s bot log reports Wix users can access their bot log data by navigating to the Analytics & Reports section of their dashboard, and then selecting Reports . In the Marketing & SEO section, click the “show more” button to reveal the Bot Traffic over Time , Bot Traffic by Page , and Response Status over Time reports. Access your bot log reports by going to the Analytics & Reports section of your dashboard, and then selecting Reports. These reports only include requests from bots, which is what you need to troubleshoot technical SEO issues. In addition to viewing this information in the Wix dashboard, you can also download the reports as Excel, CSV or image files to use later. Now, let’s take a closer look at each report to see how you can use them to improve your site’s SEO. Bot Traffic over Time You can use the Bot Traffic over Time report to view which bots have crawled your site or to get an overview of bot traffic trends over time. This information can help you: See whether Google or another search engine crawled your site (or a specific page) recently Estimate the time between when a search engine crawls a page and when the page gets indexed This report is visualized as a split bar chart (shown below). The Bot Traffic over Time report in Wix. Highlighting a segment of a bar will show you how many requests a bot made on a given date. In the example above, we can see that Bingbot made 11 requests on February 11. Filters can help you find the data that matters most By default, this report shows request data from the most common bots, but you can add or remove bots using the Select bots option. You can also segment the data to find exactly what you’re looking for by using the following filters: Entry page – This shows the report for a specific page (or set of pages) on your site Response status classes – This shows just the data for pages that are returning 2XX, 3XX, 4XX, or 5XX status codes, which can be useful for troubleshooting. Response status codes – This enables you to go into more detail and view the report for just the pages that are returning a specific status code (such as 404s, for example). Bot Traffic by Page Your Bot Traffic by Page report shows how frequently your pages are crawled, which can help you see: Which pages on your site are getting crawled the most Whether search engines are crawling your pages more or less often You can view this report as a bar chart (shown below) or as a customizable table by selecting the Table option above the chart. The Bot Traffic by Page report in Wix. Use the table view for more detailed analysis To get an easier, yet deeper understanding, switch over to the table view of your report. The Bot Traffic by Page report presented as a chart. In this view, you can add or remove columns, such as Date, Bot, Entry page, Unique pages, and so on, enabling you to create an overview with just the information you’re looking for. Response Status over Time Your Response Status over Time report is where you’ll go to learn about errors that may be preventing your content from reaching users. It can help you: See whether redirects are working correctly Identify missing pages ( 404 status code ) that can be redirected to improve user experience The Response Status over Time report in Wix. You can view this information in two ways: Unique pages – This shows the number of different pages on your site that received a response status code. Hits – This shows the number of times a specific page was visited by a bot. You can also filter this data by bot, entry page or response status code. And, the table view for this report enables you to toggle columns to show more or less data. Now that you’re familiar with bot log reports, the next step is to check in on them regularly so that you can continue to fix errors and find more ways to improve your SEO. The subscription options for bot log reports in Wix. Consider scheduling each report so that they automatically get sent to your inbox as often as you like. You can do this by selecting the Subscribe button at the top-right of each report. Monitor bot log reports to identify issues and opportunities Log data is no different from your regular user analytics in that they both allow you to monitor crucial site functions and provide you with areas to troubleshoot or optimize. Now that you understand how to interpret this data, take a look at your reports to establish a baseline. Then, subscribe to your reports so that you’re always up to date with your site’s technical health and can address problems as they arise. 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 Rich results are search listings that contain additional information beyond the standard URL, page title and description. They also include visual enhancements and/or interactive features. An example of a standard search listing (above) and an example of a rich result (below) with star ratings, review count, price and availability information. Rich results come in many different forms and serve various purposes. They may appear similar to standard listings, but with elements such as reviews, prices, or star ratings, for example. Other times, they may be less subtle—for instance, the rich result example below shows a drop-down menu for frequently asked questions. A search listing featuring frequently asked questions (FAQ). Rich results can also include additional text links, a search box and more. In this article, we’ll dive into: The benefits of rich results How rich results work Common types of rich results Breadcrumbs Review snippets Product-related snippets Recipe snippets Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) How-to snippets Other enhanced result types Featured snippets Knowledge Panels People also ask Note: The term “rich snippet” is often used interchangeably with “rich result”—this may be because Google used to refer to these result types as “ rich snippets .” Since the search engine now uses the term “rich result,” this post will as well. Additionally, some rich result types are still known as snippets, like the featured snippet, for example. Benefits of rich results Rich results improve the search experience before potential visitors even land on your site. If you’re already offering people relevant information from the search results, they’re more likely to trust your brand. This increases the chances that people will visit your site , make a purchase, or use your services. The recipe carousel is a collection of rich results. The star ratings, cooking time, and ingredients help searchers quickly identify recipes that fit their needs. Rich results also make your listings stand out from standard listings. This gives you more online visibility and can help distinguish your brand from the competition. How rich results work Search engines generate rich results from structured data markup , which is code that can be added to your pages. While search engines crawl the content of your pages so that they can potentially index and rank them, that’s not enough information for the search engines to create rich results. Structured data markup allows you to put that content into context for search engines. For example, you can use structured data markup to tell search engines that a particular page is a product page. Search engines use that information to enrich search listings with more information, like the product’s price or whether it’s in stock. Schema.org is the industry standard for adding structured data markup. There are over 1,300 structured data properties that support different types of websites and content. There are also several structured data formats. Wix supports JSON-LD , which is also what Google recommends . It’s worth noting, structured data has no direct impact on your rankings . However, Google has said that it “uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.” Information used to generate rich results can also come from a variety sources, such as other websites or the Knowledge Graph (see the Knowledge Panels section below). Common types of rich results Depending on the search intent, several types of rich results may appear on the search engine results page ( SERP ). Some are reserved for specific uses, such as Google’s COVID-19 announcement rich result, while others you’re probably already familiar with. Below are some of the more commonly found rich results. Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs tell potential visitors about a page’s position within a site’s hierarchy. This helps them navigate a site more efficiently to find what they’re looking for. Breadcrumbs are appropriate for many types of sites. They can be especially useful for sites with rich structures, such as online retailers with a wide range of product categories. Review snippets Review snippets typically include star ratings (shown below). They may also be accompanied by other information, like the number of reviews or the reviewers’ names. On top of being a rich result, this snippet may also show up in Knowledge Panels (an information box that appears on the right-hand side of the SERP when looking for a person, place, thing or organization). Google and other search engines support review snippets for the following content types: Products Movies Books Recipes Events Local businesses Courses How-to’s Software apps If you sell or create content that falls into one of those categories, review snippets can make potential customers more interested in what you have to offer. Keep in mind that the “Product” content type is a broad category—product can also apply to your content and business offerings. Product-related snippets You can mark up your pages to display product availability, price, and ratings on your search listings. If you’re a Wix site owner, Wix Stores automatically adds product markup to your product pages. Applying structured data to your product pages will also enhance your Google image results with that information. An image search result with star ratings, price, and availability. This snippet is useful for online retailers and service providers. But, you’ll want to verify that your prices are competitive and your products are in stock. If your price point is too high or you’re out of inventory, searchers may skip over your page in favor of a site that has what they need. Recipe snippets For recipe content, site owners can add structured data to display ratings, preparation time, and nutrition information. Adding recipe structured data can also allow smart devices to display or read your recipes aloud. Recipe snippets can also show up in Google’s recipe carousel. Keep in mind, recipe carousels don't necessarily reflect the top search listings. If Google includes your recipe in the carousel, you could be leapfrogging your competitors. While this rich snippet relates to recipes, you don't have to have a cooking blog to take advantage of it. Get creative—you can publish recipes associated with your brand (like DoubleTree Hotels did), or recipes that use your products. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) FAQ rich results contain a list of questions and answers about a particular topic. All of the answers are sourced from the page they appear under. FAQ structured data can make your listings more prominent on the SERP, potentially attracting more traffic. However, they can also resolve a searcher’s question without them having to visit your site. FAQ sections (and similar rich results) can help filter site traffic, meaning visitors that do click through have higher intent and are more likely to engage with your brand. Test out this structured data on your pages to see what works best for your site. Wix site owners can use the Wix FAQ app to automatically add an FAQ section to their site. How-to snippets How-to snippets are best suited for content that’s viewed as a sequence, such as tutorials or walkthroughs. These snippets can appear as text, images, or video. In the example below, the how-to snippet is a carousel of captioned images. A how-to snippet on the mobile SERP. How-to snippets can also appear as a video or image. When structured data is properly applied, this rich result can be read aloud by the Google Assistant. This can increase your content’s reach to users beyond a smartphone or computer screen. Other enhanced result types The final three result types are a bit different because they don’t require structured data. Featured snippets Featured snippets are what search engines consider to be the best answer for a given query. They are highly visible, generally appear at the top of the SERP, and take up more real estate than a typical listing. This makes featured snippets a very valuable asset for branding. Featured snippets are most likely to show up when a user’s query takes the form of a question. Google can display “answer” excerpts from a page as a paragraph, a list, or a table of information. Unlike typical search results, where the page title comes first, the excerpt is the focus. Instead of being powered by structured data, search engine algorithms determine which content appears as a featured snippet. You can increase your odds of earning a featured snippet by anticipating audience questions and answering them in your page content. Present your answer as a paragraph, list, or table, since these are the formats Google supports. Keep in mind, featured snippets are rarely longer than three sentences, so make sure your answers are to-the-point. For site owners, having a featured snippet can be a mixed bag: On one hand, your brand and content are more prominent on the SERP. On the other hand, providing a direct answer may eliminate the need for searchers to click through to your site. If your pages are showing up on SERPs that contain featured snippets, you might as well optimize for it. If the presence of a featured snippet prevents users from clicking on the top result, that might be happening to all the other listings on the page as well. At the very least, your brand could gain by appearing as the trusted provider of the answer, if you’re able to earn the featured snippet. Knowledge Panels Knowledge Panels are a special type of rich result that appear on the right-hand side of desktop search results, or near the top of mobile results. This feature is very prominent on the SERP, which is good for the brands they represent. Wix’s Knowledge Panel includes a brief overview of the company, business details, a drop-down menu of information that users might be interested in, and links to Wix’s social profiles. Knowledge Panels are a bit trickier to earn. The information they present comes from the Knowledge Graph, a system that connects facts about people, places, things, and how they’re related to one another. Search engines might gather some of that information from your website. They can also get information about you from other sites, like Wikipedia or LinkedIn. Once search engines have enough information in your Knowledge Graph entry, they will automatically show Knowledge Panels when people search for your brand. From here, you can claim your Knowledge Panel and suggest changes. The local Knowledge Panel For local businesses, creating a local Knowledge Panel is as simple as creating a Google Business Profile . These panels are similar to regular Knowledge Panels, but without the “share” icon at the top. They usually include a map and other details customers typically look for, like business hours. Both brand and local Knowledge Panels act as virtual billboards for your business, helping searchers learn more about you. Having a Knowledge Panel may also increase trust amongst prospective customers. This is especially true for brand Knowledge Panels, which are curated by Google or Bing and not controlled by the brand itself. These panels may also contain links to your social channels, which can boost your follower count. People Also Ask The People Also Ask (PAA) box has become a common feature on SERPs. It typically contains three or four questions related to the search query. When a user clicks on one of the questions, it expands with an answer. The answer is typically followed by more related questions, which are dynamically populated. Similar to featured snippets, the answer to the question appears prominently and is accompanied by a link to the site. There are some important differences between PAA boxes and featured snippets: PAA answers can be excerpts from pages that don’t even appear on the first page of the SERP. This gives sites that own these answers an opportunity to gain visibility over listings that outrank them. The other distinction is that the PAA box offers a list of questions that users are curious about—this can serve as a valuable tool for researching keywords and sourcing relevant content ideas. Search engine algorithms determine which questions and answers appear in the PAA section. To increase your odds of landing a PAA answer, write complete question and answer pairs within your content, using plain language, and apply Q&A schema . Take a look at the PAA box for your brand’s own search result page. If you don’t already own the answer to those questions, this is a good place to start. Use rich results to get more visibility for your pages The first step to creating a successful website is crafting pages and content that are right for your audience. However, those pages won’t serve your brand or business if nobody discovers them. Applying structured data to your pages can help search engines turn your listings into rich results that grab people’s attention and inform them about your content. Now that you’re familiar with the most common rich results, refer to Google’s complete list of rich result types to see which ones might be right for your site. There, you’ll find tips on how to add structured data and optimize your brand’s visibility for the SERP. 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 8, 2023 Author: George Nguyen Google employs thousands of people to scrutinize its search results and provide them with feedback—these people are known as “search quality raters.” “Their feedback helps us understand which changes make Search more useful. Raters also help us categorize information to improve our systems. For example, we might ask what language a page is written in or what’s important on a page. We use responses from raters to evaluate changes, but they don’t directly impact how our search results are ranked.” — Google Search Help page In other words, Google uses data from search quality raters like a restaurant might use feedback from its customers. This feedback helps Google assess whether their algorithms are working as intended. While rater feedback doesn't directly affect rankings, over time it can inform Google about how to adjust its algorithms. These algorithms are key to how content across the web is ranked. The rubric that quality raters follow is called the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines . These guidelines serve as a lens through which raters judge search results, and can tell us what Google considers to be a high quality result. Creating content with Google’s expectations in mind can help you signal relevance and increase your chances of ranking higher. Two concepts mentioned extensively throughout Google’s guidelines are: 01. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) 02. Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics Let’s go over these concepts and discuss how they can be applied to your site content. Defining Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) E-E-A-T (read as “ double E-A-T ”) can be thought of as a measurement of content credibility for a particular page. Having a high degree of E-E-A-T means your content is more likely to satisfy searchers, which is ultimately Google’s goal. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T) are all important considerations in page quality rating, but Trust is the most important. When evaluating the E-E-A-T of any given page, raters are instructed to consider: Experience — The extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Expertise — The extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic. Authoritativeness : The extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic. Trust is the most important component of E-E-A-T: Pages that lack trust have low E-E-A-T regardless of how experienced, expert, or authoritative they may appear. “For example, a financial scam is untrustworthy, even if the content creator is a highly experienced and expert scammer who is considered the go-to on running scams!” Google wrote in section 3.4 of its Search Quality Guidelines. This criteria applies to pages and sites of all types, even gossip and fashion websites, forums, and everything in between. All these sites can display a high degree of E-E-A-T. Here are some examples of the type of content that Google considers as having a high degree of E-E-A-T, from section 8.4 of the guidelines (as of May 2023): News articles should showcase journalistic professionalism, be factually accurate and presented in a way that helps visitors better understand events. High E-E-A-T news sources usually publish their editorial policies and review processes. Medical advice must be created by people or organizations with medical expertise or accreditation. It should be professionally written/produced, edited, reviewed and updated on a regular basis. Information pages on scientific topics must be produced by people or organizations with scientific expertise and represent well-established scientific consensus (if consensus exists). Financial advice, legal advice, and tax advice should come from trustworthy sources and be updated regularly. Niche advice topics (i.e., home renovations, parenting, etc.) should come from trustworthy, experienced sources. Credibility matters because these topics impact individuals’ finances or overall happiness. Pages on hobbies (i.e., photography, guitar playing, etc.) require expertise. Because the formal expertise gap varies significantly between, for example, medical advice and photography tips, expertise is measured relative to the topic. Quality raters are instructed to value everyday expertise. If a content creator has enough experience with a topic to make them an expert, the likelihood of being penalized for lack formal education or training is slim. How E-E-A-T is evaluated Remember, search quality guidelines are for Google’s human raters, not search engine algorithms. Google’s Danny Sullivan described this relationship as follows: “Our systems aren't looking for [E-E-A-T]. Our raters are using that to see if our systems are working well to show good information. There are many different signals that, if we get it right, align with what a good human [E-E-A-T] assessment would be.” — Danny Sullivan , public search liaison at Google In essence, Google uses various signals in place of a “good human E-E-A-T assessment.” In February 2019, Google disclosed one of these signals in a white paper about how it fights misinformation , stating, “Google’s algorithms identify signals about pages that correlate with trustworthiness and authoritativeness. The best known of these signals is PageRank , which uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness.” Unfortunately for site owners, Google did not share the rest of the signals it uses to approximate E-E-A-T. However, SEO professionals have adapted best practices from Google’s quality guidelines to help their websites convey expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness to their customers. Some of these tactics include using expert writers, citing their sources and regularly updating content, but best practices can vary by industry. Defining Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics Some topics are more serious than others. Moreover, creating content for some topics requires more E-E-A-T than others. To that end, Google refers to pages that may potentially affect a person’s happiness, health, finances or safety as “Your Money or Your Life” pages. “For these YMYL pages, we assume that users expect us to operate with our strictest standards of trustworthiness and safety,” Google said in its white paper on fighting misinformation. “Where our algorithms detect that a user’s query relates to a ‘YMYL’ topic, we will give more weight in our ranking systems to factors like our understanding of the authoritativeness, expertise or trustworthiness [E-A-T] of the pages we present in response.” — Google, How Google Fights Disinformation , February 2019 Simply put, Google gives more weight in its ranking algorithms to factors indicating E-E-A-T for YMYL topics. You should know whether the content you’re creating falls under a YMYL topic. If it does, you may have to reinforce its E-E-A-T and update it regularly . This helps you provide the most accurate information to visitors and signals to Google that your content deserves to rank well. You can assess whether a topic is YMYL by evaluating the types of harm that might occur (section 2.3 of the search quality guidelines): YMYL Health or Safety : Topics that could harm mental, physical, and emotional health, or any form of safety such as physical safety or safety online. YMYL Financial Security : Topics that could damage a person's ability to support themselves and their families. YMYL Society : Topics that could negatively impact groups of people, issues of public interest, trust in public institutions, etc. YMYL Other : Topics that could hurt people or negatively impact welfare or well-being of society. Google holds “clear YMYL” topics to the highest level of scrutiny for page quality rating. The chart below (also taken from section 2.3 of the search quality guidelines) provides examples of the YMYL spectrum for various topics. Type of Topic Clear YMYL Topic ​May be YMYL Topic Not or Unlikely YMYL Topic ​ Information Could significant harm result from inaccurate information? ​ Evacuation routes for a tsunami Explanation : Inaccurate information on evacuation routes could cause significant harm to people. ​ Weather forecast Explanation : In most situations, slightly inaccurate information about the weather forecast will not cause harm. People often ask family members "what's the weather today". Music award winners Explanation : This topic is unlikely to cause harm. Advice about an activity Could significant harm result from poor advice? ​ When to go to the emergency room Explanation : Bad advice on when to go to the emergency room could cause significant harm. ​ How often to replace a toothbrush Explanation : This is a casual health topic people commonly discuss with friends. A slightly imperfect suggestion is unlikely to significantly impact health or safety. ​ How frequently to wash jeans Explanation : This topic is unlikely to cause harm. ​ A personal opinion What impact could this opinion have on other people and society? ​ Personal opinion about why a racial group is inferior Explanation :Pages on this topic have been used to justify or incite violence against groups of people. ​ Personal opinion about why an exercise is inferior Explanation : While there may be a health concern if the exercise is extreme or risky, most discussions of jogging vs swimming, etc. involve personal preference. ​ Personal opinion about why a rock band is inferior Explanation : This topic is unlikely to cause harm, although there may be strong opinions involved! ​ News about current event Could this topic significantly impact people and society? For societal impact, consider issues such as elections and trust in public institutions that benefit society ​ News about ongoing violence Explanation : People need accurate information to stay safe. Society may also be impacted by information about ongoing violence, as citizens and governments make civic decisions accordingly. ​ News about a car accident Explanation : The accident itself may have been harmful, but there is likely little risk of future harm from small inaccuracies in reporting about an incident. ​ News about a local high school basketball game Explanation : This topic is unlikely to cause harm. ​ Sharing on social media Could the social media post cause significant harm? Could it hurt individuals? Could it damage society if widely shared? ​ A tide pod challenge post Explanation : This harmful social media challenge was responsible for deaths. A hot sauce challenge Explanation : While some people may experience some discomfort by tasting various hot sauces, it is unlikely that sharing about such challenges would cause significant harm. ​ A music video Explanation : This type of content generally has little risk of harm. ​ Online commerce and product reviews Consider the product. Could the product cause significant harm? ​ Purchasing prescription drugs Explanation : Prescription drugs have the potential to cause harm and require purchase from licensed pharmacies. ​ Review of a type of car Explanation : While cars are big purchases, many people ask friends and family about cars. ​ Purchasing pencils Explanation : Pencils and other everyday items are unlikely to cause harm. How to convey E-E-A-T As mentioned, the PageRank algorithm is one of the signals used to determine E-E-A-T. That means acquiring backlinks to your content can help you communicate E-E-A-T to Google. However, the consensus in the SEO industry is that not all backlinks have the same value. Google is unlikely to value a link in the comments section of a YouTube video as highly as it may value a link from a government website or The Washington Post , for example. This makes it difficult to manipulate the system by spamming links across forums or acquiring illegitimate links through private blog networks. In addition to backlinks, there are several ways to vouch for your site’s credibility. Here are a few places to start: Create an “About Us” page: Your organization’s history and its staff can help contextualize your site’s E-E-A-T. Be transparent, but also highlight reasons why your brand/business is trustworthy. If you’re publishing opinions based on decades of experience, here’s where you can tell people about your expertise. Display your contact details: Contact information should be included in your “About Us” page and footer. Making it easy for visitors to reach out to you conveys credibility and can help build trust. Include author biographies: Showcasing your authors’ experiences and qualifications shows visitors that your content is informed by trusted expertise. An example of an author bio with social media links. Include links to get in touch with your authors through their social media accounts and/or email addresses. Use HTTPS: HTTPS is now the standard and Google ranks these sites more favorably (compared to HTTP websites, all other considerations being equal). Using HTTPS makes your site more secure for visitors by encrypting their information. Better security may even mean that your site is more trustworthy. There are also ways in which your content can help convey E-E-A-T: Maintain focus throughout your content: While you probably wouldn’t consult with a car mechanic for plumbing advice, publishing content on irrelevant topics may raise eyebrows for your audience. Stick to your main subject area and if a topic is tangentially related, make sure to explain how they are connected. Cite your sources: Unsubstantiated claims are simply opinions, which makes them less credible. Clearly citing where your information comes from bolsters your E-E-A-T by leveraging the E-E-A-T of your sources. Update your content regularly: This is especially important if your topic changes often. Fresh content has a higher chance of being relevant because it takes into account the latest findings, trends, and most recent events . Trustworthy content helps you satisfy visitors and search engines The search quality guidelines give us a detailed description of the type of content Google values. Keep these principles in mind when creating pages so that you can satisfy the search engines, lift your rankings, and drive more visitors to your site. More importantly, E-E-A-T and YMYL are human concepts. Sticking to them will help you make the most out of that increased traffic by providing your audience with well-crafted, relevant content. 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