Search Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday 10, Dec 2025 | 12 PM ET State of AI Search Heading Into 2026: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Insights Join Tiago Bianchi, Internet & AI Trends Industry Expert at Statista, and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix, for a data-first deep-dive into the state of AI search and generative engine optimization (GEO). This session is designed to give you a solid grounding in industry data and actionable GEO insights so you can make intelligent marketing decisions in 2026. What you’ll learn The latest data on AI search growth and consumer information discovery, including an analysis of how Google compares to AI search platforms. Top sources for large language model (LLM) citations and key data on how users are accessing AI platforms. How to use this data  to make strategic generative engine optimization and SEO decisions in 2026 , including exclusive data for AI search optimizations on Wix. You’ll leave this session with the knowledge you need to build a future-proof marketing strategy for the year ahead. Meet your hosts:   Tiago Bianchi,  Industry Expert of Internet and AI Trends, Statista Tiago Bianchi is an industry expert at Statista focused on internet and AI developments. Other topics of his coverage include online search, web traffic, AI, social media, and gaming. He is dedicated to transforming data into actionable insights and connections, supporting companies and professionals in understanding and navigating digital trends. LinkedI n Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Comms, Wix Crystal is an AI, SEO and digital marketing professional with over 20 years experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, OMR, BrightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. LinkedIn

Author: Eli Schwartz Small businesses  have been at a disadvantage in search for most of the internet’s history. You could have the best product or service in the world, but you’d still be competing with the sheer marketing heft of big brands. A local shoe store could offer better quality and a nicer customer experience than Foot Locker and still end up buried ten pages deep in Google results. That’s about to change. Over the next year, we’ll witness one of the biggest shifts in search since the invention of Google itself. Thanks to AI, search results are becoming more diverse , more personalized , and more context-aware  than ever before.  For small businesses, this isn’t a threat. It’s the biggest opportunity in decades. As the author of Product-Led SEO  and a growth advisor who consults with some of the internet's largest companies to drive billions in revenue, I’ve seen how algorithmic changes have traditionally favored scale. But with AI search  rewarding depth, authenticity, and expertise, small businesses are uniquely positioned to win. Here’s how. First, SEO isn’t dead Let’s clear something up right away: SEO isn’t dead. It won’t die until humans stop searching, and that’s not happening anytime soon. What’s changing is how  people search, and how search engines interpret their intent. AI-driven search features, like Google's AI Mode or ChatGPT’s Search, are no longer just matching keywords to pages. They’re using massive context models to understand meaning, intent, and nuance.  That means they can generate different results for each individual, based on everything from their location to their search history to the specific phrasing of their question. This is the personalization revolution in search today. Search is no longer about guessing what “everyone” is typing. It’s about matching exactly what your customers are asking for , and being the most credible, useful, and trustworthy source for that intent. That’s a huge shift in power. It levels the playing field between small and large companies in a way we’ve never seen before. How small businesses can win in this new landscape As the definition of “search” expands to include SERP results, AI answers, smart devices, voice queries, and AR glasses, the principles of SEO are evolving, too. But the fundamentals haven’t changed: you still need to understand your customers, meet their needs, and provide clear, credible information. Here’s how to do that in the age of AI-driven search. Think like your user, not like a search engine Strip away the extras Build from your customer out, not from competitors in Design everything around outcomes Measure what actually matters 01. Think like your user, not like a search engine Most small business owners overthink SEO. They start by researching what user-first keywords  they should rank for instead of asking, “who am I actually trying to reach?” In the AI era, that mindset doesn’t work. You can’t game the algorithm anymore because there is  no single algorithm. There are millions of individual search journeys happening in real time, and your job is to align with the right ones. Start every content or website decision by pretending you’re the customer . What would you type—or ask—if you were searching for what you offer? What questions would you have before making a purchase? For example, a local plumber doesn’t need to rank for “how to fix a leaky faucet.” That query is for people trying to DIY the problem. The real opportunity is showing up for “emergency plumber near me” or “can I get a plumber to my apartment today?” Those are commercial-intent searches, and the ones that lead to sales. If your content speaks directly to that customer, you’re already ahead. 02. Strip away the extras Over the years, SEO has become cluttered with unnecessary advice: long blog posts no one reads, “about us” pages that say nothing, keyword lists that add no value. In 2026, the businesses that win will be the ones that simplify. That means removing every word, page, or element that doesn’t serve a clear user need. If your business is a service provider, your homepage  should immediately explain what you do, where you operate, and how to contact you. If you sell products, your pages should focus on clear descriptions, transparent pricing, and trustworthy details. Odds are you don’t need that content roadmap that addresses a bunch of things that ChatGPT, or any other AI model, is going to answer anyway. Don’t create content for a hypothetical algorithm. Create it for the human on the other side of the screen. Less is truly more here. 03. Build from your customer out, not from competitors in It’s tempting to copy your competitors’ SEO strategies. You see what they’re ranking for and think, Maybe I should make that same landing page. Don’t. That’s backwards thinking. Your competitors’ audience isn’t your audience. The only way to win in AI-powered search is to build your strategy around your actual  customers—their questions, their pain points, their language. Ask yourself: What makes my business meaningfully different? What do my best customers already love about working with me? What’s missing from my competitors’ content that I could provide better? Answer those questions, and you’ll create content that no AI model can ignore. For example, let’s say you’re making a website for a retail store. It’s tempting to just Google all the retail stores in your space and try to mimic their website structure, but I want you to stop and ask: What do I personally want on a retail store page? What are the products I want to see on the homepage? Do I need a search box or do I need categories?  This is no longer about the best practices required for SEO, but the best practices required for selling your product or services on the internet. 04. Design everything around outcomes Ranking doesn’t pay the bills…bookings do. Traffic doesn’t equal revenue…conversion does. In 2026, the smartest small businesses will design every page, form, and button around outcomes. Whether that outcome is scheduling a consultation, buying a product, or signing up for a service, your entire user journey should lead there.  For example: If you’re a small business service provider and you want people to call you, make sure your entire website is structured so that it leads to a phone number or contact form with a clear call to action .  If your analytics show that 90% of visitors land on your homepage, make it crystal clear what they should do next. Think of your site not as an SEO machine, but as a digital storefront. AI-driven search will get people to your door, but it’s still your job to invite them in. 05. Measure what actually matters Here’s a truth most SEO dashboards don’t tell you: traffic drops aren’t always bad. As AI starts answering more questions directly in search results, you may see fewer total clicks, but higher-quality visitors. If your conversions, calls, or orders are steady (or growing), that’s not a problem; that’s progress. The goal isn’t to chase vanity metrics. The goal is to reach the right  audience—the ones ready to take action. For example: If a Wix user runs a website for a pediatric practice, the recent changes in search (with people getting certain answers from AI) will likely mean that their traffic has gone down. But even if traffic is down 50%, the number of children who need to go to the doctor has not changed. Now, the question is, is your website optimized to help them book an appointment with you? A good rule of thumb: if a drop in traffic doesn’t impact your bottom line, it’s not a drop that matters. Monitor more than traffic with Wix’s AI Visibility Overview Good SEO delivers for “AI optimization” These days, everyone is talking about AEO (AI engine optimization) or GEO ( generative engine optimization ). Here’s my take: these aren’t new disciplines. They’re just the latest iteration of SEO under a different name. When mobile search exploded, some people started saying “mobile SEO.” But in reality, it was still about delivering a better user experience. This is no different. AI search rewards clarity, freshness, and credibility. It favors sites that are well-organized, easy to understand, and regularly updated. Instead of chasing the latest acronym, focus on timeless principles: Keep your content current and accurate Structure your pages with clear headings and lists Make your expertise obvious Update your site regularly with new products, testimonials, or FAQs that impact your bottom line That’s not AI optimization—it’s just good digital hygiene. The future of search might be more fair For years, SEO felt like an arms race: whoever had the most money for backlinks, content, and technical tweaks usually won. AI is changing that. For the first time, search engines can deliver individualized  results without losing quality—and that makes relevance more powerful than budget. A small yoga studio, a local jewelry maker, or a niche newsletter can now appear in more results than ever before, precisely because they match someone’s intent better than a big brand ever could. With AI, everyone has a personal shopping assistant who can offer more targeted results. That’s the beauty of what’s coming in 2026. Search is becoming more human again. It’s no longer about who shouts the loudest. It’s about who answers best. Eli Schwartz - Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Twitter  | Linkedin

July 25, 2023 During this SEO webinar , panelists shared tips and tactics that show how blogging can help your business beat even the toughest of SEO competitors. In the session, uSERP's Jeremy Moser and MarketMuse’s Elizabeth Irvine offered practical SEO content marketing strategies that can help your website gain more visibility and get more clicks. In this webinar, we covered: Tips for demonstrating topic authority and E-E-A-T with search engines How to pick the right blog topics for the greatest SEO gains Best practices for structuring your blog content Free template: Download our SEO blog writing Google Doc template to help your writers create targeted content that engages visitors and follows SEO best practices. Meet your hosts: Elizabeth Irvine Vice President of Marketing, MarketMuse With a whopping 16 years of experience in B2B marketing, Elizabeth currently leads content, demand generation, and customer enablement at MarketMuse. She has previously leant her significant expertise to leading companies such as Gartner, Code Ocean, and TechTarget. Twitter | LinkedIn Jeremy Moser Founder and CEO, uSERP Jeremy leads a team of over 50 people at uSERP, a firm that drives organic growth for leading tech brands. He has spearheaded SEO campaigns for clients like monday.com, ActiveCampaign, and Freshworks. He’s been named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Marketing and Advertising. Twitter | 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. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Competitive positioning in your SEO content strategy Elizabeth Irvine explained the importance of establishing authority by emphasizing the quality of your content—an absolute necessity for many businesses, particularly ones that operate in competitive niches. Topic authority: There could be thousands of results for your most relevant keywords. You’ll need to show search engines and your audience that you’re an expert on your topic if you want to rank and convert well. Scaling output: Your audience expects detailed content to guide them through every aspect of your product/service/business/industry. Working with AI for content briefs can help you scale without impacting quality. Content refreshes: When approached correctly, refreshing existing content can help you improve rankings and attract visitors from the SERP, while taking less time than it would to create from scratch. SEO tactics for competitive blog topics Jeremy Moser advocated for putting processes in place to ensure that your blog has multiple opportunities to reach relevant audiences. Content velocity vs. content specificity: An initial emphasis on content velocity can help new sites identify winning niches and build brand authority within them. But, beware of content decay and other potential pitfalls that can occur due to a long-term focus on velocity. Content prioritization: Get the most ROI for your efforts by factoring in demand, SERP competition, your own topical authority, and organic CTR for potential content. Content distribution: Optimize for mixed-content SERPs to exploit opportunities to appear more than once in the search results, then identify non-direct competitors to outreach to for more backlinks . 5 Wix SEO and digital marketing tools to make your content more competitive Wix site owners can put these insights into action using some of the SEO and marketing features built into the platform. 01. Optimize your blog posts with the Wix SEO Assistant The Wix SEO Assistant tool gives you real-time information on optimizations that you can add to your blog posts to improve the structure, keyword optimization, and accessibility. Integrated with Semrush keyword insights, the emphasis on keyword positioning and HTML formatting can help make your content more visible on SERP features on mobile and desktop. 02. Distribute content with Wix RSS, social share, and email integrations Tools like Wix RSS , social share, and email integrations can help you to distribute your content to followers on social media and your email marketing lists. In addition to alerting new and existing followers of your content as you create it, these content distribution tools can help your site be more visible to search engines during the indexation process. 03. Use the Wix Video Maker and structured data for better SERP visibility Content creation tools like the Wixel Video Maker help you create multimedia content from the image and video library of your website, themes, templates, and stock content from Vimeo. Add original videos to your blog and include custom video structured data via the the Advanced SEO panel to increase the opportunity for your video pages to show in rich results . 04. Track your backlinks in the Traffic over Time report Wix Analytics keeps track of all of the backlinks that people have clicked on. In the Traffic over Time Report , you can filter by Traffic category > Referral to see which websites have linked to your content. 05. Verify rich results eligibility with the Wix Site Inspection tool Wix’s Google Search Console reports and Site Inspection tool can help you assess how your content is performing and maximize the impact of your efforts. With the Site Inspection panel, you can verify and sort your content by rich result eligibility, enabling you to identify which pages have structured data issues at a glance. Transcript: Outranking the biggest brands with blogging Crystal Carter 00:00 We're joined today by Jeremy Moser. Jeremy, I don't know if you want to say hello and introduce yourself quickly. Jeremy Moser 00:08 Yeah. Hey everyone, how's it going? Appreciate you having me here. And I am excited to jump into some of the topics today. Is anyone in the chat from the Tennessee area? I'm in Nashville. Any fellow Tennesseeans out there? Crystal Carter 00:23 Shout out to Dolly Parton. We've also got Elizabeth Irvine here with us today, if you’d like to say hello and introduce yourself quickly? Elizabeth Irvine 00:36 Yes. Hi, everyone. I'm Elizabeth Irvine, the VP of Marketing for MarketMuse and I'm coming to you from Arlington, Virginia today. Crystal Carter 00:44 Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, I'm Crystal Carter. I'm head of SEO communications. I'm joined today by Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding. We are both from the team here at Wix. And we are going to get started just now. So just to let you know. And if anyone else asks in the chat, please let them know because people join late sometimes. But yes, this webinar is being recorded, it will be shared on YouTube. And you will get a link with the recording in an email sent to your inbox after the webinar. And we also have a q&a panel right next to the chat box on the webinar page. And you can see that and you can ask questions there. We have a team of people answering questions there who know lots about blogging, and who know lots about Wix and can help give you answers there. You can also go to the Wix SEO Learning Hub to find out lots more about our webinars and find lots more information, including our Wix SEO newsletter, Searchlight newsletter, which Mordy always reminds me to remind everyone that we have. So I've nailed that today. And in terms of agenda, we've done our introductions. Very soon, we're going to hear from Elizabeth Irvine, and she's going to talk about some amazing things that she knows about blogging, and she knows a lot, you're also going to get some insights from Jeremy Moser. And then I'm going to share five quick Wix Blog resources that can help you to grow your blog and help you to get more traffic and things like that. And then we're going to have a q&a hosted by the one and only Mordy Oberstein. So we are going to jump into it if we're ready, Elizabeth. And I'm going to stop sharing my screen. Oh, it's disabled for me. Would you mind giving me the power? Just a second... Jeremy Moser 02:28 Okay, got it. Crystal Carter 02:34 Yes, wonderful. Elizabeth Irvine 02:36 Great. So, I'm going to start by talking about high quality content and low quality content. Because both impact your ability to establish topical authority and influence decisions around content optimization. So let's dig in. High quality means your content delivers value, you're offering something authentic and unique. You're telling search engines and your readers that you know what you're talking about. Go through some of these rewritten, aggregated, rephrased content. It doesn't really offer anything new. It can be considered copycat content. Thin content, of course, doesn't cover enough, its surface level. I'll use that as an example in a minute. Overly optimized content is risky, because it's trying to do too much on one page, it's overcompensating. If you're overdoing it with certain keywords and kind of repeating yourself in order to hit a word count target, then you risk over optimization, or if you're trying to show what the problems are, why you need to solve it, how to solve it, tools to help you solve it. Search engines won't know when to serve that page, because it's unclear what it's about. No information gain: If you're not offering something new and different, not offering your experience and expertise, why would search engines favor your article? For promotional use, topic misalignment really comes down to the story you're telling and journey you want your audience to go on. Does everything on the page in question help move your reader to the next step of their journey? Or would it take them on a completely different path altogether? Think about what makes you read an article or something you're trying to solve. This happened to me the other day I landed on, I waited on something that was like three ways to do X, Y, Z and added additional content that was kind of related, but not really. A bunch of promos and pop ups. And that's a frustrating experience. It's not giving me what I really needed. So then, when AI comes into the mix, it's exciting because you can save time and resources in your production. But if you're not producing high quality content every time you publish now and you figure out a way to scale your process with AI, you may see slight increases in the beginning because of volume, but you risk long term pain because of the lack of quality, which is what search engines prioritize. Creating a high quality article is a long process. You have to decide where you want to save time. And I'll briefly go through the steps and note this is pre-generated AI. Research is diving into competitor topics and keyword research, how are they covering it? What are the gaps that you could fill? What are the must haves? Planning, you drill down a little bit more into targeted topics that will better attract your audience based on authority, and long tail keywords that position your content in a more niche area where you can thrive. Briefing, putting together a detailed outline of titles, subheadings topics, questions to address, and links to include for your writer to focus around, writing, putting it all together in a story. Editing pertains to proofreading, copy editing, is it telling the story you want. Publishing and distributing to your audience and optimizing afterwards for continuous improvement and changes in the market, which we'll also get to in a minute. It's easy to look at this and think, Well, why wouldn't I want to shorten that writing bar with generative AI? Or maybe I can cut most of the research out and simplify that. But what are you sacrificing? It could be a lot depending on your existing process and implementation of AI. Say your current process is to give a writer a brief or a topic that's been on your list for a long time. They write it, you edit and then you post it. Now you want to shorten that process with AI. So you create a brief based on the topic and it looks good. Seems like it's covering everything you would expect. What you risk missing out on here is targeted, personalized research, what if that topic wasn't the right topic to pursue to begin with? What if coverage is so good and vast for that topic, you're facing a huge uphill battle to rank for it. If you then use generative AI to help with copy, providing light editing, because again, everything sounds fine. That piece isn't going to help you build authority, knowing how hard it will be for you to rank, and not just anybody to rank, it's important. And your authority is a huge factor in determining that. So if you're using AI to identify a topic to create a brief to write your content, where does your expertise fit into that story, prioritize authority and helpfulness in your content, then volume. So let's go into an example. Here, we're going to use the term "how to groom a dog". This is an example of a piece of thin content ranking for this term. But this is all the article was: There was an intro paragraph in the beginning with related links at the bottom, not much detail, low content score, meaning they left a lot of stuff out. There's also an intent mismatch. This seems more like it's trying to sell these scissors, these three in one scissors, but they're not really giving instructions on how to groom a dog. Let's look at a high quality page. So I can't put the whole page on here, obviously, but it's just this section alone has much more detail. It could be formatted a lot better. But the information is valuable. They had other sections on what not to do. And details on brushing, eye ear cleaning, it actually talks about how to groom a dog. Clearly, there's experience that went into creating this, it has a high content score, meaning it covered a lot of relevant topics. If you were looking for details, steps on grooming a dog, you're going to stay on this page and not the other one. You'll also be more likely to buy grooming tools from them or follow the recommendations because they earn your trust with how to do it. You're likely to buy from them instead of the other. Every page on your site should have a purpose. Really think about what your page is about. Do the keywords you're going after reflect that? Does the intent match? Are you trying to sell something on a page that's really meant to be informational? These on this slide. These are some of the questions that Google provided on how they define helpful content. It goes back to experience. Have you actually done this or got help from someone who can weigh in on the narrative and provide details that you may have overlooked? Because if a writer or generative AI is helping you build it out, it looks fine. It looks good. It reads well. But it's not necessarily sticking to the topic and has that experience and expertise to make it really authentic. The first page that I showed recommended the reader to actually go to a groomer in a couple of those paragraphs, which is really confusing because the article was about how to trim your dog's hair. It's easy to find out. It's easy to think about it from a personal point of view. How often have you gone to a site like I said before, looking for an answer to a question, you get frustrated and you go back to search. You haven't learned enough from that page. So when visitors reach your page, will they have learned enough? Low quality content has a compounding effect. Outdated content can also hurt you here. If you have an old article talking about ways to cook a turkey, for example, and you don't mention air fryers, that's going to hurt if people don't stay on your page because they didn't get any value. You may see traffic but that's it. It feels good. Create new content and increase your footprint. But content is not "set it and forget it". All of your content together tells a story to search engines about what you know and how well you know it. So don't automate for the sake of it, identify the safest place to automate, or bring AI in and test it first and then scale. There's a lot of really great prompt recommendations and templates, but they're meant to give you a starting point, you need to make it your own and personalize the inputs before executing, or you risk creating similar content to what's already out there. Remember to prioritize authority, and helpfulness in your content, then volume. So let's talk about how to build authority with content optimization. We will do that with the example I showed before. But content optimization is not just about the page you're working on today, or going back to old posts. Of course, you want to prune, looking for posts with dates, name, stats, that may need to be updated. But it's also good for good performing posts, good performing posts to help them continue to improve and do even better. But content optimization is more than optimizing a single page. As I said, you want to tell search engines that you're an expert on the whole topic, which is the makings of a cluster. So let's go back to that example that was underperforming and talk about how we could quickly improve it. First, this page is not talking about how to groom a dog. It's really talking about the tools you need, and honestly recommended that you go to a groomer. So this can be rewritten and a new page can be created that goes into more detail on all the gear that you need to groom a dog including scissors, nail trimmers, shampoo, all that stuff. So make sure you're really clear on what the page is about, going back to the purpose of the article. You don't want to cover too much and cause confusion for the search engines. It will confuse intents in the search engines won't know what your page is about. Read your articles if you know nothing on the topic, I actually do this quite a lot. Or write it for your parents who adopted a dog for the first time and you want to clearly explain how to do something like that. I think sometimes we get so close to our content and our topics that we kind of forget what our readers don't know and how to fill in those gaps and help create that context for them. Look at your topic model, some of that early research that you did to identify what you should write about in the first place. In this case, trimming nails, skin health, dogs, ears, and eyes were key to showing search engines what was needed to build an authoritative piece but they weren't included in this page anywhere. The site also ranks for how to groom curly coats, which also points to a somewhat surface level page. But this paragraph could be updated about why the coats are complex. What type of breeds does that pertain to? It could turn into two or three paragraphs probably removing the groomer mentioned. But that's really all that would be needed to tell search engines that there's more information here. But we want to be really careful not to tell search engines that this page is about grooming curly coats, because that's not the title. That's not what you're trying to rank for. But since we don't want to change the focus of that page, but there's enough content and expertise for a full article, that's when you can create a new page for how to groom a dog with curly coats, and also medium to long coats. And with those pages create a link to that original how to page. Without too much work, the site could pretty quickly increase its authority on dog grooming. To take it a step further, when you go back to your topic model, look at those related topics we covered. We covered the thinning shears, that bottom of funnel content. Specific breeds are there, really certain breeds that are incredibly challenging, dig more into those explain why paw pads must be particularly challenging with grooming because it was quite high up for semantic relevancy. I know that personally because we get charged extra from the groomer because my dog hates having his paws clipped. So I don't think that's fair, because it's also a crazy amount to get your dog groomed. But that's beside the point. Once those pages are created, they can all be linked together along with strategic, non competitive external links because you don't want to give more juice to sites that have crazy authority anyway, like Wikipedia. And there you have yourself a beautiful cluster. Topic authority matters. Use good data to help you make decisions, including finding gaps, we go back to the topic model in that previous page. We saw that nobody was covering dry skin in a comprehensive way. They could create additional content on that and take advantage of that gap, it would give them an additional edge. Keep the language simple and clear. One tip I got a long time ago was to read the content out loud. It's amazing what errors you'll uncover. And you'll find if you're reading it to yourself over and over trying to understand what it's saying, then it won't be clear to your audience either. And that's part of optimization. You want them to be able to absorb the information. And don't forget intent and make sure your page has a purpose. Mordy Oberstein 14:55 That was amazing. But I just want to really, really hone in for the audience on the point of experience that you brought up, if you're competing with a big brand on the SERP, and they have an entire content team, and a content team on top of the content team, working on top of the content team, one of the gaps that they'll generally have, one of the vulnerabilities, is a lack of experience. They're a content machine, whereas you're a niche site. You have experience, you're in contact with people that have experience. You could really write deep, nuanced, very specific content, you can really build up the authority, the topical authority around that topic, multiple posts covering the topic from different angles for different audiences, in different ways, all built on real first hand experience. And that's really a way as we just saw, that you can really differentiate yourself from the big brands. I know someone in the chat asked as well, how do I outrank a big brand? That's really how. Use your strength. Your strength as an SME, or as an SMB is that you aren't a content machine. And it's actually a great thing these days, it's one of the things I've been juggling with a lot lately. You see this trend where people are looking for real experience, they're hopping over to social media to TikTok or whatever to get information. Because we're craving that personal experience. I don't believe a random webpage. I believe a person. If you're a niche site, you can really create that feeling of getting information from a person when you write in a really experienced-based way. And you're really covering a topic in a really holistic way, in a really thorough way, that really aligns to that wider marketing trend of people looking for and searching for great information built on personal experience. I just really wanted to reinforce that point. Because it's something that I think is so powerful in blogging today that you really have the power to do. I'm off my soapbox now. Crystal Carter 17:00 It was a great presentation. We really appreciate it. Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking the time. We're going to move on to Jeremy's so that we can get through some more fantastic insights. Now, Jeremy, if you are ready to share your screen. That'd be great. Jeremy Moser 17:19 Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We can let me make sure I'm on the first slide here. But yeah, Elizabeth did a really good presentation, I think Mordy kind of hit the nail on the head too, with focusing on your strengths there. And it's something we'll talk about too, in this presentation is, you know, the difference between velocity and specificity and how you can use those to your advantage sort of based on the situation that you're in. So yeah, let's just dive right in. I'm Jeremy Moser, co-founder and CEO of uSERP, and also part owner and operator in Codeless. And we do stuff for a wide variety of brands from SaaS, to e-Commerce, to even service-based companies as well. I've worked with some cool brands like monday.com, FreshWorks, Robinhood, HotJar, Active Campaign, things like that. And I'm just here to share a little bit about some of the frameworks that we use, in relation to main prompts. How do we use blogging to outrank the competition? What does that actually look like in practice? How do we prioritize things? And so the presentation today is just going to cover a little bit of that, and if there's any questions, we can kind of go from there. So on the agenda, there's kind of like three main things I wanted to address today, revolving mostly around, content velocity versus specificity. So what are those two entities? When do you use them or pick them based on the scenario that you're in currently? Number two, being topic prioritization. So when you look at a mix of topics within these sorts of frameworks, how do you decide what to prioritize? And why? What does that sort of payback period look like for you? And how do you map that within a given strategy? And then number three, once you've got some of that content output going, how do you then distribute that content? And how do you do link building at scale to where you can start to outrank competition? I think it's a really key factor within just kind of that blogging sphere as a whole, right? Good content is good. And it's a great start. But we also need to figure out how do we promote that content? And how do we get good quality websites to link back to it so that we can outrank and we can last a long time on the search results without competitors coming in. So those are like the three main points that we'll hit home on today, we'll just dive right into the velocity versus specificity. So, velocity from a content standpoint is really just how many pieces are you publishing on a given you know, daily, weekly, monthly basis, whatever it is, whatever sort of timeframe you're looking at. Velocity is most often used up like, you know, you'll hear it all the time. I've just published more content, right? Like, get more content on your site, publish more, add more articles. It's all about that quantity game where it's specificity is, sort of what Mordy was hitting on a little bit there, around how do you find what niche you're in and how deep can you go within that niche and I think both have their merits But it just depends entirely on where you're at as a company in terms of, are you already substantially within SEO in the sense that you've been here for a couple of years, you've been publishing for a while, or are you a brand new site. Those all sort of impact your ability to use one of these frameworks here. So velocity, we tend to think of it from our experience here, velocity tends to be really good for new sites to test out what works and what doesn't work, we'll typically find that if you're a brand new site, and you're just getting your blog up, you're just starting to publish things. If you throw sort of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, it tends to be a little bit better than actually going for something that's super, super specific there, you're spending a lot of time in the early stages, let's say this is your first couple pieces, you're putting those out. You're spending, you know, maybe weeks or even a month to get that piece out the door, you're really delaying your time to see any sort of baseline analytics that you can iterate from. And that's really the key that we find for brand new sites is that sometimes if you have, let's say, three or four different ideal customer profiles that you target, and you want to create content for all of those, sometimes it's going to be really hard to tell if you're going slow, which one of those niches is going to be the most profitable for you from an SEO perspective. And the way you can get around that is just kind of sheer velocity in the early stages to see what picks up, what doesn't, what's hitting home in the eyes of Google and what's not. And then you can really use that to your advantage, to essentially harp on that specificity later on. And so essentially, as a new site, it can be really hard to find specificity without velocity first. So you can end up spinning your wheels. You're going too specific if you're saying, hey, we need to polish this one guide, this other guide, those ones just might not hit as well as if you're doing a bunch in a wide variety of spaces there and seeing what works and then doubling down on there. So really, velocity we find is very, very good for new sites. But it can also be combined with specificity, which we'll kind of dive into in a little bit here. So some of the main findings, I'll just summarize super quick before we actually get into kind of like the nitty gritty and actual frameworks, and how do you apply it. But some of the main things we've noticed over time, after working with a couple of 100 brands, that big brands should often prioritize velocity in a specific measure and not land grabs or volume metrics. And so what we mean by that specific velocity is really dialing in on what are those currents? ICP? So what are your ideal customer profiles within a search framework, you know, which one of those are doing well, currently? Which ones do you already have existing topical authority and that you can kind of go deeper in. So for example, let's say you have a couple different customers from like, you know, construction firms to law firms, whatever it is that you find currently has a really strong foothold from a search perspective, those are generally speaking ones where you want to prioritize specific velocity. So how do we go deeper within that one very specific niche now and how do we publish a lot of content across the board there versus then we're looking at all these in, you know, Semrush, Ahrefs, whatever it is. And we're seeing a tonne of volume metrics here that look great, let's just go through everything, it's usually not a great strategy if you just spread your efforts too thin when you can really dial it down, when you focus on one or two niches there when you're a little bit larger of a brand. And you already know that you have good traction in those spaces. Small brands, generally speaking, should start with velocity to identify some of those winning niches to understand which ones are working, which ones aren't for them. But then they should focus on specific velocity once they reach those, those analytics there, and they can kind of see what's working and what's not. And then small brands should not focus on velocity long term. And we'll kind of dive into some of the downsides of velocity here that we've just seen over time. And so we'll just jump right into essentially a framework that we've used on RN, which we kind of deem the velocity specificity cycle, it's kind of a mouthful. But essentially stage one here, what we're looking at is typically newer sites or a new topical niche. So this can apply if you're, like I mentioned a brand new site, you're just getting your foothold in the SEO space. Or if you are sort of a larger entity that’s been around for a bit, but you're entering sort of a new topical niche. So let's say you just haven't covered this subset of content before or this topic before. This still applies to you. Even if you're a bit larger of a brand you have more experience etc. And so you know, newer sites, new to topical niches, what you want to do here is really prioritize the velocity of those topical niches in their space. And so if you're a newer site, and let's say you have three ICPs, or you offer multiple different product variations, if your product has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bunch of different features there. There's a lot of good, unique content you can create around those features around their use cases. A lot of what you want to do there is really prioritize velocity, and so that's stage two, where we're talking about how do we publish content clusters across three to five verticals at a time. And then we sit back for a little bit, we analyze some of that data and we understand which content clusters within that publishing framework are actually performing best. And so it's a really key stage that we find that a lot of newer sites or folks that even have larger sites , and they say, cool, we have a huge site, we have a big domain rating authority, whatever it is, we can kind of capture any topic we want. We find that you're creating a little bit more work for yourself doing it that way. Whereas going a little more specific and seeing, hey, these topics, these verticals, they're performing well, let's go a little deeper here until we've got a really good foothold. And then you can kind of expand out from there. And so stage three is what we're talking about, they're just analyzing the data after a few months, right, depending on your competition or difficulty. Analyzing the data could be as quick as a couple of weeks, it could be as long as a couple months, depending on how aggressive you're being, as well as obviously competition, right? If you're going up against larger competitors, you want to take a little bit more time to analyze that data, you're not going to see movements quite as fast. So take that into account based on your sort of existing site authority, as well as competitors in our space, and how difficult realistically it's going to be. In stage four here, what we'd like to look at is essentially finding those winning niches that align with your business goals and intent. So instead of looking at things from just a purely volume standpoint of like, hey, this one says it's low keyword difficulty, it says it's high volume, it's sort of related, maybe in some senses, let's just go after it, because it sounds nice. Those are usually ones that you want to avoid, because you're probably not going to rank for it long term, it might feel like a good short term win. But again, if it's not aligning with your business goals, and intents, a lot of the content you're creating in that sense is sort of just useless, right. And so what we want to do here within that block, that specificity cycle, is again, find those winning niches based on a little bit of velocity at the start, and then go a little bit deeper with these specific niches that we're finding are doing well. And when you're looking at, you know, metrics within Ahref, Semrush, Moz, whatever sort of keyword tool you're using, a lot of those volume metrics are just plain wrong anyways. So for example, we've seen this across our own brands, as well as hundreds of sites we've worked with, in that we'll usually see, if there's a keyword that says a couple of 1000, maybe it's probably two to 3 times that amount of search volume, if it says it's somewhere in that like, you know, 10 to 50 a month, we'd assume it's probably three, four times that amount, just based on the actual experience in there. So if you're seeing things that are super low volume, even if they're registering within a keyword tool, that's generally speaking, a really good sign that actually has more volume than it says. So it's just something to take into account here that we want to avoid some of those shiny objects, when we're talking about stage two to four here of finding those content clusters across the verticals, and then finding sort of that winning niche where one is just outperforming another, this is usually what you'll find across these stages, that when you do publish across a few different verticals, you'll find maybe one or two are going to perform better than another. And it's usually due to things, you know, different competition, or maybe you just have more experience in that space, or Google perceives you to have a little more topical authority at the moment there. And those are the ways that you kind of double down. And stage five here, essentially what we're looking at is the specificity production. And so that's how we go deep, essentially in a winning niche now. And so those are ones you should have identified from sort of that multiple month period of analyzing data, you'll now have a pretty good understanding of what are those niches that actually do perform well, for us, not only from just a pure SEO standpoint of like, actually ranked well for it, we got traffic, but did it actually result in some sort of movement towards your goals, right? Whether that's directly for leads or sales, conversions, whatever sort of business model you run, making sure that those winning niches are categorized correctly in the sense that they're forwarding or getting closer to your goals. And so that's when you start to amp the production up within that specific niche. And you really dial in on that without sort of getting that shiny object syndrome across different spaces. So stage six, there is basically increased velocity only within those spaces and put a major focus on content rejuvenation cycles. So what the heck does that mean? What is constant rejuvenation? How do we framework that within sort of new content production, where we're doing a lot of this at scale? One of the key things that you'll notice over time is that too much velocity often means a lot of content decay, even for large brands. So this is something you want to be aware of that at almost all times and Elizabeth hit on this Mordy hit on this a little bit as well, where essentially if we're seeing low quality content on a given site, Google has said this time and time again, we've also just seen it in practice that low quality, outdated, inaccurate sort of content brings your entire site down. And so it's something to be really cautious of when we're looking at content velocity. And we're looking at that too much in a silo of saying, you know, we hear it all the time, right? It just publish more content, just create more content. And then you'll start to see traffic. A lot of that can be good advice in some cases, but it also sets you up for failure. If you don't have the processes in place from a content rejuvenation perspective of now that I've created all this content, how do I go back and make sure that it's updated over time, that I'm not just creating a piece and kind of setting and forgetting because we've just seen time and time again, that brands that do set and forget there. That's an opening for another company to come in, right? And it's another way that you can actually rank against larger brands doing sort of a basic level search like this, you can do this on pretty much any keyword tool you've got. But essentially just take a look and plug in a domain and see what sort of content they are ranking for and different positions, you can even then compare that over time, they'll give you a really good understanding of like, what are all these keywords that they're not even ranking well for? Which ones have declined in the past 360, 90 days or even longer? It gives you a really cool insight into what topics are these brands prioritizing or simply just not focusing as much on. Those are really your kind of ins in a competitive space. A good example for stage sort of number two: You're publishing content across three to five verticals. So I'll give you a little bit of a breakdown of how you do that, how you identify that, what's the next step there. So this is a direct example of what we did for monday.com. So we looked at essentially all the different sorts of niches that they serve, and their different ideal customer profiles, and we just mapped to those apps to start. So they cover a whole host of different customer profiles, your business might cover only one or two, and that's totally fine. We can chat about ways to adapt based on that. But if you cover multiple ideal customer profiles here, what we want to look at is essentially spreading those out and seeing what terms, what keywords, what sort of content can we create specifically for those teams, and then sort of expand upon that. And so what we realized was, okay, cool, monday.com, it's a pretty broad product around project management, they serve a bunch of different companies, styles, types, what have you. And so we looked at, they're covering marketing, CRM and sales, project management in general, creative teams, software, dev teams, nonprofits, construction, firms, finance and accounting, right? There's all these different topics that they can cover. And so we want to do here is pick a few of these at the start that are sort of the bread and butter ones that historically if you have that data over time, which ones have converted best for you, or resulted in the highest return on investment, or lifetime value, whatever sort of metrics you're measuring there, and then create content for those specific niches. So the cool thing about Monday that might not directly apply to you is that a lot of that is really scalable in the sense that you're talking about one sort of specific product here, right, a project management tool, and you can expand that based on the use cases of each individual team. So you can really scale the amount of content velocity there within a specific niche. But that whole sort of stage two to stage four applies directly here of buying those, you know, three to five verticals. Let's just say here, it's you know, marketing, CRM, sales, project management, and really focus on velocity at the start within those. Maybe we identify that, hey, marketing and creative teams, these ones are ranking really well. Let's put a little bit of the other stuff on the backburner. And let's double down on that specificity and see that we've already got some of that topical authority there. So that's kind of what it looks like in practice. Hopefully, that makes some sense. If I'm going a little quick, we'll send some of these slides to everyone after I'm sure so you can kind of dive in and see if anything else up close there. Cool. So that was a lot for the first framework there. The second section here is a little bit on how we prioritize some of those topics. And now that you've actually done some of the research, you're saying, cool, I've got some of these ICPs. I know what I'm going to target here. How do we go from the typical phrase--we're all guilty of it, right? I need to rank for X,Y, Z and it's one specific sort of money keyword or a batch of those, how do we go from that to I know, I can rank for a given keyword and X amount of time frame, resulting in a given ROI. And so we really like to get a little bit more granular on topic, prioritization, and really look at some of the metrics there and our realistic ability to rank for that over time. So what we're going to cover in this section here is topic prioritization, which goes into a few things like the payback period. So how long will it take? You've actually recouped some of the investment there from targeting the specific pages? What are your timeframes to goals ratio? What are your KPIs? And then what does success actually look like to you? So this is a framework that we use quite often across codeless. And you serve our companies, and it's a constant framework here called Planning Predictor. And what we'd like to start here is at the base of harvesting demand, and so what we're talking about, there is looking to see what already exists from the search engine perspective, there's a few ways that you can create demand via SEO. But a lot of the time, 99% of the time, you're looking to harvest existing demand of folks already searching for this. How do we show up and build a brand in this space? How do we capture some of that attention? There are several ways to create demand. But again, a lot of what we want to focus on here is how do we harvest it because creating it is really, really hard to measure over time. And if we're talking about trying to get a really good ROI, in a reasonable timeframe, a lot of it is going to be based on harvesting existing searches. And so what we want to do here is really perform both a top down and bottom up analysis to build out a lot of that initial keyword lists for things like relevancy to your business, from the direct relevancy to something that's a little more broad, from volume metrics to again, take those with a grain of salt just based on your industry and space. And then things like keyword difficulty and even cost per click. So I'll just breeze through some of the stuff on this framework as a whole. And then we're going to dive into each one in specifics. So just feel free to listen, no need to take any notes or anything on this section just yet. We'll dive in each one there. The second stage here essentially is sort of competitiveness. So how difficulty or how difficult is the corresponding SERP that you're looking within? Can you realistically compete based on average DR, Da scores that give you sort of a good proxy, but also looking at like, how long have they been ranking there? What's their content, quality, referring domains, all these sorts of things will give you an idea of like, what is your actual, you know, reasonable timeline for ranking for some of that? The third stage here is topical authority. So are you already seen as a topical expert in these spaces? Are you building it up from the bottom? Are you already ranking for similar queries? Again, that's sort of what we were touching on earlier there, you're in that specificity stage, you might have a lot of topical authority already. It gives you a little bit more room to expand and see results faster. The organic CTR stage here of the framework is can you realistically rank within let's just say the top three for that given keyword, which is going to net probably somewhere between 70%, maybe even higher of the clicks. And you're also assuming kind of baking in that organic CTR is just been decreasing over time with various SERP features, whatever it is, you really need to be ranking within 3,4,5 to really see any sort of payback from the keyword these days. So it's something to keep in mind, you're doing that initial research. And then last, but not least, is the fun parts, right? The money part. So the payback period, what's your ideal payback period, and risk tolerance plays a huge, huge factor in how you build a content strategy from the ground up. So your tolerance here can be, need to get leads in two to three months. Or it could be, hey, we've got funding here, we've got a 24 month timeline, let's hit the ground running and see what we can rank for in that timeframe, your strategies are going to look completely different. So those are really key factors that we take into account before even looking at a piece of content and deciding whether or not to publish for it. Cool. So we'll dive straight into all of these. Now, hopefully, we won't take up too much more of your time, we'll try to be concise on some of them. But essentially, the harvest demand stage is where we're plugging in a bunch of different initial keyword ideas. And looking at essentially all of the longtail variations weighing up their respective relevance volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click. These metrics here are really good at understanding, what's the intent of a piece? What sort of length do I need to put into it? What's that cost going to be? So you know, a metric like CPC, some of you know this, some of you might not, but you know, well, it's obviously an advertising metric that can really help you indicate what people are willing to spend on something. And usually, if someone's willing to spend a pretty significant amount of money for a single click, and generally speaking, means they're getting really good quality leads, and traffic to their sites. And so you will often see, if you're in a law firm niche, they're searching for a law office near X,Y, Z city, that's going to probably be maybe even upwards of $100, $200 per click. And that generally speaking means the folks that are bidding on that are seeing a pretty good return, we're seeing good quality leads come through the door. So it's something to keep in mind in your space obviously depends on the space you're in, how expensive the things you sell are. But you can weigh those up on different keywords and essentially get some really good data on structuring intent. So this is just another example of what we did for Monday of looking at basically a keyword framework that you can plug in, which is that customer segment vertical, and then a problem or a pain point that they face. It can be as literal as this one here, where it's construction, project management, literally taking their ICP and then taking their exact software that they do here. This one's a little bit more middle of the bottom of the funnel. But you can also get a little bit more broad with these and you'll come up with a lot of really good quality terms here. And so the harvesting demand is really just building a lot of different keyword lists at scale, that you can then compare side by side, and understand which ones you can go after, that you're going to see results from, in a given timeframe. So it's a really good starting point of just building a lot of lifts in a lot of different areas. So you can have a lot of that data on and from a SERP competitiveness standpoint. What we want to look at here are a few different things. And so what you'll tend to see and given keyword tools are things like, you know, keyword difficulty metrica, or a score. These are basically useless these days, in my opinion. I think they can be a good starting point but when you really dig into the fundamentals, how they're ranking some of that are scoring, they're just not great indicators of what you'll actually see work. So for example, if you're looking at this one here, this keyword of contractors, planner, says the keyword difficulty of sticks. And when you look at some of the stuff in here, it's a bit misleading, right, like there's a few brands in here that are super high DR, millions of link's pointing to them. But when you actually look at how that metric is scored, it's really just looking off the domains pointing to that individual page. So it's looking at things at a page level, more than it's looking at things at the domain level. And we need to be taking into account the factors because obviously, they matter heavily in that, you know, if Forbes comes in on this topic, and they have zero links pointing to that specific page, their brand is just so large, that they're probably going to be able to garner some topical authority and rank there really quickly. So we don't want to base things off of just the amount of domain to a specific page, we want to look at things from a domain level. And so the good news is that when you actually do that, you'll start to see things a little bit more clearly. You know, maybe this one shows an app store ranking, etc. This one shows Amazon ranking Monday.com. This might not be a term that you really want to go after for the short term, as you're just probably not going to rank for it based on competition, despite the keyword tool, saying it's an eight, which for a brand new site, it might be relatively easy. So what we look at here, from a search competitiveness standpoint, is especially as it relates to how do we create content at scale? How do we do this? How do we create a piece that's actually going to rank for here and using blogging to outrank the competition, we're gonna look here at modeling things that work from brands that are at your size, or potentially even smaller. And so when you look at, you know, the first few things that are ranking here, you'll see pretty large companies, big domains, big brands, we often are told in various different circles that, hey, we shouldn't look at the number one ranking thing here, we should basically try to make that a little bit better. And then we'll hopefully at some point rank better than them. But it's just really not how it works. In practice, we find that there are often sort of, you know, smaller size brands, they're just getting things going on the SEO side that are actually penetrating a lot of these SERPs. And so that's something we want to really hone in on and understand how they are doing this, and a lot of it comes down to that specificity within a given topical area. So whereas a brand like Reich or whatever is ranking here, they can rank for a lot of these things, just based on the fact they built a brand over the past decade, they've got a bunch of different ICPs. They have content going and a whole host of spaces, that might not be you, right, and that's okay. And you can identify, there's other folks out there that are succeeding doing this. And so you want to model after them and not model after some of the big hitters you see on SERPs, because a lot of folks can rank for some content, unfortunately, just by the size of their brand and the quality, you might read it, you might say, you know, it's not the best content I've ever read, this one's a little better. And so that's one you want to model after, generally speaking, when you're looking at certain competitiveness. Is there anyone that's a little bit closer to your brand size, lower than your brand size, or smaller rather. And then using that as an indication of whether or not it's realistic to rank for these terms. And oftentimes, you will find that even if something is hyper competitive, like an international marketing strategy, whatever it is, you'll find that there are doors that are open, they're depending on your own brand, you know, how does it fit with your company, your ICPs, things like that, from a topical authority standpoint. Elizabeth hit on this a lot as well. So I'll just expand a tiny bit on that. But essentially, what we've looked at here is organizing topics around specific customer industries, and then using basically a parent child hierarchy to help reinforce some of that topical authority. So creating pretty dense clusters, again, going back to that specificity velocity framework, by identifying the specific clusters and inches and then really going deep within those. So you can see some of that to just on their sites, as well as sort of that URL structure that we tend to use here is essentially just sending positive signals around those various different topics, topic areas that we want to focus on making sure we've got a lot of good quality content that's condensed into this area. So we're building along with that topical authority. We're adding an expertise over time, etc. And we want to focus obviously on a lot of the topics where we can add some of that uniqueness to it. So that could be you know, your company does things a certain way. Let's touch on how we actually utilize that in practice within the content and add some sort of unique value there. So that's what you mean by the topical authority standpoint. Some of the practical application here is really going back to specificity, right? So if you're ranking well, for similar terms, you probably have some topical authority there. And you can go deeper and then use that velocity framework within specificity. So really take a look. If you're already an established company, or you've been doing SEO for a while, you've been blogging for a while, you can just go take a look and run a quick analysis and check and see what are sort of those generalized themes or areas that we rank well, then which ones maybe not so much. That'll give you a really clear idea of your expansion opportunity there, or even your pruning opportunity to say, you know, hey, this content has been in this niche for the past 12 months, it's not ranking for anything. You can potentially prune that, or redirect or remove it, whatever sort of decision you make there based on your current standing. And then really focusing on areas where you do have that topical authority, you're gonna see content rank far faster. So that's a really good practical application there. And, you know, I'm not sponsored by MarketMuse and it's just a coincidence that they're involved in the webinar, but we like to use them for this specific purpose, actually. So using tools like their inventory feature, where we can analyze things like a more personalized difficulty score, we prefer that over sort of just looking at them generically and other tools, because it can help predict just based on your own sort of topical authority in a given space, how much content you have, they're currently ranking versus relying on generalized numbers that tend to be really vague. Again, like we saw in the example, up here, it tends to not be a really clear indicator of if you're actually going to rank well or not, if you see an eight out of 100 keyword difficulty score, the last thing I would expect to see is Amazon ranking number one, because you're just not going to outrank Amazon for the most part. So just something to keep in mind there. Cool. Back to the organic CTR. So we're moving again, I'll jump back here as well as you can get another bit of an overview here. So we've covered the harvest demand section, SERP competitiveness, authority down to the CTR, and then the final one, payback period. And Wix team feel free to stop me if I'm going way too over on time. Crystal Carter 47:17 You kid of are, I didn't want to say anything. Jeremy Moser 47:20 No, you're good. I figured it might have been a little too in depth. So I'm happy to skip ahead to on anything if we have like another minute or two. Crystal Carter 47:28 Sure. Jeremy Moser 47:30 Cool, cool. No worries. So the payback period, essentially--you'll have the slides afterwards, you can kind of run through, there's a few kind of questions you can ask yourself based on where you're currently ranking, all those sorts of things, to kind of determine how do you make sense of like velocities, specificity, ROI, things like that, to be able to dive into some of that, the distribution side, too. There's a lot of practical applications in here, it will take too long to go through. But essentially, what we're looking at here is, we see that it's from a link building perspective, it plays just as much in the content as anything else. And that's content quality isn't just on page. So here's kind of a direct line from Google's own How Search Works documentation, basically saying, you know, one of the several factors they use to determine quality content is if other prominent websites link to you. And so what we want to see link building as is not really this like kind of mystical thing, but more as an extension to the content quality. So how do we get really good quality sites to link back to that content you've created, actually bolsters that content and makes it better quality. So that's what we want to do in this section here. I won't dive into all of it just now. But there's a few different things you can test around in here, a few different ways to go about link building at scale. And there's a couple of different frameworks in there that you can dive into at another time. But I won't drone on too long, I think I already went too far. Crystal Carter 48:49 It was a lot of information so we really appreciate you sharing everything. I'm just going to signpost everyone quickly so we can get to some of our things here. Just a second. So we want to make sure that we are getting to your questions. On the place where you registered for the webinar with all of this information we have added lots of the notes here from Jeremy and from Elizabeth. And we've also added a lot of the the signposting lots of different tools that you can use on Wix to optimize your blog for distribution, using Wix Video Maker for different content, different content, using analytics to understand some additional opportunities, and verifying your your site for rich results, which can also give you different opportunities and things like that. So we'll link to that in your email that you get. And I'm going to pass it over to Mordy so that we can get some questions before we wrap up. Mordy Oberstein 49:45 Hi there, okay. I'm gonna quickly just pull up my list. Yep. Thank you Jeremy, that was absolutely amazing. I just want to like, kind of sum up what you're talking about in one distinct sentence. So I know there;s a bunch of questions around this. If you see that you're ranking or you're getting some traction around a particular topic, so if you fix cars and you talk about brakes on your blog posts, talk about the engines on your blog post, you talk about spark plugs (I just got mine changed). And you see that the content about the engine is not working. It's not ranking, but the content of the brakes is ranking and you're starting to get some traction on that, go deeper into braking, or brakes. You really want to build on the momentum. You have a whole podcast episode of the SERPs podcast on the Wix SEO hub about momentum, and its role in SEO. So check out that episode for more on that. Okay. Well, let's go to Andy Jarvis and he has a great question. He wrote, how do you know if you should update, optimize a piece of content or write a new piece? Say if something updates from spring to summer? 2023? What factors would be driving updating the piece versus writing a new one? Jeremy Moser 50:56 Do you want me to...? Mordy Oberstein 51:04 The floor is yours, Jeremy. Jeremy Moser 51:07 Cool. Yeah. So in terms of deciding whether to update or create a new one--is that sort of the basis of the question? Yeah, I think it depends and kind of goes back to some of the stuff we were just chatting about around how much content you've already got published there versus creating new ones. And I think a lot of the difficulty we run into with content velocity as a blanket prescription for most folks, is that you do run into the fact that you just have so much decay going on. So it'll depend a little bit on the evergreen nature of a given topic that you have. And so you can do a little bit of a clear test there by just looking at what content is already ranking there when you search that term. So if you go to Google, don't even need an SEO tool for this, just plug in that keyword and see what timeframe was the content published that's currently ranking? Did anyone update recently? Or is it still showing stuff from two, three years ago, that gives you a pretty clear idea actually, in two senses. Number one being, that content, if it's outdated, a little bit, that's an opportunity for you to create a little bit better content, if you're not already ranking number one, or it's potentially your opportunity to just bolster that number one ranking by updating it anyway with newer fresh information. And if you see that a lot of the content there is updated more frequently, and you have been losing rankings, I'd for sure prioritize rejuvenation, or updating of that content, then I would net new because again, you're then playing into that net new cycle, right, you're creating a bunch of new content, that's also going to decay. At some point, you're creating yourself a really big backlog there. So I tend to be a much bigger fan of working with what you've already got. There's still opportunity in that space, and you're seeing results from it. Crystal Carter 52:46 And that's something Elizabeth touched on as well about making sure that it's not a set it and forget it sort of approach. Elizabeth Irvine 52:53 Yeah, I think it's going to be very rare to hurt yourself by updating your content, that you can only improve your content that way, especially if there's a change in the market, changing information. When it comes to updating or creating new, it goes back to thinking about, what is this page actually about? If you're adding too much information that's changing the subject of that page, that's when you should create something new, and go really deep into it. Mordy Oberstein 53:22 So Elizabeth, you spoke a lot about content clusters. And a bunch of folks were asking, could you maybe define what is a content cluster? And maybe give an example of one and how you go about creating one? Elizabeth Irvine 53:35 Yeah, it's a lot we can provide some additional content on clusters too. In the simplest terms, though, it's a group of content that fully covers a topic. And I like to think about it across the buyer's journey. That's kind of what I was talking about earlier, too, if you're talking about tools, in a how-to article, that's clashing. That's the intent mismatch, the intent of someone searching how to do something, if they're served with products, that's now answering their query. So when you're creating a content cluster, you want to think about the related topics to your core topic and create content that covers the why, the how ,the what. Jeremy talked about different verticals. So how can you expand, go into more detail, on the topics within that the related terms, what's semantically related to that initial topic and go deep into all of those. It's kind of a mix of science and art and really thinking about what's going to provide value to your audience. That's really what you're trying to do with your content and answer their questions. If you need to create 10 pieces of content to do that, to answer all of those questions, do it. If you need to do 20, then that's fine, too. It's not necessarily that you need five pieces for this cluster and you move on. It's really how you're going to show that you know this topic really well and can provide a comprehensive answer for them. Crystal Carter 55:06 And I think it's sort of being a one stop shop. So if somebody's got a question about a house plant or something, that they know how to grow it, whether to put it in dark, light or bright light, or you know, what kind of food it needs, or what kind of pot it might go in, or all of that sort of stuff. So it's got all of the different ways that people might be interested in that topic and really showing a depth of knowledge. Mordy Oberstein 55:30 Yeah, basically, if someone were to say, hey, are you an expert on plants, you will show them your blog. Yeah, here's all the things I talked about. Clearly, I am an expert on plants. One question that kind of came up and really touched on the core of what this webinar is about. Let's say for example, I'm starting to write content, and I'm ranking in position number 15. So page two of Google, and I just can't seem to get above page two, what do I do now? The first thing that I would typically look at there would be sort of a one-on-one stacking of like, is the content quality good at a baseline perspective, from a subjective level, looking at the depth that you're going into, in comparison to competitors. What sort of varying other related topics can you add to that content? If you've checked all those boxes, you've created as good, if not better, piece of quality content. A lot of the difference maker there, from what we see, tends to be the link building side, do you have enough authority in that space, are other good quality brands pointing to that piece of content or your company as a whole and saying, hey, they're the experts in this space, listen to them around this. Generally speaking, that is what we see pushes folks from let's just say, the bottom of the first page, top of the second page, into a position where you can actually compete. And then from there tends to be a little more around, how do you update that content, etc. Generally speaking, that's what we find to work. But there's multiple ways to do it, of course. So one last thing. Right now, we're really short on time, but I've seen multiple times throughout the q & a, this idea of authority. And what I mean by authority, what are we trying to do here? And I'll say this really quickly, before I hand it over to our guests, you know, that Google is sort of like a courtship, you need to show Google that you're trustworthy, that you're relevant that they can feel comfortable showing your website on on the result pages for whatever keywords that you're trying to rank for. And that's a long process of really creating content. And I think in terms of outranking bigger websites, it's really a place where you have some advantages, because you can, as I mentioned before, get really into the nitty gritty details of a topic to build up that authority in ways that maybe a bigger website can't. But again, when we're talking about authority. Elizabeth, Jeremy, what comes to mind, what's really important to building authority? And what does that actually mean for a SME or an SMB smaller kind of website? Crystal Carter 57:54 Elizabeth it would be good to hear from you, I know you talked about this a little bit in yours. Elizabeth Irvine 57:58 Yeah, it starts with expertise and experience and displaying that in your content. So I talked about dog grooming, if everything on my site is about dog grooming, and going into a talk about specific breeds, I talked about things that if I start talking about cats, and I have no other content about cats on my blog, I'm not gonna have any authority on cats, because Google's like her blog is about dogs. Why am I gonna give her rankings for something about cats, I need to build out a whole infrastructure with all the basics and go into the same details of what I did for dogs for cats. And at the basic level, that's, that's how we perceive authority. Mordy Oberstein 58:43 And with that, I think I'll hand it back over to Crystal. Just one quick plug for the SERP's Up podcast. And I think two weeks in August, I'm gonna say eighth. We're releasing episode number 50 of the podcast. So check out episode 50, it's got a heap of cuts from our previous episodes. If you're looking to get into SEO, learn more about SEO, we will cover a whole gamut of topics in just one episode. So that's the perfect one to get started with. And now I'll hand it back to Crystal. Crystal Carter 59:09 Yes, and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for joining us here. Thank you, Elizabeth, for your fantastic insights. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us today with your amazing insights. We're going to be sharing this video on YouTube. We're going to be sharing it on the web, the website that you joined this webinar via and thank you all so much for coming. I hope you guys have a great, great rest of the week and see you again for the next webinar. Bye. Thank you.

Author: Kiera Carter With the rise of AI search  and decline of organic site traffic, it's refreshing to know there's one constant: content is king. Content creation, strategy, and operations were key topics at MozCon in New York, where experts agreed on a nuanced, thoughtful approach to content in 2026. (Agreement? In SEO? I know—groundbreaking.) That’s because anyone deep in the trenches knows success in this chaotic moment isn’t about recklessly abandoning fundamentals. It's about understanding your audience , applying your search skills to new platforms, and—for the love of all original content—not writing the same explainers as everyone else on the internet. As a content marketer myself, I found it both grounding and freeing. So, as we head into 2026, I curated the best content tips from MozCon New York to help inform your future-first content strategy. If you’re looking to go deeper on AI search, check out 5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs  by Kevin Indig. Top content marketing tips for 2026 GEO or SEO? Stop stressing about acronyms Bridge search and social  Break free from keywords Optimize your content operations Stop measuring traffic. Start measuring trust. Think like a publisher Actually be a thought leader Focus on your heavy hitters GEO or SEO? Stop stressing about acronyms Lily Ray, VP of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, has a message for those panicking about GEO, AEO, and LLMO: it's SEO. "Good SEO is good GEO," she said in her talk, echoing a statement from Google's Danny Sullivan. "If you're doing things right from an SEO perspective, you should expect visibility in AI search as well." Ray pointed to the tactics everyone's calling revolutionary—content chunking, FAQ schema, earning brand mentions across platforms—and reminded us that SEOs have been doing this for years. "Chunking is just writing good content with optimized headlines," she said. "The way people search has absolutely changed, but the tactics to earn AI search visibility are really just evolutions of many of the existing SEO and marketing best practices that we've employed for years." Some (level-headed) adjustments you can make to evolve your content strategy, according to Ray: Build your brand presence on Wikipedia , Reddit, and YouTube, “without being too salesy and too promotional.” Answer common questions about your business very clearly on your website. Adjust your KPIs  and explore new AI search tools  to measure your AI visibility. Wix’s AI Visibility Overview  displays how your site is performing across AI platforms  Bridge search and social  We only spend 3.5% of our online time searching, as Paul Norris, organic media director at Journey Further, explained in his talk. The rest of the time, we're scrolling through social media, streaming YouTube videos, and browsing Reddit forums. "Discovery happens everywhere," Norris said. "Search is a specific behavior. It's not a channel." But SEOs used to long-term organic traffic can bristle at the quick lifespan of social content. Norris shared research from Measure Studio  finding that TikTok videos reach 75% of their total views within the first day, and YouTube Shorts hit 95% within 35 days. "Most social content is actually like fast food for algorithms," Norris said. "It spikes. It's fleeting. It's gone." That’s exactly where search optimization comes in, he said. By making social content discoverable and indexable, you can extend its shelf life, and in some cases—particularly on Instagram—make it evergreen. His advice: Don’t keyword stuff your captions. Instead, learn how people search within each platform and optimize accordingly. Repurpose your content strategically. For example, one piece could inspire an on-site article for Google, short-form videos for TikTok, and long-form content for YouTube. Work with creators. “That stuff lands better. They've got their own audience.” Break free from keywords The journey toward natural language search didn't start with ChatGPT, said Pete Meyers, principal innovation architect at Moz. “In some ways, we've been on the natural language journey for at least 15 years now.” This means we’ve already learned the building blocks: “Even though some of this is new, and we're a little worried, I think we have what we need, and we can take a little bit of a breath,” he said. That’s the good news. The problem is that most SEOs are still thinking in keywords when they should be thinking in journeys. "People might be having multi-paragraph conversations that have multiple steps," Meyers said. “How do we cope with that from a keyword research standpoint?”   It’s a question we’re all asking, because it’s clear that traditional keyword research can't keep up. Meyers said to forget trying to track one-off, infinitely-long queries. Instead, group long-tail queries into topic families and use topic clustering tools to group semantic variations together.  When Meyers demonstrated typing "iPhone or Android" into Moz's Keyword Explorer , it surfaced questions like "why is Android better than iOS?" and "why is iPhone better than Android?" alongside "why people believe iPhones are better than Android." "These are all on the same topic cluster," he said. "We can start to group them together." The key is understanding that every query represents a path from initial curiosity to final action. Map that journey, and you'll be positioned for success no matter what search looks like next. Image courtesy of Moz Optimize your content operations Josh Spilker, content marketing and SEO lead at AirOps, spoke about content engineering, or the practice of establishing a content engine primed for cross-channel distribution and efficiency.  “We were told that machines are coming for our jobs, and that every article would be AI generated,” he said. “The reality is that AI capabilities have created a new category and the people who figure it out are going to have a competitive advantage.” That advantage—and thing to “figure out”—is your process. “We've had a ceiling with incremental improvements: you tweak your brief, you tweak your outline, you tweak some of your internal linking processes. But you can't tweak your way out of a broken system,” he said. “What we're really thinking about is how content gets built, how it gets managed, how it gets scaled, and how you can do that in this new environment.” Start by whiteboarding out your entire content process. When you break down what it takes to publish one piece—outline, slug, meta description, internal links—you'll realize how many individual steps you're managing and can start to see opportunities. Make sure to put a human in charge of quality. “Content engineering is about orchestrating humans and LLMs together with a clear strategy, not just around disconnected tools.” Stop measuring traffic. Start measuring trust. Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, said his organic traffic is at an all-time low, but his leads are at an all-time high. "It took me 13,000 visits from search to get 67 newsletter signups," he said, "and only 2,821 visits from social to get 66." If you're still celebrating traffic numbers while your conversion rates tank, you're measuring the wrong thing. Reynolds breaks marketing into three stages:  Being seen Being believed Being chosen "Google's great at helping you be seen, but it's not great at being believed or chosen," he said. So, how do you start measuring “belief,” essentially trust, in your brand and company, in order to be chosen , everyone’s ultimate goal? Reynolds suggests tracking the percentage of traffic that comes from sources other than search and AI. "If that number is really low, humans don't give a shit,” he said. “Track newsletter signups by source—if 50% are coming from social, that's people choosing to hear from you.”  Image courtesy of Moz Think like a publisher The future of PR looks less like backlink outreach and more like operating an in-house newsroom, as Misty Larkins, director of public relations and internal communications at the University of Missouri Health Care, explained in her talk about digital PR . "When you create the data, you control the story.” That’s why companies are now hiring economists, statisticians, and data journalists to lead their content teams—because journalists quote and cite original sources. If you’re that original source, you're not just another brand hoping for coverage; you’re the expert that informs the story. This doesn't mean you need to hire a full-time economist tomorrow. But it does mean investing in content that's actually newsworthy: original research, surveys, trend reports, analysis of your internal data. "Instead of creating 50 pieces of generic content that's indistinguishable from your competitors, think about creating five highly differentiated pieces that all work together," Larkins said. Actually be a thought leader Chima Mmeje, senior content marketing manager at Moz, has zero nostalgia for the days of “boring SEO-optimized content that nobody wants to read."  The old process was predictable: do keyword research, copy what's on the SERP, use a tool to check your optimization score, and publish. "It was like math. It was boring. It was lifeless. It was lame."  Real thought leadership means becoming the primary source, not an interpreter. "Nobody wants to link to a secondary interpreter.” she said. “Everybody wants to link to the source of truth."  Mmeje pointed to Mike King as an example. “When the Google leak happened, Mike King was there first, reverse-engineering the patterns and teaching people how to assess it,” she said, noting that King's analysis earned 2,200 inbound links from a piece that doesn't even rank on the SERP. The barrier is mindset more than time. Mmeje suggested publishing just two original research pieces per year, writing opinion pieces that "either alienate or inform," and capturing demand as trends break instead of six months later. Focus on your heavy hitters Not all pages are created equal. In the post-traffic era, you need to know which pages are working hard for the business, and which ones are worth leaving behind. That’s the basis of the heavy-hitters framework shared by Bianca Anderson, organic growth manager at hims & hers. Your heavy hitters are the top 10 to 20% of URLs that drive the majority of your conversions.  Your action item: Apply a weighted score to your reporting that favors conversions (70% weight) over traffic (30% weight) to identify the pages that deserve your attention. From there, you can focus on updating the pages truly worth your time.  So, as Anderson says, "when leadership asks you,’ how bad is it?’ You can say, ‘our top traffic-driving content is down, but our conversions are doing really well.’" The marketers who'll thrive in 2026 are the ones who laser focus on the pages that actually matter—to the audience and to the business. Kiera Carter, Editorial Director at Wix Studio Kiera oversees content on Wix Studio's AI Search Lab and SEO Learning Hub. She has 15 years of experience in SEO and content strategy. In a past life, she held editorial leadership positions at companies like Hearst and People Inc. Her journalism has been published by The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , and others. Linkedin

Author: Adel Raslan The final quarter of the year is packed with holidays that can lead to higher organic traffic for certain brands—and that means more opportunities to earn money through advertising on your site. But making the most of this spike takes planning. This guide breaks down what to expect during the holiday season, based on the latest data from Google, and how to prepare your content and ad strategy to meet higher demand. For a general primer on using Google AdSense with Wix, see how you can generate additional revenue streams with Wix & Google AdSense . By putting in the work now, you can improve your results not just for the holiday season, but year-round. 8 ways to optimize your website ads for the holidays Understand the holiday traffic cycle Use the ad formats that match user behavior Activate Google AdSense Auto ads  Publish relevant content Prioritize device optimization Don’t let compliance slide under pressure Build a campaign calendar, not a content list Think long-term 01. Understand the holiday traffic cycle The holidays don’t just come with more traffic. They also come with higher- value traffic. People go online with a purpose. They’re searching for gift ideas, making travel plans, comparing prices, and looking for end-of-year inspiration. This intent makes them more likely to engage with both your content and your ads. Publishers across multiple regions saw ad revenue grow as much as 18% at the end of 2024, with click-through rates rising up to 26% in some regions of the world, according to Google AdSense  data. This reflects a seasonal shift in advertiser competition, user interest, and content engagement. If you can get your audience to spend more time on your site or visit multiple pages, that increases the chances they’ll see and click on your ads. The first step is understanding when and where traffic spikes happen on your site.  Use your website analytics to look back at October through December of last year. Pinpoint your most visited pages and highest-converting content. Did your traffic rise around specific holidays? Were there particular blog posts, product roundups, or tutorials that drew more visitors? This historical data can guide your upcoming content strategy. Analyze your traffic over time with Wix Analytics Also examine your traffic by device. In 2024, mobile and tablet visits increased across many regions, though desktop browsing held strong in North America. If you saw a mobile spike during Black Friday week or Christmas, it’s worth investing extra time in optimizing for smaller screens. 02. Use the ad formats that match user behavior Not all ads perform equally, especially during peak season. Certain formats consistently outperform others during the holidays. These include: Anchor ads These ads stay visible as users scroll through your content, making them a strong choice for mobile and tablet traffic. They’re less intrusive than interstitials and often deliver higher viewability rates. Offerwall ads These are opt-in formats that offer users something in exchange for viewing an ad. If you run a site with downloadable tools, exclusive content, or video tutorials, these ads offer a way to monetize deeper engagement. In-page ads These ads are embedded directly within your content, making them versatile and effective. They work particularly well on longer blog posts or product reviews, where the reader scrolls through multiple sections. 03. Activate Google AdSense Auto ads  If you’re pairing Google AdSense with a Wix site , you may also want to activate Auto Ads, which uses machine learning to test ad placements and automatically show the most effective ads for your audience and the best placements for them. While Google AdSense shows you where to position ads on your site and optimizes them based on your specific site and readers, you maintain the control. By using the ad quality and brand safety tools, you can override the technology and decide which ads are shown and what brands you advertise. This way, you get suggested placements for the best success, but can apply your own knowledge of your audience to make sure the ads are something they’ll actually want to click on. 04. Publish relevant content Great ad performance depends on great content. During the holiday season, this means creating content that’s timely, useful, and aligned with seasonal searches. Instead of chasing holiday trends, think about the intent behind your audience’s searches. People are usually looking for ways to save time, make decisions, or solve seasonal challenges. Budget guides, quick gift ideas, travel checklists, family-friendly recipes, or tips for starting fresh in the new year all fit the bill. You want to meet them at the moment they’re searching and offer something of immediate value. The timing of your content matters, too. Publishing as early as possible in Q4 gives your content time to get indexed by search engines and start earning backlinks . It also allows time for internal promotion via newsletters or social media. If you already have older seasonal content that performed well, refresh it. Consider updating statistics, replacing outdated links, or swapping in newer product mentions. Refer to Google Search’s advice  on creating helpful, reliable and people-first content for recommendations.  Blog owners and developers can streamline this process by scheduling blog posts, adding seasonal imagery, and using announcement bars to point to new or refreshed content. Adding internal links to related content also helps keep users engaged longer, increasing the likelihood of ad views. 05. Prioritize device optimization If your site loads slowly or displays awkwardly on mobile, it’s going to cost you both traffic and revenue. During the holidays, mobile and tablet usage spikes: Google AdSense data shows that eCPMs ( revenue earned by the publisher) grew by 22% on tablets, and by 15% on mobile devices during the holiday peak season in 2024. This means your site needs to be fast, easy to navigate, and ad-friendly across all screen sizes. Use Google PageSpeed Insights  or Lighthouse  to find performance issues Compress large image files Avoid overlapping ad placements or pop-ups that interrupt browsing Next, test ad layouts across devices. A sidebar ad that works fine on desktop might push your content too far down on mobile. Likewise, rewarded ads should appear where users are likely to engage, not where they disrupt scrolling. 06. Don’t let compliance slide under pressure Before peak season arrives, review your site using the AdSense Policy Center, which you can access by signing into your AdSense account. Look out for: Overuse of ads on a single page Accidental or misleading placements Lack of clear navigation or accessibility It’s easy to think more ads equal more revenue, but that’s not always true. Ad clutter can lead to poor user experience, which increases bounce rates and decreases long-term engagement. Worse, it can damage the trust you’ve built with your audience and lead to your ad account being penalized or suspended. As a rule of thumb, if it feels like too many ads, it probably is. Keep your layout clean and your user journey clear. Your goal should be sustainable earnings and an enjoyable experience for your site visitors, not short-term gains at the expense of trust. 07. Build a campaign calendar, not a content list The most effective publishers build a campaign-style calendar to organize their holiday strategy. Instead of just a list of blog post ideas, plan a coordinated rollout with deadlines, promotional timelines, and follow-ups. A content calendar can help you stay on track and plan publishing for strategic moments. Your calendar should include: Blog post topics, outlines, and due dates Timeframes for content updates, especially on high-traffic pages Email campaign launch dates Social promotion windows, like previews, reminders, recirculation Analytics check-ins to evaluate content and ad performance Planning this way helps you make more impactful choices with your content. 08. Think long-term The strategies you use during the holidays can serve your site all year long. By identifying high-converting content, refining your ad setup, and building an editorial calendar, you’re developing systems that support growth well beyond the holidays. Use what you learn now to shape your strategy for the new year and beyond. Which ad formats worked best? Which pages saw the most time on site? Where did users bounce? The answers will help you fine-tune your approach moving forward and help you adapt content to other times of year. An end-of-year checklist can become a quarterly feature A seasonal product roundup format can be reused for spring, back-to-school, or summer A reward-based content strategy can become part of your regular content calendar plans Make the most of the season Holiday seasonality can bring a revenue boost. More importantly, it can reveal the blueprint for what makes your content and ad strategy work best. With the right tools and a plan in place, you can meet your audience’s needs while maximizing ad performance. Whether you're just starting with Google AdSense  or looking to build on past wins, start analyzing, optimizing, and publishing with intention to get the most out of the season. Adel Raslan, Product Marketing Manager at Google Adel Raslan is a product marketing manager responsible for publisher acquisition at Google AdSense. Google AdSense makes it easy to earn money from your content, whether you're an independent creator or a larger company. Linkedin

Webinar on how to optimize for AI visibility on Wix & Wix Studio Grow and manage your presence in ChatGPT from your Wix & Wix Studio websites. Join this webinar to learn how to use new techniques and features—including the AI Visibility Overview and LLMs.txt generator— to thrive in AI search. As AI reshapes the digital landscape, understanding generative engine optimization (GEO) is paramount for discoverability. This session will equip you with unprecedented insight into how your brand appears in the emerging era of large language models (LLMs). What you’ll learn: How to use the AI Visibility Overview dashboard  What Wix LLMs.txt and other tools mean for growth Where Wix’s AI agents can support you with your site optimization Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product  for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. 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, OMR, BrightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush, and more. LinkedIn