Wix has been making some cute commercials lately. Including one where an actor says he made a “dope” website and then flirts with me a little with a sexy glance.
I won’t say it wasn’t flattering but, more importantly, let’s look under the hood of Wix’s current SEO offerings. Although the cute actors claim it’s “dope”, that’s not the most important aspect of your new website.
Wix websites have come a long way with SEO features since their inception. It’s not as simple as a few clicks, though. You, your developer or SEO partner, will still need to admin into your Wix site and add the necessary things to make your site SEO friendly. The important SEO features like page titles, meta descriptions were non-existent at one point but now have been added as customizable options, but you will need to know where to find these options.
A few important SEO features are still lacking at the time of this writing. For example, there still is no way to truly personalize a URL. Although it is customizable for pages, Wix adds a short extra string (post) to the URLs of blog posts and product pages which is not an ideal situation for your SEO.
This is especially important for online stores built with Wix. The first thing a potential customer will see when they find your store is your product page’s SEO title and description. You will need to customize them all for good SEO. Wix does have a good page resource for how to edit your Page SEO settings but you will need to do this yourself. If your product pages already exist and you want to maintain the existing SEO for a particular page, you must accompany this with a 301 redirect.
A faster website will always rank higher than a slow website. Speed & uptime is high on the SEO priority list and Wix sites reportedly run slower than they should.
The bottom line…the mantra hasn’t changed. Content is still king. It still legislates for your position in the search results. To raise your rank organically, your content should be informative and useful to the reader. Google needs to trust that your content will be a good result for the person searching. They need your content to be unique; especially corresponding to the keywords being searched. If Google feels that they can’t find your information anywhere else, you will be served up first! Lastly, your content needs to be current and fresh. If Google senses that your website features new or updated content regularly, up you will go.
Naturally, a great way to produce fresh content is by using the blogging features on your website and publishing original content regularly. If you can’t think of what to write about, just take a gander at your sent email folder. If you find that you are copying and forwarding the same content to your customers and clients, you’re probably looking at a great subject for a blog post. That’s exactly how this post started!
So, is Wix good for SEO? We give it a resounding, “Meh”. Wix isn’t bad, but it’s not ideal. It does cover the SEO basics that regular sites need, but lacks in performance and the robust production of fresh blog content. Add it’s sluggish reputation, and your better off with an alternative like WordPress for SEO.
Sources
https://support.wix.com/en/article/editing-page-seo-settings-for-products-in-wix-stores