In part 1 of our SEO workshop series, eCommerce SEO for Beginners, you’ll learn how to set up and optimize Wix SEO tools for your product pages. Get a hands-on tutorial from Wix product specialists on using SEO to boost organic traffic to your store and start growing your discoverability on search engines like Google.
Transcript: eCommerce SEO for beginners
Speakers
Matthew Kaminsky, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Education, Wix.com
Asaf Rothem, Head of Marketing, Wix Stores
00:02
Asaf: Hi everybody, and welcome to today's workshop: eCommerce SEO for Beginners. My name is Asaf. I lead Stores Marketing at Wix. I'm super excited to be here, and with me is Matthew Kaminsky-Shalem from the SEO team. Before we jump in, feel free to say hello and connect with me on LinkedIn. You have the URL for me and the handle for Matthew’s Twitter.
One last thing before we start—this is the first of two workshops that we are doing on SEO. Today is for beginners, mostly on setup. Here’s what we’ll cover today. It’ll be the basics—intent and keywords—and most importantly, how to optimize your product pages with SEO tools. After that, we’ll do Q&As, and we'll throw some of them at you, Matthew, as you speak, just to make things more interesting. So without further ado, I'll hand over the mic to you.
00:58
Matthew: Alright, sounds good. Thank you, everybody. I'm so excited to see such a large turnout. This is really exciting for me. Like Asaf said, my name is Matthew. I'm a Product Marketing Manager here at Wix, not just for SEO, but specifically for SEO education. My role here is to [support] users like you—who want to learn more about SEO, who understand that SEO is important, and have heard it helps bring more customers and traffic to your site, but who don't necessarily know how to get started or what to do. That's what I'm here to help with today.
So before we can get into the Editor, and dive into all the great tools and features that we have to help you gain more traffic from Google and other search engines, we need to start from the beginning.
What is SEO? So, SEO is search engine optimization. That's what it stands for. And what that means is, it's basically a process of enhancing a website so that it appears higher in organic search results. Organic being the key word—I'll explain what that means in a second. But why is SEO important? It's all about getting people through the door. Just think about your day-to-day life. Even myself, just today, I think I Googled stuff 50 or maybe 100 times. All of us, whether we're looking for more information—if we're going to buy something for our house, like a new fridge or a new big purchase, or even if we're just arguing with someone over lunch or at dinner and we want to settle the score—we go to Google to get the answers, right? So all over the world, everybody uses Google. It's even a verb and we say we “Google this, Google that.” It's become just a part of life. So that's a great gateway for your business and your website to be seen. Automatically, all of us when we go on Google, we search—and it's important that your website be there. Otherwise, you know, what's the point? It's a great traffic channel for you.
So think about this. Right away, when we go to Google, we usually type something in, right? That's normally what we call a search query. And after that, we see something like this, which is a search engine results page, or the SERP as we like to call it. It can look a bit different depending on what you're searching for. In this case, I searched for “building blocks for kids”. I have two and a half year old twins at home and I wanted to buy some more blocks, so this is what I looked for. And this is what the results came up with. In the purple box, we see actual product pages. That's Google Shopping, those are paid ads that you can run for specific products. Below that in the red box, you see paid search ads. They're text based, but those are also paid campaigns. You have to pay for that.
What search engine optimization focuses on, and what we're going to focus on today, is the organic posts. And that's in the green box. As prominent as the ads are on this page—and I'm sure you're asking, “Why shouldn’t I just run ads? Why am I focusing on that?” It takes so long to get down there. Well, the ad campaigns are like a water faucet. When you turn it on, the water flows, right? So when you're paying for these campaigns, you're paying a lot of money, and the traffic will flow. You'll get traffic to your site, but the minute you stop, and the minute you turn off your campaigns, the traffic will stop.
Organic search is not as easy as starting a campaign. Search engine optimization takes time. It will take time before you begin to see your pages rising up and seeing results. It's long term. It's an investment in the long term. The minute you rank number one, it's really hard to get knocked down. And also, there's a thing called banner blindness, where about 70-80% of people who even look at the ads kind of gloss over them and look right past them. They don't even see them, and they’ll go straight to the organic part.
Why do they go to the organic posts? Because we all understand that when we search for something on Google, we all inherently trust Google to show us the results that are the most relevant and the most trustworthy on the internet. So when I search for “building blocks for kids”, I see the first organic search is probably the best, most accurate, most authoritative place where I can learn about building blocks for kids. I know that they didn't pay to be there. Google decided that they were there. We're all store owners, right? So let's talk specifically about our eCommerce sites and our businesses.
05:49
I looked at some research out in the world and 44% of people start their online shopping journey with a Google search. That's a huge number. And also, 37.5% of all traffic to eCommerce sites specifically comes from search engines. So if you're not investing in your search engine optimization, and you're not taking the time to really optimize your site, you're really missing out on a big chunk of sales and a big chunk of revenue. So it's super important.
Let's talk specifically about Wix sites. We looked at our data from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and this is what we found. We found that direct traffic was the most popular, but behind that, 20% of traffic came from organic search. And not only do we see a higher conversion rate than Facebook and Instagram, but we see a higher average order value than even direct. So investing in search engine optimization really can have a positive effect on your sales, and we see it in the data.
06:58
Asaf: Matthew, let me jump in and say that this data—and we're going to share data soon, not only from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but even at the height of the sales season, when you are bombarded with ads and sales from everywhere—still, organic search counts for a large chunk of your traffic, and maintains a high conversion rate in your store with a high average order value. And I think it speaks to how important it is to understand the shopper’s intent. I think Google is probably the best way for you—and not only Google, by the way. There are Bing and some other ones where people actually search for products that could be yours. But the fact that [shoppers] do this sequence of actions shows how much they want it. And this translates into high conversion rates and high average order value.
07:54
Matthew: Exactly. And we'll talk more about intent very soon. It's very important when it comes to search engine optimization. But for now, before we can even get to the point of the sale, we need to start with the ranking. The ranking is the means to an end. Obviously, the goal here is to get visitors to your site, which will ultimately make a purchase. But first, they need to be able to find you on Google.
When we look at this graph here on the left side, you can see the click through rate. The bottom shows the rankings on organic traffic. So, this site is ranking first, second, third, fourth, and so on, on organic search. When you look at this, you can see that the top three positions on organic search take about 60 to 70% of all the click-throughs. Most of the people who are searching on Google click the first, second, or third ranked site. Even if you're in the top 10, which is the first page or even the second page, you might not even be seen. So it's really important that you try to get high up in organic rankings, because otherwise you're basically invisible. So we're going to talk a lot about how to get started and how to do that. And like I said, we're going to talk about search intent. It's really the first step.
We're going to show you a lot of things to do today in the Wix Editor, and specifically within Wix Stores. But there's a big step that you need to do first, and that's research. You really need to understand who your target customer is, what their needs are, what their desires are, and why they’re coming to you to buy your product. You need to understand what they want so you can understand what they're searching for. When it comes to search intent, there are four main types of search intent. I'm going to quickly go over them, and actually in the next session, in part two, we're going to talk more about all these different intents. Today, we're going to focus on one.
Really quickly, informational is a majority of what search is. It's because you want to know something, like in this example—names of flowers, types of flowers, which flowers are red. You want to know information. Navigational means you know where you want to end up, so you search for that. So instead of having to type in the full link, gmail login—I know the name of the business, and I know I want to go to their website. You put that in and that's how you end up there—or the return policy for so and so store. That's navigational. And commercial is when you know that you want to buy something, but you're still not sure where or what. So that's like “best online florists,” “PC versus Mac”—all types where someone's doing their research, and they're trying to investigate a bit more. And then the last one, and this one is very important, is transactional. They already know that they want to purchase, they want to buy, they want to book, they want to contact.
Obviously, for eCommerce, we're going to focus on buying. So things like “coupon,” or “buying building blocks,” or “free delivery”—things like that show there's an intent to purchase. That's why, when it comes to eCommerce stores and product pages, you really need to think a bit differently than the typical SEO advice that's out there on the internet. Most sites are focusing on informational intent, like blogs. Most websites out there are informational. Even other pages on your store are informational too, like the About Us pages, and the policy pages. Those are very informational. But your product pages specifically should focus on transactional intent. Focus on those people who are already ready to buy, and focus on those keywords.
I want to give you a good example. This is a screenshot of two different searches. Continuing with the toy blocks, cause I’m a dad, the first one on the left is informational. So I typed in “types of toy blocks”—and you can see how different the SERP page is compared to the transactional on the right. You can see it's a list. There's a lot of information and right away the top organic result is Wikipedia. There’s a People Also Ask box with a featured snippet, with other types of questions that may be interesting to answer. And on the right side, you can see I put “wooden blocks for kids sale”. I'm looking for the things that are on sale. You can see how, right away, we see a bunch of different ads. On the right side, we see Google Shopping. And the first organic search result is for eBay. And the second one is for Amazon. So in this case, Google understands that when someone is searching for “wooden blocks for kids sale,” they're interested [in buying], and they want to buy wooden blocks now. They want to find a deal. That's why it looks so different, because there's a different intent behind the search. It's really important to think about when you're doing your research and looking at different keywords to target.
Like I said before—before you even start to go into the Editor and optimize, you really need to identify the high value terms that your customer might be using. This is a perfect example that Asaf mentioned earlier. I can't tell you what those keywords are—it varies from business to business. Depending on the location, the type of product you're selling, and the needs of your audience and customers, it can be very different. When it comes to SEO, optimization is so unique to every site and every business that it's super important that you speak to your customers, speak to your employees, if you have employees. Just try to understand and put yourself in the mindset of your potential shopper. What makes them tick? What would make them want to come to your site?
A great place to start with this kind of research is a totally free tool. You don't even have to pay. You can just go and use Google. Google has so many features. I already mentioned one, the People Also Ask box. Google is also trying to understand what people want. So they have created a lot of different features as part of the SERP results page that allow us to better understand exactly what someone's looking for.
So right away, use autosuggest. If you type in just one keyword—”building blocks” or anything—you can see that Google is automatically suggesting a few different options. One word can go multiple different directions, so they try to create longer phrases to understand exactly what you want. Also, at the bottom of every search results page, there’s a Related Searches [section]. Basically, Google understands, “Okay, people who also searched for what you're searching for, they search for these things, too.” It's a really great way to understand and look at what's going on. The People Also Ask feature is the same kind of thing, but in question form, because people are usually asking questions to Google. So, sometimes you want to put things in the form of a question.
But because we are store owners and we want to focus on transactional content, we want to mine the mindset of our biggest competitor, which is Amazon. When people go to Amazon, they're already in the mindset with intent to buy. So, look at Amazon's autosuggests. Amazon is also a search engine. I looked for blocks there, and you can see a lot of different ideas for keywords for targeting blocks. I can see “toddlers ages one through three” or “for kids ages four to eight”. That's something I didn't think of—that people are searching by age or by group. It’s really clear to me that somebody who's looking for blocks is looking based on age.
Also, you can use Amazon subcategories. Amazon structures their website very well. They're the masters when it comes to structuring their site. So I went into their toys and games, and I found a few different subcategories that building blocks would fit in. You can see under toys and games, there's preschool building sets. There's also a separate department for building toys, which has stacking blocks. And also, under “baby and toddler toys” there are also “stacking toys.” So there's even a subcategory for one type of product.
17:09
There are multiple ways to structure your store, and multiple ways for somebody to search for the same product. You can use all of these as ideas to understand exactly what your customer wants. So those are [some] free options—and those are great for getting keyword ideas. There are also a lot of paid tools out there that don't just give you ideas, but also give you more information about competitiveness, how hard it is to rank for these keywords. As well as allow you to do more competitive analysis and understand what your direct competitors are doing, what their products are ranking for, and what keywords they're trying to target.
So a lot of these provide a free plugin or free tools that you can add to Chrome, and provide free trials as well. You don't have to do this right away, but if you're really going to be serious and take the time to invest in your SEO, it's worth it. Even if you do $100 for one month, it might be worth it. I'm not sure about all the pricing.
So, let's start talking about why you're really here. You want to see it in action, right? Let's optimize some product pages. We're going to go into the Editor in just a second. I'm going to switch over to that screen soon. But before we do, I want to list off all the things Wix does automatically for you. The great thing about Wix is that we try and take as much of the load off in terms of the technical side of SEO, so you don't have to worry about it. We do a lot of things to make sure that all of our Wix sites are up to best practices when it comes to SEO. SEO changes constantly. Whenever we can, we try to make it as easy and automatic as possible to update your site. And when we do update something, all websites are updated as well.
A good example of this is canonical tags. I'll explain a bit more about what those are, but that's something that we automatically do for all of our product pages. We self-canonicalize. I’ll show you an example in a second. Our sitemaps and robots.txt are automatically generated and updated. A sitemap is just like it sounds. When Google comes to visit your site for indexing, they need a map to understand what pages are here, and what pages are there. That's what a sitemap is. We automatically update it and generate it for you. So you don’t have to worry about—if you unpublished a page or deleted a page—that it's still on your sitemap. Nope. We automatically remove it for you.
If the sitemap is Google's map, the robots.txt is more like the police officer blocking off certain areas. You can tell Google, “No, don't visit this section, it's not ready yet,” or “This page was just updated, come take a look at it and see how great it looks.” Those are automatically generated and updated. I'll show you a bit more about that.
For all of our product pages, we automatically generate title tags that are optimized according to best practices that include your product name and your store name. So even if you don't automate, or you just update your product information and you don't actually edit your SEO information, we automatically add it there for you. It's better to have it, so we automatically do it because then there's something there, rather than Google seeing nothing there. Cause that’s not good for SEO.
Also, when Google crawls pages, they use what's called structured data to understand what's on the page. Structured data is a way to tell Google, “Not only is this a URL, but this page has products listed on it. And here's the price. Here's everything.” I'll show you how it looks in the Editor. We also automatically structure with header tags, and we do image optimization.
So, if we do all of that for you, what are you supposed to do? Well, just like I said, there are a lot of things that you can do. While we do automatically create title tags and meta descriptions for you, you should optimize them to include the keywords that are based on your research. Also, while we generate the URLs for you, you can edit the URLs to be more concise. I'll show you that in a bit as well. While we do optimize the quality of the images so that they are as small and load as fast as possible, you should optimize the image file names and the alt text to include your keywords. I'll show you that as well. And also, write in-depth product descriptions.
22:02
Asaf: Matthew, let me jump in for a second.
Matthew: Of course.
Asaf: The first question that I saw was, “How can we appear in searches without using Google Ads?” I think this entire workshop will help you rank on that first page and be there without using Google Ads. Matthew will show you in a second what we’re doing in the Editor and on the Wix Dashboard, on the product pages.
22:34
Matthew: Let's go into the Dashboard here. Before I get into the actual product page in the settings, I want to show you here in the marketing and SEO section that we have all of our SEO Tools. I mentioned a few things that I'll come back to. So I want to show you that here. Like I said, the sitemap. All the sitemaps are automatically created. We recently made a huge update, and we totally restructured it to follow best practices that were recently updated. All of our sites automatically come with the sitemap. You don't have to worry about it. We get a lot of questions, like, “I can't find my site map. Where is my sitemap?” Here in the SEO Tools section, all you have to do is click and it will open and you can see your sitemap as-is.
I told you about robots.txt. This is actually for more advanced SEO, so I'm not really going to go into it, but you do have the ability to tell search engines what pages to crawl, and how long. You can do that using the robots.txt editor, but we don't need to show that today.
SEO Patterns I'm going to get into very shortly. It’s a way to apply a logic across all of your product pages so that you can automatically update your SEO settings for all your product pages in one click. It's a really powerful tool.
Now let’s talk about site verification. Even though Google is the most popular search engine, there are plenty of other search engines out there. The site verification allows you to easily add—all search engines [have this]—a little snippet of code. You can add it directly in here to verify your ownership of your website on that system. So you can do it for Pinterest, Bing, and Yandex, which is more popular in Russia and that part of the world. You can also do it for Google Search Console. But there's actually an easier way to do it. You can see here using our SEO Wiz, you can connect to Google automatically without having to copy and paste the code snippet. The great thing about the SEO Wiz is that it creates a customized SEO plan based on your site. It’s a great place to start with your SEO setup.
You can go in and you can put in your name. So let's just say “Matthew’s toy box.” Do I have a physical location? No, I'm online only, I ship all over the world. And then, how would you describe your business? This is a great place to add your keywords. “Educational toys”—let's just put something here. This, I would really recommend you do keyword research for—”educational toys”, “wooden toys”, “toys for toddlers”. Try that. Then, I click Create. And using the keywords that I put in here, it creates a personalized plan. The first step of that plan is to connect to Google. So once you complete the first few steps, which are updating the title, description, and text, you can in one click be connected to Google and your site will be indexed almost immediately. For most other platforms, if you do it automatically or do it using the code, it can take a few days or up to even a week for Google to come and recognize and crawl all the pages on your site. With us, you can do it almost instantly. And it's super simple—
26:14
Asaf: —and critical to do immediately after the keyword research. So once you have the information, right, this is where you start your setup. Make sure you go over it step-by-step. Wix does a lot of the heavy lifting here. But not all of it.
26:29
Matthew: No, not all of it. This is a great place to get started. SEO is a continuous process. It's ongoing. It takes time, and it's experimental. There's no cut and dry way. SEO isn’t rocket science. It’s not super complicated, but it’s also not plug-and-play. I can't give you specific rules on exactly what to do. But there are guidelines. And that's kind of what we're talking about today.
So I said I would talk about canonicals really quickly. You can see here, this is the URL for my page, right? Google looks at this as a unique version of the page. But I have filters here on this site. So let's say I want to filter by price, and I want to filter it to between $3 and $28.50. See how the URL has changed? How it’s added a question mark and a little price parameter at the end? Now, even though it's the same page with the same content, and maybe just a few different products removed, Google looks at this URL as a totally different page. But that's what the canonicals solve. No matter what happens after this question mark, whether we add more filters or change more things, Google will look at this with our canonicals. And I'll show you how that looks in the pages section.
27:56
When I go to the shop page, that's the page it's on.
28:05
There we go. If I go into this SEO Google settings—it's actually in the advanced SEO section. You can see that the canonical is automatically added. So rather than having the same exact page with just a few different parameters at the end competing against each other for rankings, this is a way to tell Google that this is the master version of this page. So, no matter how many different types of this page there are, this is the master one. This is the only one you should look at. All these other versions should count as this one. That’s something important. But I—
28:42
Asaf: That is done in the Editor, right? As opposed to the Dashboard, where we'll show in a minute the actual pages.
Matthew: Yes—
Asaf: This canonical is added from the Editor.
28:52
Matthew: So that's for the Shop page. But we have it on the product pages, too. So let's go into our products, and let's see here. Alright, so I have all my products here, and I'm looking for my building blocks. Okay, that's the product we're going to work on today. We've done a little research already and saw how to optimize this.
Alright, so—just so I don't forget, I'll show you the canonicals. We're going to go to the Edit SEO Settings. And you can see here, like I said, it’s advanced so it's automatically done for you. So I don't want you to dwell too much on this. It's done for you so you don't have to worry about it. That's the main point here.
Alright, so right away, based on looking at my competitors' pages and on Amazon, I noticed that nobody calls them building bricks. They call them building blocks, right? That's what people are searching for. So right away, I'm going to change the product name to building blocks. I also added a picture here. I just want to show you here in the Media Manager, this is where you can change the file name. You can see I already did it, but I optimized the file name to be “building_blocks_toddlers”. Google can crawl content, they can crawl code, but they can't see images. So a way to tell Google—to inform them of what's in the image is to name your file name of your image. You can change it here, and if I want to say instead of toddlers, let's just say “kids_and_toddlers.” There we go, saved.
30:45
Asaf: Matthew, what other information can you provide about the image to help Google or other people learn more? Just from the image, before we even talk about the description.
30:58
The other information you can provide is something called alt text. Alt text is short for alternative text. It's primarily used for accessibility purposes. People who are visually impaired and are unable to see images use devices like screen readers to browse websites. These devices read what the alt text says in place of the image. When someone comes to your site, instead of seeing the image, they’ll be read this. Even though that's the primary use, it's very useful for SEO because, you know, screen readers are machines reading websites. Google is also, you know, their crawlers are machines that are reading the websites just the same way. They take that information and they use it to inform what's going on.
Let's edit the alt text for these images. We've optimized the file names. Now let's edit the alt text. I'm going to click the three dots here. You can see, I can edit the alt text for my images. So I have two images here, but if I had 5, 6 or more, all of them would appear here. And here, you can edit the alt text. Here I’ve put building blocks for toddlers. It's important that you don't overuse your keywords in alt text. You want to be as natural as possible, and also be as descriptive as possible. So I put “building blocks for toddlers.” Here I put “building blocks for toddlers stacked by color” because if I were to close my eyes and you were to explain to me the image, that's what it is. And I could actually put “multicolored” here. Perfect. Done.
32:40
Asaf: And one more thing, Matthew. I see a lot of the questions here are asking, “Where is that feature?” One way, obviously, is to watch this and pay close attention, and you can then watch it again. Another way is to either search using the search bar on top, or just go to Google and say “Wix how to edit image alt text” and get to our extensive knowledge base. And you can do it there.
We have a knowledge base article for practically anything that Matthew is saying right now. So just be aware, this isn’t a secret or something. Just Google it and you'll see it there in the first result.
33:19
Matthew: We're focusing on Wix stores today. There are different ways to edit alt text in different page types of Wix. I really recommend using the knowledge base because they have multiple articles on how to edit alt text. Depending on whether it's a main page or a bookings page, or a background of a strip—there’s a few different ways. So that's a great question. But here in Wix Stores, we can see it right here. Edit alt text by clicking the little three buttons.
Alright, so I changed the name to Building Blocks. Now I'm going to go back into the Edit SEO Settings here. Let's save and continue. Very important. Now, let's take a look here. You can see here the SEO Settings, and it shows a little preview of what the page will look like on Google. But you can see the URL slug still says building bricks, it doesn't say building blocks, even though I changed the name. Google also uses the URL to understand what's on the page. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to change from building bricks to building blocks. Perfect.
Notice there's a little pop up here. We're going to link our old URL to the new one. Now, we'll talk a little bit about redirects—we'll come back to it in a second. But whenever you change a URL, if Google has ranked the previous URL—if that page gets changed, and the customer tries to come to that page, they're going to get an error message saying this page no longer exists. A 301 redirect is kind of like when you go to the post office and tell them you’ve moved houses, and this is the new address and they forward all your mail. This is the same type of concept. The 301 redirect tells Google, “Hey, this URL is no longer live. We actually moved to this URL.” And it's really easy to do in the URL Redirect Manager in the Dashboard. I'll show you that in a second.
35:28
Actually, let's actually show that now. So I'm going to go back to Marketing & SEO, back to my SEO Tools. Here we have the URL Redirect Manager. Now, this is a very powerful tool. It's really helpful. Obviously, I'm using a free site, so you probably won't see this message. But you can see I already created this. I'll recreate it.
So I changed the URL from building bricks [to building blocks] and you can see it shows a list of all the different product pages that we have in the store. This is the one that I want to redirect to. Now we're telling Google that whoever goes to this old URL, send whoever goes to this old URL to this new URL. Save and close, we're done. Now, that is just for one URL. You can do it for groups of URLs. For example, if you're moving from a different platform to Wix, and all of your product URLs are structured in a certain way, you can say: domain/products/product name to product page/, and you can do all your products in one go.
You can also import and export redirects if you have up to 500, because sometimes they get pretty extensive. You can easily import and export all the redirects that you've done. That's a very important tool, especially if you have products that are out of stock, or they were available for part of the season and they're not available now. If someone still has that link, you want to redirect them to a similar product or a similar category page, as opposed to just having them get to a dead end.
37:31
Asaf: And I'm jumping in for a second. We have a lot of questions, and the teams will answer as many as they can. However, one repeating question is: will we share this video? We're recording this session, and we'll share it after the session. So it's better to understand the approach and how to do it, and then the step-by-step will be shared. And you can run the video on your own after we're done today.
38:00
Matthew: Okay, two final points and then I'll stop and we can answer as many questions as we can.
Your product page. Typically, product pages are relatively thin on content, right? You have the name, the price, and the shipping and return policy info. The best thing for you in terms of SEO is to write as much as you can in your product descriptions. Go into detail. Give as much information as you can, because the more information you can provide in your description, the more context Google has to understand what the page is about. But it also just provides a better experience for your customer. You know, when you're shopping for something, you want to understand exactly what you're getting. When you're deciding whether to buy something, you want to have as much information as possible. So put as much information in your product info section as you can. You should use this real estate to your advantage. And you can create additional info sections, which is also really great depending on the product, and you can structure it how you want.
Let's talk about the SEO Patterns. So, some of us have really extensive stores, right? We have hundreds of products. To do this process for each product page, to go through and find keywords and find all this information—it can take a lot of time to update and change all this stuff. So that's why we created SEO Patterns. It's a way to really streamline the process of updating your SEO settings. So you can see the SEO Patterns. You can automatically update different types of pages. Apply a logic and it will allow you to automatically update.
You can see here we have, in the SEO Patterns > Product section, Search engines & social media. So I'm going to go there real quick. By default, like I said, Wix automatically structures your SEO title with product name, and site name. It also includes the product description. But let's say we want to optimize it. A great way to optimize this is to use modifiers. Like, if you're having a sale, “big sale now” or adding something like “free shipping.” But I don't want to have to do that one-by-one for every single page.
So, let's do this. I know Valentine's Day just passed, but let's say we want to update all our product pages that we're having a Valentine's Day Sale. 20% off. Product Name. Great. So what I do here is click Save. And now, when I go back into my products page, you'll be able to see that all the SEO settings were updated with that information. Now, let's say most of our stock is part of the sale, but there are a few products that we don't want to update with this information. So if we go into the Abacus, you can see when you go into the title.
41:40
Not sure why it didn't work, but it should have worked. Let's go back and just double check. Pretend it worked, that's supposed to work.
41:49
Asaf: Matthew, let me ask you a quick question here. In the eyes of Google, when we run sales and we change the titles or the description, does it dramatically affect how they see the product? Or does Google know already that in certain periods you can expect more sales techniques on the title?
42:16
Matthew: That's a very good question. I think at this point, the SEO title and description is less about rankings—because if somebody sees it at this point, it's more about getting the click through. It's a way to increase click through rates. At this point, it's not about Google. Google's goal is what their end user wants, right? So their goal is to provide us with what we're looking for. Rather than thinking about what Google wants, try to think about what your user wants. What your customer wants. At this point, you want to entice them to click on your link on the results page. So when you're talking about the SEO title and description, that's what you should be thinking about—okay, so they're seeing my page, let's focus on trying to get them to click through. Let's talk about all the value that we provide on this page. That's what you should be optimizing for.
43:17
Asaf: And that's great advice, because it's not only how high you rank. I mean, we obviously all want to rank high. But we also want people to click on it. You have to see how the one above you and the one below you speak. You want to make sure that you get those clicks to your site, as opposed to them, because that's what the browser is going to be looking at—the nearby results.
43:43
Matthew: Exactly. Rankings are important, but they're a means to an end. Ultimately, you want to get sales, right? It doesn't matter if you're ranking number one for a keyword if that keyword isn't generating or bringing you traffic that ultimately ends up in a sale. So you really need to be thinking about that.
And let's see if it worked now, hopefully. I don't know what's going on.
44:08
Asaf: Might be an experiment.
44:10
Matthew: Sometimes—yeah, maybe. Sometimes things happen. Bugs happen, but I'll take a look. What it should do is automatically update across all of our products. I think I maybe overrode this one. What’s nice is you can manually edit the settings. Yep, that was it. I manually edited that one.
So here you can see what I put in SEO Patterns. It shows up here. But this product doesn't have 20% off. I can just go ahead and delete that one, and now all my products are updated. It doesn't matter what I put in the SEO Patterns, I can just override it here.
44:59
Asaf: So just to wrap this up, the SEO Patterns will go product by product for all of your products, except the ones that you manually override, right?
45:10
Matthew: It will automatically apply logic to all your products. It'll change all of your products in one click. If you want to override that and you don't want to apply this logic to specific products, you can override it yourself by manually going into the SEO Settings and changing it.
45:26
Asaf: Which is what we've done both here and in the previous page.
Matthew: Exactly.
45:36
Matthew: I think that's all the time we have in terms of covering this. There's a lot going on, we just barely scratched the surface. We mainly talked about transactional on our product pages. In part two, Mordy is going to come and talk a little bit more about advanced content strategy for SEO, and how to create other types of content that will drive traffic to your product pages. In the meantime, I think it's time for Q&A.
46:07
Asaf: Many, many questions, obviously. Let's start with some of the more basic ones. How to measure results after setting up the SEO. Let's say somebody watches this in an hour, they start doing their research, they do all the SEO Patterns, they override whatever they do, they put a ton of work into it. What should they be expecting?
46:28
Matthew: In terms of measuring results and the very first steps, we have Wix Analytics, which is really great when it comes to tracking—especially for Wix stores. We have a lot of sales information. You can track and see which sales came from organic traffic. I also recommend you integrate—we also have an extension with Google Analytics, you can integrate there. And there's a way that you can really drill down by keyword and see: Okay, this keyword brought this many sales, and so on and so forth. That's a whole other topic. I could spend a whole hour on that.
But even if you just integrate—there's a marketing integrations section of the Dashboard, and you integrate Google Analytics. Also, like I said, Connect to Google creates a Google Search Console account for you and indexes your site. That has a lot of information in terms of which keywords, which search queries your pages are showing up for, and which ones get click through. There's a lot of information out there and it's really important that, ultimately, it ends up in a sale. So just track how many sales you get from your organic search.
47:49
Asaf: Absolutely. And one more link here to connect. Obviously, when you start ranking higher, you will see the traffic coming in. However, you will still need to optimize your pages for conversion. Google typically drives quality traffic, but make sure you have all the right indicators to build trust and help people.
Another question, “How long should it take until I see results?”
48:17
Matthew: That's the biggest question. For most SEOs, the favorite response is: It depends. It really depends on your store, how competitive your market is, how many people are trying to go for the same keywords as you. But SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. It takes time. It might take months before you begin to see true, meaningful results. It’s not—I would love to be able to give you a strict timeline. But I think at least once a month, you should be checking and reviewing your store analytics, checking your search results, and seeing where you're ranking.
SEO is a process, so there are always little tweaks here and there. It's ongoing. You should never stop doing SEO. It's not something that’s set it and forget it. You should be always checking, and always seeing after a change if there was any meaningful result or not.
49:19
Asaf: And Matthew, we spend a lot of time on the product pages. How often should we update them? On a daily basis? Every month? Every week? How would you approach it if you were just setting up your store right now?
49:41
Matthew: I think that depends. If you have a product that you're selling and the information about that product changes on a daily basis, then by all means you should be updating that daily. But if it's something that's typically the same and doesn't really change that much, as long as your pages have the most up to date information at the time, that's what's important. You know, one of the things that Google looks at is what's called freshness. Content freshness—not just quality, or that it's correct, but freshness, meaning you're not still selling something from last year when there’s already a new model. Things like that. So, it really—like I said, it depends. It's what's right for your product. Don't make changes just because you're supposed to make changes. That's not going to help.
50:39
Asaf: We’ve also been asked a couple of very important questions. One thing people have said is, “This is a lot to take in. So what is the start?” I think we kind of structured it, but how would you start now, if you had a shop?
50:56
Matthew: Yeah, what would be the first step. Like I said, the first step in anything—you know, SEO is just one channel in your overall marketing plan or your overall marketing strategy. So just like with any marketing that you do, you should start with your customer. Start with looking at who they are, and doing the research and really trying to understand who you're going after.
I understand SEO feels so overwhelming. There are so many pieces, so many aspects. Especially if you've never heard the word canonical before, it's like, what does that mean? I've been there. I started out SEO just like anybody else. It takes time. It’s something that—you know—little by little you start to learn and the more you start to see things, it just kind of starts to click. So I really think of it as a journey. You may have just started your SEO learning journey today. And I'm really happy if this is the first time you've heard a lot of this stuff. It can be overwhelming, but don't don't take it to heart. It takes time. And over time, it will get better.
52:07
Asaf: That's about it for today. Matthew, I want to thank you. I know it's such a huge topic and sometimes the most difficult thing is knowing where to start. I think you've given us and our merchants a ton of information and a great way to start. I hope to see you here at future events.
Don’t forget—in the meantime, if you want to follow us and connect with us, definitely go to the Wix eCommerce School. There's a ton of information and all the previous workshops are there. Go to Facebook also and join us in the Wix Stores community there. Thanks again for your time. We hope this gave you a lot of value. And we'll see you next time.