Author: George Nguyen
Remember how easy it was to manage your business website (or your client’s) when it first launched? Well, in addition to growing over time, your site may also evolve, adding new sections that have to scale with your business.
That was the case for this publication—the SEO Learning Hub. As we expanded to offer different content mediums and adapted our strategy for the latest SEO best practices, we turned to the Wix Studio CMS to generate pages for that content dynamically, saving us time on both content creation as well as optimization.
Let’s take a look at:
Note: The ‘Wix Studio CMS’ refers specifically to our tool for organizing and managing dynamic content and pages.
What the Wix Studio CMS does
The Wix Studio CMS enables you to store your content in database collections. You can then connect the data to elements or pages that display them dynamically (as shown above).
The main benefit here is efficient scalability—you can design a dynamic page once and add items to your collection to automatically create new URLs for each item (we call these ‘dynamic item pages’ and I’ll explain them later on).
You can generate an unlimited number of dynamic pages this way, which is useful for content management, author pages, job listings and more. You can even engage your users by allowing them to submit content directly to collections on your live site.
The Wix Studio CMS on the SEO Learning Hub: How we use it
On the SEO Learning Hub, we use the the Wix Studio CMS to:
Manage and promote weekly episodes of our SERP’s Up podcast
Let’s take a look under the hood to see how the Wix Studio CMS helps us perform these core SEO tasks.
Highlight E-E-A-T with dynamic author pages
During the first year or so of the SEO Learning Hub’s life, we didn't have bio pages for our expert authors (shown in the example below). Consequently, there was no way to view all of an expert’s articles in one place and what readers (and search engines) could learn about them on our domain was limited to their byline at the end of their content.
Implementing author pages for our expert contributors not only remedied the issues above (improving UX, internal linking, and E-E-A-T), it also helps us rank in search results for the industry’s top experts, boosting our brand in SERPs and giving readers more reason to trust in our content.
All of this SEO value/content comes from:
Designing the individual expert pages and expert collection page
Creating a CMS collection to house our expert author details
Adding new experts (as they become SEO Learning Hub authors) as well as internal links (between the individual expert page and the expert collection page, the individual expert page and the expert’s articles, etc.)
The first two items above are one-time tasks, so after they were set up, all I have to do is add new author details to the CMS collection to automatically create their individual expert page as well as add them to the main experts page (shown below).
I even use this collection to power an element on the Hub’s main landing page—our experts carousel:
Manage content at scale to define entities and relationships for Google
We also use the Wix Studio CMS to create landing pages for episodes of our SERP’s Up podcast. As you can see from the image above, we have nearly 100 episodes (at the time of writing), which would be a very time-consuming task if you had to create those pages manually:
“My SEO Rant podcast is a low-effort community-focused asset. For it, I don’t use the Wix Studio CMS, but instead rely on traditional blog pages (as opposed to SERP’s Up, where we use the CMS). The irony is that—from a formatting point of view—SERP’s Up is less effort than my low-effort podcast. On the SEO Rant’s episode pages, despite the fact that I don’t offer a robust summary, etc., I still have to format it. The formatting itself is not scalable and not streamlined. Using the CMS for SERP’s Up removes all of that effort as the format is simply templated. Upon thinking about it now, I should have definitely used the CMS for the SEO Rant (despite my thinking that it is low-effort content output).”— Mordy Oberstein, co-host of SERP’s Up and host of The SEO Rant
We don’t just upload the content—we take advantage of the dynamic fields for the following optimizations:
This week’s guests — Listeners expect these details, so we provide them to instill trust and confidence that our podcast guests are experienced marketing experts (i.e., E-E-A-T).
Notes — We add internal links to our expert pages and relevant SEO Hub articles, as well as external links to our podcast guests’ profiles or other relevant resources.
Transcript — In addition to facilitating accessibility, the transcript tells search engines exactly what the episode is about.
These optimizations help us outline the SEO Learning Hub’s topical authority for search engines via keyword-rich text that establishes entities as well as our relationships with those entities.
Create and optimize dynamic content with the Wix Studio CMS
Now that you’ve seen how the SEO Learning Hub deploys the Wix Studio CMS, you probably have some use cases of your own to test out.
First, you need to add the CMS to your site:
Open your Wix Editor.
Click CMS on the left side of the Editor.
Click Start Now or Add to site.
Finally, either select a preset layout or start from scratch by creating a collection and adding to it.
Collections are where you’ll store your content (text, images, videos) for use within dynamic pages and elements. You can input data manually or scale the process by importing a CSV file.
Dynamic pages maintain the same design layout across your site while dynamically updating their content based on the collection items you connect them to. And, as mentioned above, you can create an unlimited number of dynamic pages to meet any client requirement.
There are two types of dynamic pages you can use to display the content in your CMS collections:
Dynamic list pages — Display multiple collection items in a repeater, gallery, or table. On the SEO Learning Hub, this would be the main experts page and the main SERP’s Up page.
Dynamic item pages — These are automatically generated for each item in your connected collection. Each page has its own unique URL and provides more details about that particular item. On the SEO Learning Hub, this would be an individual expert page (example) or an individual SERP’s Up episode page (example).
There are many other potential uses for CMS collections, but for the purposes of this article, let's focus on some on-page optimization tips so that your collections can help improve your site’s SEO.
Header tags: While you can assign these within various CMS collection fields, it’s best to assign header tags within the template of your dynamic list and item pages if you know a certain field (e.g., an author’s name) will always be assigned the H1, for example.
Title tags, meta descriptions, alt text: For dynamic item pages, use fields within your CMS collection to optimize these elements. For dynamic list pages, use the Edit by Page settings in your SEO dashboard to format your title tags, meta descriptions, and define OG tags. You can even leverage variables to populate these fields.
URL slug: You can edit the formatting that defines your dynamic page URLs in the SEO tab of your page settings. Below are the default structures.
Dynamic list pages: https://www.{your-domain.com}/{collection-name}
Dynamic item pages: https://www.{your-domain.com}/{collection-name}/{primary-field}
You can also add variables to your URL slug structure to ensure that each item has a unique URL (make sure your items don’t have the same URL).
As a final note, certain fields within your CMS collections allow you to add links—remember to use these opportunities to improve your site’s internal linking.
The Wix Studio CMS: Build optimized, content-rich websites faster
You’ve seen how we use the Wix Studio CMS to promote the SEO Learning Hub, but there’s so much more you can do—you can even have our AI Collection Creator jump start the process for you.
Whether you’re a recruiter working on dozens of job postings per day, a real estate agency that needs to keep listings up-to-date, or anything in between, Wix Studio’s dynamic pages help you effectively create, manage, and optimize your content for better search optimization at scale.
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.
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