Author: Mordy Oberstein
A lot has changed in the world of SEO over the past few years. A lot has changed for Wix over the last few years as well. Not the least of which has been the SEO capabilities Wix offers you.
We thought it was high time we had a conversation to update you on what Wix can do for SEO in light of how SEO has evolved. We sat down with renowned SEO expert Alexis Sanders to hash it all out.
Our SEO philosophy
Outlook is always important.
To kick the conversation off, Nati Elimelech, our top technical SEO, discussed Wix’s overall philosophy when it comes to the platform’s SEO abilities. Specifically, Nati discussed our desire to protect Wix users but offer flexibility at the same time.
Wix presents out-of-the-box defaults that help protect our users from making mistakes should they not be SEO experts. At the same time, Wix strives to offer advanced SEO users the ability to customize as much as possible.
This directly speaks to doing technical SEO on a Wix site. There is a lot that a technically oriented SEO can do with Wix. This ranges from editing a Wix site’s robots.txt file to editing canonical tags to using our developer’s tool, Velo, to execute many of the things Wix doesn’t provide out-of-the-box.
Where things stand with Wix for SEO
We tackled a wide range of topics during our discussion with Alexis. Here are few highlights that deserve to be mentioned above all else.
Structured data on your Wix site
One of the more significant advancements we’ve made has been around Structured Data. The platform offers you a lot of markup out-of-the-box. For example, we add out-of-the-box structured data to product pages, bookings, events and more.
SEO pros who want to further modify their markup can use Velo to do so.
On static pages, such as your homepage, about page, etc. you have the ability to add custom structured data code right to the editor.
On that note, some SEOs wanted to know if we support the use of microdata to add structured data to a Wix site. Currently, we only support using JSON-LD which is Google’s preferred format for adding markup to a page.
Moving forward, we’re working to make it easier to modify the out-of-the-box markup we create. This will make it possible to add custom variables to the markup created for you without using our developer’s tool.
Working with meta-data at scale
It should go without saying that you can edit your Wix site’s meta-data. However, SEOs often want to work at optimizing their meta-data at scale.
For this, we allow for updating elements such as your title-tags, meta-descriptions, og tags and beyond at the page-type level.
Users can add variables to their meta-data elements that will be dynamically updated as the content on the page itself changes. For example, you can add a product’s price to all of your product page title-tags with a single click. If you change the price on a given page, the tag will be updated without you having to do anything.
Further, via Velo, you can have custom variables added to your meta-data (and even your pages themselves) by dynamically adding content via a database.
You can, of course, also add custom content to your meta-data elements at the page level as well.
Wix’s image optimization
There’s a lot Wix does for its users automatically to optimize images for search engines. Images added to a Wix site are automatically cropped, re-sized and compressed. We serve WebP images whenever it’s supported.
Further, Wix's image optimization uses a combination of both lazy loading and low-quality image placeholders to help the page load as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
The road ahead
We’ve dedicated a lot of energy to ensuring the Wix platform offers you the tools and structure needed to be successful on search. This effort is not stopping any time soon. We have a vast amount of development around SEO ongoing. There are new tools and new structures constantly being added and implemented to the Wix platform. We’re excited about it and look forward to announcing these upgrades as they are released.
Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker.
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