Are you looking to increase the amount of traffic you receive to your Wix website? The best way that to drive more organic search traffic to your Wix site is by doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing skill that you can use to drive high converting traffic to your Wix website. With these Wix SEO Tips, you’ll learn the best practices to improve your rankings and get your site to the top of search results.
Our SEO tips will teach you:
- What SEO is and why your website needs it to grow.
- Effective keyword research and how to implement keywords on your site.
- Wix website settings to change for optimal SEO.
- Optimization for your site’s content and images.
- Tools and plugins to use to improve your search engine rankings.
- The importance of backlinks and how to acquire and utilize them.
This guide will go over every important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. It can be used for any Wix website to increase traffic and improve search engine rankings as fast as possible.
1. What is SEO and Why is it Important?
When trying to drive more traffic to your Wix website, paying for marketing and ad campaigns can add a lot to your expenses. What makes SEO such a valuable part of your site is that it doesn’t require you to have a massive budget to increase your traffic. SEO is can drive substantial amounts of traffic to your website for FREE.
Implementing an effective SEO strategy will increase the visibility of your Wix site by helping you rank better for your target keywords. By ranking higher for your target keywords, your website becomes exposed to a broader audience. The reason ranking high in search engines is so important is because the majority of people don’t go to the second page of search results.
Multiple studies have concluded that only about 25% of people go to the second page of search results. This means that if your website ranks on the second page for a keyword with 2,000 monthly searches, only 500 users are seeing your website on Google. Keep in mind that even less than that will click on your link and go to your site.
SEO can take time and effort to implement correctly but don’t be discouraged, the result will more than makeup for it. SEO is an extremely powerful resource and many large websites wouldn’t be where they are today without it. Implementing the right SEO strategy is one of the best ways startups and websites can grow their traffic while still keeping costs low.
2. Keyword Research for Wix
Now that you understand the potential benefits of implementing SEO, the next step is to do proper keyword research. This is the most important aspect of SEO and needs to be done before you begin search engine optimizing your Wix website. Keyword research is the starting point of any SEO strategy because it can be used to understand what people are searching for on Google.
We recommend you start by creating a list of potential keywords related to your business that you plan on targeting. Once you have created a list of keywords that are relevant to your website, you’re going to analyze two key aspects about them: search volume and keyword difficulty.
A keyword’s search volume is an estimate of how many times a month a keyword has been searched. This data is often calculated from the keywords search volume history. One of the best ways to determine which keywords to use is by looking at how often it is searched per month. The higher the search volume of your target keyword, the more competitive it will be to rank for.
Generally, websites with a smaller domain score should target lower search volume keywords. This is because larger websites will usually rank higher than your website due to massive amounts of traffic and hundreds of thousands of links they are receiving. Instead of trying to targeting high search volume keywords, your better off choosing smaller ones to focus your SEO efforts on. As a smaller website, you need to target low competition keywords.
A free keyword research tool that we recommend using to check search volume is Keyword Surfer. Based on the keyword that you search in your browser, this tool will give you an entire list of related keywords. Keyword Surfer is a great tool for finding 2-4 word keywords to target. If you’re having trouble finding specific keywords, you can start by searching a general keyword. The program will then give you similar keywords to the one you searched and provide you data on their monthly search volume. This tool can save you a ton of time in your keyword research.
Keyword difficulty is a calculation that is offered by most keyword research tools available on the internet. The keyword difficulty indicator will inform you of how easy or hard it will be to rank for that keyword. The keyword difficulty percentage is calculated by taking into account the search volume, number of results, and the websites currently ranking for a keyword.
To quickly check keyword difficulty, we highly recommend trying out a free keyword research tool.
SEOquake is one of the best free tools that we found when reviewing the best free SEO extensions. This tool is extremely versatile and can expedite your keyword research process by providing you real-time SEO data directly in your browser of choice.
This Google Chrome extension is perfect for finding small keywords for your Wix website to target. When you are searching for keywords in Google, this program will give you a keyword difficulty percentage automatically. As we talked about earlier, this keyword difficulty percentage is a great indicator of how hard it will be to rank for your focus keyword.
Now that you understand the two main aspects of keyword research, you should narrow down your list of targeted keywords. You should aim to focus on keywords that have high potential search volume and a low to medium difficulty. General keywords will be harder to rank for, so pick more specific keywords.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when conducting your keyword research:
- 1-word keywords are too broad and competitive. They will usually be harder to rank for in search engine results.
- Avoid general keywords. Instead, aim for specific keywords made up of 2-4 words. You will have a much better chance of ranking for these keywords and will acquire higher converting users.
- Use keywords that are within the low to medium keyword difficulty range
- Avoid keywords that have a large number of search results as they will be more competitive
3. Use the Wix SEO Wiz
The Wix SEO Wiz is a new tool that Wix has created to help it’s users improve the SEO on their websites. By answering just a few questions about your website, location, and keywords, this tool will design a plan specifically for your site’s SEO.
This comprehensive tool is a great addition to Wix and will help guide you on how to best search engine optimize your site. The Wix SEO Wiz will create a step by step checklist that is broken down into each page. The Wix SEO checklist this program provides is a great starting point that will show you exactly what you need to do, why it’s important, and how to do it in the website editor.
4. Wix SEO Website Settings
Following the checklist in the Wix SEO Wiz is a great way to improve your SEO, but it doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to outrank your competitors. To ensure the highest likelihood of outperforming competitors, we’ve made a checklist of Wix SEO best practices for the strongest website foundation. Make sure to naturally include your keywords within these settings.
- Site Title: This should be your business name as it will appear on your Website and Google search results. Your website title can be a maximum of 60 characters. To change this go to Wix ADI > Pages > Home > Click Settings Icon > Page SEO > Title on Search Engine
- Site SEO Description: Your goal should be to make this description as compelling as possible. It will appear in Google search results under your website title. Include your site name and at least one of your keywords. We recommend including a Call to Action to receive a higher click-through rate from users. You can set your site SEO description by going to Wix ADI > Pages > Home > Click Settings Icon > Page SEO > Page Description
- URL Structure: You MUST optimize the URL link for each page of your Wix website. Make your URL’s descriptive, short, and easy to read for both Google and users. Your page URLs should be no more than 6 words each. Try to keep them to 4 words or less. You can change each page’s URL by navigating to Wix ADI > Pages > “Page Name” > Click Settings Icon > Page SEO > Page URL
- Page SEO Title and Description: This title and description are customizable for each page of your website and will appear in Google search results. Include your target keyword in both the title and description of each page of your website. For each page go to Wix ADI > Pages > “Page Name” > Click Settings Icon > Page SEO
- Business Contact Info: Include any address and contact details for your business so that it can appear in local searches on Google. This can be changed by navigating to Wix ADI > Site > Click the Footer or Contact Section > Edit Contact Info
- Website Navigation: Make sure to only include pages in your website’s navigation menu that you want users to view and engage with. Keep your website navigation menus clean and avoid making them too large.
5. Wix SEO Tips for Your Content and Blog Posts
Once you have finished your Wix SEO website settings, the next step is to optimize your content and blog posts. Creating content and blog posts for your website is a key part of a successful SEO strategy. Your goal when creating content should be to make high-quality unique posts that focus on your site’s area of expertise. Google heavily favors sites with these types of posts so be sure you’re consistent.
Frequently creating and posting high-quality content is the first step to improve your blog SEO. The next step to ranking higher in search results is to have the right on-site optimization strategy for your blog. Your on-site optimization is a crucial component because search engines will frequently crawl and analyze your website for content. Here’s a list of SEO tips for you to follow to best optimize each blog post you make:
- Write your target keyword at the beginning of your blog post’s title.
- Your blog post title should be 60 characters or less.
- Include numbers and power words in your blog titles for a higher click-through rate.
- Insert your focus keyword in your blog description/excerpt and keep it to under 160 characters.
- Use subheadings (H1&H2) to structure your content and describe the topics of your post. Also, make sure to write your focus keyword in the subheadings of your post at least once.
- Your focus keyword should be in the first 10% of your blog post’s text.
- Write at least 2,100 words for each post you make. You should analyze the word count of websites that compete for your target keyword.
- Internal link to 2-3 of your previous content within each of your blog posts.
- Link out to at least 3 external websites that have a good reputation within each of your posts. (Sites that have good reputation include .gov, .edu, industry publications, and research sites)
6. Optimize Your Wix Images
The next step on our list of Wix SEO tips is to optimize the images on your website. This step can often get overlooked by some companies. Don’t make the same mistake as this crucial aspect can give your SEO a step up on your competitors. Google’s search engine algorithm penalizes slow websites, and images are one of the main contributors that slow a website down.
Another reason images are important for SEO is because Google factors in behavior metrics that reflect users experience on your website. One of the main behavior metrics factored into Google’s algorithm is the amount of time visitors spend on a webpage. It’s well known that visitors tend to spend more time on pages with high-quality relevant images.
To take your SEO to the next level, every image that you upload and post on your Wix website needs to be optimized for speed and SEO. There are three main steps that you can implement to improve the optimization of your images on Wix.
First, you must include your target keyword in at least one of the image filenames for each blog post you make. You should also use relevant keywords for the names for each image that you plan to include on your Wix website.
Secondly, you can reduce your webpage’s load time by resizing and compressing your images before upload. The image size you use for each file should be under 500kb. You should do both of these steps before you upload your image to your Wix website.
The third and final step is to upload your image to Wix and add your focus keyword to the alt text of your image. To add alt text to individual images click the image in your Editor. Click the Settings icon and enter your text under “What’s in the image? Tell Google.”
If you want to add alt text to your gallery images, first click the gallery in your Editor. Next click Manage Media and select a media file. Type the alt text in the title area on the right side and click Done.
7. Configure Google Search Console
The first tool that we recommend using to improve your Wix SEO is Google Search Console. This program is extremely useful and was created for website owners to view data about their site’s performance. With this tool configured to your Wix website, you will be able to:
- See which of your content is generating the most conversions for your website.
- Analyze which keywords on your list are receiving the most clicks.
- Understand the performance of each of your keywords over time.
- Request indexing by Google of your website’s pages.
- Submit your sitemap to Google so it can be found quicker.
- Receive feedback on any website errors from Google.
Setting up Google Search Console on your Wix website only takes a few minutes. Follow the steps below to set it up on your site.
- Go to Google Search Console.
- Click on Start Now.
- Select the URL Prefix type and enter the full URL of your website.
- Click the Continue button.
- Select the Expand icon next to HTML tag.
- Copy the meta tag code in the box and leave the Google Search Console open.
- Navigate to SEO Tools in your Wix dashboard.
- Select Site Verification.
- Click on Google Search Console to expand.
- Enter the meta tag and click Save.
- Lastly, return the Google Search Console and click Verify.
8. Setup Google Analytics
Now that we have Google Search Console configured, it’s time to set up Google Analytics on your website as well. Google Analytics is a powerful and versatile tool that provides you with a wide range of data that you can analyze to improve your SEO. With Google Analytics setup on your Wix website, you can learn:
- The channels that are generating the most traffic to your website.
- What type of content is attracting the most customers.
- Which marketing campaigns have been the most/least successful
- The number of users visiting your website who are using mobile/desktop
- Extensive demographic insights about your users.
- How much revenue and how many conversions you are getting from your SEO efforts.
To get started with Google Analytics, you first need to sign up for a Google Analytics account. Once you have signed up for an account, follow the steps below:
- Sign in to your Google Analytics account and click the Admin icon.
- Under the Property section, click Tracking Info.
- Click Tracking Code.
- Copy your Tracking ID.
- Navigate to your Wix website dashboard and select Marketing Integrations.
- Go to where it says Google Analytics and click Connect.
- Click Connect Google Analytics near the top right corner.
- Paste your Google Analytics ID
- Select the IP Anonymization checkbox so that Google doesn’t save your visitors’ IP addresses.
- Click Save.
9. Aquire Backlinks to Improve your SEO
One of the last of our Wix SEO Tips is to acquire backlinks for your site. One of the most effective ways to increase your search engine rankings is to receive a lot of backlinks to your website. Google factors the number of backlinks a website has into its algorithm to see which businesses are experts at what they do. A lot of high-quality backlinks to your business will increase your site’s credibility, as well as domain score. The more sources you have linking to your site, the higher Google will show your business in search results.
When trying to acquire more backlinks to your site, you should aim to receive them from sources that are relevant to your site or post. Relevant sources linking to your website will greatly increase your credibility on the topic. Try obtaining backlinks from popular websites because they will add more value than less established ones. You also want to keep in mind that a lot of links from irrelevant websites won’t help and may even harm your rankings.
There are several different ways that you can acquire more backlinks to improve your Wix SEO. One method you can do that we talked about earlier is to create niche in-depth content. Try making content that people will want to share or refer to within their blog posts.
Another way you can receive more backlinks is by posting your content frequently on different social media outlets. We’ve discovered that you can receive a lot of high-quality backlinks and improve your marketing using Pinterest. Additionally, you can also write content that reviews and backlinks to useful tools and products. If you reach out to the creators with your post, they may share it on their social media or website.
Concluding Our Wix SEO Tips
In conclusion, Wix can be a great resource if you are looking to build your first website. If you are someone who is new to SEO and has never done it before, Wix is a great first step for learning. That being said, as your website experience grows, you are eventually going to want to move off the platform. Once you have become familiar with SEO and understand the basics, we highly recommend that you make the switch over to WordPress.
The reason that you should make the switch to WordPress is that it allows you the opportunity to do so much more with SEO than Wix does. Wix is very limiting with the amount that you can optimize on your website. Using WordPress allows you more control of your SEO efforts, enabling you to install plugins that can tremendously help your website. There are thousands of free WordPress plugins that you can install to drastically enhance your website’s SEO.
If you are a student looking to start a website, you can currently build a website for free using the WordPress Education Promotion. By taking advantage of this promotion, you may be able to save a % off (depending on what the current deal on WordPress is at the time, I’ve seen as high as 50%), on higher-level website subscriptions.
Other SEO Resources from YoYoFuMedia
- The Must-Have Squarespace SEO Checklist for 2021
- SEO for Amazon Alexa: Optimizing for Voice Search in 2021
- SEO for Startups: 7 Steps for Fast Growth That You Must Do
- 9 Must-Have Free Chrome Extensions That’ll Improve Your SEO
Other Shopify Resources from YoYoFuMedia
