When it comes to building a website for your print on demand business, there are plenty of directions you could take.
Printify offers easy integrations for popular marketplaces like Etsy, WordPress websites and even platforms like Shopify and Wix.
So which option should you choose for your own website?
A quick Google search will reveal plenty of opinions on the subject, but the platform that seems to draw the heaviest criticism is Wix.
Wix websites are widely regarded as being great looking and easy for beginners to set up, but have scored badly in the past when it comes to loading speeds and SEO — leaving many newcomers hesitant to use the platform at all.
Is Wix really that bad for SEO?
Nobody wants to be stuck with a website that performs poorly in search results. So is Wix good for SEO, or should you steer clear of the platform entirely?
The truth is that much of the criticism leveled at Wix simply doesn’t apply anymore. The platform has made huge technological strides in recent years, with projects like Wix Turbo and Editor X showing big improvements in speed and usability.
Whilst it’s true that Wix websites still lack the depth of customization offered by WordPress, many of the techniques that SEO experts use to help a site rank in Google can be applied to any website — regardless of the platform it runs on.
In this guide, we’re going to give you five Wix SEO tips that will help you to boost the search rankings of your Wix website, whilst hopefully convincing newcomers that the Wix platform is worth a second look:
- Wix SEO Tip 1: Start by setting up the SEO Wiz tool
- Wix SEO Tip 2: Improve your Wix website’s speed
- Wix SEO Tip 3: Learn how to perform keyword research
- Wix SEO Tip 4: Master the art of link building
- Wix SEO Tip 5: Focus heavily on content marketing
- Summing up
Wix SEO Tip 1: Start by setting up the SEO Wiz tool
When it comes to SEO and Wix, many purists would argue that a platform like WordPress is far better suited to search optimization. Whilst WordPress certainly offers more customization options and plugins than Wix, the truth is that the vast majority of WordPress website owners simply install a plugin called “Yoast SEO” and call it a day.
Wix’s own “SEO Wiz” tool offers many of the same features that you can find in the Yoast plugin, and whilst neither can promise to catapult you to the top of the search engine results, they can lay some important foundations.
Setting up Wix SEO Wiz
To set up the Wix SEO Wiz, head to your website’s dashboard, click on the settings dropdown menu, and then click “Get Found on Google”.
Clicking this item will launch the Wix SEO Wiz tool, which will guide you step-by-step through the initial process of making your site more SEO friendly, both for humans and search engines.
Here are some of the questions you’ll be asked by the tool:
- Your website’s full name
- Do you have a business location?
- How would you describe your business?
After answering these basic questions, you’ll be taken to the main page, where you’ll be able to view and modify your “Wix SEO Plan”.
The Wix SEO Plan contains a checklist of things that you need to do to make your website more SEO friendly, as well as allowing you to link your site to services like the Google Search Console, as well as submitting sitemaps to all of the major search engines.
These initial Wix SEO tweaks aren’t going to do a whole lot on their own, but they serve the purpose of keeping your site neat and organized, helping the search engines to understand what your site is about — a little like the contents and index pages of a book.
Wix SEO Tip 2: Improve your Wix website’s speed
Improving your website’s speed is one of the easiest ways to boost Wix SEO. Google’s search algorithm was modified back in 2010 to include page loading times as a determining factor in how well a site should rank. Recently, the search giant introduced “Core Web Vitals” — a metric that evaluates the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a site, further highlighting the importance of fast loading times.
It might seem strange for a search engine to focus on speed as an indication of a website’s relevance in a search, but Google places a lot of importance on quality content and user experience these days — and for good reason: 53% of mobile users will abandon a page if it fails to load in under 3 seconds.
The limitations of Wix
Before we talk about the things that you can do to speed up your website to improve Wix SEO, it’s important to understand the limitations of the platform itself:
Wix website owners have far fewer opportunities to improve speed than those using an open source platform like WordPress. That’s because website builders like Wix are focused on simplicity and ease of use, rather than deep customization.
But there are several things that you can do as a website owner to ensure your site doesn’t slow down over time:
Optimize your images
When it comes to seo with wix, filling your website with large or poorly optimized images is one of the most common mistakes that you can make as a newcomer. If your site is image heavy, you might be genuinely shocked at the improvements in speed that you’ll enjoy with this one tweak alone.
First up, check that your images aren’t unnecessarily large. If you find anything that you feel could be smaller, you can resize it using any number of online tools — such as this one from Adobe.
Once everything is looking good, you’ll need to go through every image on your site, checking the file sizes to ensure they aren’t too large. If you find anything that’s over 100KB in size, throw it into TinyPNG, a free image compressing tool that can drastically reduce the size of your files.
Add alt tags
Once you’ve replaced your images with smaller versions, you’ll need to pay attention to “alt tags” or more correctly, “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions”.
These are labels that you can add to your images using the Wix SEO Wiz that describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. Alt tags provide image descriptions to search engine robots, helping them to figure out what your site is about. That means they can also help to boost your search rankings.
So what should you add in your alt text descriptions? Don’t overthink things here: Try and keep your tags simple and descriptive. Later on, we’ll talk a little more about keywords, and how they can help you get found online.
Other speed enhancements
As we’ve previously mentioned, there aren’t too many things you can do to influence the speed of a Wix website. However, there are plenty of things that you can NOT do that will prevent your site becoming slower over time.
Embrace digital minimalism and try to do more with less:
- Be more selective with images and prioritize text
- Put your most important information at the top of the page
- Reduce the number of fonts that you use to 1-2
- Avoid animations, image sliders, and other moving elements
- Be very selective about the third-party apps that you install
- Consider ditching resource hogs like Google Maps
Monitor and test your site
If you want to find out the effect your tweaks and improvements are having on website speed, you’ll need to take a few measurements before and after making changes.
Measuring and monitoring the performance of your website regularly is a very good habit to get into, and Wix allows you to do this from within the dashboard itself:
“The Site Speed dashboard in Wix Analytics shows your site’s current loading speed and offers helpful tips to improve page loading. The data displayed is based on real site visitors, the comparative performance of similar websites, and PageSpeed Insights.” – Wix support
As well as using Wix’s own tool, you should also head over to Google’s page speed insights for a more thorough run down of how your site is performing, whilst Google Analytics can also give you vital information on how your visitors are interacting and engaging with the individual pages on your site.
Make it happen today!
Wix SEO Tip 3: Learn how to perform keyword research
Although search engines like Google are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they still rely heavily on keywords to decide how well a website should rank in the search results.
In basic terms, if you were to type “best headphones 2021” into a search engine, you would see a bunch of online stores and tech review websites in the results, rather than a list of restaurants or dentists — to use an overly simplistic example.
By analyzing lists of keywords and finding out what people are actually typing into a search engine, you will hopefully find a selection of phrases that your potential audience are using. By adding these phrases into the pages and blog posts of your site, you’ll stand a better chance of being found.
How to find relevant keywords
When it comes to inbuilt Wix SEO, the platform itself doesn’t provide tools for finding keywords, so you’ll have to look for other options. If you know your niche or industry well enough, you could simply use Google to search for inspiration:
Related searches: You may have noticed that Google’s “Related Searches” section often displays different wording or similar keywords for the phrase you’ve entered. This can help you find keywords that you might otherwise have missed
Auto-complete: When you start to type a search into Google, the algorithm will attempt to complete the phrase for you. You can use this feature to uncover lots of relevant keywords in a short space of time, by selectively adding and removing words and letters from your phrases.
People also ask: Google searches now provide a separate section with questions that are similar to the original term that you typed. These questions can help you to uncover problems that people in your industry are facing, as well as helping you to understand the mindset of your customers.
Tools for conducting keyword research:
Keyword research can be a complex subject for beginners to wrap their heads around. Once you’ve exhausted all of the manual options and inspiration starts to dry up, it’s time to leverage software tools to help your search:
Ahrefs and Semrush are fantastic services for analyzing competing websites and compiling lists of relevant keywords, but they do cost money. Google’s services on the other hand are entirely free, and can be really powerful tools for uncovering profitable keyword phrases.
Wix SEO Tip 4: Master the art of link building
Just like keywords, links are one of the key metrics that Google uses to decide whether a website is high quality and relevant to a particular search term. If Google’s algorithm spots that lots of websites include links back to your website, you will be pushed further towards the top of the search results. The thinking here is that if lots of people are linking to your site, it must be high quality and relevant!
At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself:
“Surely I could pay website owners to include hundreds of links to my site?”
The simple answer to this question is that yes, you certainly can do that. However, Google is getting increasingly intelligent and can tell the difference between quality (real) links and fake links from dubious websites.
So how can you get links from real websites?
In short, it’s a slow process that involves creating lots of quality content and sharing it as much as possible across social networks, guest posts and genuine word of mouth recommendations.
Proceed with caution
If you really do want to make link buying part of your Wix SEO strategy, we’d advise you to proceed with caution. Hire a Wix SEO expert and ask for lots of case studies and testimonials before proceeding, as a single slip up could ruin your site’s search rankings for good.
Adding internal links
One way that you can play around (risk free) with links on your Wix website and receive a nice SEO boost is by creating “internal links”.
Internal links are exactly what they sound like: Links that point users towards other interesting or useful areas of your site. Internal links help Google to understand how your pages connect to each other, and help to take your website visitors on a more coherent journey through your content.
Internal links can keep users engaged for longer, increasing the time they spend on your site.
Wix SEO Tip 5: Focus heavily on content marketing
You’ve probably heard the mantra “Content is King” repeated dozens of times in your search for Wix SEO advice. Despite being something of a cliche, this statement still rings true in 2021, and will continue to be an important factor in how well your site ranks in search engines, with Google in particular becoming ever more sophisticated when it comes to understanding the context and quality of a website’s information.
Always include a blog on your website
One of the best things you can do to improve Wix SEO as a beginner is to start blogging on your website. If you’re a business owner, blogging is a fantastic way to promote your products and services, whilst sending out signals to search engines like Google that you mean business.
Wix makes it super simple to start a blog on your website, but you’ll need to think carefully about the type of content that you’re going to create, as well as committing to a regular posting schedule to ensure that your site stays fresh and engaging.
We’ve already discussed how Google looks for relevant keywords in your content in order to establish what your site is all about. However, that isn’t an invitation to stuff your posts with as many keywords as possible — Google is now wise to those kinds of tricks, and expects to see relevant, actionable advice on your blog, with keywords appearing naturally in the post.
What to write about
Writing an engaging blog post isn’t easy. You’ll need to think about your target audience or customer base and the topics that they would most likely be interested in. Try to write posts that solve problems rather than advertising specific services, and try to give as much insight and personal opinion as possible.
How long should your posts be?
That’s a tricky question. Several experts have studied the average length of high ranking content, discovering that the optimum word-count is around 1,900 words. The caveat of course is that to rank well, your posts can’t just be long, they also need to be interesting!
Summing up
We hope our Wix SEO tips have helped you to understand the importance of SEO when it comes to getting your website found online. SEO for Wix might not be as easy or flexible as on other platforms, but there are still plenty of things that you can do to keep your website running smoothly, leaving you more time to concentrate on the foundations of successful SEO — creating great quality content that your visitors will love.
Make it happen today!
The post 5 useful Wix SEO tips to help you get found online appeared first on Printify.
