So we decided to look into the ins and the aspects of the SEO offered by Wix. give you the details of our findings. We’ll also explain the areas where we found weaknesses (for certain kinds of projects, we’d suggest on against Wix).
First… what exactly is Wix’s poor reputation originate?
It’s true that at first, the idea of recommending Wix to use for SEO was not easy. They had numerous issues that caused them to compete in Google and different search engines challenging. A few of these issues included:
A poor URL structure. It could add weird character within the address (e.g. yoursite.com/#!about/xis9 ). This isn’t SEO-friendly in any way. However, this issue was rectified in the year of 2016.
In the past, adding alt attributes (alternative text for images) was not possible. It’s now no longer a possibility.
Blogs… Well the blog was a complete catastrophe because you couldn’t improve the quality of your title tag, the URL , or the meta-description for your posts. Awful! However, Wix has fixed this in 2016 as well.
Additionally, back in the time, Wix was based on Flash technology. This was not good for SEO and I’m talking about really bad.
All the SEO problems that Wix was facing, hurt its credibility. We must admit that they’ve been working extremely hard and, in the year 2016, they finally reached the top of the line with alternative for building websites using SEO.
in 2019, Wix also added some advanced SEO options, such as Canonical URLs, and Rich Results which makes Wix an innovator in websites builder SEO. In 2021 they also put out this video in which they go over the features of technical SEO:
As a web-based website builder, this is not common.
Finally, it’s worth noting it is the case that Google (through their chief staffer, John Mueller), has repeatedly stated that “WIX websites are working fine for the field of”
Then why do some projects fail to reach their SEO objectives?
In the past, we’ve received feedback from numerous website builders customers (Wix as well as other than Wix) dissatisfied with their results in SEO. We’ve observed that it is typically because of a lack of SEO strategy…no offence. In general, we notice the below issues on websites that show poor SEO results:
The content is thin: Google wants to serve its users with the most relevant content that is available. In the event that your website’s content doesn’t rank more than the best 10 search results there’s very little chance you’ll get to the top of the page results of a search.
Images-based content isn’t equipped to comprehend images. If you add text to your images because Google isn’t in a position to understand, and index that content. This is more prevalent than you think.
Poor on-page optimization: Occasionally we have encountered websites that had bad SEO optimization problems (e.g. missing title tags, strange URL names, etc).
Keyword research is not done properly What do you want your website to be ranked for? It is ideal to find keywords that have low competition and adequate amounts of traffic that you can optimize your website for.
Poor competition assessment Some areas where it’s likely to be extremely difficult to rank high. For instance, the phrase “car insurance firms” is very competitive and it’s unwise to assume that you’ll be able to rank for it with a empty check to pay for SEO.
What is the Wix SEO add-on?
This Wix SEO Wiz device can (supposedly) assist you in getting your on-page SEO correct. After having tried this tool, we are able to conclude that it’s an acceptable free add-on however, you shouldn’t completely depend on it to handle your SEO strategy since it will only help with the most simple ranking elements.
One issue that we’d love Wix to correct is the confusing name image files are given when they are uploaded to Editor (e.g. 09a0ab7~mv2.jpg/). This is particularly interesting for sites concerned about appearing an appearance on Google images.
Did You Know? NXSA are experts in SEO for Wix websites…
If you’re planning to utilize their multilingual system, you should be conscious that this isn’t ideal for SEO other tools such as Webnode (read the review) are far more sophisticated. Although you can make use of language-specific web pages (using subdirectories for instance) but you can’t alter the slugs of the pages for every language (e.g. yoursite.com/en/about-us will be yoursite/es/about-us for your Spanish store). This is a major issue from an SEO standpoint, but it seems like they’ll resolve this issue very soon.
Another issue is Wix’s website loading speed. The site loads somewhat slowly, possibly due to the structure of the site builder. It’s good to know that Wix is currently working to address this issue by including features such as page caching that is unique for a builder of websites.
Wix’s SEO is perfectly fine for the majority of website projects. It is possible that you don’t have access to .htaccess or sitemap, however, these are extremely specific features you shouldn’t touch unless you know exactly the procedure. The odds of you mucking with something are much greater than the chance of making a change. The majority of the time, you’ll be battling with the use of keywords, content and link structure, for example. These are the factors which have the greatest impact on your website.
With that being said, Wix added access to canonical tags, and allows mass import and export redirects to 301. This is quite sophisticated!
Our full Wix review
So…is Wix’s SEO positive or negative?
You’ve got it. In general, Wix covers all the essentials (and additional) of SEO features that normal websites need. This is sufficient to meet the needs of Wix’s intended audience.
The only situation in which Wix isn’t a great option is if you’re in a competitive market that requires everything that bells and bells. Although Wix isn’t a bad choice, it’s not the best alternative in this situation. It’s no question that using WordPress is smarter (even even though it’s more complex). Another benefit is that WordPress can also support larger websites with more complicated structures (i.e. multilingual).
For all other things, Wix is perfectly fine.