Is Wix SEO Friendly?

There’s nothing worse than making an amazing website only to find that no-one can actually get to it to see it… Especially after slaving away for hours, choosing your templates, writing all the content, and finding nice pictures to include.

No. What you want it to make it the talk of the town, if not the globe. And to that end you will need to have at least some SEO carried out on your site. 

So before you even begin to decide whether Wix is the right app for your website, you need to consider how SEO friendly it is exactly.

This is exactly what we’re going to look at in this article. We’re also going to look at Wix SEO features and Wix SEO pros and cons, before wrapping up with a conclusion. (Feel free to scroll ahead if you like.)

What’s Wix’s Reputation Like With SEO?

Previously, Wix has had a bad reputation when it comes to SEO. And this is not just because their rivals such as WordPress and the like have been well ahead of the game.

There were all manner of issues – you couldn’t add alternative text for images, strange characters would be added to the URL, blog posts couldn’t be optimized, and worse yet, it used to be based on Flash technology (ye gods!).

But now, we’re pleased to report that Wix has done a lot of catching up, and their bad reputation for SEO began to crack at about 2016, by which point most of these points were properly rectified.

Wix SEO Features

So, as we’ve already touched upon, Wix has made some significant changes to improve website SEO…

And these include all of the more basic necessities for SEO such as the inclusion of a meta title, meta description, customizable URLs (rather than jumbles of characters), and of course headings and subheadings.

But it’s not just these more basic features for SEO that are available on Wix. The people behind Wix have also thought of several other factors that can improve your Wix website search engine rankings.

For example, Wix websites are very quick to load up, and don’t freeze much at all. They are also web responsive, which basically means that the site can be viewed on devices of all sizes.

But perhaps most importantly, there’s the social media integration, which allows your Wix website visitors to share parts of your content on all of the major social media platforms.

This way you can generate a substantial amount of organic traffic to your website, and hopefully get your content trending amongst interested parties.

It even allows for more advanced SEO tinkering. For example, you can use canonical tags for multiple versions of the same page, so you can tell the search engines which one to focus on.

Wix SEO Pros

What many website creators love about apps like Wix, is that they can create their website without any coding knowledge whatsoever. And better yet, many factors that can affect a Wix website’s SEO also don’t require any coding knowledge or background.

Of course if you want to tweak the appearance of your Wix website’s theme then it would be good to know a little coding. But the beauty of sites creators like Wix is that so much stuff is already taken care of for you.

Better yet, Wix’s SEO comes built into the dashboard, and you don’t have to mess about with any special plugins or widgets. 

But what’s super convenient for SEO with your Wix website is how you can use it with the top free Google tools, including the likes of Google Analytics and Google Search Console…

With these tools at hand you can see exactly how your website is performing, and view all kinds of data about your website’s traffic, such as user demographics. 

All in all, this means that Wix is excellent for core SEO, and anyone determined enough could get their Wix website to a great position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).

Wix SEO Cons

But despite all of Wix’s changes to it’s websites and all the work done on improving it’s SEO, it is not without fault, and certainly isn’t what we would call perfect.

Although you get a sitemap with your Wix website, unfortunately you can’t manage it through your Wix website login, and you instead have to go through Google Search Console.

Moreover structured data isn’t built into Wix quite as slickly as we would like, and trying to add it yourself can be rather tricky. Good structured data for SEO is far easier to achieve on rival WordPress with their special plugins.

Conclusion

We are pleased to report that Wix has vastly improved in their SEO since previous years, and that websites built with Wix can get into the top SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But if you don’t know your stuff you might struggle to achieve good ranking.

There are plenty of basic SEO tools to help you with your Wix website, and their once tarnished reputation has since been redeemed. 

And what really makes Wix stand out when it comes to it’s SEO, is how anybody can use it. Not only has Wix made website creation as easy as can be, requiring no prior knowledge, but their SEO offering also requires very little SEO knowledge or experience. 

Of course, however, this does not set them apart from their rival counterparts, such as WordPress and the like. Speaking of which, you may also be interested in another relevant article of ours, Wix Vs WordPress SEO, which is available on this link. 

A study by Joshua Hardwick has found that a large comparison of SEO between Wix and WordPress websites was inconclusive. So I guess this means that deciding between Wix and WordPress should be determined by other factors besides SEO capabilities.

Whichever website creator you decide to go with, we would like to wish you all the best in your efforts in marketing your website!