Author: Celeste Gonzalez
So, you have a Wix site for your blog or business, hooray! Now that you’ve taken the first step in launching your website, how do you get people to visit it? Attracting people to your website when they search for services, products, or blog posts you offer can be accomplished through search engine optimization (SEO).
When you optimize your site by following SEO best practices, you’re able to provide audiences with a better user experience by making it clear what your brand is about and helping them find what they came for. Not only will it help your users, but it will also help your site get found on Google and other search engines.
By clearly communicating what you’re offering to both to users and search engines, you’ll be working towards:
Gaining more visitors
Attracting leads and potential customers
Converting users into customers or subscribers
Fortunately, you don’t need a professional to start optimizing your Wix website. Wix has plenty of convenient, easily accessible features built in so you can start dipping your toes into SEO and improving your site’s presence in the search results.
In this article, we’ll discuss optimizations for site owners looking to cover the basics, which also serves as a foundation for those who aspire to take their SEO further. This includes:
What to know before getting started with SEO
Search engine optimization is about putting the user first. You are attempting to create a seamless experience for anyone who visits your website, including search engine crawlers (which are essentially programs that search engines use to index your site so that it can be featured in search results).
SEO isn’t a one-off task where you go in, make a few changes, and you’re done optimizing your website forever.
Instead, SEO is a dynamic process, as search engines release updates to improve the quality of their results. This shouldn’t scare you, though, since the basics almost never change. The time and energy you invest into your optimizations will continue to pay dividends as long as you keep in mind the principles of SEO and focus first and foremost on your audience.
Basic optimizations suitable for every type of web page
A website is typically just a collection of web pages. The following optimizations are suitable for every web page you want to be found in search results, and are thus suitable for nearly every website.
Title tags
Title tags are displayed as the clickable headlines of pages you see in the search results when you look something up (as shown below). Similar to a book title or the headline of an article, they help people (and search engines) understand the purpose of the page.
Your title tag is likely the first thing a potential visitor will notice when they see your site pop up in search results. That’s why it’s very important to have a title tag that accurately represents what the page is about and makes people want to click on it.
If your title tag isn’t about the main topic of that page or includes irrelevant information, then people may bounce (leave the page without looking at any of your other content) or may not want to click on it to begin with.
When writing a title tag, keep the following in mind:
Although there’s no actual character limit, keep your title tag between 50-60 characters so that it doesn’t get cut off in the search results.
Brainstorm a few title tag ideas and pick the one that most accurately reflects the contents of that page to pique a potential visitor’s attention.
While Google still ranks content without keywords in the title tag, including the page’s primary keyword may be helpful for users.
It’s important to know that Google may replace your title tag altogether. This doesn’t necessarily mean you did a bad job of writing your title tag, but that Google believes its rewrite is better for the user’s search.
How to add and edit a title tag on Wix
Wix makes it simple to create a title tag for each page on your site in four simple steps:
01. Open the Wix Editor (shown below).
02. In the left-hand menu, click the “Pages” icon.
03. Click the three dots next to the page you would like to edit to reveal more options.
04. Select SEO Basics.
Here, you’ll be able to add your desired title tag.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are those short paragraphs of information underneath a title on the search engine results page. Like title tags, this little piece of information helps inform users about the page and, with the right text, is an excellent opportunity to distinguish yourself from competitors as well as incentivize users to click on your content.
This is your chance to offer additional information to support your title tag. When it comes to meta descriptions, stick to the following guidelines:
Keep it between 125-160 characters to ensure that potential visitors can see most of the description.
Include information that is relevant and unique to the page. Don’t duplicate meta descriptions across several pages.
Add a call to action when applicable to signal to potential visitors what they should do next.
Keep in mind that, like title tags, Google may also rewrite the page’s meta description in the search results.
How to write a meta description on Wix
You add or edit a meta description the same way as a title tag, through the SEO Basics menu (explained above). You’ll be able to add your description in the field underneath the title tag (shown below).
As you can see above, Wix also shows you a search engine results page (SERP) preview so you can see how this might look on Google.
Headers
Headers organize and break down the content on your page. This makes your content easier to skim, enabling your visitors to find what they are looking for faster. The positive user experience this creates can decrease friction for visitors, enabling them to get familiar with your brand, which should ultimately get you closer to your business goals.
Let’s use this article (the one you’re currently reading) as an example: You wanted to read general optimization tips for Wix, so perhaps you scrolled through and found the smaller heading titled “Basic optimizations suitable for every type of web page.” Then, you would have also noticed that there’s a smaller heading, “Title tags.”
Including the title of this article, these are examples of H1, H2, and H3 header tags:
<H1> How to start optimizing your Wix site for search
<H2> Optimizations suitable for just about every site
<H3> Title tags
The H2 tag has supporting information for the H1 tag. Likewise, the H3 tag’s information supports the H2 tag’s content, and so on.
Here are some tips that can help you make the best use of headers:
Stick to one H1 per page. This is the title of your page, so you only need one.
Order your headers properly. As mentioned before, if you want to expand on something within an H2 header, you’ll put that information under an H3 header, and if you want to expand on that subject even further, then you’ll use an H4 header, and so on.
Use headers to distinguish important content. Users often want a way to quickly find the information they are looking for without having to read an entire page. By flagging key content with the appropriate headers, a user can skim through the content and find exactly what they need.
Use keywords in your headers when possible and appropriate: Keywords are the topics that a user is searching for, so including them in your headers can help signal relevance. However, don’t add a keyword to your header for the sake of adding a keyword. If you’re including information that’s relevant to the topic at hand, you’ll likely end up with keywords in there anyway without additional effort.
How to write headers on Wix
You can add a header to your Wix web page by double-clicking a text box to reveal the Text Settings box, with the option to change the header tag, font, size, and more.
Then, click on Themes and choose your header tag.
Image optimizations
Optimizing your website’s images for users is likely more important than you think it is: Images alone can be an important source of traffic. It’s common for people to conduct Google Image searches for things like products or infographics. If you optimize your images, you have a chance of capturing this organic traffic on Google Images as well as traditional Search.
Wix conveniently handles a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to image optimization, like:
Image compression, to make your image file sizes smaller without sacrificing quality. This can help keep overall page load times reasonable.
Image formatting. Wix converts images from PNG, JPG, or JPEG to WebP, a format that Google released in 2010 that decreases file size anywhere from 25-35%.
Lazy loading images. Lazy load delays the loading of your images that appear “below the fold” (content that’s only visible once you begin scrolling). Instead of all images on a page loading at the same time, the image will only load once it’s been reached by the user, which helps with your page’s initial load time.
Low-quality image placeholders. If the image file is simply too big, Wix will load a lower-quality version of it immediately and, as the page continues to load, it will be replaced with the high-quality, compressed image.
While Wix can take the lead on image optimizations, there are still some things to control on your end.
Image name, format, and compression
When you are ready to upload an image to your Wix site, there are a few things to check:
The format of the image (JPEG, PNG, etc.)
The size of the image
If you upload a very large JPEG or PNG to your site, then it’s going to slow down your page load for users.
While Wix does compress images that are under 25MB, if you’re regularly working with larger files, you can pre-compress them before uploading them to Wix using a free service like TinyPNG.
Alt text
Alternative text, or alt text, is a description of the content within the image—essentially, this is what the image depicts. It’s very important to include alt text on each content image that is uploaded to the site since it provides context for users that rely on screen readers to navigate your site.
Make sure that your alt text describes the image, but in a concise way (around 140 characters). You don’t have to get down to the nitty-gritty when writing your alt text, but visitors should be able to understand the substance of the photo based on your description.
In addition to being read aloud to users with screen readers, alt text is also read by search engines to understand what an image depicts. If you’re able to include a keyword in your alt text, then that’s great, but keep in mind that the point of alternative text is to help those who use screen readers. Do not artificially stuff keywords into your alt text in an effort to rank higher.
The simplest way to check for images that need alt text is to use Wix’s Accessibility Wizard tool. To get started, go to your Wix Editor > Settings > Accessibility Wizard (as shown below).
Once you click on Accessibility Wizard, the tool will scan your site and let you know of any images that are missing alt text. You can fill in your alt text directly within the Accessibility Wizard. Alternatively, you can check “This image is decorative, it doesn’t need a description,” if the image that was flagged is not crucial for the content of the page. “Decorative” images can include SVG files, a hero image, a featured image, or favicon.
URLs
A URL is the web address for a page. According to Google, a URL should be simple, logical, and easy to read so that it can signal to users and search engines what the page is about.
How to edit a URL on Wix
Users can edit the URL slug for all their Wix pages. A URL slug is the final part of the URL, after the last backslash (as shown above).
To edit a URL slug on Wix:
01. Access your Wix Editor
02. Select the “Pages” icon from the left-hand menu.
03. Click “...” for the page you’d like to edit the URL slug
04. Click SEO Basics
05. Add your URL slug under the “What’s the URL slug (last part of the URL) for this page?” section
Internal linking
An internal link is when you hyperlink to another page on the same website. For example, when a homepage links to the contact page, that’s an internal link.
Internal linking helps pages on your site get discovered by search engines. It helps Google understand what the most important pages on your site are. If a page has a lot of internal links pointing to it, Google may consider that an important page (as opposed to a page with only one link pointing to it).
Search engines also look at the anchor text of the link for additional context. Anchor text is the text that’s hyperlinked (this generally highlights the text, as you can see throughout this article). The anchor text you use should describe the content of the page you’re linking to. Think of an internal link as a chance to help a user find additional information about a topic you’re already discussing and the anchor text as a way to specify that information.
How to add an internal link on Wix
Highlight the text you’d like to add a link to.
Click the link icon in the Text Settings that appear.
Click “Choose a Page” and select the page you’d like to link to.
There’s more than one way to optimize your Wix site
When it comes to improving your site’s SEO, the optimizations mentioned above cover the basics, but the sky’s the limit. Below are two more resources you can use to improve your Wix site’s visibility in the search results.
Wix’s SEO Setup Checklist
The SEO Setup Checklist is a step-by-step guide designed to help you improve your site’s SEO (based on your business information and keywords). It also enables you to connect and verify your site with Google. You can access the SEO Setup Checklist by going to SEO Tools in your site’s dashboard and clicking Let’s Go under Get Found on Google.
As its name suggests, the SEO Setup Checklist is a great starting point for your SEO efforts, whether you’ve recently launched your site or are just discovering this tool. Addressing each item will help add to your search presence as well as your user experience.
The Complete Wix SEO Guide
While the interface instructions mentioned throughout this article are specifically for static pages (e.g., Homepages, About pages, Services pages, Contact pages, Pricing pages, etc.) on Wix, the optimization tips apply to just about every type of web page.
Dynamic pages (a page that can change its content while keeping the same design and layout, such as blog posts, product pages, event pages, etc.) may have their own unique (but similar) workflows to accomplish the same optimizations. The settings you’ll need to access will depend on the type of page you’re optimizing.
Many of these optimizations are explained in our Complete Wix SEO Guide, which is updated quarterly. Bookmark this resource as a reference to aid you as your site grows, but also up to date with Wix’s latest SEO capabilities and integrations.
Small optimizations can lead to a big impact for your business
If you follow the basic optimizations listed in this article for all your pages and images, your site will have a great SEO foundation. Continue to put the user first and make decisions to align with that goal. As long as you do that, you’ll be working towards ranking in the search results, and gaining traffic as well as leads and customers over time.
Celeste Gonzalez - SEO Specialist at RicketyRoo
Celeste Gonzalez is an SEO Specialist at RicketyRoo. She began her journey with SEO by doing what she loves best: learning. She continues to learn in public and share her experiences—good and bad—with the community through Twitter and the SEOBreakdown. Twitter | Linkedin