Wix built its beginnings on the concept that with Wix anyone can build an attractive website. However, Wix’s success also lead to some of the more difficult issues facing website developers, designers, and owners. Time and again, Wix has stepped up to provide solutions to many technically difficult issues and Wix’s SEO Wizard is one of the most important solutions to a website owner.
After all, designing a great website is a challenging enough, but once built and published how do you get it noticed? The issue of effective SEO is certainly a difficult one for many Wix users, including Wix web designers to understand, but with the SEO Wizard, Wix has helped to manage the first step in getting ta website ranking by Google, Bing, Goo, Baidu and other world-wide search engines.
It is important though to understand what the SEO Wizard does and does not do for a website. As I mentioned it is only a starting place for full SEO.
The SEO Wizard is really more of a checklist than a wizard, and a very helpful one for INTRERNAL SEO at that. The Wizard will help a designer identify key search phrases, but is limited to 5 search terms. It will offer some help in identifying optimal terms as well.
The Wizard can identify the following for each page that is set to be indexed by search engines.
Identification of meta descriptions
Identification of meta key words
Identification of page titles as displayed by search engines
It recommends Title structure that can be optimized, particularly by Google
It sets indexing robots
It reviews all pictures and determines whether or not those images have alt tags
Once a sufficient number of issues have been identified and fixed by the designer, the SEO Wizard will submit a sitemap to google and then informs you when the site has been successfully indexed by Google.
All of this is great, as a start to managing INTERNAL SEO.
So, how successful have you been for your clients by using the SEO Wizard?
What is your experience with SEO and the Wizard?
What would you like to see the product become in the future? #SEOProsTribe
Thank you for this post @david-rosenblatt ! The SEO Wiz really is an amazing tool and a great starter kit to SEO. I would also love to see more advanced features implemented and am excited to see what the future holds for the Wiz!
I agree Sheyla. I believe this is an important tool that can become even more so in time. It has already propelled WIx sites and made it very difficult for WP folks to brow-beat Wix for SEO. I look forward to seeing the next iteration of the Wizard.
I like the SEO Wiz. It catches things for me that I miss (especially when there are a lot of pages). Most of my clients are confused by SEO and don’t know what the letters S,E, or O stand for. It gives them peace of mind knowing that something is being done, even if it’s at a base level. Whenever the topic comes up, I always stress with clients that SEO is an ongoing process and that they can’t just let their site sit there. They need to implement some type of marketing strategy getting the word out about their site.
Thank you David, great article. My experience with the SEO Wizard is similar to what Ruthann’s has been. It’s definitely a starting point and it has helped me to catch mistakes or things I left out on the site. As for what next or more…I’d love to see some way to sort out or recommend or evaluate how to take the next step for the external links that make for successful SEO. The hardest thing for me to get through to my clients is the need for this to fit in to a marketing plan. And to have that plan change over time. Again, ditto what Ruthann said.
My clients really like the SEO Wiz, I think they feel empowered by it and able to take control of their own SEO. Which is fine, there are still plenty of other things I can do for them in the ‘advanced SEO’ category.
The Wizard is indeed a good starting point for I NTERNAL SEO . But i should stress that it is ONLY i nternal SEO and is not complete. It still will not set canonical tags (though I hear Wix is working on this) nor does it evaluate the wording of the H1, H2, H3 meta tags. Also, it does not help to take advantage of Schema markup.
Lastly, the Wizard does not offer any services for EXTERNAL SEO, nor should it . But external SEO is the real key to marketing.
I think an issue that Wix likely has to face is that as more professional organizations use Wix as a platform, they are going to need to address the highly technical issues involved in the use of websites as tools. Technical issues of which the normal person has no knowledge.
So @kate-from-sydney you do not include internal SEO as part of the service you provide when designing and delivering a site to a client? Interesting! How does the Client know what to do with the Wizard? This is a different model and I am very curious how it works for you and your clients.
