Wix is a free, easy-to-use website builder that helps users create their website quickly. This ease of use is its greatest advantage, enabling amateurs to create professional-looking websites without technical skills or lots of time.
However, this ease of use comes with various issues that have led to a bad SEO reputation for the platform. Let's take a look at some of the 'historical and outdated' issues and ways you can work around them for your SEO.
Outdated perception - The AJAX issue
In Wix, every URL used to have a hashbang (#!), making each page canonical to the homepage. This means that Google sees multiple duplicates of your homepage, rather than different pages. Google can understand hashbangs, but it requires extra work to do so. You could try using PushState instead to make your Wix website more search engine friendly. The AJAX problem needs to be addressed to improve your Wix website's SEO.
Wix solved this - You can now and have been able to for some time create and edit a complete search engine friendly URL structure, just like other well-known CMS platforms.
Outdated perception - Hashbang 301 redirects
In the hashbang framework, there is no provision for 301 redirects. This means that users who visit a page's old location will not be automatically redirected to the new one, and this can be harmful to SEO.
Wix solved this - Wix now includes a complete 301 redirect manager within the Wix SEO tools suite. You can 301 redirect a single URL or any URL using a specified prefix.
Outdated perception - Creating SEO-friendly blogs
Blogging has become the key method for many large and small businesses to attract traffic through high-quality SEO posts relating to their business. Wix doesn't offer native support for optimising blog posts, so it is that much harder for businesses to optimise their posts for search engines.
Wix solved this - Wix Blog contains all the SEO features you would need to ensure every blog post you publish is totally SEO friendly. Here at WiX SEO Guy we have many clients blog posts generating thousands of organic visitors per month.
Outdated perception - Single page sites
Search engines view a Wix site as a single, long page. This means the number of relevant keywords you can rank for is limited. When you build a website through a more advanced platform, you can use different pages like 'services' and 'about us' to provide opportunities to rank for different keywords. This makes it more likely you will get organic traffic from visitors searching for different things and get access to a broader base of consumers. Wix doesn't enable you to do this, making it more important to optimise well for your chosen keywords.
Wix solved this - You can structure your Wix website just as well as other known CMS platforms, creating a search engine friendly internal linking structure.
Outdated perception - Google Search Console and Analytics
Anyone who has operated a non-Wix website will know how helpful Google Search Console tools can be. Wix sites cannot be verified using Google Search Console Tools, so your job will be that much harder to rank well in Google. Similarly, Wix doesn't use the Google Analytics code, so it cannot take advantage of the latest Google Analytics features.
Wix solved this - By solving this issue, Wix didn't just allow you to connect Google Search Console to your Wix website. They actually built the Wix SEO Wiz which guides you through the process of easily connecting your website up to Google Search Console and get's the homepage of your new Wix website indexed in Google within a matter of minutes. You can also easily connect Google Analytics to your website.
Final thoughts!
As you can clearly see, a lot of the bad SEO reputation Wix has when you read other articles published on the internet is based on outdated information. Wix have invested a considerable amount of money and resource to ensure that the SEO functionality within the CMS platform is not just on-par with other website builder platforms but surpasses them. They are on a continuous mission to always strive forward.
Don't believe everything you read online about Wix SEO and instead, get stuck in to the platform and take all the various SEO features for a test drive. If SEO is something new and scary to you, don't worry as you can take our Wix SEO Course which will easily guide you through the process.