Wix is a company that offers free websites with premium upgrades. According to their website, 59 million people have Wix websites, but can anyone find those websites in search engines?
Many companies have rolled out online website builders designed to make building and managing your own website easier. (We here at OurChurch.com were among the first, launching our Beacon Website Builder all the way back in 1997, and now providing our NE1 Website builder with all our web hosting services.)
Unfortunately, though, in an effort to simplify things, many of those web builders haven’t included the the options to make the “behind the scenes” tweaks (aka search engine optimization) necessary to help them rank well in search engines.
Can Wix Websites be optimized for search engines?
We took a look under the hood of a Wix website and here’s what we found…
1) You can edit all of the following parts of the webpage:
- title tag
- META tags
- page text
- H1 and H2 tags
- images alt tags
2) You can also add stuff to the head of the page for verifying ownership of the page with Google and other search engines.
3) You can blog. Important for content marketing.
4) You can set up a sitemap
5) You can integrate social media sharing.
AJAX Problem?
One unique aspect to Wix which caused us some concern is that Wix sites are built in AJAX which works like Flash some ways. Google can’t read AJAX just like it can’t read Flash. However, Google has provided a way around this as outlined here.
The URLs for all the pages use hashbangs (#!); but the content at URLs are not readable. Google sees the hashbang and changes the URL to a URL when the #! Is replaced with ?_escaped_fragment_=. All the SEO is on the alternative escaped_fragment URL pages.
For example, a page might have a URL http://test123.wix.com/testsite1#!aboutus/cjg9. There is no content and nothing can be optimized in the code for this URL. All the content and SEO stuff is on http://test123.wix.com/testsite1?_escaped_fragment_=aboutus/cjg9.
We tested it, though, and Google does connect the content from the alternative URL with related real URL. So, all is well.
The bottom line is Wix does provide all the options necessary to optimize Wix website.
If you have a Wix website, there’s no excuse for ranking poorly in search engines. If you’d like help with the SEO of your Wix site, contact us to schedule a time to talk about the search engine marketing for your website.
Discuss
Have you built a website with Wix? If so, what do you think?
(Kurt Steinbrueck contributed significantly to this post)
8 Comments
I've actually seen couple Wix site's ranking top searches on Google, pretty impressive.
Hey Randy, thanks for confirming our research.
Best tip for seoer! Thank for share!
thanks alot guys, I am glad to see that people are actually writing about this great seo tips in such a smart way
It is working very well with google, after a couple of hours after sebmiting the website to google it showed on the serch result. however bing seems to have problem reading it.
Very good tips for Seoers. Thank you a lot, I am trying to make my website going better
Thanks for sharing this marvelous post & I have a question is it possible wix template use wordpress website
I don’t think so.