The Wix web builder offers an easy alternative to expensive web development services for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Offering a myriad of templates and styles it has become known for providing those on a tighter web marketing budget a way to get a very professional website for less.
The Wix SEO Debate
The one thing that has dogged Wix for years is its reputation for offering websites that not particularly SEO friendly. And in part that reputation was deserved. So much so in fact that for a short time Google delisted the company’s own website as a penalty for poor SEO practices.
Wix also offered some rather poor SEO advice to its clients, although that was due more to poorly informed content writers than deliberate deception. These incidents gave Wix websites a very poor reputation in the SEO community.
Things have improved over the last several years, and with Wix more popular than ever, especially among small local businesses who need a web presence – as every business does – but cannot afford to invest in a more robust site. Therefore, more and more people are approaching SEO professionals to provide them with Wix SEO services. Is Wix perfect for SEO? No, as we’ll explain in a minute. But it can be optimized, and optimized well with the help of professional Wix SEO services.
Should You Choose a Wix Site for Your Business?
The biggest problem with a Wix website is no longer SEO, it is the restrictive nature of the sites. With Wix there is no way to export your data. It’s a bit like having all your furniture bolted to your house. If you move–you can’t bring anything with you.
In the worst-case scenario, you’d have to scrape and/or manually copy paste your data to your new site. But either way, Wix does not make it easy to leave. So, some businesses, although perhaps frustrated by being limited to Wix – especially when every new feature they might want to add to their site will probably involve extra expense – as these are perfectly functional sites there are easy to make the most of what may not be the best situation in the world and use an existing Wix site and still gain success in the SERPs.
In terms of onsite SEO, now that Wix has cleaned up its act – and its code – most of the basic onsite SEO tweaks can be made relatively easily. You may not want to follow all of Wix’ official ‘advice’ too closely as some of it is still very inaccurate – but if you take the time to study current SEO best practices – or enlist some professional help- a Wix website can now be optimized so that it is reasonably structurally sound, in terms of SEO anyway.
Going Offsite, Going Local
As mentioned, many of the businesses that opt to build a Wix website in the first place are small businesses with a mainly local presence. The good news here is while good on-site SEO is important there are other factors outside Wix itself that can be improved and tweaked to help any site rank higher in the SERPs, no matter what CMS it is powered by.
One of the biggest is a company’s Google My Business page. As it is a creation powered by Google itself, it should come as little surprise to find that a properly optimized and well-maintained Google My Business page can give any local business a big boost in visibility. It’s for this reason that those offering Wix SEO services will focus a great deal of attention on getting your GMB listing right and ensuring that it remains as attractive to Google bots as possible.
Link building with Wix
Links are also important ranking factors, even in 2019 when so many other SEO best practices have changed. Gaining good backlinks is not easy -it is only spammy, low value links that are easily obtained- but with the help of an SEO specialist if your content is good it can be linked to, no matter what platform your site runs on, and good pros will show you how.
