SEO on Wix Studio | 2024 highlights and 2025 preview

Okay, welcome to our 2024 SEO product recap. We have an amazing team here with you today. A not pause. Our SEO product people are here. So you're talking directly to the brains behind the SEO product, which is super amazing and super nice that they're here for us today. Of course, Crystal, our head of SEO communications, the one, the only is here, and me who's looking for breakfast options. Okay, so on the agenda today. So first off, yes, this webinar is being recorded. If you signed up for the webinar, which you are, because you're here, you'll get an email with the the recording. It'll be on the SEO hub. Make sure you check out the SEO hub, check out our newsletter, Searchlight and our podcast and all the other stuff we do. And it's new. Our daily SEO new series Monday through Thursday with the godfather of SEO himself, Barry Schwartz. Okay, I'm done plugging. Sorry. Markers are going to market. After breakfast, we're also going to have a Q and A session. So ask questions, not in the chat. Chat is for breakfast options. The Q and A box is where we ask the questions that we'll take towards the end of the the webinar. Okay. On the actual agenda. So we're going to do the 2024 product recap. We're going to talk what's coming next. Little sneak peek for you, and as I mentioned, then we'll go ahead and do the Q and A, which means it's time to hand it off to our lovely product folk.

Thank you.

Mori. Hi. So, Ami Knight, I'm the head of product of SEO in Wix and I'm super excited to be here and do another annual recap telling you about all the new product releases in 2024. So let's start with something very helpful that we released in the beginning of the year is a bulk alt text with AI. It's the option to create alt text in bulk and using AI. It's available right now in the SEO Setup checklist and you can find it also in the assistant panel, bookings, online programs and portfolio. And it will roll out soon to all different page type. So let's look how it looks. If you click here add alt text, you will see the text that already exists. And if you click on Generate alt text with AI, it will generate alt text to all your images of the page. Once it's done, you can go over it, you can change it if you want to click apply and that's it, you're done. You've made the Alt text to all your images on the page. Another thing that we did throughout the year is adding new structured data markups to different page types. So we have the image structured data for bookings, online programs, forum and groups. We added a site name structured data markup to the homepage. We have a course carousel for online programs and soon for booking courses. We have the forum discussions and video structured data, which is a new one and it's rolling up and you will see it very soon in a lot of page types. Another thing to talk about is the site hierarchy. It was released last year in the end of 2023, but I want to talk about it because it's an important feature that I want to touch base on this again and because it was expanded to a lot of other places. So the site hierarchy is actually the option to set a parent and a child relationship between the editor pages, meaning you can set hierarchy between different pages of your site. The hierarchy that you will set will be reflected in the URL and we will automatically redirect all the URLs according to all the changes that you did. So we got you covered and no damage will be done in terms of SEO. So it's available in Classic Editor and now it's available also in Studio and in Edit by Page in the Business Manager. You can do the same also here.

I love this feature. I think it's great just jumping in.

It is another thing that we put an effort this year is the multilingual aspect in general. So the first thing that we release is a multilingual sitemap for multilingual users. If you have a site with different languages, you will have it automatically out of the box. It will create your multilingual sitemap per each language that you have and it's updated automatically. So every time when you add a language, you add a page, you delete a page, the segment will be automatically updated. And I'm heading this off to Paz.

Hi everyone, I'm Paz, Product Manager at WIX SEO Team. Happy to be here. So now I want to talk a little bit about the SEO Assistant panel. So the SEO Assistant Panel helps you improve a page for SEO by showing you what to do next. Once you choose a focus keyword, it updates the list of the tasks for optimize the page. Up until now it was available in blog and now we also have it in Bookings, products, online program and portfolio. So we can see here in the video that we have the Assistant panel for blog and you can add the focus keyword on A specific post, once you click on add, it will see all the tasks according to the focus keyword that you've added.

Cool.

Now I want to talk a little bit about SEO settings. So SEO setting is act as a one stop shop for managing all page type on a site. Once you choose a specific type, you will see custom default and also for many of the page type, you can also see the Edit by page. So here we can see the custom default and the edit by page. Great. So the edit by page table lets you view all the page under a specific page type. It's a great place to review your URLs log, to set multiple tags together and to see the index status of the pages. So this year we focus on empowering the Edit by page tool. So what we did is from a static table created an interactive table with a lot of options. So also we now have inline editing that you can edit the tags without opening the panel at all. We added a focus keyword column to help you refine title and description according to the focus keyword. And also you have the option to generate a title and description using AI. So we will see a short video here of how it looks like. So now we have the interactive table that opens in inline editing. You can add the focus keyword here and also you have the title and description that you want to change according to the focus keyword with an option to generate with AI. Cool. So another thing that we did in the edit by page is adding a filter and column management option. So now you can customize the view according to filter on a specific criteria and control which column you want to display and which order to help you focus on what is more important for you. So I want to show you guys a little bit numbers of how the change that we did affect the usage. So we can see here a graph of entering the SEO settings and to see how many of you changed within which tool. If it's the inline editing, the panel or the default. We can see here a big spike in the increase of entering the business the SEO setting. This is because we added a new entry point and we can see that once we open the new feature of the edit by page, most of you guys use the inline editing, which is truly amazing to see the engagement with the product and made us really, really happy. This is like the most important thing for us. So it's really great. Now I want to talk a little bit of expansion that we did with the with the SEO settings. So we also have now the Edit by page for several Verticals we have it for blog categories, restaurants menu, portfolio and bookings. And for those page type we also have the option to bulk edit which can set a default configuration or change the index status of the pages. So this is a new vertical that we added here.

Cool.

Another thing that we did is adding more verticals and page types to the SEO settings. So we have the restaurants menu and also member author profile. I want to focus for a second on the members author profile. Up until now members profile page was one general for all and now we've added for members. They're also author their pages will be automatically indexed and they have structured data out of the box making it more SEO friendly for them. So this is also a new integration.

Cool.

Another thing, in the SEO settings under the default we have a new vertical using the URL structure. So the URL structure enable you to edit the structure of the URL according to what you like. You can also flatten it. Also once you change the URL slug it will automatically create redirects for you. It was available in blog posts and products and now it's also available in online program and very soon in bookings. Amazing. So this was the update on the SEO setting. And now I want to tell you on a new feature that we released this year which is bulk connect for large scale clients. Clients with thousands of But Apple team now needed to go side by side to connect it and we've created a new tool to connect multiple sites together and helping users with save both time and effort to connect to Google. I should mention that it's open only for enterprise user at the moment but we wanted to share it with you. So the main key features of this product is overview of all managed sites and see the connection status of each site. The ability to bulk connect multiple sites together and reconnect disconnected sites.

Great.

Okay. Hi.

So just jumping in and thank you so much. We've had some great comments in the comments about all of these great new features. I know that things about some of the dynamic pages and and all of the new features on the SEO settings are just fantastic on the the edit by page. You just love to see it. So on behalf of everyone, well done to the product team for all of those things. Also jumping in just to say apps. So there are various different apps around the WIX ecosystem for WIX and WIX Studio websites and in the last year we've seen apps from SE Ranking and Winter and Rankics come out and all of those have to do with keywords. So I saw someone who was saying, you know, how can we know about keyword volume? SE Ranking now joins Semrush as one of the end. Winter now joined Semrush as some of the tools that you can use to identify your keyword search volume, your keyword difficulty. And rankix helps you sort of monitor where you're doing with with with that work there. There's also some some information on AdSense. So ad released an update to their their app which allows you to monetize your WIX blog if you're doing that. And we also have the Zapier integration which allows you to get the most out of sort of WIX automations and allows you to do more with your full marketing funnel with your with your website. So you can go on to onto Zapier and you can find different parts of your wix WIX Studio website and you can connect it up with zapier integrations. And if you want to check out, if we go to the next slide,

I just want to add something about regarding SEO Rankin and Winter. They are not only apps, they are also integrated as part of the products. So you can find them in the SEO Setup checklist or in the Assistant panels and you can do your own research per page within the product.

Yes, absolutely. And if you'd like to know more about some of these, we have some great articles on the WIX Studio SEO Learning Hub where we get into some of that. So you can see the AdSense article, you can see an article all about the SE Ranking app from Morty Overstein and I've got an article about the Zapier Zapier integration there as well. And then we have a podcast for our Surfs Up SEO podcast which talks to the team from Winter as well. So there's some great, great resources on the SEO Learning Hub to help you to learn more about apps, but it's also worth checking them out in as Anat was saying, in your SEO set of checklist in the Assistant and also in the app market.

Thank you Crystal. So I want to talk to you about accessibility. I know you know us as SEOs, but recently we took over also the accessibility products of wix. So there's a lot of things in common between SEO and accessibility. And I wanted to show you like a sneak peek of what we are doing in accessibility because I'm sure it will be beneficial for a lot of you. So first of all, why is this accessibility important in general? Let's say first, is it inclusivity? 20% of the world population has some kind of disabilities and you want to make your website accessible for everyone. And there's also legal compliance in many countries. There are laws and regulation that you need to follow in order to have an accessible website. And if we're speaking already on regulation. So something that is very important to know is the European Accessibility Accessibility act that is coming on pretty soon in June 2025 and where every website that is based in Europe or is serving customer in Europe will have to be compliant with the accessibility rules. So I think it's relevant for a lot of you partners and website owners. So what we did, I'm sure most of you, some of you may probably know the Accessibility wizard that we had in Classic Editor. It was missing in Studio, so we added it now to the Studio. It was really released this month I think. And Accessibility wizard helps you detect accessibility issues on your site and fix them right on the spot. So it's new in Studio and it's offered an improvement experience and new capabilities that you didn't have in the former one in Classic Editor. What it allows you is to scan your site, figure out what issues you have in each page, identifies the issues and per page and per break point. So if you have, let's say for example, an image in the mobile view that is missing an alt, it will show you and it will take you right there and you can fix it immediately. All the rules in the wizard is based on WCAG 2.2 level AA requirements. WCAG, it's kind of like the bible of accessibility. So we are following that.

And I also just want to shout out to the product team for being ranked as the most accessible CMS by the Web Almanac this year for a lot of the work that they've done across the Accessibility Wizard. And it's great to see this coming to wix Studio as well.

Thank you.

So I want to show you a bit about the Accessibility wizard, how it works. You can find it here in this little site checker icon and you can have this fixed accessibility issues. You can also find it in the tools of the Studio. So once you click on this, you scan your site, it will go over all your pages and all your breakpoint and will show you the issues that you have. If it's in red you can go over I'm missing an alt text here. I can set an image to be decorative if I don't want an alt text and I can set the alt text right from here, which is very helpful. You don't need to go image by image. It's all in One place and you can fix everything. So this is the Accessibility Wizard. One thing that is important to notice, it has two tabs. The first one is detected issues that I showed you. Right now, it's something that we can identify automatically and help you fix. But accessibility is a wide range of things that you need to take care and take under consideration. There's a lot of things that cannot be detected automatically. For example, if you use the caller to emphasize something positive, it's not accessible, but you need to pay attention to it. So in the second tab, there's the manual task, and it actually guides you to all the other things that you need to take into consideration when you're building an accessible website. And the last thing that I want to talk about, and it's important for accessibility, but also for SEO and also for performance, is the DOM order. The DOM order is the order of elements that appears in the code. It's a bit technical, but bear with me because for the one that is relevant, I want to explain you what's going on and how you can work with this. So the visual order of the elements on your website must match the order of the code. For when the DOM order is arranged. It determines what users see first when they are using assistive technologies like screen readers. And it also determines how search engine will read and understand your page. So if the order is wrong, it can confuse the user and make your site harder to use and not accessible. Let's see an example. If I have this page and I added this amazing image and then I added the title for it. So if I look at a page, I will read first the title and then the image, and I will assume that the DOM order, the code will be arranged exactly the same. First the title and then the image. But actually, what sometimes happen in Studio is that it's not always like this. A lot of time it's arranged by chronological order, meaning that if I edit first the image, then the image will be first and then the headings, which is not good, of course, and this is not something that you want. So the solution for it. First of all, Studio released really recently the Autodrome order For every new site starting from November, it's on by default and it's arranged and you don't need to take care about anything. Also, if you add new sections, they are already arranged. The problem here is that it's not arranged retroactively. So if you had an old site before November, it's not arranged. So what we did is we solved it with the Accessibility Wizard. The first time you will open the Accessibility wizard you will see this kind of checkbox that allowing us to arrange your DOM order also retroactively. Once you scan the site it will arrange all your DOM order and then it can scan your site in the right way and solve the issues for you. It's a one time thing that you need to do and then you're set and you have here since it's very technical, you have all the documentation and explanation about everything. Regarding this last thing about accessibility is also you can find it in the Business manager. So you have in the website overview page you have the accessibility monitoring widget will show you. It's also scanning your site and letting you know if you have issues on your site and you can go and fix them in the editor. Also you have in the website overview also a SEO entry pointer that also scan your site and shows you issues on your site from the SEO point of view.

Thank you so much in that and Paz, there's so much going on and I think I'm, I'm really excited about seeing the Accessibility wizard in WIX Studio. It's been such a great part of WIX Classic and I think that the DOM order element is going to be really, really good because yeah, the DOM order on WIX Studio is great, so having that tool is fantastic. Speaking of WIX Studio, there have been lots of different developments across WIX Studio in the last few months across the year that have have impact on on SEO. So I just wanted to highlight a few of those to folks who might have missed it or not. So a few I wanted to, to talk to you about or the, the visual sitemap, the Figma to X Studio and the expanded CMS offerings. So the visual sitemap if you can click play there. So the visual sitemap is something that's what's just been released in the last sort of month or so. And what it does is it allows you to see and set your site site architecture. It's AI powered so you can use it to help you generate a site map if you're building a website and it will help you sort of layout wireframes and things like that, but it also lets you manage your sections. So when you click on it you can see, you can see all of the different sections across your website. You can also move around the sessions the section. So if you say actually I don't want the form at the bottom, I want the form at the top, you can move the form from the bottom to the top or wherever you need to move it. You can, you can nest things where you, where you need to nest them and, and you can also share and export your, your visual sitemap, which is a great, great tool. I know as an SEO and as an account manager for our clients, I've definitely paid for tools that do this. So it's great that this in the, in the WIX Studio cms Next one, another one I'd like to talk about. I've spoken to loads of agency teams across, across the world about, about wix Studio and all of the different awesome things that it does. One of our favorite things that we also announced this year, again, if you haven't tried it out, it's really, really great. It's the Figma to WIX Studio integration. So essentially what it allows you to do, if you press Play for me, it allows you to go into Figma, set your design and then you export your frame and it goes into wix and they put everything into wix and they put all of the different elements in there and into wix Studio, they put all of the different elements in there and you can sort of get going, get going on that. From an SEO point of view, from a site growth point of view, one of the things that it can help you do is that it can help you streamline your, your design process. So if you're working with a designer that using Figma, then you can sort of make comments on things as you go along before you export it to, to the website. You can also manage your hierarchy there. So and on the design files, so you can say I need to move this, I need to move that. You can adjust the copy headers. So if you want to make your H1s, your H2s, you can do that in the design file and it will export, you know, the hierarchy of those headers into your wix Studio account. You can also manage your breakpoints. So Anant was talking about DOM order. When we're thinking about a DOM for a page, you can manage where you're going to break up the website on the web page and you can manage those in the design on your figma. And you can also think about dependencies. So when you're thinking about layering things and layering images, sometimes if a designer gives you a page, it's hard to see what they've put underneath it, but it can sometimes be easier to see that on a figma. So that could be really, really useful. It can be great for helping you to manage. I saw someone in the comments mentioning about about site speed and things like that. And it can also be helpful for managing ux, which can help you to get great results for SEO. Next one and then also people who are using Dynamic Pages. We have expanded the offering for content in the CMS if you press play for me. So we've increased the quota from for cms items to 20,000 items in the plus plan and up to 500,000 items in the Elite plan. So that means that if you are somebody who uses Dynamic Pages, you can use them even more in the next little while, which is great for helping you grow your audience and helping you grow your website. Now I'm going to hand over to Morty to talk about our SEO course.