Wix SEO Unfiltered | We're Taking a Closer Look at Wix SEO | Wix.com

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Let's let a rip. Welcome to WIX SEO Unfiltered. Helping us help you understand where things stand with WIX and SEO. You'll laugh, you'll learn, and you might be pleasantly surprised by what you hear to boot. I am your host, Morty Oberstein, the official liaison here at wix, literally here at wix, to the SEO community. I'm joining you from the office of WIX in Tel Aviv, and I am joined by the vivaciously daring, the incredibly wonderful, the incredibly knowledgeable Alexis Sanders. Hey, Alexis.

Hi, Morty. How's everything going?

Good. Where are you joining us from?

I'm joining us from Pittsburgh today, and I'm excited to be here, so thanks for having me.

I'm sure. I'm super excited that you're here. We are also joined by wix's own lead technical SEO, the former CEO of Israel's largest SEO agency, Nati Elimal. Hey, Nati.

Hi, Moody. Hi, Alexis. Happy to be here.

See, I'm so glad you're all here. Okay, so this is how it's going to work. We, as in wix, felt that we needed to create an open dialogue with the SEO community. A lot has changed with us. A lot has changed with the SEO community. A lot has changed with SEO, and it's high time we had a metaphoric beer together. I mean, I really personally like to have an actual beer together, but that's just the world that we live in to that. I've been speaking to SEOs late at night over Zoom, taking their feedback, picking their brains. We've put out an open forum seeking questions about WIX for SEO out to the wider community and so forth. So now we want to address the feedback and answer those questions plain and simple, which is just the way I like it. The format goes like this. We've pulled out questions that we've asked the wider SEO community to jot down and that they did jot down in the form that we put out there. And Alexis has her own questions. Each question or topic that we bring up is. Has a general time limit. Specifically, each question can only be discussed for two minutes or about two minutes, and then we have to move on to the next question, much the way you move on to one dish to the next at a smorgasbord. And I love smorgasbords. So if you're all ready. I'm ready. Let's begin. Alexis, take it away.

All right. Awesome. I would love to know, at a high level, what does Wix Consider the Wix CMS's responsibility versus the webmaster's responsibility.

Oh, that's a great question. I think when it comes to CMSs, they have two major responsibilities. One is to protect the beginner user. The DIYs, the ones that don't necessarily know how to do SEO but are aware of its existence and importance. For example, out of the box defaults that prevent users from making mistakes. And the other thing is enabling advanced users to do whatever they want, basically. So if we're trying to protect the DIYs, we should let the pros do what they think is best and not decide for them.

And to that, the way WIX development works is that we release something out of the box and the next stage of development is, okay, what's the custom thing that we can do next to support the more advanced user?

Definitely. I think the webmaster's responsibility here. Are we still calling it a webmaster? I think that's like deprecated.

Even Google changed that, right?

Yeah, yeah. So the webmaster's responsibility is about doing their own thing, you know, you know SEO, you have your own process. We're just here to help you and definitely not get in the way.

Definitely. And do you feel that intersects a lot with the technical side of SEO? A lot. So like how do you differentiate the responsibility of an SEO from a technical perspective versus. Because I think more what you're alluding to is the content side of the business that, you know, it's responsibility of the webmaster to put their best foot forward in terms of their content for technical SEO. Do you see it as more of a partnership between CMSS and.

Definitely, definitely.

That's a great question. Wait before you answer that, because that's actually Mark Belen's question. So Mark Belen, one of my favorite SEOs out of SearchLab Digital in Chicago. So he actually asked that. He asked how flexible is Wix for SEOs who want to make technical SEO changes. So great minds think alike.

Can I answer now?

Moldy, you have my full permission to answer whatever you want. Nati.

Thank you, I appreciate it. You can do a lot when it comes to SEO and wix. These are improvements we've been adding for the past couple of years. You can edit your robots Txt file, you can edit your canonicals, you can edit your meta tags, and you can even use Velo, our developer tool, to do basically whatever we didn't provide you out of the box. So that's quite a lot.

So kind of going back to that meta tag element, so you can add Any meta tag that you want manually, headers, titles, meta descriptions, all those tags. Correct.

You can add or edit canonicals, titles, meta descriptions, OG tags. Awesome. You can add your own custom tags. You can do it on a page level and soon you'll be able to add your own custom tags on a page type level.

And so we're going to get into all that soon in depth. That's definitely a topic I want to bring up and I think discuss. I want to bring up another hot topic issue in SEO if I could. And this one actually comes from one of my literally favorite SEOs, Caroline Lyman. By the way, big old congrats on being named as the Director of Search at Search Engine Land recently. So she asks, is WIX going to be ready for Core Web vitals and what is being done to improve performance overall? Natalie, is it cool if I take this one?

Sure.

Okay, so WIX thinks about performance from multiple perspectives. There's SEO, there's CRO. Right? Your user goes to a website, how does performance impact their ability to convert? Right. All those sort of things. And it is one giant big package, but it's multifaceted and we take performance incredibly seriously. I would say over the last year or so there's been an enormous push to boost performance for our sites and users are just starting to see that now, which is amazing. Also, in terms of core Web vitals, obviously we know that's coming in May 2021. What we're doing now is sort of focusing in setting things up, researching, diving in and forming a road ahead so that we can tackle Core Web vitals because again, we are very much aware that it is coming in May 2021. Alex, is there anything you guys want to add to this?

No, I definitely, I think you've covered it so far. I think it's going to be huge with the page experience update and I'm really glad that Carolyn reached out and asked a question about it because I think it's on the top of everybody's mind.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm almost like sort of shocked that SEOs aren't like pushing back on it, but they're actually embracing it completely.

Yeah, definitely. I think it's always tough when you have to work between multiple teams and anything that's page performance optimization oriented. You're going to be working with your dev team, you're going to be working with UX team and then potentially even like some executives at the company to get some buy in. So it's always such a tough conversation to have. As an SEO, but having the data and the materials and the logic and business case behind it is really important. So I'm excited to hear that WIX is already thinking about it because it's something that I think will take a huge load off of developers and SEOs minds to at least have the CMS on your side.

It's definitely one of those. Performance is one of those issues, touches on every aspect of everything from dev to SEO to the person trying to bring those sales in. Okay Alexis, this one again comes from you. And it's all about robots txt.

Yeah, definitely. So Nati, you kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I'm curious just to confirm that robots TXT has complete flexibility. So if for instance, you had to do some sort of specific thing for Baidu Spider for China, or you wanted to add a delay for Bing because they were calling you too aggressively or anything like that, are you able to have full reign over your robots txt?

Sure, you can do whatever you'd like with Robot txt and if you mess it up, you can always restore the defaults in with one click.

Perfect.

Yeah, robot, that's one of those. Oh, I'm sorry. No, you go. Sorry, didn't mean to overspeak you.

Yeah, so use with caution. Right, right.

No, but that's what the restore to default is. Great. Again, that's WIX taking care of the, you know, the new user, new to SEO kind of thing and giving the flexibility to the SEO Pro at the same time. I love the fact that robot cat keeps coming up because I see that all the time. It's like one of those, like WIX SEO miss. No, you can't edit your robot cx. No, you can and you've been able to do that for a while. It's almost like one of those myths like client side rendering. WIX still uses client side rendering. No, we don't. We use server side rendering. It's just one of those funny topics that keeps coming up. Again,

no.

Well, hopefully we're myth busting here.

Okay, this one comes from favorite SEO of mine, Milos Milosevic. And he asks, are there plans to easily allow or even automatically add relevant structured data markup in JSON, LD and microformats to the header and microdata elements to the body of a page. Structured data, such a hot topic.

I think I'm going to surprise Milos by saying that we already provide out of the box structured data for certain page types. If we're talking about products or blog posts or events, we do provide it and we also sometimes use logic. So for example, if you have a booking website and you add a course, you'll get the course structure data. So we do have that out of the box and we always render it when we have all the required properties. And in the future you can also add your own, build it your own using the generator and paste it. And in the future you'll also be able to customize it, use variables in it, and do whatever you'd like with structured data. When it comes to microformats, I've got to honestly say that the way we see it, JSON and LD is the way to go. That's where Google is going and that's where the entire industry is going. And it really is an edge case when micro formats can resolve an issue that JSON LD can't. So I don't think I'm gonna say

Nati like you always say, like WIX goes where Google goes and it's JSON lt. John Mueller said itself. Right. JSON LT is their preferred format.

Yeah, I think they say that in their documentation too. So it's good, it's good direction.

Awesome.

By the way, I'm really, now that I have you here, Alexis, and you're such a structured data maven, I really want to get your feelings on structured data, the importance of structured data. Just share your thoughts with us because you are an expert on the topic.

Oh, thank you. Well, I think overall Google has supported formants like Microdata RDFA as well as JSON ld and they mentioned that it's preferred. I think across all of those it doesn't generally matter, but if they say it's preferred, then I think it's fair game. And you know, I think JSON LD is a little bit easier for SEOs to digest. It's a little bit easier for developers to digest because it has like a very similar look to JSON. So overall, if it makes it easier for everyone, I think it's the way to go.

So let's turn this back to you, Alexis. You have a great question about meta tags and headers. Take it away.

I think one of the number one things that any content SEO is concerned with is can I adjust title meta descriptions and as well as headers on page copy. So Nati, you kind of mentioned that that's custom, but you can also do some stuff potentially at scale at a higher level. Can you confirm that or add any details or flavor there?

Sure. So we have the SEO panel. The SEO panel is where you can edit your meta tags Whatever meta tag you'd like, including the defaults on a page level. But when you want to go broader, you want to be more efficient. You can edit it by page type and even use variables we provide to enhance your meta tags. So you can definitely do all of that on a page type level. Example, products, events, posts, challenges, whatever.

Awesome. So let's say, for instance, there's some brands that every year they change the date within the title tag or something along those lines. Is there a way to add a specific changing element in it that rolls over?

Definitely. So I think there are two ways to approach this. First of all, you can always come to us and say, hey, guys, I'm missing a variable here. I usually use the current year in my blog posts and I need it. So that's one way. The other, more advanced way is to actually use Velo. You can either use our variables, but you can use custom code to do whatever you'd like. For example, change the titles according to the current holiday. If it's like Boxing Day, if it's Black Friday, if it's Cyber Monday, you can use code to actually put this in the titles, in the meta tags, in the description, according to the current date.

Very cool.

Yeah, I'm not sure people even are aware of the fact we have a devtool. There's an amazing devop which was really named, called Velo, I think, without being

a developer, because someone can do that for you and we have plenty of examples. SEO is a lot about being creative, even tech SEO. So definitely, definitely. That's a powerful tool to have in your arsenal.

Definitely.

By the way, Alexis, I love the fact that you brought up adding the year to the title tag. Yeah, it's always like, because Google said, no, you just don't need to do those sort of things. But those sort of things sometimes do move the needle, regardless of what the official line is.

Definitely. And I think that's one thing that you don't want developers spending time on at the end of the day. If that's something you have in your title tag or your, you know, meta copy, you don't want developers have to go back every single January and change that. You want them to be doing more important things than that. So that's kind of like a little bit of a benign example. But like you said, it's, you know,

it comes up every year. Every year it's another discussion about, in the SEO community about changing your tags in the current year. Since we're talking about tags, let's talk about social and Tags and. And Alexa, I'm going to turn it back to you because this one again comes from you.

Yeah, definitely. So obviously social is huge and webmasters want to be able to share out their content. So how much integration and how easy is it for webmasters to add social buttons? And going back to that structured semantic website of things, how easy is it for webmasters to add open graph protocol to their site? And does that happen automatically or is that something that users have to use some sort of extension for?

Well, adding social buttons is just a drag and drop action. You can do it in a couple of seconds. When it comes to OG tags, you would definitely have them out of the box and you can edit all of them. And as far as we know, Twitter uses OG tags, but we plan on adding Twitter tags as well.

Perfect. Okay, cool. And I think Twitter even defaults to ogp.

So if you have rgb, it's like it definitely does. At least you don't get.

Yeah, but you get the small little card instead of the full card.

Exactly. And sometimes users for certain scenarios want different titles, for certain shorter, longer titles, for certain networks. And we definitely should allow that.

Yeah, no, I love it. The more semantic elements you can add. It's awesome.

Awesome. Cool.

By the way, I love that you brought up social, because I know we as SEOs only talk about SEO, but if you're talking about from an overall growth mindset. So social is a really important part of the equation.

Definitely.

Yeah, definitely. Anything we can do to help out all the other channels. Right. I think SEO is so unique because we do so much stuff with the website that we really sit at the center of different areas and can influence different areas of the business.

So, Alexis, let's talk sitemaps. What do you got for us about sitemaps?

Yes, So I hate creating manual sitemaps. I'm sure everyone here does. So does WIX automatically create end state 200 status code URLs and add those within the sitemap?

Right now we provide out of the box a sitemap index, which includes a sitemap for each page type for easy management. So you have a sitemap for products, for categories, for whatever. And we're working on enhancing its capabilities to also support considering canonical tags. So if you decide as an SEO to override your canonical tag, we'll take that into consideration and not display that URL in the sitemap we also working on. I can't promise anything that's on my wish list, as we say, to take a look at Actual redirects user inputting into the system so we can ignore these URLs as well. So we try for you to have the cleanest possible sitemaps and we keep on constantly improving that.

Perfect. And does that extend to video and image sitemaps?

Ooh, that hurt a bit.

You just made Nati's day.

Yeah, yeah, we're working on adding images out of the box. Videos are also going to join the party, but a bit later.

Perfect. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Nati.

Sure.

Awesome. Okay, let's move it right along again. This one is coming from you, Alexis, and it's one of my favorite questions because I love mobile.

Yeah. So I obviously was really curious about Carolyn asked about core web vitals. But also mobile is huge and a huge part of the page experience Update. So how is wix preparing for mobile friendliness? And has it already been. Is it supporting responsive web design?

I'd like to separate mobile friendliness and responsiveness.

Okay, perfect.

WIX is mobile friendly. For each page type, we constantly monitor it. But the wix, the classic WIX editor, is not responsive. You have different HTML for mobile and desktop. But one of the things. Yeah, it's adaptive. Exactly. And what we do, the tech SEO team constantly monitors it. Just like JavaScript and CSR to constantly find parities between desktop and mobile parity issues. There aren't any that I'm aware of, but we do have Editor X, which is wix's answer to responsive design. It's totally responsive. And so we do have a solution.

Perfect. And so since you're doing adaptive, are you? I mean, I'm sure that you guys are doing this, but ensuring mobile and desktop parity for mobile first index, we do that.

We've been actually actively talking to Google about that. We do constant audits when it comes to the content, the meta tags, the links, everything that is on desktop should be on mobile. We even detect widgets that don't behave the way they should on mobile. We ask the relevant teams to fix them. That's always on our mind.

Okay, perfect.

Again, it goes back to your point earlier about protecting the user.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, I definitely think that's one of the things that some people may just forget to look at. So it's good that WIX is kind of taking that onto your own hands, so user webmasters don't have to worry about checking all that, which is great. So thanks for handling that.

I may be shooting myself in the fruit, but I think webmasters should always be checking for that, regardless of what the CMS does good to know, but we are here to make sure they don't find anything.

Perfect.

Perfect. Okay, let's move on to the next one. Again, Alexis, this one is coming from you. You have a lot of great questions and I particularly like this one. What do you got for us next?

Yes, so you've mentioned before that you guys support custom rel canonical tags. Kind of shifting gears into like more of the paginated series. So another rel. Different rel. I guess it's still in the HTML link domain. So Google has obviously changed their approach to pagination. But other search engines like Bing still leverage RHEL next and preve. Does WIX support that? And if not, what is the plans to either support or not support that in the future?

Okay, so you're absolutely right. Google has like deprecated when it comes to Google those tags. But Google isn't the only search engine. Other search engines do support it and it does relate to accessibility. So we're not dropping it just yet. We do use these tags. I can say that sometimes we find instances where they're not used and we fix that. But we also care about pagination links, which is more important to Google. For example, if a user chooses to use Infinite load or click more or Load more button, then we also try to make sure that the links are there so search engines can actually find these paginated pages. So that's how we see that.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. So you're approaching it from more of a findability perspective and like being able to actually crawl the site efficiently.

Yeah.

All right, that's a good answer, Nati.

Thank you, Modi.

Okay, let's move on to the next one. This one comes from Simon Cox. Simon Cox is a great SEO and an amazing bread baker. Simon asks, how do I build multi level topic based URL structures in wix? I love that question also. Not that you love this question. This is a hot topic for us.

Yeah, yeah. So right now what you can do is edit slugs for pages. But relatively soon we're going to release a feature that allows you to customize URLs however you want. It's going to roll up gradually.

You tease us on Twitter, right?

Yeah, I did, I did.

And it's out there.

Yeah, there was great reception. And basically if you want to put banana before your product, you'll be able to whatever you want. You can. It will be reflected in canonical tags, it will be reflected in all the other meta tags, it will be reflected in sizeMaps.

So yeah, one URL. Amazing.

It's amazing. It's a big change. It's great. It's really good. Very exciting. Okay, this is the last question and this one also comes from luck, because I'll take this one away. What's the story with images and wix? I love this question. There's so much to chew on here. Can people add alt tags? Are the images optimized? Is image text overlaid and crawlable HTML? What's the deal with WIX and image optimization? To quote Seinfeld, Come on.

Of course people can add alt text. Okay, that's basic. Let's all go there. Can people upload images? So yeah, people can add alt tags. And where there's a page that isn't editable by the user, for example, a category page where it takes the images from the posts themselves, we add image, thumbnail, alt text. So wherever you can't edit, it will provide a good out of the box default. When it comes to proper optimization, we, we already, when an image is rendered, it's always cropped, resized and reduced in size to match the device. In some cases we serve webp images where it's supported. And yeah, so we try to do everything and keep it pixel perfect. So it's not just about optimizing your images, it's about not, you know, hurting the quality of your images. Because design is an important aspect. But whatever we can we do to minimize the size.

Definitely.

There's a lot. One of the things I love about WIX and images one is, okay, so first off, it also depends a lot on what the user does. That's like, I'm definitely going to say that. But we also implement lazy loading, right. We use low quality placeholders, which works like hand in hand with the lazy loading. So there's a lot we do to take care of the user because we know like obviously the user images are like a high focal point for their website. So we want to make sure again, like we want to make sure we take care of them with that, that sort of thing. And you can see that theme running throughout what WIX does.

I love that. And how do you implement lazy loading? Is it in a way that Google will be able to pick up the images that are lower on the page?

Well, we implemented, you know, with eager auto and lazy, meaning that whenever something is in the viewport, it's loaded. Whenever it's not in the viewport, it's not loaded. Just the way Google recommends it.

Okay, so just like the native lazy loading feature on Chrome.

Yeah, There is, if I'm not mistaken, JavaScript fallback, but I need to check that.

Okay, cool. All right. Well, good to hear. Thank you. Awesome.

Awesome. So that's it for us. Out of time. I just want to thank both of my wonderful panelists. Yeah, that's it. Thank you both for joining me, sharing a ton of knowledge and information. Thank you both. It's been wonderful. Nathi, it's always nice to be able to chat with you. And Alexis, it's been absolutely amazing to catch up with you a little bit. Where can people find both of you?

Yeah, so you can find me on

Twitter lexisksanders, and you can find me on Twitter netanelle. Just search for Nati E and it will bring it up. You can follow me for updates, teasers, and ask me questions about Wix.

Okay.

Okay.

Also, a big thanks to the SEOs I've been talking with and to the entire SEO community for submitting your questions. Definitely expect more conversation, more dialogue, more updates around WIX and SEO from me and the entire WIX team. We're incredibly dedicated to making great SEO strides. So big loud, shout out to the development and the product teams for doing all this, and it should be exciting to see how things continue to progress on the SEO front. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.

Thank you.