In this recorded Wix SEO webinar, host Mordy Oberstein introduces a panel of Wix SEO experts—Crystal (moderator), Nati Alemenik (Head of SEO) and Einat (SEO Product Lead)—to recap the major SEO product developments released in 2022 and preview upcoming 2023 enhancements. The presenters explain Wix’s overarching mission to make SEO easier and more time‑efficient for agencies and site owners, then walk through concrete feature releases: an Auto‑Redirect toggle that automatically creates 301 redirects when a page slug changes (over 400,000 redirects generated so far); a vastly expanded Structured Data system that offers out‑of‑the‑box markup for product, article, event, Q&A, and new custom markup capabilities, including homepage‑specific search‑box and local‑business schema that automatically align with Google’s rich‑result updates; dynamic Image Sitemaps that now list all page images and a planned Video Sitemap addition; integration of SEO defaults for Wix apps such as Google Posts, Portfolio, and upcoming Store Categories; and a partnership with SEMrush that embeds keyword‑research tools directly into the Wix SEO Checklist, providing users with up to ten free daily searches and a seamless freemium account setup. Throughout, the hosts stress the time‑saving, competitive‑advantage benefits of these automated solutions. The webinar also outlines logistical details (recording, YouTube link, SEO Learning Hub resources) and encourages live Q&A participation, promising to address thematic questions at the end.
Chapters
Welcome everybody. My name is Morty Oberstein. I'm the head of SEO Branding at wix and we have a wonderful webinar for you today. It's actually a treat. Normally when you talk about SEO product or product in general, usually have some marketing people like myself talking about the product and relating about the product. But in this case we have something pretty unique for you. We have two of the actual people who worked on our SEO development, not just this year, but previous years, to talk to you about what we've done around SEO tool capability development in 2022. I'm really excited about it. We've done a lot of things and we'll offer you a little bit of a sneak peek at 2023 before we dive into. I'm going to hand it over to Crystal to walk you through just the formatting of the webinar today.
Thank you, Mordy. So just in case anyone's wondering, yes, this webinar is being recorded and yes, you will be sent a YouTube link. You will also be sent it by email. You will also be able to Access it on YouTube whatever you like after the, after the email. And we will also have information about the webinar on the WIX SEO Learning Hub, which is@wix.com SEO learn. That's where you can find information about this webinar and you can also find information about past webinars and also about our upcoming webinars in 2023. If you have any questions for the panel during the event, please make sure to use the Q and A panel which is at the bottom of the screen. And we will try to answer as many as we can during the session. We will also, if you don't get your question asked straight, we'll also be collecting sort of thematic questions if people are asking similar, similar questions around similar things. And we will be addressing them at the end of the session as well. So please, please be ready with those. We always have a really lively Q and A session, so. So thank you for, for joining us there. And then if I can move on to the actual things we're going to be talking about today, we will be joined by myself, Mordy Oberstein Natielemenik, who is our head of SEO and also by innat, going to be discussing our SEO products. She's our SEO product lead and does amazing things there and we are going to cover lots of things about what happened this year and we're also going to talk about what's going to be happening next year. So we're going to recap some of our, some of our greatest hits from our, from our recent releases. We're also going to talk about some of the newer features you might have, might have seen in the last few months. There's been quite a few updates in the last couple of months, so we're going to cover those and we're also going to talk, give you a little teaser of things that are coming to come and we're going to get to the Q and A. So with that, I'd like to introduce Nati Alemenik, who is our head of SEO and who's going to talk to you all about the ways that we address SEO@Wix.
Thank you, Crystal. Wow, so many people. So thank you everyone for joining us. Some of you it's early morning, some it's midday, some it's night. So thank you for joining us. That means you care and we like that. However, this is way too many people for me, so I'm going home. No, but really, thank you. My name is Nati, I'm head of SEO at Wix and I'm joined by the amazing, the talented, Einat, our product lead. And Enat will be the major voice here today, but before that, an intro. So I think or hope many of you are aware of the tools and the features we've released for the past year, even the past couple of years. A lot of tools, a lot of updates. But before we go into the highlights, I want to explain a little bit about our focus and where we invest our resources and why we do that. So most of you already know that you can pretty much customize all the SEO related settings across weeks, almost everywhere. But that's not really enough, is it? Like, I get it, I've been there. I used to manage a large SEO agency here before I joined wix and we know you're busy and we know you have a lot of things you need to do for your clients and clients can be extremely demanding of your time. So one of our major focuses was and will be on making your lives easier when it comes to SEO, right? We want you to be able to do whatever you want, but we also want to make it easier and efficient and time saving because ultimately you're a business and this way you can get more done for your clients or you can take on more clients, or you can go to the beach, if you have a beach. But we really, really, really wanted to make everything easier, not just in weeks, but compared to other places across the web. Today we'll go over and that's important to understand. We'll go over the highlights of what We've released in 2022. There have been so many things that we've done when it comes to SEO, from products and features that we worked on to also things that we worked on with other teams in Wix to make their products and their apps SEO friendlier. So we can touch on everything. There isn't enough time. But know that these are just the highlights and things which we thought you should be aware of. After that, as Crystal mentioned, I will give you a sneak peek into some of the cool stuff we are going to release like in the recent days and weeks and in 2023, if I can say so myself, we have amazing plans for 2023. I think you're going to love them. And again, that is going to be just a taste of what we have planned for 2023. So without further, any further ado Inat. Take it away.
Hi everyone, I'm inat. I'm the product lead for CEO here at Wix and I'm really excited to see all of you here. So I'm gonna walk you through about the main thing that we did in 2022. And so let's start. One of the products that we released a few months ago was the auto redirect. It seems small, it's just this new toggle, this little toggle that you see under the slug. But it's a very, it's extremely meaningful one. Every time you change a slug on a page you will see this little toggle or in order it will be a checkbox that is automatically on telling you that we will, we will create an automatic redirect from the old slug to the new slug, saving you time and efforts and helping you avoid 404 pages and also for SEO power. Just a little anecdote about what we did, why we did it, because up until now we used to have like a little message underneath it. Every time we identify you change a slug we had a message telling you okay, go to the URL redirect manager and create this redirect. But when we checked it we saw that around 4% clicked on it or created a redirect. So we understand it is a huge issue here that we can save a lot of trouble for our users when the WIX users. So we created this, this new feature and up until now, since it was released a few months ago, we already created more than 400,000 redirects which is massive and it means that we save so much errors and lots of SEO power for our users. So it's a really exciting one for us. Another thing that we did in in 2022 is we focus on our expanding our structured data offering. I'm sure you probably have predefined structured data for certain page types out of the box. For example, if you have a store and a product, product pages you already have automatically we create for you structured data for product pages. So you don't need to write any code and you don't need to deal with this. It's already automatically added for all your pages. But we also believe in full customization. So we release this option to add any custom data that you want to any page that you want. If you want to add it, you just need to go to the page that you want. The structured data. If you want to add a structured data, open the SEO panel and go to the Advanced tab and then you can click on add new markup. This screen will open and you can add any syntax of markup that you want. And of course you can play with it. You will have a validation and you can add anything you want. Another thing that we did in the structuredata ward is that we added a predefined structured data markups for the homepage. So, so the first one was citing search box. If you're using, if you have the search app installed on your site, you will automatically get the citing search box such a data markup on your homepage. And this will make your site eligible to get the search box in the search result page. Another one that we did also for the homepage is the local business structure data and this is for the ones of you that have local businesses. So if you added a local address in your business info of the site, we identify it and we automatically create for you localbusinessstructure data. Markup on the homepage is very important for your local SEO strategy. Of course, all of those structured data, you can hide them, you can create your own, it's fully customizable. Those of course are being added to all the predefined out of the box structure data that we have for different pages. For example, we have the article for blog post, we have product for product pages, Q and A for form, event images for portfolio, and many more.
What's interesting about all the structured data markup work that we've done, I've seen it a few times where Google has released an update and made new requirements to the markup so that you appear on the results page as a rich result. Where we've already incorporated that previously into the markup that we automatically create. Meaning that you literally has a site owner. You literally had to do nothing in order to be aligned with the new requirements to appear as rich result, when in theory there was a potential, you would have had to gone through and update thousands upon thousands of your pages in order to align. One of the great things about the work that you've been doing is you end up automatically aligning without having to do much of anything, if anything at all.
Absolutely. And I think that's something that a lot of businesses will really benefit from from saving, saving that time and from, from being, you know, ahead of the pack with regards to being competitive. So it's a, it's a really, it's a really great feature that I, I'm sure a lot of people are grateful for. And, and it's great to see more Google Shopping and on rich results in other spaces.
Yeah. Because with the product market that we create automatically now, you're eligible to appear within Google Shopping automatically. Bonus.
Absolutely. Let's move on to other things that we did. We added images in sitemaps. So right now your sitemap has all the images are being added dynamically to your sitemaps and helping Google understand more your visual content. And this is kind of aligning with the focus that Google is putting lately on visual search as well. Our plan for next is to add also videos for the sitemaps, also automatically. And other than all of this, we are continuing always to add WIX apps to the SEO setting defaults, which is the structures that you can define for your pages. We added a Google post lately and also the WIX Portfolio, which is a new WIX app that you can use. So they are all integrated in the SEO setting default, so you can create structures for those type of pages. And soon we're going to add also the stores categories, which is a big deal. Let's talk about something big. Another big thing that happened is our integration with SEMrush. We partnered with Semrush, which is one of the leading tools to perform keyword research. We integrated with the keyword research tool and now you can perform the keyword research within our product, within the platform. In the SEO Checklist, you can choose any keyword that you want. You can analyze it and add it to your SEO checklist, and it will automatically be added to the SEO checklist. And I think the important thing to say that it's free, that even if you don't have an SEMrush account, you are eligible for 10 free searches a day. So you can really start exploring and building your SEO strategy with this. So let's see how it works. So it's in the SEO Setup checklist in the settings part. So you can click here on Semrush and click on get the App, and then you go for an installation process that you need to connect SEMrush with Wix. Pay attention that you don't need to go to the app market in order to install the app. It's already here within the product. So once you've got the application, you can see here the keywords that you already added to your SEO Setup checklist, and you can analyze them or you can analyze new keywords. You will get a list with your keyword and related keywords to this search, and you can see the search volume, how many users search for it, the trend, the difficulty to rank, and the search intent. So you can choose the best keyword for your pages on the site. You can check whatever keywords that you want and, and click Apply, and they're automatically being added to your checklist, which is really cool. Right now it's in the settings of the SEO Setup Checklist, but we are planning to edit in a lot of other places. For example, in the Setup checklist onboarding, when you start to look for the keywords and also in the panels. So there will be more about this coming up.
And one of the great things is that when you set up that account through wix to connect to Semrush, you're now eligible. You've now set up at the same time a freemium account on Semrush itself. So if you went over to SEMrush, you can use all the free, their free tools they have as part of their freemium model as well. So two birds with one stone.
Absolutely.
And I think one of the great things about, about these tools is that while people are learning to use them, there are, we have a great set of documentation. So this, this web, this webinar, the deck for this webinar will also be shared. So.
