Complete Wix SEO Guide

Wix remains one of the most budget-friendly website builders and content management systems (CMS) available today. With plans starting at just £9.00 per month, it’s a compelling option compared to other widely used platforms like WordPress.

However, ongoing user complaints about site performance have sparked doubts about Wix’s effectiveness as a CMS. Are these concerns justified, particularly when it comes to SEO? Let’s dive in.

Does Wix SEO Work?

In short, yes. Wix SEO is fully capable of helping your website rank well and hold its own against competitors hosted on other platforms, including WordPress.

If that piques your interest, here’s an updated look at how Wix SEO can boost your business in search engine results.

Wix SEO vs. WordPress SEO

WordPress currently powers around 43% of websites globally, according to recent estimates, whilst Wix hosts over 22 million sites. WordPress’s commanding market share often stems from its reputation as the more flexible and customisable CMS of the two.

With a broader range of SEO tools and a vast ecosystem of plugins, WordPress might seem the obvious choice. However, this flexibility comes with a downside: WordPress sites can be prone to breaking—whether due to plugin conflicts, theme updates, or security issues—and often require more maintenance, especially for users without technical know-how. Regular updates, backups, and troubleshooting are standard, which can feel daunting compared to Wix’s more managed setup.

So, is WordPress truly the clear winner? Not necessarily.

Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, has shed light on this ongoing Wix vs. WordPress debate. “From what I see with small business websites, technical SEO issues are less common than they used to be. The real challenge now is often the quality of the content,” he remarked in a recent discussion.

This insight shifts the focus: your choice of CMS matters less for ranking than the strength of your content and basic SEO execution. Whether you’re on Wix or WordPress, success hinges on substance over platform. For most small businesses, advanced SEO tactics aren’t essential. High-quality content paired with solid, straightforward SEO practices is enough to get noticed by search engines.

Key Things to Know About Using Wix SEO Wiz

Whilst WordPress offers greater scalability for complex projects, Wix excels in accessibility—especially for beginners. If you’re considering Wix for your SEO efforts, here are three essentials to understand:

1. You’ll Need Basic SEO Knowledge

Wix SEO Wiz is arguably the most beginner-friendly SEO tool available. Its step-by-step guidance takes you from setup to optimisation with ease, making it ideal for novices. That said, a basic understanding of SEO—think keyword research, meta tag usage, and site structure—will help you make the most of it.

2. Plugin Options May Feel Limited

Unlike WordPress, an open-source CMS boasting over 60,000 plugins and nearly 9,000 themes, Wix operates as a closed-source system. Its Wix App Market offers 250+ apps—fewer choices, but tightly integrated and reliable for Wix sites.

Think of it like iOS versus Android: Android offers endless customisation, but Apple’s curated App Store still delivers quality. Wix’s smaller pool doesn’t mean you’re missing out. Plus, its third-party SEO apps, such as Site Booster or Rabbit SEO, consistently perform well and meet most needs.

3. Convenience Comes First

Wix prioritises simplicity over complexity, which can be a trade-off for power users but a blessing for those starting out. Its drag-and-drop interface and built-in tools, like SEO Wiz, streamline the process of getting a site live and optimised without needing coding skills or external hosting—sparing you the maintenance headaches that WordPress users often encounter.

You can hire a Wix SEO expert anytime

In case you can’t figure out Wix SEO, the CMS allows you to hire an SEO expert via the platform itself. It asks you for some details regarding your requirement and connects you with the most suitable provider within hours. It saves you time and you know you are getting authorized support for your site.

What is wrong with Wix SEO? Should you worry?

Wix has put in a lot of work to improve their SEO Wiz. Still, the following are some of the common complaints that Wix users have.

Poor site ranking

Wix users often complain about not getting sufficient exposure on the search engines. But in 2016, Wix fixed their terrible URL structure by getting rid of ‘#’ that accompanied every page URL. Since then, thousands of sites have seen a difference.

According to Wix’s report, 82% of sites rank higher using Wix SEO Wiz and 67% of sites appear on the first page of Google.

Verdict: You should not worry about ranking low using Wix.

Not enough SEO tools

Wix is absolute value for money, which means that you don’t have enough SEO tools to work with. But you don’t need 5000 tools to rank. You only need one good tool to get the job done.

For instance, WordPress has a plethora of free and paid SEO tools but you can count the popular ones on your fingertips. Try it! Besides Yoast and RankMath, there are very few exclusive SEO tools that you can use to optimise your website.

Verdict: You should not worry about not having enough SEO tools on Wix.

Lack of advanced SEO options

The entire USP of Wix is that it is beginner-friendly. But before we criticize the system, let’s understand what people are referring to when talking about ‘advanced tools.’

While every SEO expert has a different notion of ‘advanced,’ competitor analysis, responsive SEO design, planning featured snippets, backlinking, targeting voice search, advanced analytics and reports are some commonly spoken of terms.

However, except for off-site SEO, which no CMS proactively supports, Wix can handle all those tasks. The only useful advanced feature that Wix really needs to add is bulk SEO tools, so you don’t have to optimise your site page-by-page.

Verdict: You should not worry about the lack of advanced SEO options.

No AMP support

For now, Wix does not support Accelerated Mobile Pages. Because AMP is quite an advanced feature, Wix has not introduced this feature in their CMS. That said, if your site is mobile-friendly and has basic SEO integrated into it, you won’t need AMP support.

Verdict: You should worry about not having AMP support if you are looking to launch them for your business.

The pros of using Wix SEO

As you can see, Wix has already resolved three out of the four major snags. And there are some other favorable SEO benefits for users, such as:

In-built SEO Wiz

Unlike other CMSs, you don’t have to find the right SEO apps to optimise your site. Wix SEO Wiz is a built-in tool that eliminates the need for multiple SEO tools. This one feature allows you to concentrate on each specific content without managing a ton of apps, helping you rank your site and easily compete with other online businesses.

In-built SEO guide

The best part about Wix SEO Wiz is that it comes with a step-by-step guide for optimisation. If you are a small business owner or hosting a website for the first time, Wix will help you set up your SEO plan by providing you with clear actions, unlike any other CMS.

If you find it difficult to get around, Wix is actually equipped to offer you a customized plan. It asks you a few questions about your business, location, and the search terms that you wish to rank for, and instantly generates an SEO plan for your site.

No coding required

Wix is a straightforward drag and drop site builder, so you don’t have to know any coding to create or optimise your website. All SEO activity can be carried out using the Wix SEO Wiz, making it really convenient for you to appear in search results.

What SEO features does Wix have?

A comprehensive SEO tool, Wix SEO Wiz offers everything you need to get started with your site optimisation. Here is what you get when you set up your Wix site.

Default and custom title tags, meta descriptions, H tags (H1, H2, etc.)
SEO patterns to automatically update sitewide default settings
Custom URLs for every page
Alt image tags to optimise photos on the page
Already optimised mobile-friendly templates
Google Analytics & Search Console integration
Canonical tags
HTTPS
XML sitemap
Schema markup
Structured data
Social share settings
Instant indexing

The more you learn about how these features work, the better you can optimise your website. In fact, one of Wix’s users jumped from page 14 to page 1 after using SEO Wiz for just one month.

15 ways to boost your Wix website using SEO

SEO can be challenging if you are clueless about it. So, if you believe Wix can make having an online presence easier for you, here are 15 tips to optimise your Wix site using SEO.

1. Do keyword research to find long-tail keywords

Wix SEO Wiz allows you to conduct basic keyword research for your site. But if you need tangible results, start by looking for what is trending. Google Trends works perfectly for this.

Use other keyword research tools to find combinations of search terms that people are using to connect with providers. Answer the Public, Keyword Planner, Keyword Sheeter, and Keyword Surfer are a few common free choices out there.

Remember that you don’t always have to go for the most popular terms. In fact, popular keywords are the hardest to optimise due to high competition. So, go for those that are incredibly specific and have low SEO difficulty as you have a higher chance of ranking with them.

2. Set up Wix SEO Wiz

Once you narrow down your keywords, enter the combinations of your keywords in Wix SEO Wiz. The tool has a brilliant feature that allows you to check the strength of your keywords, so you know you are using the best possible search terms. You can choose up to 5 keywords at a time to optimise your site.

3. Choose the right domain

If you are operating in a highly competitive industry (ex. digital marketing), consider getting a domain that includes your main keyword. For example, if you are a career coach, you might want to work those words into your domain name to make it easier for people to find you.

4. Write unique titles & descriptions

The internet is a jungle and it is easy to get lost in it because if you are writing something, chances are that somebody else has already written about it. So, your titles and meta descriptions are the only two things that increase the clickability of your content.

When writing your titles and descriptions, think like a reader. For instance, from the above results, which are you most likely to click on? They all look the same and each of these sites has a high domain authority. But one of them is likely to receive more traffic than others. Your goal should be to be that site.

To create unique titles, you can also use title generators by HubSpot, Portent, or SEMRush.

4. Make your site mobile-friendly

Source: Statista

Smartphones make for almost 50% of total site traffic. And as you can see, the figure is growing every year. So, a site that is not optimised for mobile browsing might as well be taken off the web as it is bound to experience a ton of lead leakage across the site.

6. Verify your site to officially claim ownership of your site

Once your site is ready, connect it with search engines. Google Search Console, Baidu, Bing, and Yandex are a few search engines you can start off with. This will help you get featured in their search results.

Then, add your site to Google Analytics to get in-depth user insights. Verifying your site can take some time but

7. Submit a sitemap

The best part about Wix is that it only takes 30 seconds to index your site. For reference, other CMSs take up to 4 days to do the same.

8. Structure your site

Wix sites are already optimally structured. But if you wish to make a few tweaks to your design, you can do so easily using the designing guides on the toolbar. Remember to structure your site according to the various aspect ratios. Also, consider how your site would appear in split windows and smaller screens as millions of users prefer multitasking.

9. Optimise your site images

Search engines can’t read images, so you ought to add short descriptions to each of them to make crawling easier for search engines. Alt tags also play a big role in image searches. If your site or content does not rank in the ‘all’ section of the search results, optimising images might help you rank under the ‘images’ section.

10. Publish value-based content

Source: Moz

Google uses specific criteria to rank content effectively. To ensure its value, the search engine urges website owners to create content that aligns with its E-E-A-T guidelines. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness—key factors that determine your content’s credibility. If your site falls short in any of these areas, it’s unlikely to perform well in search results.

11. Optimise page URLs

An optimised URL helps you rank higher even when you are hosting your site on Wix. For instance, Tech Crunch can often be found using popular but relevant keywords in their URLs to increase their chances of getting noticed. Here, they have used a long-tail search term “Instagram WhatsApp down,” which is exactly what people were searching online when this happened.

12. Add internal links

For the longest time, Wix had a poor interlinking system. But after their 2016 update, Wix SEO Wiz not only supports interlinking but also encourages site users to interlink their pages as an essential SEO practice.

13. Get more backlinks

One of the common complaints that Wix users previously had was the system’s inability to offer good backlinking opportunities. But that is another element that Wix has fixed and even offers a guide on how to effectively build backlinks.

14. Set up local SEO

Source: Search Engine Journal

49% of businesses enjoy more views when they set up local SEO. So, if you are a local business, consider setting up local SEO to get noticed by local customers. All you need to do is claim your business on Google My Business, so when anybody is looking for providers related to your keywords, you have better chances of getting their business as they are near you.

15. Analyze, improve, repeat

The most successful sites are those that are continuously improving their SEO plans. Although you don’t have to redesign your Wix website every day or change your keywords every week, you ought to focus on improving on what you have already built.

The key is sustainability. Ensure that your SEO modifications align with the results you desire and that they are well-thought-out.

Finally, remember that every SEO plan takes roughly 3 months to show tangible results. So, while you keep at it, keep yourself from expecting a miracle.

So, who ideally should create a Wix site?

With Google’s algorithms becoming more accommodating and sophisticated, hosting a website has become easier than ever. As long as you have a digital presence, creating a site on any CMS is a wise decision. But does that apply to Wix?

Simply put, any business looking for a decent web presence can opt for a Wix site. The SEO plans are powerful enough to make a place for your site in search results. So, with a little help and nudge in the right direction, you can also have a thriving online presence using Wix SEO.