Ranking your Wix website aka Wix SEO.
How do you do it?
Simple, ditch the Wix! Wix is not SEO friendly, it never has been and probably never will be. It would have to completely redevelop how the platform works.
There is a lot of hype around Wix SEO, I have even seen companies offering Wix SEO services! But that’s all it is, hype. Wix is one of the worst platforms for a business to use when trying to get an online presence in organic search. At some point I might do another SEO review on the state of Wix in 2020, but until then you can read my very long journey of informing people about the pitfalls of Wix and it’s over priced, very bad Search Engine Friendly code structure.
This was my first blog post talking bad about Wix, as this was when Wix was really starting to gain traction on the internet. Or maybe just started to pop up on my radar. As a developer who writes custom code and does custom designs, I was quite annoyed by all the good reviews of all these affiliate marketers. Not to mention the “wix companies” offering paid services to use the Wix Platform. These push button platform “design companies” are still at large!
The first of it’s kind, and maybe the only of it’s kind. In 2013 after Wix started getting rid of it’s flash framework, I dove deep into the source code of it’s HTML5 version. And it was not pretty! All the SEO standards were being broken and overall the code was a huge mess. The conclusion was Wix was not SEO friendly and it was using very bad advertising tactics to promote an SEO friendly system. (again mostly these affiliate marketers spreading bad information to cash in on a crappy platform)
Google drops Wix from it’s search index
In 2015 I reported and went into depth about why Google dropped 10-100 of thousands of Wix websites out of their search engine. Something I had been commenting on since 2013 with my first Wix SEO analysis.
And lastly another marketing tactic. Wix at the time of writing this post is running a “Wix SEO Competition”, of course it is sponsored by them so who knows how real this competition really is. Their goal, to have 2 companies try and out rank each other for the term “Wix SEO”. One site using Wix’s platform and the other using whichever platform they want. I personally feel like is just a ploy to push down all the bad things ranking for Wix SEO. But also not sure it’s really a good gauge of the typical website owner’s experience with ranking in Google. If you have highly professionals SEO marketing your site, this is a level of SEO that the platform only plays a small part of your rankings in Google.
SEO is more than just filling in the “SEO” box on the backend of your website. You actually have to go out and get people to link to your website, also known as backlinks. Now where the quality of your platform or code base comes into play, is how well Google can crawl, index, and navigate your website. This is where platforms like WordPress win every time hands down. This is the SEO friendly part everyone is talking about. It’s not the rankings! That has too many variables. The other factor this “Wix SEO Competition” is not taking into consideration is the time (or in the case of a business owner the amount of money, since time is money and they will be hiring someone to market their website) it takes to rank the site. If it takes 3-5 times more time and or money to rank the site for same terms then that platform is surely not SEO friendly.
Not to mention there are some black hat tactics that could come into play. And not too long ago, and it might still be true, by definition SEO was against Google’s Guidelines! So really there would be no white or black hat SEO, all SEO is against Google’s Guidelines! And of course this might of changed as I haven’t looked at Google’s Guidelines in quite a few years, as I don’t really offer SEO to clients anymore.
*==== UPDATE ====*
The WIX SEO competition results are in, and as I already suspected the wixseolovers.com won, but barely. Now all and all with a 6 month opportunity to preform on the keyword WIX SEO, neither company actually ranked that well for the term. They were found on page 5 and 6 of Google (at the time of updating this post). In my mind this isn’t very good results all around! But I can only imagine the competition for that keyword.
But here is a quick glance breakdown. I pulled both site’s backlinks off ahrefs.com and as you can see the winning website has 10x more backlinks! Remember when I said if it takes 3-5 times more time (which equals 3-5 times more money) then that doesn’t make that platform better for SEO. In this case its 10 times! So based off this math, is woxseolovers.com really a winner? In my opinion it is not. After all the wixseohaters.com site was only a handful of places behind.
*====UPDATE 3 Months Later ====*
So how does the SEO factor stand after 3 full months after the competition ended? Well bad news for WIX, the haters are out ranking the lovers. Yup a better assessment of SEO is to see how the SEO stands over time. And in this case I see wixseohaters.com is out ranking wixseolovers.com. No big surprise to me actually! Wix Haters is ranking third of second page and Wix Lovers is last position on first page (10th). A 7 position difference. So turns out that 10x more work for 10x more backlinks didn’t actually pay off. Just another reason not to use WIX.com
