Wix is a great platform for building and managing your website and it comes with some really useful advanced SEO tools to help you rank for keywords, phrases and questions related to your business and industry, but to get the best out of the platform, you need to invest in a structured Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy plan.
SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that it shows up in search engines like Google and Bing. This can be achieved by using a range of on-page and off-page SEO strategies. However, unlike other types of marketing, you won’t see results overnight.
This begs the question, how long will it take before you start to see results from your SEO campaign? This is a difficult question to answer because every website is different, but as a rough guide, it can take anything from 4-6 months before you start to see any meaningful increase in website organic traffic and that is if you have the right SEO strategy in place. If you are competing hyper-local in a very niche industry, you may achieve top rankings within a couple of months.
Why does SEO take so long?
Any worthwhile SEO campaign is a combination of processes that focus on both on-page and off-page ranking factors. There are many ranking factors to consider, including backlink profile, keyword density, quality of website content, metadata, and so on. Although Google do not specifically state the amount of ranking factors they have, we believe within the SEO industry to be around 200 different factors. Some carry more weight than others.
To successfully increase organic Search Engine traffic, your SEO campaign must focus, not on just one of these ranking factors, but all of them. This can take a little time to get right, especially if your website has had little or no SEO optimization work done before.
While we know this is not a particularly accurate answer, it is the best we can do without auditing your website first. However, it might be helpful at this stage to examine the three primary factors that determine how long your campaign will take to see results.
The 3 factors that affect SEO
When we look at creating an SEO campaign for a new Wix website, we typically divide the work into the following three categories:
1. Content
The content on your website is one of the most critical things to get right, but it also takes the longest to see results. What do we mean by content? Put simply, it's the words and images people see when they visit your pages.
A solid content strategy delivers what your website visitors are looking for. There is a myth that you just need to have more content on your webpage than the competition to outrank them, but this is not necessarily the case. When it comes to content, quality is what counts, not quantity.
A good content strategy delivers high-quality (written specifically to match the users intent) content regularly. This will not only encourage visitors to come back to your website but will also reduce the amount of time it takes for the search engines to index the page because websites that are updated regularly are crawled more often.
2. Inbound links
Despite what you hear, inbound links still play an important role in ranking websites. Inbound links are essentially third-party websites that link to your website. Search engines see this as a vote of confidence, so the more inbound links you have, the better.
But it’s not just about quantity, the quality and relevancy of links are important as well, so you should prioritize links from popular high-traffic websites within your niche. This will allow you to achieve the greatest benefit over the shortest time. You need other quality websites who share the same target audience as you, to link back to your website from their website.
3. Competition
The competition for keywords is another major consideration. As a rule of thumb, the less competition there is for a keyword, the sooner you’ll start ranking for it. But it is rare these days to find popular keywords in any town or city without a significant amount of competition.
That is why you should prioritize long-tail keywords first, as these typically have less competition than shorter primary keywords. For example, “scale and polish hygienist Manchester” has much less competition than “Dentist Manchester”, so you will see results from this search term much earlier.
How using WIX advanced SEO tools can help
All of the above SEO strategies take time to implement, but the good news is that you are using Wix as your website platform of choice.
Wix has several advanced SEO tools built-in that can reduce the amount of time it takes before you see results. Most of these tools can be accessed through the Advanced SEO tab on the Wix dashboard.
Meta tags
Meta tags are a small but important aspect of SEO. These invisible tags can’t be seen by users as they are within the website code itself, but provide vital data to search engines about what your page is about.
The five most important meta-tags are:
Title tag
Mega description
Robots meta tag
Wix allows you to easily edit these tags without having to edit the underlying code of the website. This makes it easy to optimize tags such as titles and meta descriptions to deliver results quickly.
Image optimization
Images are one of the most important aspects of your website, some would say the most important, but they are also difficult to get right. This is partly because most website management platforms don’t provide adequate image editing tools.
But with Wix, all the imaging editing tools you need are built into the platform. This allows you to easily resize images for different versions of your website, mobile, desktop, tablet, etc. Optimise images so that they download quickly and crop them so they fit neatly into the page.
Structured data
Structured data ensures that all relevant data on your website is organised and tagged logically. This helps search engines to deliver more relevant search results.
To see how useful structured data can be, type any search term into Google. The result will show a combination of live maps, items for sale, rich snippets and more. This level of detail is only possible thanks to the use of structured data tags.
Structured data can take the form of rich snippets, featured snippets, image and video carousels, maps, knowledge boxes and more. Wix allows you to inject these into your web pages with writing code. This greatly simplifies adding structured data, allowing you to benefit from enhanced search listings sooner.
Canonical URLs
Sometimes, websites can show multiple pages to a search engine that contain the same content. An example would be a list of blog posts set to show the most read posts first rather than the date published. These are seen as two separate pages to a search engine, even though they contain the same data.
Canonical tags help search engines to determine which pages are the original and which ones should be ignored. Helping search engines navigate your website in this way can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes for your changes to show up in the search results.
Wix automatically adds self-referring canonical tags to each new page you create, so you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this powerful SEO tool. Wix does everything for you in the background, which frees you up to create more great content which will have an even greater impact.
Contact us for more information
By reading this article 'How long does SEO take to work on Wix', you may know that you need help with your Wix SEO but are not sure how long it will take to start driving new business. If this is the case, get in touch with the WiX SEO Guy and start a conversation. Alternatively, if you have time on your hands and just need a point in the right direction, take a tour through our Wix SEO Course to take your personal SEO knowledge to a whole new level.