Despite the evolution of the Wix platform for SEO, and despite Google’s own statements around Wix and ranking, the notion that you can’t rank a Wix site still persists.
But how true is it?
There is nothing preventing the ranking of a Wix site. So, YES! You can rank a Wix site and thousands upon thousands of site owners do!
Here's word from the horses mouth John Mueller (Google's SEO Big Cheese!):
“Wix is fine for SEO. A few years back it was pretty bad in terms of SEO, but they’ve made fantastic progress, and are now a fine platform for businesses. The reputation from back then lingers on, but don’t be swayed by it.”
Key Points
Wix System Infrastructure
The infrastructure used by Wix was built with SEO in mind.
Instant Home Page Indexing
Wix does things automatically, such as submitting sitemaps to Search Console to make crawling and indexing more efficient, making life easier for Google. There is a direct one-click connection to Search Console via the Wix dashboard that results in your homepage being instantly indexed.
Server Side Rendering & JavaScript
Wix uses server-side rendering to prevent any issues with Googlebot and JavaScript. This is per Google’s own recommendation and is Bing’s preferred solution as well when it comes to handling JavaScript – so no issue there.
SEO Tasks Done For You
Automatically creates structured data for product pages, event pages, and more.
Automatic redirection - if you change a URL on a Wix static page or on a product, booking, online program, or events page, the URL will automatically get redirected so you don’t need to implement a 301 redirect.
Images are auto-compressed and converted to WebP automatically.
There too many things that make life easier to list in this blog and they can be found here, The Complete Wix SEO Guide.
Good Content
While Wix may automate many things, this is not just the key to ranking well with a Wix site is undertaking good SEO. It’s about the content you create and what you do with that content.
It is important to:
Create and use a well crafted Content Strategy to reinforce topical/user relevancy - in other words create website and social media content that your users want and are interested in.
Use your depth of knowledge that only you have to create your niche.
Do your research!
The way Wix is built sets you up to rank well but ranking well doesn't just hinge on the technically capability of a CMS - it's bout doing the research, creating good quality content, keeping you website and social media content fresh, interacting with your audience and providing the audiene with the information that they want and need. Bring it all together and that is when Google rewards your efforts.