Why Wix Is Bad At SEO
August 15, 2017
It has become recently fashionable in the SEO sector to kick Wix, sorry to pile on, but Wix SEO is a bit of a joke frankly and I’m getting pretty annoyed with their practices and a particular YouTube campaign they are running.
Wix has been bombarding me (anyone else?) with ads from Karli Kloss about her new Wix website. It’s multiple times a day, often back to back. Very annoying. Set a frequency limit for your YouTube campaign, please? Thanks.
I had no idea who she was, and why would this attractive young woman be shilling free websites for Wix?
So, instead of just Googling it for myself I took out my annoyance on the Wix Twitter account. I really should have just Googled her, much more on that later.
Sorry Karlie, I spelled your name wrong in my Tweet. I still have no idea who you are aside from the basic bio. One question for you, if you can code, why are you using Wix for your website? You could do so much better on your own.
When I Googled Karlie Kloss, her website doesn’t show up on the first page of results.
Wait what?
Yes, karliekloss.com doesn’t rank #1 for “Karlie Kloss.” In fact it’s not even on the first page.
Wikipedia is number one, Instagram, Facebook, modeling profiles, Kode with Klossy, but the exact match domain is nowhere to be found. When you Google, “karlie kloss website” the exact match domain is #5, and it is behind a Karlie Kloss fan site. Not even on the first couple of pages. What’s going on? Ms. Kloss is a Victoria Secret model and runs a organization to help teach girls to code (which also runs their website on Wix). She seems very intelligent and admirable but she has hitched her wagon to the wrong team.
You really need to own your branded search. This is more like getting pwned.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the SERP. Don’t laugh, I still use Market Samurai, it’s great for quick and easy analysis of a SERP.
I had to add the domain to the analysis because it isn’t on the first page, it wasn’t ranked #1 just in case that looks confusing.
Couple of things that really stand out here: Index Count, Referring Domains, and Domain Age. The age of the domain is older that Kode with Klossy but has fewer domains linking to that site (omg the ad is playing on YouTube right now!), probably because of the recent launch. Index Count allegedly doesn’t matter that much, but large authoritative sites like Wikipedia and Amazon always seem to rank well.
Even so, the exact match domain should really rank better for that search term.
What really stands out is that Market Samurai can’t read the title, URL, meta description, or heading on the site. Highlighted in red on the spreadsheet. Google had this problem with Wix’s indexing, and this is a big problem. Screaming Frog was able to read those elements, so it’s probably more about Market Samurai’s crawler than Wix, but given Wix’s history with crawlers, it’s a safe bet that there are crawling issues.
This commenter was having the same issue with external crawlers on Wix. Also has two h1 tags like Karlie’s site.
Another major no-no is how the h1 tag was implemented. There are two tags when there should be one. There is a stylized ‘K’ and the h1 is tagged “alrie” and the second one is tagged, “Kloss.”
“Karlie Kloss” SERP Analysis
It’s weird that the ‘K’ comes after in the code, it’s a jumble of nested divs so it’s difficult to tell what is going on with the layout. It’s not worth figuring out in my opinion, it’s not exactly web standard. There are ways to change the first character using CSS, it would be a lot cleaner than how it is now.
https://gist.github.com/keepkalm/4a3b36124cdd1749afb20004bbe5032e
I don’t want to count all the spans and inline styles and tell you how wrong it is. I really don’t. Not to mention the inline styles.
There is zero reason to code things like this. It just makes my head hurt and I am starting to think Wix is doing this on purpose. Even when you use the escaped fragment for AJAX, the code is not much better to read. The “Arlie Kloss” multiple h1 really sticks out.
So, there is a lot of content devoted to Karlie Kloss, 310,000 allintitle results. She is a model after all, people pay her to appear in their content. It’s not too unreasonable higher authority publications will outrank a recently launched website.
So let’s dig into the the results when you search specifically for “karlie kloss website?” The results are almost worse.
“Karlie Kloss Website” SERP Analysis
The press releases announcing the website launch are outranking the website.
That just shouldn’t happen. Even the investor blog for wix (running on ASP) is outranking the Wix site. And still getting beat out by the fan site. At least it is on the first page. Karlie, if you are reading this you might want to change your site title to, “Karlie Kloss | The Official Website of Karlie Kloss.” I can’t SEO that any more without looking really silly.
Although it may not help much if the title tag can’t be read by a crawler.
This is a superficial analysis that isn’t digging very deep into other issues like page speed or schema. You don’t graduate to the next hurdle when you trip over the first and when your code looks this bad there isn’t much point in further investigation. But I did anyway. No rel=”canonical” set. And the crawling/indexation issue still looks like it is a problem.
In fact when I ran My Free SEO Audit it found more indexation issues. No headings no images! What? Something is not right here.
Indexation is critical! You can only rank for what Google can read.
Wix is well aware of their SEO defiencies, their little “SEO Hero” straw-man stunt was enough to show how sensitive they are to that persistent criticism. But when your new spokesperson can’t rank an exact match domain, I’d say there are some serious SEO issues and there should be a healthy dose of embarrassment to go around at Wix HQ. They have had plenty of time to fix these issues and Wix SEO has not gotten any better.
https://giphy.com/gifs/futurama-seo-zoidberg-3oEhmT5XAr54WNrkpG
Wix is much better at marketing than they are at websites. They are almost as good as GoDaddy at making themselves seem like a respected tech company. Wix has really targeted small-business owners with their messaging directed at pain points: finding a web designer, direct expense, and technical ability. They are quite effective from based on feedback I hear from clients. They always bring up Wix as a website option when we meet, and think WordPress is “just a blog.”
I find the WordPress ads for SMBs are more aspirational/inspirational than focused on pain points of business owners. I’m glad Automattic is advertising and I hope they keep at it and tweak the messaging slightly to let people know that WordPress is an easy and affordable option for a business website.
What good is a website without visitors?
Your presence on Google is key to that discovery. Google drives the vast majority of Internet traffic to websites. 25% of Internet traffic is just Google and more than 64% of total traffic to the rest of the web.
Even if Wix is free website builder, it’s still a poor value for your business and a big waste of time to figure out. The other cost is lost opportunity, missing out on additional traffic, and the time spent building something that cannot be expanded upon. You can’t run Google Analytics on Wix’s free version, you need to upgrade for that feature.
Wix isn’t really free.
Here’s our audit comparing the two Wix sites, if you can run your own SEO Audit for your site and keywords here.
Karlie Kloss Wix SEO Audit
If I were auditing this site I would fetch and render with Google Search Console to see what exactly Googlebot can crawl on this site. My suspicion is that it will be very enlightening on what is actually readable by Google. The variety of issues I encountered with my crawlers should be enough to raise anyone’s suspicions.
Something tells me not to trust Wix’s own SEO crawler, I am getting a premonition of a hardwired green lights. All is well, move along.
Just a final note, really want to be clear that this isn’t about Karlie Kloss, it’s about Wix. It’s not her fault that Wix is annoying people with their advertising practices on YouTube. And it’s certainly not her fault that Wix is Wix and is bad at SEO.
I’ll donate any ad revenue from this post to Kode With Klossy and even instruct a session on how to verify Google Search Console and install Google Analytics. Or even better, how to code this site from scratch.
So please share this post and stop building websites with Wix. Think of the children.
If you want a PDF copy of the SEO Audit we generated for this project, we will email it to you. Embedding a PDF into WordPress takes some customization and it stopped working when we switched hosts.
UPDATE: Google is deindexing karliekloss.com, there are two results for “site:karliekloss.com” and none of them are the actual home page.
UPDATE: Wix SEO Review for 2018, it’s not Wix, it’s your “developer.”
