How complex is it to index in search engines a website created with Wix (for SEO purposes)? Not much, and that's precisely what this article is about.
Why it’s important getting a Wix site indexed?
To most people, search engines are just mega-encyclopedias pulling out information in milliseconds. But for small businesses and publishers, search engines like Google and Bing are free marketing tools to boost online visibility and business. When your website appears in search results, people across the globe can discover your brand, blogs, products, and services.
Indexing is one of the most essential components of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Without getting your Wix site indexed, no one can find it in search results—zero organic traffic, lead generation, engagements, and conversions (sales).
Simply put, unindexed URLs are non-existent pages in the eyes of a search engine and its users. And that's not good.
How fast do search engines index a Wix website?
Search engines can index Wix websites and pages from a couple of days to several weeks. In short, the indexing period varies across websites. However, URLs with high-quality content or from high-authority websites (of both) are typically indexed faster than others.
Google and other search engines can automatically index newly published content as long as it is visible and accessible. However, if it takes time for search engines to discover your new website or some its pages, you may opt submitting Wix site to search engines or ask for assistance from a third-party SEO indexing tool.
How to get my Wix website on Google
In this section, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to getting your Wix site indexed on Google.
1.- Make your Wix website visible to search engines
Upon completion of your Wix website, activate its online visibility in your “SEO Dashboard”. Then, press “Go To SEO Settings”.
Afterward, enable the “Let search engines index your site” toggle. Your website is now available for crawling by search engine bots.
If you're lucky (and have some good backlinks), Googlebot might quickly find your new website and get it indexed right away. Otherwise, proceed to the next step to manually “nudge” Google to index your site hastily.
2.- Submit your site to Google
In this step, you must have an XML sitemap ready for submission to Google.
A sitemap is an extensible markup language (XML) file that indicates all relevant pages on your website and their relationships. This file also informs Google about your pages’ latest modification date, photos, videos, and mobile / desktop versions.
Sitemaps can streamline the indexing process by providing Googlebot with a clear overview of your site’s structure, helping it find all the URLs that should be indexed. Also, if you have orphan pages (pages with no inbound links pointing to them) on your website, sitemaps can facilitate search engine’s discovery of these pages. Orphan pages are not good for SEO, but we will discuss this in detail another time.
According to Wix, you don’t need a sitemap if your website is a single-page one, rarely updated, or mostly has private and gated content.
But if you have a site with hundreds of pages, blogs, and media... A sitemap is really necessary.
Wix creates sitemaps automatically. To access it, you must type [yourdomain].com/sitemap.xml in your browser.
Submitting a Wix website to Google means that you have to add its sitemap to the Google Search Console (GSC), the official Google tool for webmasters. Upon verification of your GSC account, you can submit a sitemap by following these steps:
- Visit Google Search Console.
- Pick your website from the drop-down menu.
- In the menu section, click Sitemaps.
- Under the Add a new sitemap field, enter the URL of your website’s sitemap. For instance, add mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.
- Click Submit.
That’s it! Google will recognize your sitemap submission and will start crawling your Wix website. When you make changes to the site, the sitemap will be updated automatically. So, no need to re-send it to Google.
How to get my Wix website on Bing
The process to get your Wix website indexed in Bing is super similar to Google's.
1. Make your Wix website visible to search engines
Go to the “SEO Dashboard” of your Wix admin > Click “Go To SEO Settings” > Activate the “Let search engines index your site” toggle.
Bing might automatically crawl and index your website upon doing this (changing the meta robots tag from “noindex” to “index”). Otherwise, you have to manually submit your website to the Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Submit a sitemap to Bing
Visit the Bing Webmaster Tool. Select your website from the menu afterward. Click Sitemaps > Submit Sitemap.
Enter your Wix website’s sitemap URL in the space provided, then click Enter.
Tips to effectively index Wix website in search engines
1. Produce high-quality content
Google wants well-written, informative, and accurate content (from real people...) in its search results. So, by producing high-quality content, you can tell Google that your site is worthy to be indexed.
2. Make your Wix website mobile-optimized
Google favors mobile-friendly websites and prioritizes them for indexing (and ranking). Proof of this is that the version of Googlebot that currently crawls the Internet is the mobile / smartphone version:
You can easily make your Wix site mobile-friendly by following these steps:
- In the top bar of the Wix editor, click Settings.
- Select Mobile Friendly.
- Enable the Mobile Friendly toggle.
When you activate this option, Wix will automatically resize and optimize your images and fonts for mobile devices and navigation.
3. Improve internal linking
Googlebot discovers new content by, among others, navigating across links. So, make sure that your existing (and indexed) pages are linking to the new content / URLs you want Google to index. Use descriptive anchor texts when making hyperlinks to give Google some context about the content.
4. Get high-quality backlinks
Reputable websites in your niche must have some external links pointing to their pages so search engines can find them. One way to acquire these backlinks is to write high-quality content on other websites’ blogs and then add some links directing to your website. This is commonly known as "Guest posting".
There are countless ways and techniques to build quality links. Someday we will publish an article that deals exclusively with this topic.
5. Promote content outside Google
You can also promote your blogs and articles on social media (LinkedIn, 𝕏, YouTube) and online forums / communities to boost their online visibility and push Google to crawl your website.
Get your Wix website indexed in (less than) 48 hours
With INDEXED.pro, the website URL indexer, you can index your Wix URLs automatically in less than 48 hours. Our SEO indexing tool harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, the GSC API, and the indexing API to fast-track the indexing process.
Simply connect your GSC account, choose the XML sitemaps, invite Service Accounts, and activate our auto-indexing process.
Sign up now and make your Wix website the next SEO superstar.