There's a lot of hate floating around the SEO community regarding Wix SEO.
Some people wonder if it's even possible to generate search traffic using the Wix platform.
Now, Wix obviously thinks you can.
In fact, they launched a contest in 2017 challenging the world to outrank them for the keyword, "SEO hero."
Winner takes home $50,000.
Long story short...Wix lost and doubts of using Wix for SEO continued.
But does anyone really have proof that Wix websites can't generate
just as much search traffic as the next platform?
Well, we compared SEO metrics from 3.2 million Wix websites
against the same number of WordPress domains.
And in this video, I'm going to show you the results of our data
and a few reasons why some SEOs aren't fans of Wix
when it comes to search engine optimization.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, the goal today isn't to prove that one CMS is better than the other.
I just want to bring some clarity through real data and let you decide for yourself.
So with that said, let's dig into the data.
To give you a quick background, we got our list of sample websites with the help of BuiltWith.com,
which is a service that shows you the different technologies websites are using.
Using their API, we grabbed around 3.2 million domains from Wix
and roughly the same amount of websites using WordPress.
And with the help of our data scientist, we used Ahrefs' search traffic and backlinks
data to draw our comparisons.
It's also important to note that we excluded subdomains from our sample sites
because other technologies or custom set ups could have been done there.
So the first thing we wanted to do was to get raw traffic stats.
So we created two buckets for each platform to better visualize the distribution of websites
that get search traffic.
The first bucket were domains that get at least some level of search traffic,
and the second were domains that get more than 100 search visits per month.
And here are the results.
We found that around 46.1% of WordPress websites got at least some monthly search traffic,
compared with only 1.39% of Wix sites.
Now, for our second bucket, 8.26% of the WordPress sample gets more than 100 monthly search visits
whereas our Wix sample, was down to 0.06%.
Now, it's pretty clear that on average, our sample list of WordPress sites
get significantly more organic traffic than our list of Wix sites.
But it's too soon to make any conclusions.
There are numerous factors that influence organic traffic.
One of the main factors being backlinks, which in my opinion speaks louder to the people
behind the websites as opposed to the platform itself.
So we analyzed the average Domain Rating, average number of "dofollow" referring domains,
and average monthly search traffic for each platform.
And if you're unfamiliar with these terms, Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric which represents
the overall strength of a website's backlink profile, and "dofollow" referring domains
are simply value passing links from unique websites.
As a whole, you'll see that the mean, or average DR for our WordPress sites
was nearly 3 times higher than Wix sites.
The number of "dofollow" referring domains was more than 22X higher for WordPress sites.
And for search traffic, you'll see that on average our list of WordPress sites gets around
49X the search traffic as our Wix sample.
Now, the thing with averages is that they aren't always the best measure to identify correlation.
So we also grabbed the median for each of these statistics.
And as you can see, the differences are way off compared to the mean.
So what does this all mean?
Here's what our data scientist had to say:
"When measuring central tendency of data, it's best to calculate both mean and median
and compare the two values.
Generally speaking, if both values are not too different from each other, we use the mean.
But a considerable difference between them indicates that the data is skewed.
When the data is skewed, large values have an enormous impact,
making the mean larger than the actual distribution that the data suggests.
In this case, the median is a more appropriate idea of the data distribution."
To paint a super clear picture, let's say we had 10 websites and 9 of them had 0 monthly search visits.
And the one outlier had 1000 monthly search visits.
The mean, or the average, would be 100 search visits per month.
Now, if we were to take the median of these same websites, then we'd have a value of 0,
which would be a better representation of search traffic in this sample.
Looking at our data set again, you'll see that since the mean and median are so far off,
the median would be a better representation, making correlation insignificant.
Now, we wanted to look deeper into our two buckets, which again, were websites that get
some kind of search traffic, and those that get over 100 monthly search visits.
But this time, we added 3 extra layers to our analysis.
#1. We leveled the sample sizes across the board.
So for each bucket, we randomly selected the same number of WordPress domains as Wix domains
to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison.
After all, there's no point comparing a whole army to just a few soldiers.
#2. For each of our buckets, we looked into the number of keywords the websites ranked for
in Google's top 10 search results.
We also summed up the traffic that these keywords accounted for.
And #3. We removed keywords that were exact matches to the domain.
This would exclude traffic the domain gets from keywords referring to its own brand.
Here are the results for bucket #1.
You'll see that WordPress is higher than Wix sites for both the number of top 10 keyword
rankings as well as the traffic these keywords account for.
But again, our data is insignificant as the mean and medians are still quite a bit off.
Now, looking at the second bucket of websites that get over 100 monthly search visits
is where things get interesting.
Both the mean and median aren't too far apart, and they show the same trend.
WordPress websites had a slightly higher number of top 10 organic keyword rankings,
but Wix sites got more organic traffic from their keywords.
Looking at this bucket a little deeper, you'll see that Wix websites had a higher Domain Rating,
but a lower number of "dofollow" referring domains.
So what this might be telling us is that our sample of Wix sites are getting more search traffic
based on non-link related factors.
The first one that comes to mind for me are branded queries.
For example, Long John Silver's, a popular restaurant chain, is a website that uses Wix.
And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, you'll see that they get around 139,000 search visits per month.
Now, looking at their Organic keywords report, you'll immediately see that the majority of their traffic
is actually the result of a strong brand name
as opposed to more generic keywords, like ranking for "seafood restaurant."
Now, there are no clear-cut conclusions where we can say that one platform is better than the next
based on organic search traffic figures alone.
But there are a couple of clear things that we've seen based on our data.
First, it seems as though more "SEO" might have been done on WordPress sites than Wix.
And we're able to see this based on the huge differences in organic search traffic as a whole,
as well as the number of referring domains pointing at these websites.
The second thing is that there doesn't appear to be a relationship between the platform used
and being able to rank in Google's top 10 search results.
On average, WordPress sites got more search traffic than Wix as a whole
and for our first bucket of domains that got some kind of search traffic.
But Wix had more search traffic on domains that get more than 100 monthly search visits.
So unfortunately, there are no clear-cut conclusions.
But there are certain things you should know as an SEO practitioner
or website owner about Wix vs. other platforms.
First, when it comes down to the absolute basics of on-page SEO like titles, meta descriptions, and URLs,
Wix is for the most part OK with pages.
But there are certain things in Wix that can't be customized,
which can be more annoying than anything else.
For example, from my observation, the blog structure seems to take on the URL structure
of domain.com/post/slug, which I'm personally not a fan of.
Also, when it comes down to anything custom, advanced, or technical,
you're going to run into additional limitations.
In fact, Wix says: "We are unable to provide support for external HTML codes
that are added to Wix sites as the codes have not been tested by Wix."
One example is if you plan to do multilingual SEO.
Wix doesn't support the hreflang tag at the time of making this video.
A moderator said on their forum: "There is still no way to access code directly, even with WixCode.
As far as I know - due to security reasons.
So, if this tag is not in the SEO settings for the site - then it's impossible to add it."
Another technical limitation related to SEO is the inability to modify your robots.txt file,
which is quite important in my opinion for larger sites.
Finally is a big one in the technical SEO space and that's regarding JavaScript.
Barry Adams said in this Twitter thread: "Wix relies on client-side JS to show content & links in most cases.
No JS equals no indexable content & no crawlable links.
Which, as you know, is terrible for SEO on multiple levels."
So here's my two cents on using Wix for SEO.
It all comes down to what you value.
Based on our data, if all you need are the absolute basics for on-page SEO,
then rest assured that our data supports that Wix sites don't necessarily have a hard time ranking in Google.
Wix is great for simply getting a basic website up fast
and for regular maintenance like changing text on your site,
even if you don't have a technical bone in your body.
But if you plan on using SEO as a long-term strategy, or you're hiring an agency to do SEO for you,
it may be advantageous to look into other platforms for scalability and customization.
Now, I'd love to hear from you.
What have your experiences been like using Wix for yours and your clients' websites?
Let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video, then make sure to like, share
and subscribe for actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
So until the next tutorial or data study,
keep grinding away, and I'll see you in the next video.