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Crystal Carter on SEO, Multiple Site Management, Wix Studio and More!
Manage episode 424672518 series 2733
In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn the best way for agencies to manage websites, especially if you offer SEO as a service, and how to move fast enough so that you never miss opportunities.
Brought to you by our sponsors: NetSuite and Wix Studio
She’s been on both the client and agency side. Working with a team that designed sites and provided SEO services set her up perfectly for Head of SEO Communications
Organizing clients by CMS and the joy of fixing something for marketers when it goes out to millions of users
Taking advantage of the efficiencies of scale when managing multiple sites
Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!
Templates and included APIs make it easier to increase velocity, and for agencies to service their clients quickly
Template marketplace opens up new opportunities
12:38 – 14:15 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.
Streamlining the setup too, domain name, SSL, hosting, CDN
Simplifying all the best practices SEO
SEMrush, Wincher, SE Ranking tools included, Alt text fix tool
AI Tag Generators, AI Title Generators, Video eligible for rich results
Integrations with Salesforce, Amazon, Google Ads
Wix Studio Hub and the SERPs Up Podcast
Media Recco: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Pivot
Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on exercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
John Wall – 00:01
Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio.
Speaker 3 – 00:10
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall – 00:18
Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we’re talking with Crystal Carter. She’s head of SEO communications at Wix. She’s an SEO and digital marketing professional who’s worked with clients like Disney, McDonald’s, and Tomy. She speaks and writes about SEO and is a regular on the SERPs Up SEO podcast. In fact, we’ve talked over there. Crystal, welcome to the show.
Crystal Carter – 00:38
Thank you so much, John. I’m really pleased to be here. Big fan of the show and, yeah, big fan of the work that you do at your team.
John Wall – 00:44
Thank you. It’s been so long, I actually had to dig in and it has been far too long. We normally try and check in and talk about hosting, and of course SEO is always a topic, but I wanted to get you in so we could talk to you about what’s going on in the state of folks who have to manage a bunch of websites and, people who are getting things set up. But before we dig into that stuff, tell us about your background first. Like, what happened in life that ended up bringing you to Wix?
Crystal Carter – 01:10
So I am the head of SEO communications at Wix. And in my marketing life, as many other marketers I’m sure have had this experience, I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s one of the things I love about marketing is that a lot of times, the principles are the same. You know, the cash cow and the star and the dog and like all of the, all of those sort of classic marketing things, they’re the same. But your day-to-day tends to be really flexible and really different.
And so I’ve worked in a freelance capacity. I’ve worked in an agency capacity. I’ve, been very close to management in the agency capacity. I’ve managed clients in both those spaces. And I’ve also been in-house, and I’ve worked for public facing entities. I work for private businesses, small businesses, large businesses, all of that sort of stuff. And when the role for communications SEO person came up, I thought that it would be a really good fit because the team that I was with before was an agency where we’re building websites, but we’re also providing SEO services. So we’re able to see the website from the inside out and able to advise on the digital strategies for that. And that I really enjoyed.
Even in that space, one of my favorite things was to be able to fix the CMS. To be able to sort of say, “This is something that we can fix, and this will fix all of the CMS.” And the way I was handling my clients, I was thinking about it that way as well. So I would group my clients by their CMS. And I always say, people say, “Oh, what’s your favorite marketing tool?” I’m like, “Your CMS?” And I’ll say, “What’s your favorite marketing tool?” “Samuel Wooks website.” That’s, that’s it.
Because honestly, it’s like a guitar. If you’ve got an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, you need to know the difference. You need to know how to use them. And what the sound you get out of it will depend on how good you are at using that particular guitar. A Fender Stratocaster is different from a resonator. These things are different. And it’s important for you to know the differences so that you can get, you know, make beautiful music.
So one of the things I love about working at Wix is that, I’m not a hands-on engineer fixing SEO things on that side, but we work really closely with that team. So if I see something and I’m like, “This would be really useful for marketers who are using our platform,” I can put that forward and we can get that implemented. I can think of one thing in particular that I was really pushing for. And seeing that implemented makes me so happy because it helps all of our users, and we’ve got over 250 million users worldwide, and that’s helping all of them.
So to be able to bring the firsthand experience of trying to do marketing on a website, trying to do SEO, trying to grow your website presence, and of having managed clients who are going to come to you and say, “Why can’t I do this? Or why can’t we do that? Or how come this is this way?” And being able to bring that into the sort of SaaS environment is really a dream come true. And plus, I get to talk to lovely people like you and I get to go to fantastic conferences and things like that. And so, yeah, it’s been a great journey and it’s one of those things where I get to bring all of the knowledge that I’ve gained throughout my career to the four every day.
John Wall – 04:19
Yeah, it’s funny. So it seems like you were the ideal customer for Wix Studio. And we love to see that because there’s so many times where the product marketing team doesn’t actually come from the world that had lived in that pain, and it makes it so much easier. I love that idea of bundling your clients by CMS. I hadn’t thought about that. But that does make so much sense because that’s the customer experience that you’re in.
Crystal Carter – 04:43
Yeah. And I think also the way I would do that, so we have custom, we’d have, we’d have some of the off-the-shelves. So things like that when I was working agency side. And the thing is that normally if you find a solution, and this is true with Wix as well, but if you find a solution one CMS, chances are you’ll be able to roll that out across every single client that’s on that CMS. So it gives you incredible efficiencies to bundle them together because also sometimes you can see, you can spot problems ahead of time for a different client. So maybe one person who’s on one CMS is having trouble with something and you dig into and you’re like, “Oh, it’s that.” And then you look on the other ones, you’re like, “Oh, that has that as well. And I hadn’t even noticed.” And you can fix them all and then you can move everyone forward and it just saves you a lot of time. So you can sort of have one day where you’re looking at one CMS and digging around on all of the different things and then roll them out in sync. And that can give you great boost across the board. It can also help you test theories really quickly as well if you’re looking at them by CMS.
John Wall – 05:43
Yeah, and it’s, you totally nailed that thing that we see all the time where, some of these companies are like, “Oh, we’re going tough it out and create our own thing.” But you find these situations where something breaks and it takes them two days to fix it or whatever. And it’s just what you said, you guys can go in then and go to your 35 other clients and even proactively, maybe they don’t even know they have the problem. We see that all the time. They’re not even, aware that it’s there. But talk to us more about templating of stuff and, how that makes life easier. And if you have any use cases, specific things that people maybe don’t think about, that could really help them out.
Crystal Carter – 06:17
Yeah. So I think one of the things that we really pride ourselves on at Wix is velocity. So I’ve definitely had it before where I’ve had folks who had a project idea and they were like, “I want to do this project.” And I can think of someone in particular who, a good friend of mine, she saw me at an event and she was like, “I want to start an event program like this for a different community.” And within a week she was like, “I want to do this.” And she had a website up within a week. She had a Wix website up within a week and was able to book it. And within a month she had a sold-out event. And within a year she had been acquired by another larger team and was the salary as part of that.
And that’s the kind of velocity that we’re able to give that you’re able to see some, to have an idea, to action that idea and to move it forward. And I think that when you’re thinking about clients, sometimes people think, “Oh, if I have a template, maybe that won’t be as good.” But I’ll tell you what, the thing that clients will appreciate is that you can test something out really quickly with a template in a way that you can if you’ve got to build custom. Because if you have to build custom, let’s say you have somebody who has a general, sort of like a restaurant, right? What is a restaurant? And let’s say they want to see if they can sell some merch, some T-shirts, some tote bags, some mugs or something like that.
With a Wix website, or Wix Studio website, what you could do really quickly. And we have something called Printful, which is a drop shipping tool or, sorry, print-on-demand tool. And you can connect it really quickly. You can upload all of your graphics and you could have a shop set up within a couple of days, and you could test whether or not a shop is actually a viable thing for your company before you start doing lots and lots of exhaustive dev things and lots of exhaustive design on it. You can have something that’s testable and ready to go and then find that this is viable. Then you can reiterate and you can make, you can add more bells and whistles, you can make it look wizzy or all of that sort of stuff, but you’re able to get that velocity while and strike while the art is hot because we have those templates.
And what happens with Wix, for instance, and Wix Studio is that when you get a Wix website, you’re able to add in all of those additional features. So everything is an API. So if you decide “I want to add a blog,” you just add a blog. It doesn’t cost you more to add a blog, you just add a blog. If you want to add in a shop, you just add a shop. It doesn’t cost you more to add a shop. You have to pay for fees if you’re selling things or whatever, you have to pay for that sort of thing. You have to sort that out for taxes and all that sort of stuff. That’s up to you. Then shipping and all that sort of stuff. We don’t ship things for you for free, but you want to add that on. That doesn’t cost you more. That’s not, that’s not another thing that costs you more.
And if you want to add forms, let’s say you’re a consultant and you want to add online consultancy, you can add that to your website really quickly and you can start selling consultancy slots. You can say, “Book a consultancy slot with me for half an hour” and you can book that in as well. And that’s all included in the one fee that you pay. So in terms of templatizing, it allows you to get velocity and get velocity for your clients.
Because sometimes, and John I’m sure you’ve been here, you have a client and you say, “Hey, we should do this great thing.” And they’re like, “Wonderful, let’s do it now.” And then you talk to your dev team or you talk to whoever or whatever, and it’s like, “We’re going to do that six months from now,” and they will lose steam, they will lose interest. People will change jobs, their financial things will change. And by the time you come back around to it, they might even, might not even have the budget approved for it anymore. They might have spent it on something else.
So what you get with the template is the ability to not leave money on the table if you’re servicing clients, the ability to move things forward at a pace that is viable for you and for your client. And it also gives you the flexibility to try things at a sort of low level of input and then iterate on them. So you’re going to go back, you’re going to update it, you’re going to get things going. But you can see, “Is this something we should invest in, yes or no?” And you can test that straight away.
Additionally, what we’ve built into Wix Studio is the ability to templatize sections of your website. So as you’re building a section of your website, you might say, “Oh, this section is really great. I’m going to save this and I’m going to put this across every single page.” Or if you are somebody who’s managing clients and let’s say you have, like, a mortgage calculator, or I had a client who was like, they built marquee tents for weddings and stuff like that. And we had one where you could see how many people would fit in a certain marquee. So there’s one set that was like if you had long tables, if you had round tables, if you had a dance floor and round tables, that sort of thing. And so you could sort of gauge how many people would be able to fit in the tent, whether or not you’re able to invite your grandmother or whether or not she’s going to sit that one out, that sort of thing.
So let’s say you build a tool like that, you can make that into a widget that you could roll out to multiple clients. So let’s say you had multiple mortgage clients or multiple marquee clients or whatever it was, let’s say you were specializing in something, then you could roll that out, that particular widget out to other clients as well. So that’s been built into the Wix studio as well, where you can code your own apps, you can create your own replicable apps and put them on different sites.
The other thing we’ve looked at is the ability to duplicate sites. So let’s say somebody looks at my website for, I don’t know, nail polish or something, I’m just looking at things on my desk, and they say, “Oh, I love that. I’d like one in…” You say, “Great, you can go into Wix Studio and you can press duplicate and within seconds it will duplicate the entire website,” which allows you a lot of flexibility and again, allows you velocity. So it means that you have templates.
The other thing that we’ve introduced recently is the ability to sell your templates. And this is something that we’re really excited about. And this gives people, particularly developers, designers, website agencies, gives them a lot more flexibility in terms of how they use Wix. And it gives people a lot, gives you a lot of great opportunities to showcase your abilities as a web designer and as a marketing team. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of benefits.
John Wall – 12:40
Okay. I’ve got to pick your brain about that a little bit more. But before we do that, we just want to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. In our consulting, we come across a number of companies set up with different infrastructures. And one thing that we’ve seen over and over again is you do reach a point where you’ve just, you’re carrying so much IT infrastructure that you’re no longer able to get ahead and accelerate. The quick math is that the less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you get to keep.
So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses graduate to Netsuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. With Netsuite, you reduce IT costs because Netsuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required accessed from anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you’ve got one unified business management suite. You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you’ll profit with Netsuite.
John Wall – 13:44
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 13:44
Even with everything getting more expensive and the challenge of managing your budget, it just makes sense to find proven ways to cut costs and boost performance at the same time. So check out Netsuite by Oracle. By popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/coffee. That’s netsuite.com/coffee. netsuite.com/coffee. Again, if you want to reduce costs and cut the headaches, check them out. And we thank them for their support of the show.
John Wall – 14:15
Yeah, that’s amazing. I did not know that you guys will be, have templates that could be resold. That’s kind of cool if you’ve got something that’s, and to have a marketplace too, from the other side of that, while you’re at an agency to be able to just go search and say, “Hey, show me some templates for auto dealerships or like you said, restaurants.” That’s a classic one where they want the specific features, but kind of everybody wants their own look. They, they do want it to be for them. But yeah, if it’s somebody that’s 15 states away, nobody’s going to care if they’re very similar, everybody, right.
Crystal Carter – 14:44
And I think that the great thing about Wix templates is that they all come with all of the relevant apps already installed. So let’s say you have the Restaurants app, or let’s say you had a restaurant website, it would also include the Restaurants booking app, and it would also include, like, the sales app, and it would also include all of the apps that you need in order to make a restaurant function in the template. And that means that pretty much as soon as you download it, you’re ready to go. And as soon as you download it, as soon as you get, you know, input your data and all of that sort of stuff and get yourself ready to go, then you can get yourself online. And we try to maximize velocity and efficiency at all stages. So, you know, you can get your domain name, you can get your hosting, you can get your SSL all covered, all within one thing. And it also includes all the CDN setup and all that sort of stuff. And I know that there’s, those are some of the tiny little things that, for somebody who’s a pro, not a big deal. They’re like, “Yeah, I just set up my CDN and I set up my SSL and I do…” and it takes them no time at all. But for folks who are maybe more marketing focused and less infrastructure focused, then it can be a great, great opportunity to just have all of that stuff covered and all of that stuff sorted.
I had someone online the other day who tweeted me and they were trying to be disparaging of Wix. And then I went to their website and I saw that I couldn’t go to their website because they hadn’t set up a redirect from their HTTP website to their HTTPS website. And though I felt the need to, I did not tweet them to say that “We do that automatically for you on Wix. And if you were on Wix, you wouldn’t have that trouble, isn’t it?”
John Wall – 16:19
There’s so many gotchas. People just don’t realize that there’s just all these tiny little things where if something’s not configured right somewhere, you’re going to end up, you’re just like, “Wait, why are we not getting any traffic today? What’s going on with that?” And again, you go down the rat hole. Whereas yeah, if you can just have that wrapped up for you, that saves you so much hassle.
Now we do have to talk about, you actually do with Wix, the SERPs Up podcast, talking about SEO stuff. So we got to ask you about kind of what’s going on over there and even talk about just, like, SEO stuff that’s baked into Wix too because that’s a whole nother thing. People kind of like, “Okay, I finally solved the website problem, and it’s up and running.” And then they’re like, “Oh, maybe we should do some of this SEO stuff.” And there’s headaches and problems that go around with that lack of strategy. So, tell us more about what’s the best practices and stuff that you guys have.
Crystal Carter – 17:08
So what are the things we do at the SERPs Up SEO podcast? And one of the things that we do at Wix overall, it’s really at our core, is that we want to make sure that we are accessible to everyone and accessible with a lowercase “a” and with an uppercase “A” as much as possible. We try to make sure that folks who are, like, super professional can access our information and our platform and that folks who are maybe learning or just starting their journey can also access that as well.
So for our podcast, we talk about some very complex topics with some really interesting experts like yourself. We also tried to cover them so that if you are coming completely new to that topic, then you can also be up to speed. So we like to have a lot of fun with it as well to make sure that it’s completely accessible for whatever topic we’re talking about. And I think that’s really important. Personally, I know that people say, “I’m an expert and you’re a digital marketing expert,” but I’m not an expert on GA4. I’ll tell you that right now. I was very good at UA, but I’m not an expert on GA4 because it’s new and it’s clunky and it’s not my favorite thing.
And there’s lots of people who are experts in one thing and noobs at other things. And so we try to take that approach with SERPs Up podcasts and try to make sure that everything’s really accessible to everyone. And that’s how we approach, that’s really at the core of what Wix does.
So with our SEO, we have the Wix SEO Setup Checklist which can guide you through optimizing your website. If you are somebody who’s an SEO pro, you can ignore it if you want to, but it also has some benefits. So, for instance, if you go onto it, it will say, “What are the main keywords for your website?” And it will also let you search for the search, the search volume of those keywords in SEMrush, in Wix. So you can choose from SEMrush. There’s something called Ahrefs, and there’s also SE Ranking and you can pick from one of those to check the search volume of your core keywords before you even get going. You add in your business details and it automatically adds in the local business markup for your website on the appropriate pages. Every time you add a blog, it also adds up structured data, or adds in structured data for your blogs.
And when you go through the SEO Setup Checklist, it reminds you that, “Oh, you need an H1 on your homepage. Oh, you need to make sure that you know, you have some links to your homepage.” We have things like, “We can see that you’ve missed alt text, you should update your alt text.” And then we pull up all of the images and they have little fields and you can see where you can add in the alt text. You don’t have to go back to the page, you don’t have to navigate to each individual image. We make sure that it’s really available there. And we do that because we can see how users are using the website.
And what we found was that two things: One, when we set, told people, “Hey, you should update your alt text,” people would contact our help desk and go, “What is that? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what you’re talking about or why I should do it.” And number two, we found that when we added it in the checklist that we saw a massive uptick in people and people using this and people accessing this. And this also meant that the websites became more accessible as well.
Now, if you are a super whizzy SEO expert, then you could do it the other way. But it’s also easier to just do it that way. Similarly, once you complete the SEO Setup Checklist, we will submit your homepage to Google as you connect to Google Search Console. So it will say, “Would you like to submit your website to Google?” And if you click “Yes,” then it will create a Google Search Console profile for you and it will submit your homepage for indexing to Google. And I tested this right on my own personal site.
So when I joined Wix, I saw this and I was like, “No way, John. This is not, this is not a thing.” So I tested my site. I went to a site, the search modifier or their search operator “site:crystalcarterseo.com.” I sent tested that in and Google was like, “I don’t know, you have no links. I don’t know what this website is, you’re not online.” And I was like, “Good. Okay, great.” And so I did that and then I submitted my site to Google via the Wix SEO Setup Checklist and I went back the next day and it was like, “Yeah, you’ve got four pages on Google.” Based on the links that were coming off of my homepage, I only had 12 pages on my site overall, but I had four pages within a day on Google.
Now I have definitely, definitely on my agency side and working with clients, had people go, “Are we on Google?” Like, “Yeah, you know, you just got to wait. We’re just going to, you know, see how it goes. Maybe if we just, like, send some tweets, maybe if we, like, light some incense and say a prayer, like maybe we can hope that we might get indexed the next day.” So with the SEO Checklist, it’s really consistent and can really get you indexed in a couple of days. And like that is the honest truth.
So, yeah, so that helps you do that. Once you’re set up on that, we also give you lots of live data from Google Search Console. So as soon as you log in, it will tell you your impressions and your clicks for some of the top keywords as soon as you log into your Wix website. And we have the ability for you to search your index pages within Wix. So for people who like to geek out, we have lots of those tools as well. We also have a bot log report, which you do not have to ask a developer for, you can just see. And if you’re adding code to your page, if you’re adding because we also have a Velo suite where we have JavaScript and stuff that you can use, you’re adding code to your page, then you can also run the code and see if it works, and then you can check your bot logs and see if you got the response that you were expecting and all of that sort of stuff.
You can add API things or you can just coast, you can just coast and enjoy all of the SEO things that are already built in. We have AI meta tag generators, we have AI title tag generators, we have structured data that’s built into every single event. Every time you make an event, it has event markup on it that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you add in you use Wix video, it has video markup that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you do, you know, every time you add in a blog, it adds in the image for your blog, it adds in all of that sort of stuff.
We have all of these things that are built in to make life easier for you. And no matter what stage you’re on. And the structured data, for instance, that’s built into Wix is also editable. So you can add in your own structured data, you can update it however you like, and it really gives you that flexibility. So really what we are really about is making sure that people who want to be, super advanced can do that. People who want to just chillax can do that too. But that everybody is serviced in our space because we really want everyone to thrive and we really want to help the Internet be a better place.
John Wall – 23:46
And so AI, of course, is, like, everybody’s talking all AI all the time. I mean, if you’ve got AI stuff that you guys are talking about as far as features and interesting stuff, and you talked about already auto tagging and things like that, which save you a huge ton of time, but also, kind of what else is on the horizon? Is there other stuff, maybe that outside of the AI bandwagon?
Crystal Carter – 24:06
Yeah. So we’ve got tons of AI built in across the Wix ecosystem. And this is something that we have had for ages. So our CEO, I think about a year ago or something, someone was like, “Oh, Wix is at risk because of AI.” And our CEO was like, “What? What are you talking about? We’ve, we’ve had an AI web builder since 2016. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had AI all over Wix for, you know, for years.” We’ve been at this for a very long time and we work with regularly with different AI folks. And we’ve got some great tools. We have AI text, and the way that we have our AI text creator is that, like, you will say to it, “What are the keywords you’re interested in? Where is this going? Is this an about page? Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to, describe, this location or something? What are you trying to discuss?”
Then it will generate a couple of different examples and then you can pick from one of them, like it’s pretty good. And we don’t have it in the blog to write you a blog. We have it in the webpage builder to sort of help you with their sections because I know from working client side that clients hate writing their own biographies. They cannot stand it. They all just go, “No, but I couldn’t possibly write about myself.” And I go, “Yes you can, Susan, you can do it. You just write about yourself in the third person. ‘Susan is wonderful and she knows lots of things.’ That’s what you should write.” People really struggle with that and it can really just get rid of that blank page thing really quickly. And you don’t have to go off to some other tool and you can just use it there, which is really useful.
We also have some great AI image generators and some of the things that other tools make you pay for, like removing the background on an image. We do that for free and that’s built into the Wix CMS. Beyond that, we are working within the Wix Studio space to really supercharge integrations. So we have lots and lots of integrations across Wix. We have a Salesforce integration, we have integrations with Mailchimp, with Amazon, with Google. We have Google Ads integrations, Google Search Console. I mentioned Google Analytics. So GA4, you can just add the code and you don’t have to go through adding the tag and all of that sort of stuff. You can literally just add your code and then you’re on Google Merchant Center, for instance. You can add in your Google Merchant feed and it will update and pull everything through. We have collaborations with LegalZoom, we have collaborations with lots of other tools, and we’re continuing to build on that.
And that is an initiative that we’ve done constantly, but it’s something that we’re pushing forward within the next little while as well, to make it easier for marketers to market. As a marketer, you have things that you like and they’re the things that you want to use. And sometimes you’re like, “I don’t have time to learn this other thing. I already know how to achieve this with this thing, so I would like to do that.” And essentially this allows you to do that. So we also make things like, for instance, like Facebook or not Facebook, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel and things like that. We make it really easy to install tags like that and things like that. And we’re constantly adding more of those as well.
So the connectivity is really at the fore, both within things that we’re cooking ourselves and also things that we’re allowing you to add.
One of the other things that’s really great, and a lot of people are really surprised at is that within our coding framework, Velo, there’s a full connectivity to NPM libraries, so you can connect pretty much any API that you want into Wix and go forth and do lots of cool stuff with that. And we have a really easy way for you to manage all of your keys and all of that sort of stuff as well. So there’s lots of things there. And also there’s an AI coding assistant, which is really cool that I really like. I was suspicious, I’ll be completely honest. It was like, “I don’t know about you coding assistant.” And then I said, “Can you spin me up this code like this?” And it said, “Yes.” And I checked it and I was like, “That’s actually pretty good.” And the thing that I like about it is that in the places where it’s filling in the blanks where I’ve had ChatGPT just make up some URL that looks right but isn’t quite right, it will just say, “yoururl.com, your image.jpeg, address 123,” like that sort of thing. So it’s very clear that it’s a placeholder rather than you assuming that’s the thing that you did and then having to go back so it can make it really useful.
And so yeah, I think there’s a lot of things around connectivity and a lot of things around AI are really probably the next phase of Wix and Wix Studio.
John Wall – 28:39
That’s great. I’m glad we had a chance to really do a deep dive because so often people just kind of give the overview of what the thing does. But it’s great to actually talk about specific features that kind of light things up and make things happen. If folks want to learn more about Wix Studio, what’s the best way or to get in contact with you about speaking or the podcast, whatever. What’s the best way to do that?
Crystal Carter – 28:57
So I’m online all over the place. So I am on TikTok with a host of 200 very exclusive followers. We are an elite group. I also on LinkedIn with a lot more people and also on Twitter a lot as well. I do not mess with Facebook. It’s not really my thing. I occasionally post pictures of trees on Instagram if you would like to follow that as well.
And then if you want to find all things Wix and Wix Studio, we have our Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about features on Wix and Wix Studio and lots of things SEO. And our podcast comes out weekly on a Wednesday. So you can follow those. I’m also going to be speaking at Brighton SEO in San Diego, and I’m speaking in Mascon, and I’m speaking in various different places. So, you know, find me in one of those places as well. And Wix Studio has some great, great information on the Wix Studio website and you can find that online as well.
John Wall – 29:55
That sounds great. And then going out the door, any media, books, movies, articles, anything you’ve read recently for marketing folks that you can recommend for our audience.
Crystal Carter – 30:04
My favorite marketing go-to is Beyonce. I think she’s a marketing genius and pretty much following anything that she does is really fascinating. Her cowboy Carter pivot has been fascinating to me, how she’s pivoted from that. So I feel like pick someone and follow them and study what they’re doing. So I’m a big student of Beyonce, but like Kim Kardashian would be a very interesting person to study as well. Taylor Swift, lots of other folks. So yeah, that’s my marketing school of marketing is Beyonce.
John Wall – 30:33
That’s an easy plug. Can’t argue with success like that.
Crystal Carter – 30:36
She’s the other Ms. Carter. It’s all good.
John Wall – 30:38
All right, Crystal, thanks for spending some time with it. We really appreciate it.
Crystal Carter – 30:42
Thank you so much, John.
John Wall – 30:43
All right, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 3 – 30:47
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at JW5150.com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funkmasters, and you can find it at musicale from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes.
The post Crystal Carter on SEO, Multiple Site Management, Wix Studio and More! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.
382 episodes
Manage episode 424672518 series 2733
In this Marketing Over Coffee:
Learn the best way for agencies to manage websites, especially if you offer SEO as a service, and how to move fast enough so that you never miss opportunities.
Brought to you by our sponsors: NetSuite and Wix Studio
She’s been on both the client and agency side. Working with a team that designed sites and provided SEO services set her up perfectly for Head of SEO Communications
Organizing clients by CMS and the joy of fixing something for marketers when it goes out to millions of users
Taking advantage of the efficiencies of scale when managing multiple sites
Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!
Templates and included APIs make it easier to increase velocity, and for agencies to service their clients quickly
Template marketplace opens up new opportunities
12:38 – 14:15 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.
Streamlining the setup too, domain name, SSL, hosting, CDN
Simplifying all the best practices SEO
SEMrush, Wincher, SE Ranking tools included, Alt text fix tool
AI Tag Generators, AI Title Generators, Video eligible for rich results
Integrations with Salesforce, Amazon, Google Ads
Wix Studio Hub and the SERPs Up Podcast
Media Recco: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter Pivot
Gen AI Course Updates done: Special Discount on the newest Generative AI for Marketing Course! Hands on exercises to put AI to work for you! USE CODE MOC now!
Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie
Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!
Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
John Wall – 00:01
Today’s episode is brought to you by Netsuite and Wix Studio.
Speaker 3 – 00:10
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall – 00:18
Good morning. Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we’re talking with Crystal Carter. She’s head of SEO communications at Wix. She’s an SEO and digital marketing professional who’s worked with clients like Disney, McDonald’s, and Tomy. She speaks and writes about SEO and is a regular on the SERPs Up SEO podcast. In fact, we’ve talked over there. Crystal, welcome to the show.
Crystal Carter – 00:38
Thank you so much, John. I’m really pleased to be here. Big fan of the show and, yeah, big fan of the work that you do at your team.
John Wall – 00:44
Thank you. It’s been so long, I actually had to dig in and it has been far too long. We normally try and check in and talk about hosting, and of course SEO is always a topic, but I wanted to get you in so we could talk to you about what’s going on in the state of folks who have to manage a bunch of websites and, people who are getting things set up. But before we dig into that stuff, tell us about your background first. Like, what happened in life that ended up bringing you to Wix?
Crystal Carter – 01:10
So I am the head of SEO communications at Wix. And in my marketing life, as many other marketers I’m sure have had this experience, I’ve done a lot of different things. It’s one of the things I love about marketing is that a lot of times, the principles are the same. You know, the cash cow and the star and the dog and like all of the, all of those sort of classic marketing things, they’re the same. But your day-to-day tends to be really flexible and really different.
And so I’ve worked in a freelance capacity. I’ve worked in an agency capacity. I’ve, been very close to management in the agency capacity. I’ve managed clients in both those spaces. And I’ve also been in-house, and I’ve worked for public facing entities. I work for private businesses, small businesses, large businesses, all of that sort of stuff. And when the role for communications SEO person came up, I thought that it would be a really good fit because the team that I was with before was an agency where we’re building websites, but we’re also providing SEO services. So we’re able to see the website from the inside out and able to advise on the digital strategies for that. And that I really enjoyed.
Even in that space, one of my favorite things was to be able to fix the CMS. To be able to sort of say, “This is something that we can fix, and this will fix all of the CMS.” And the way I was handling my clients, I was thinking about it that way as well. So I would group my clients by their CMS. And I always say, people say, “Oh, what’s your favorite marketing tool?” I’m like, “Your CMS?” And I’ll say, “What’s your favorite marketing tool?” “Samuel Wooks website.” That’s, that’s it.
Because honestly, it’s like a guitar. If you’ve got an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, you need to know the difference. You need to know how to use them. And what the sound you get out of it will depend on how good you are at using that particular guitar. A Fender Stratocaster is different from a resonator. These things are different. And it’s important for you to know the differences so that you can get, you know, make beautiful music.
So one of the things I love about working at Wix is that, I’m not a hands-on engineer fixing SEO things on that side, but we work really closely with that team. So if I see something and I’m like, “This would be really useful for marketers who are using our platform,” I can put that forward and we can get that implemented. I can think of one thing in particular that I was really pushing for. And seeing that implemented makes me so happy because it helps all of our users, and we’ve got over 250 million users worldwide, and that’s helping all of them.
So to be able to bring the firsthand experience of trying to do marketing on a website, trying to do SEO, trying to grow your website presence, and of having managed clients who are going to come to you and say, “Why can’t I do this? Or why can’t we do that? Or how come this is this way?” And being able to bring that into the sort of SaaS environment is really a dream come true. And plus, I get to talk to lovely people like you and I get to go to fantastic conferences and things like that. And so, yeah, it’s been a great journey and it’s one of those things where I get to bring all of the knowledge that I’ve gained throughout my career to the four every day.
John Wall – 04:19
Yeah, it’s funny. So it seems like you were the ideal customer for Wix Studio. And we love to see that because there’s so many times where the product marketing team doesn’t actually come from the world that had lived in that pain, and it makes it so much easier. I love that idea of bundling your clients by CMS. I hadn’t thought about that. But that does make so much sense because that’s the customer experience that you’re in.
Crystal Carter – 04:43
Yeah. And I think also the way I would do that, so we have custom, we’d have, we’d have some of the off-the-shelves. So things like that when I was working agency side. And the thing is that normally if you find a solution, and this is true with Wix as well, but if you find a solution one CMS, chances are you’ll be able to roll that out across every single client that’s on that CMS. So it gives you incredible efficiencies to bundle them together because also sometimes you can see, you can spot problems ahead of time for a different client. So maybe one person who’s on one CMS is having trouble with something and you dig into and you’re like, “Oh, it’s that.” And then you look on the other ones, you’re like, “Oh, that has that as well. And I hadn’t even noticed.” And you can fix them all and then you can move everyone forward and it just saves you a lot of time. So you can sort of have one day where you’re looking at one CMS and digging around on all of the different things and then roll them out in sync. And that can give you great boost across the board. It can also help you test theories really quickly as well if you’re looking at them by CMS.
John Wall – 05:43
Yeah, and it’s, you totally nailed that thing that we see all the time where, some of these companies are like, “Oh, we’re going tough it out and create our own thing.” But you find these situations where something breaks and it takes them two days to fix it or whatever. And it’s just what you said, you guys can go in then and go to your 35 other clients and even proactively, maybe they don’t even know they have the problem. We see that all the time. They’re not even, aware that it’s there. But talk to us more about templating of stuff and, how that makes life easier. And if you have any use cases, specific things that people maybe don’t think about, that could really help them out.
Crystal Carter – 06:17
Yeah. So I think one of the things that we really pride ourselves on at Wix is velocity. So I’ve definitely had it before where I’ve had folks who had a project idea and they were like, “I want to do this project.” And I can think of someone in particular who, a good friend of mine, she saw me at an event and she was like, “I want to start an event program like this for a different community.” And within a week she was like, “I want to do this.” And she had a website up within a week. She had a Wix website up within a week and was able to book it. And within a month she had a sold-out event. And within a year she had been acquired by another larger team and was the salary as part of that.
And that’s the kind of velocity that we’re able to give that you’re able to see some, to have an idea, to action that idea and to move it forward. And I think that when you’re thinking about clients, sometimes people think, “Oh, if I have a template, maybe that won’t be as good.” But I’ll tell you what, the thing that clients will appreciate is that you can test something out really quickly with a template in a way that you can if you’ve got to build custom. Because if you have to build custom, let’s say you have somebody who has a general, sort of like a restaurant, right? What is a restaurant? And let’s say they want to see if they can sell some merch, some T-shirts, some tote bags, some mugs or something like that.
With a Wix website, or Wix Studio website, what you could do really quickly. And we have something called Printful, which is a drop shipping tool or, sorry, print-on-demand tool. And you can connect it really quickly. You can upload all of your graphics and you could have a shop set up within a couple of days, and you could test whether or not a shop is actually a viable thing for your company before you start doing lots and lots of exhaustive dev things and lots of exhaustive design on it. You can have something that’s testable and ready to go and then find that this is viable. Then you can reiterate and you can make, you can add more bells and whistles, you can make it look wizzy or all of that sort of stuff, but you’re able to get that velocity while and strike while the art is hot because we have those templates.
And what happens with Wix, for instance, and Wix Studio is that when you get a Wix website, you’re able to add in all of those additional features. So everything is an API. So if you decide “I want to add a blog,” you just add a blog. It doesn’t cost you more to add a blog, you just add a blog. If you want to add in a shop, you just add a shop. It doesn’t cost you more to add a shop. You have to pay for fees if you’re selling things or whatever, you have to pay for that sort of thing. You have to sort that out for taxes and all that sort of stuff. That’s up to you. Then shipping and all that sort of stuff. We don’t ship things for you for free, but you want to add that on. That doesn’t cost you more. That’s not, that’s not another thing that costs you more.
And if you want to add forms, let’s say you’re a consultant and you want to add online consultancy, you can add that to your website really quickly and you can start selling consultancy slots. You can say, “Book a consultancy slot with me for half an hour” and you can book that in as well. And that’s all included in the one fee that you pay. So in terms of templatizing, it allows you to get velocity and get velocity for your clients.
Because sometimes, and John I’m sure you’ve been here, you have a client and you say, “Hey, we should do this great thing.” And they’re like, “Wonderful, let’s do it now.” And then you talk to your dev team or you talk to whoever or whatever, and it’s like, “We’re going to do that six months from now,” and they will lose steam, they will lose interest. People will change jobs, their financial things will change. And by the time you come back around to it, they might even, might not even have the budget approved for it anymore. They might have spent it on something else.
So what you get with the template is the ability to not leave money on the table if you’re servicing clients, the ability to move things forward at a pace that is viable for you and for your client. And it also gives you the flexibility to try things at a sort of low level of input and then iterate on them. So you’re going to go back, you’re going to update it, you’re going to get things going. But you can see, “Is this something we should invest in, yes or no?” And you can test that straight away.
Additionally, what we’ve built into Wix Studio is the ability to templatize sections of your website. So as you’re building a section of your website, you might say, “Oh, this section is really great. I’m going to save this and I’m going to put this across every single page.” Or if you are somebody who’s managing clients and let’s say you have, like, a mortgage calculator, or I had a client who was like, they built marquee tents for weddings and stuff like that. And we had one where you could see how many people would fit in a certain marquee. So there’s one set that was like if you had long tables, if you had round tables, if you had a dance floor and round tables, that sort of thing. And so you could sort of gauge how many people would be able to fit in the tent, whether or not you’re able to invite your grandmother or whether or not she’s going to sit that one out, that sort of thing.
So let’s say you build a tool like that, you can make that into a widget that you could roll out to multiple clients. So let’s say you had multiple mortgage clients or multiple marquee clients or whatever it was, let’s say you were specializing in something, then you could roll that out, that particular widget out to other clients as well. So that’s been built into the Wix studio as well, where you can code your own apps, you can create your own replicable apps and put them on different sites.
The other thing we’ve looked at is the ability to duplicate sites. So let’s say somebody looks at my website for, I don’t know, nail polish or something, I’m just looking at things on my desk, and they say, “Oh, I love that. I’d like one in…” You say, “Great, you can go into Wix Studio and you can press duplicate and within seconds it will duplicate the entire website,” which allows you a lot of flexibility and again, allows you velocity. So it means that you have templates.
The other thing that we’ve introduced recently is the ability to sell your templates. And this is something that we’re really excited about. And this gives people, particularly developers, designers, website agencies, gives them a lot more flexibility in terms of how they use Wix. And it gives people a lot, gives you a lot of great opportunities to showcase your abilities as a web designer and as a marketing team. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of benefits.
John Wall – 12:40
Okay. I’ve got to pick your brain about that a little bit more. But before we do that, we just want to take a second. We want to thank Netsuite by Oracle for their support of marketing over coffee. In our consulting, we come across a number of companies set up with different infrastructures. And one thing that we’ve seen over and over again is you do reach a point where you’ve just, you’re carrying so much IT infrastructure that you’re no longer able to get ahead and accelerate. The quick math is that the less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, on delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you get to keep.
So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses graduate to Netsuite by Oracle. Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one platform and one source of truth. With Netsuite, you reduce IT costs because Netsuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required accessed from anywhere. You cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you’ve got one unified business management suite. You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you’ll profit with Netsuite.
John Wall – 13:44
Yeah.
Speaker 1 – 13:44
Even with everything getting more expensive and the challenge of managing your budget, it just makes sense to find proven ways to cut costs and boost performance at the same time. So check out Netsuite by Oracle. By popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/coffee. That’s netsuite.com/coffee. netsuite.com/coffee. Again, if you want to reduce costs and cut the headaches, check them out. And we thank them for their support of the show.
John Wall – 14:15
Yeah, that’s amazing. I did not know that you guys will be, have templates that could be resold. That’s kind of cool if you’ve got something that’s, and to have a marketplace too, from the other side of that, while you’re at an agency to be able to just go search and say, “Hey, show me some templates for auto dealerships or like you said, restaurants.” That’s a classic one where they want the specific features, but kind of everybody wants their own look. They, they do want it to be for them. But yeah, if it’s somebody that’s 15 states away, nobody’s going to care if they’re very similar, everybody, right.
Crystal Carter – 14:44
And I think that the great thing about Wix templates is that they all come with all of the relevant apps already installed. So let’s say you have the Restaurants app, or let’s say you had a restaurant website, it would also include the Restaurants booking app, and it would also include, like, the sales app, and it would also include all of the apps that you need in order to make a restaurant function in the template. And that means that pretty much as soon as you download it, you’re ready to go. And as soon as you download it, as soon as you get, you know, input your data and all of that sort of stuff and get yourself ready to go, then you can get yourself online. And we try to maximize velocity and efficiency at all stages. So, you know, you can get your domain name, you can get your hosting, you can get your SSL all covered, all within one thing. And it also includes all the CDN setup and all that sort of stuff. And I know that there’s, those are some of the tiny little things that, for somebody who’s a pro, not a big deal. They’re like, “Yeah, I just set up my CDN and I set up my SSL and I do…” and it takes them no time at all. But for folks who are maybe more marketing focused and less infrastructure focused, then it can be a great, great opportunity to just have all of that stuff covered and all of that stuff sorted.
I had someone online the other day who tweeted me and they were trying to be disparaging of Wix. And then I went to their website and I saw that I couldn’t go to their website because they hadn’t set up a redirect from their HTTP website to their HTTPS website. And though I felt the need to, I did not tweet them to say that “We do that automatically for you on Wix. And if you were on Wix, you wouldn’t have that trouble, isn’t it?”
John Wall – 16:19
There’s so many gotchas. People just don’t realize that there’s just all these tiny little things where if something’s not configured right somewhere, you’re going to end up, you’re just like, “Wait, why are we not getting any traffic today? What’s going on with that?” And again, you go down the rat hole. Whereas yeah, if you can just have that wrapped up for you, that saves you so much hassle.
Now we do have to talk about, you actually do with Wix, the SERPs Up podcast, talking about SEO stuff. So we got to ask you about kind of what’s going on over there and even talk about just, like, SEO stuff that’s baked into Wix too because that’s a whole nother thing. People kind of like, “Okay, I finally solved the website problem, and it’s up and running.” And then they’re like, “Oh, maybe we should do some of this SEO stuff.” And there’s headaches and problems that go around with that lack of strategy. So, tell us more about what’s the best practices and stuff that you guys have.
Crystal Carter – 17:08
So what are the things we do at the SERPs Up SEO podcast? And one of the things that we do at Wix overall, it’s really at our core, is that we want to make sure that we are accessible to everyone and accessible with a lowercase “a” and with an uppercase “A” as much as possible. We try to make sure that folks who are, like, super professional can access our information and our platform and that folks who are maybe learning or just starting their journey can also access that as well.
So for our podcast, we talk about some very complex topics with some really interesting experts like yourself. We also tried to cover them so that if you are coming completely new to that topic, then you can also be up to speed. So we like to have a lot of fun with it as well to make sure that it’s completely accessible for whatever topic we’re talking about. And I think that’s really important. Personally, I know that people say, “I’m an expert and you’re a digital marketing expert,” but I’m not an expert on GA4. I’ll tell you that right now. I was very good at UA, but I’m not an expert on GA4 because it’s new and it’s clunky and it’s not my favorite thing.
And there’s lots of people who are experts in one thing and noobs at other things. And so we try to take that approach with SERPs Up podcasts and try to make sure that everything’s really accessible to everyone. And that’s how we approach, that’s really at the core of what Wix does.
So with our SEO, we have the Wix SEO Setup Checklist which can guide you through optimizing your website. If you are somebody who’s an SEO pro, you can ignore it if you want to, but it also has some benefits. So, for instance, if you go onto it, it will say, “What are the main keywords for your website?” And it will also let you search for the search, the search volume of those keywords in SEMrush, in Wix. So you can choose from SEMrush. There’s something called Ahrefs, and there’s also SE Ranking and you can pick from one of those to check the search volume of your core keywords before you even get going. You add in your business details and it automatically adds in the local business markup for your website on the appropriate pages. Every time you add a blog, it also adds up structured data, or adds in structured data for your blogs.
And when you go through the SEO Setup Checklist, it reminds you that, “Oh, you need an H1 on your homepage. Oh, you need to make sure that you know, you have some links to your homepage.” We have things like, “We can see that you’ve missed alt text, you should update your alt text.” And then we pull up all of the images and they have little fields and you can see where you can add in the alt text. You don’t have to go back to the page, you don’t have to navigate to each individual image. We make sure that it’s really available there. And we do that because we can see how users are using the website.
And what we found was that two things: One, when we set, told people, “Hey, you should update your alt text,” people would contact our help desk and go, “What is that? I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what you’re talking about or why I should do it.” And number two, we found that when we added it in the checklist that we saw a massive uptick in people and people using this and people accessing this. And this also meant that the websites became more accessible as well.
Now, if you are a super whizzy SEO expert, then you could do it the other way. But it’s also easier to just do it that way. Similarly, once you complete the SEO Setup Checklist, we will submit your homepage to Google as you connect to Google Search Console. So it will say, “Would you like to submit your website to Google?” And if you click “Yes,” then it will create a Google Search Console profile for you and it will submit your homepage for indexing to Google. And I tested this right on my own personal site.
So when I joined Wix, I saw this and I was like, “No way, John. This is not, this is not a thing.” So I tested my site. I went to a site, the search modifier or their search operator “site:crystalcarterseo.com.” I sent tested that in and Google was like, “I don’t know, you have no links. I don’t know what this website is, you’re not online.” And I was like, “Good. Okay, great.” And so I did that and then I submitted my site to Google via the Wix SEO Setup Checklist and I went back the next day and it was like, “Yeah, you’ve got four pages on Google.” Based on the links that were coming off of my homepage, I only had 12 pages on my site overall, but I had four pages within a day on Google.
Now I have definitely, definitely on my agency side and working with clients, had people go, “Are we on Google?” Like, “Yeah, you know, you just got to wait. We’re just going to, you know, see how it goes. Maybe if we just, like, send some tweets, maybe if we, like, light some incense and say a prayer, like maybe we can hope that we might get indexed the next day.” So with the SEO Checklist, it’s really consistent and can really get you indexed in a couple of days. And like that is the honest truth.
So, yeah, so that helps you do that. Once you’re set up on that, we also give you lots of live data from Google Search Console. So as soon as you log in, it will tell you your impressions and your clicks for some of the top keywords as soon as you log into your Wix website. And we have the ability for you to search your index pages within Wix. So for people who like to geek out, we have lots of those tools as well. We also have a bot log report, which you do not have to ask a developer for, you can just see. And if you’re adding code to your page, if you’re adding because we also have a Velo suite where we have JavaScript and stuff that you can use, you’re adding code to your page, then you can also run the code and see if it works, and then you can check your bot logs and see if you got the response that you were expecting and all of that sort of stuff.
You can add API things or you can just coast, you can just coast and enjoy all of the SEO things that are already built in. We have AI meta tag generators, we have AI title tag generators, we have structured data that’s built into every single event. Every time you make an event, it has event markup on it that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you add in you use Wix video, it has video markup that’s eligible for rich results. Every time you do, you know, every time you add in a blog, it adds in the image for your blog, it adds in all of that sort of stuff.
We have all of these things that are built in to make life easier for you. And no matter what stage you’re on. And the structured data, for instance, that’s built into Wix is also editable. So you can add in your own structured data, you can update it however you like, and it really gives you that flexibility. So really what we are really about is making sure that people who want to be, super advanced can do that. People who want to just chillax can do that too. But that everybody is serviced in our space because we really want everyone to thrive and we really want to help the Internet be a better place.
John Wall – 23:46
And so AI, of course, is, like, everybody’s talking all AI all the time. I mean, if you’ve got AI stuff that you guys are talking about as far as features and interesting stuff, and you talked about already auto tagging and things like that, which save you a huge ton of time, but also, kind of what else is on the horizon? Is there other stuff, maybe that outside of the AI bandwagon?
Crystal Carter – 24:06
Yeah. So we’ve got tons of AI built in across the Wix ecosystem. And this is something that we have had for ages. So our CEO, I think about a year ago or something, someone was like, “Oh, Wix is at risk because of AI.” And our CEO was like, “What? What are you talking about? We’ve, we’ve had an AI web builder since 2016. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had AI all over Wix for, you know, for years.” We’ve been at this for a very long time and we work with regularly with different AI folks. And we’ve got some great tools. We have AI text, and the way that we have our AI text creator is that, like, you will say to it, “What are the keywords you’re interested in? Where is this going? Is this an about page? Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to, describe, this location or something? What are you trying to discuss?”
Then it will generate a couple of different examples and then you can pick from one of them, like it’s pretty good. And we don’t have it in the blog to write you a blog. We have it in the webpage builder to sort of help you with their sections because I know from working client side that clients hate writing their own biographies. They cannot stand it. They all just go, “No, but I couldn’t possibly write about myself.” And I go, “Yes you can, Susan, you can do it. You just write about yourself in the third person. ‘Susan is wonderful and she knows lots of things.’ That’s what you should write.” People really struggle with that and it can really just get rid of that blank page thing really quickly. And you don’t have to go off to some other tool and you can just use it there, which is really useful.
We also have some great AI image generators and some of the things that other tools make you pay for, like removing the background on an image. We do that for free and that’s built into the Wix CMS. Beyond that, we are working within the Wix Studio space to really supercharge integrations. So we have lots and lots of integrations across Wix. We have a Salesforce integration, we have integrations with Mailchimp, with Amazon, with Google. We have Google Ads integrations, Google Search Console. I mentioned Google Analytics. So GA4, you can just add the code and you don’t have to go through adding the tag and all of that sort of stuff. You can literally just add your code and then you’re on Google Merchant Center, for instance. You can add in your Google Merchant feed and it will update and pull everything through. We have collaborations with LegalZoom, we have collaborations with lots of other tools, and we’re continuing to build on that.
And that is an initiative that we’ve done constantly, but it’s something that we’re pushing forward within the next little while as well, to make it easier for marketers to market. As a marketer, you have things that you like and they’re the things that you want to use. And sometimes you’re like, “I don’t have time to learn this other thing. I already know how to achieve this with this thing, so I would like to do that.” And essentially this allows you to do that. So we also make things like, for instance, like Facebook or not Facebook, Meta Pixel and TikTok Pixel and things like that. We make it really easy to install tags like that and things like that. And we’re constantly adding more of those as well.
So the connectivity is really at the fore, both within things that we’re cooking ourselves and also things that we’re allowing you to add.
One of the other things that’s really great, and a lot of people are really surprised at is that within our coding framework, Velo, there’s a full connectivity to NPM libraries, so you can connect pretty much any API that you want into Wix and go forth and do lots of cool stuff with that. And we have a really easy way for you to manage all of your keys and all of that sort of stuff as well. So there’s lots of things there. And also there’s an AI coding assistant, which is really cool that I really like. I was suspicious, I’ll be completely honest. It was like, “I don’t know about you coding assistant.” And then I said, “Can you spin me up this code like this?” And it said, “Yes.” And I checked it and I was like, “That’s actually pretty good.” And the thing that I like about it is that in the places where it’s filling in the blanks where I’ve had ChatGPT just make up some URL that looks right but isn’t quite right, it will just say, “yoururl.com, your image.jpeg, address 123,” like that sort of thing. So it’s very clear that it’s a placeholder rather than you assuming that’s the thing that you did and then having to go back so it can make it really useful.
And so yeah, I think there’s a lot of things around connectivity and a lot of things around AI are really probably the next phase of Wix and Wix Studio.
John Wall – 28:39
That’s great. I’m glad we had a chance to really do a deep dive because so often people just kind of give the overview of what the thing does. But it’s great to actually talk about specific features that kind of light things up and make things happen. If folks want to learn more about Wix Studio, what’s the best way or to get in contact with you about speaking or the podcast, whatever. What’s the best way to do that?
Crystal Carter – 28:57
So I’m online all over the place. So I am on TikTok with a host of 200 very exclusive followers. We are an elite group. I also on LinkedIn with a lot more people and also on Twitter a lot as well. I do not mess with Facebook. It’s not really my thing. I occasionally post pictures of trees on Instagram if you would like to follow that as well.
And then if you want to find all things Wix and Wix Studio, we have our Wix SEO Learning Hub, which talks about features on Wix and Wix Studio and lots of things SEO. And our podcast comes out weekly on a Wednesday. So you can follow those. I’m also going to be speaking at Brighton SEO in San Diego, and I’m speaking in Mascon, and I’m speaking in various different places. So, you know, find me in one of those places as well. And Wix Studio has some great, great information on the Wix Studio website and you can find that online as well.
John Wall – 29:55
That sounds great. And then going out the door, any media, books, movies, articles, anything you’ve read recently for marketing folks that you can recommend for our audience.
Crystal Carter – 30:04
My favorite marketing go-to is Beyonce. I think she’s a marketing genius and pretty much following anything that she does is really fascinating. Her cowboy Carter pivot has been fascinating to me, how she’s pivoted from that. So I feel like pick someone and follow them and study what they’re doing. So I’m a big student of Beyonce, but like Kim Kardashian would be a very interesting person to study as well. Taylor Swift, lots of other folks. So yeah, that’s my marketing school of marketing is Beyonce.
John Wall – 30:33
That’s an easy plug. Can’t argue with success like that.
Crystal Carter – 30:36
She’s the other Ms. Carter. It’s all good.
John Wall – 30:38
All right, Crystal, thanks for spending some time with it. We really appreciate it.
Crystal Carter – 30:42
Thank you so much, John.
John Wall – 30:43
All right, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.
Speaker 3 – 30:47
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at JW5150.com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funkmasters, and you can find it at musicale from Mevio. Or follow the link in our show notes.
The post Crystal Carter on SEO, Multiple Site Management, Wix Studio and More! appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.
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