What a Showit Website Actually Needs to Rank on Google

Alright, I’m gonna break the silence on this. As someone with an oddly 50/50 brain split between data & creativity, I can in fact appreciate Showit’s amazing creative freedom WHILE not condoning their SEO shortcomings. BUT… a Showit website not only can, but will rank on the first page of Google if your designer is aware of those shortcomings and how to work with them.

You’ve already heard the basics. Fill in your meta titles. Add alt text to your images. Use H1 tags correctly. Write a meta description. These are real things that matter, and yes, you should do them.

But if you’re reading this, you probably already know that stuff. You’ve done the checklist. Your titles are filled in. Your images have alt text. And your Showit site is still sitting on page four of Google wondering what it did wrong.

So let’s go deeper. Here’s what actually moves the needle on Showit SEO that most people aren’t talking about.

The Hidden Problem: Showit’s Layer Order Affects How Google Reads Your Page

This is a quirky one… When Showit renders your page into HTML, it outputs your design elements in reverse layer order, meaning the bottom layer in your editor shows up first in the HTML.

Why does this matter for SEO? Because search engines read HTML top to bottom. If your most important headline is layered above a random image in Showit, it may be rendering lower in the actual HTML than you think. Google is encountering your decorative elements before it gets to your core content.

The fix is intentional: put your most critical text elements, your H1, your primary value proposition, your keyword-rich content, at the bottom of your layer stack so they render at the top of the HTML.

Your Blog and Your Main Site Are Two Different Things to Google

Showit’s WordPress blog integration is genuinely powerful, but it creates a technical split that a lot of site owners don’t fully account for. Your main Showit pages and your WordPress blog pages are technically two separate systems. They look like one site to your visitors, but Google treats them differently.

This means your Yoast or RankMath plugin settings only apply to your blog posts, not to your main Showit pages. Your main pages need their SEO configured directly inside Showit. If you’ve been relying on your SEO plugin to handle everything, your service pages and homepage may be under-optimized even if your blog posts look great in the plugin dashboard.

The practical move: treat your SEO setup as two separate workflows. One for Showit pages, one for WordPress blog posts. Both need attention.

Hidden Elements Are Hurting You More Than You Know

Showit makes it easy to hide elements on mobile that are visible on desktop, or vice versa. Designers do this constantly for layout reasons. The problem is that Google’s crawler sees both versions.

If you have keyword-rich text that you’ve hidden on mobile to clean up the layout, Google may still be indexing it. In some cases, content hidden via CSS can be treated with less weight or, worse, flagged as an attempt to stuff keywords out of sight. Neither outcome is good.

Go through your mobile canvas with fresh eyes. Don’t hide elements just for the sake of hiding.

Page Speed Is a Ranking Factor and Showit Sites Have a Specific Vulnerability

Showit automatically compresses images when you upload them, but this doesn’t replace pre-optimizing before upload. Large hero images and full-width background images are one of the most common culprits behind slow Showit sites, and site speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor.

Before uploading any image to Showit, compress it to under 500KB for most images and under 200KB for anything that isn’t a hero or gallery. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights and look specifically at the “Largest Contentful Paint” score. That number tells you how fast your main visible content loads, and it correlates directly with rankings, especially on mobile.

If your LCP is slow, the likely culprit is your hero image. Export it as WebP if possible, compress it further, and consider whether that enormous cinematic header image is worth the ranking cost.

You Need Dedicated Pages, Not Just Mentions

This is arguably the biggest strategic miss on most Showit service sites. Google ranks pages, not websites. A mention of your service buried inside your homepage copy is not the same as a dedicated page built around that service with its own URL, its own H1, its own copy, and its own internal links pointing to it.

If you offer wedding planning and photography, those should be their own page. If you serve clients in a specific city or state, that location should have its own page or at minimum a significant dedicated section with a unique URL. If you offer multiple services, each service deserves its own home.

The sites that rank are the ones that give Google a clear, specific answer to a specific search. A general homepage that mentions everything is not a specific answer to anything.

Internal Linking Is Your Underused Authority Engine

Every time you publish a blog post, you have an opportunity to pass authority to your service pages through internal links. Most Showit site owners write a blog post, publish it, and move on. They’re leaving power on the table.

When you write a blog post about anything related to your services, link back to the relevant service page with anchor text that includes your target keyword. Not “click here.” Not “learn more.” Something like “Digital strategy for female founders” or “Hawaii small business website design.” That’s how Google understands the relationship between your content and your services.

Done consistently over time, internal linking creates a web of authority that reinforces your core pages and helps them rank without needing to chase external backlinks.

The Bottom Line on Showit SEO

Showit is not an SEO liability. It’s a perfectly capable platform for ranking on Google. But it requires you to understand how it actually works under the hood, not just how it looks on the canvas.

The designers and business owners who rank on Showit are the ones who understand the layer order quirk, who manage their Showit and WordPress SEO separately, who audit their hidden elements, who obsess over page speed, and who build dedicated pages instead of trying to rank one bloated homepage for twenty different keywords.

The checklist is just the starting point. The strategy is what gets you to page one. So… are you ready for a strategy-first Showit website? Let’s chat!