Before I started working for Showit, I used it to build websites for non-profit organizations as a way to help provide for my family.

In 2022, my husband and I quit our full time jobs as pastors and decided to make a complete change in our professional careers – to something we still didn't know what it would be. We just knew we needed a change.

So when my friends offered to train me on Showit because “it's so easy to use, even a former pastor could learn it,” I did, and created my very first few websites on Showit.

After launching them, I waited for Google to fall in love with them and show them to everybody on the web.

Google did not fall in love. I don't even think it noticed them.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why. The site looked finished, so I assumed it was finished.

After a few conversations and some research, I learned that underneath all that cool design, there were a handful of settings I'd never touched – fields left blank, headings tagged wrong, images the size of small moons. None of it showed up on the screen but all of it was quietly tanking the search rankings.

The challenging truth about Showit SEO is that the platform gives you incredible design freedom, which also means it trusts you to handle the SEO settings yourself. And the settings that matter most for getting found on Google are tucked in panels you can absolutely build an entire site without ever opening.

So let's open them. Below are the Showit SEO settings that quietly hurt your rankings, and exactly how to fix each one this afternoon.

Empty Page Titles and Meta Descriptions Are Costing You Clicks

This is the big one, so we're starting here.

In Showit, every single page has its own SEO Settings tab. You'll find it by selecting a page in the left panel, then clicking the “SEO Settings” tab in the right panel. Inside, you'll see three fields: Page Title, Meta Description, and Share Image.

If those fields are blank, Google is left to guess what your page is about. And Google's guesses are not good. You'll end up with a search result that says something like “Home | Untitled” – which inspires roughly zero clicks.

The Page Title is what shows up as the clickable blue headline in search results. Google only displays about 60 characters, so keep it tight. Lead with what the page is and who it's for: “Wedding Photographer in Austin, TX | Jane Doe Photography” beats “Home” every time.

The Meta Description is the little paragraph underneath that headline, so aim for around 150 characters. This is your ad copy and it doesn't directly move rankings, but it's what convinces a human to click your link instead of the one above it. Write it like an invitation, not a robot.

The Share Image is what appears when someone drops your link in a text, a Facebook post, or a DM. Skip it and your beautiful page shows up as a sad gray box. Please don't skip it.

One important thing to note: you have to do this on every single page – your Home, About, Services, Contact, each blog category, all of them. Showit does not copy your homepage settings across the site. Every page is its own little SEO island.

Why it matters: Unique, descriptive titles and descriptions on every page tell both Google and AI search tools exactly what each page offers. That clarity is the difference between getting indexed properly and getting ignored.

Your Heading Tags Are Probably Tied to Your Fonts (Which Is a Problem)

This one is sneaky, and it trips up even experienced designers.

In Showit, the HTML text tag – whether a piece of text is an H1, H2, H3, or plain paragraph – is automatically assigned based on the text style you pick when you add it. Title style becomes H1, Heading style becomes H2, Subheading style becomes H3, and Paragraph style becomes a p tag.

If you grab the Title style for a piece of text simply because it's the right size and looks pretty, you've just created another H1 on the page. Search engines expect no more than one H1 per page – your main headline, the “this is what this page is about” signal.

I once audited a friend's site that had nine H1 tags on the homepage. Nine. Every chunky bit of text she liked the look of had been styled as a Title. To Google, that page was shouting nine different “most important things” at once, which is the SEO equivalent of everyone talking over each other at Thanksgiving.

The reverse happens too. People style a genuine heading as Paragraph because they liked that font better, and now the page has no H1 at all and no real heading structure for crawlers to follow.

How to fix it: Select any text box and look under Text Properties for the Text Tag setting. Set it manually. Give each page one clear H1 (usually the main headline), use H2s for your section titles, and H3s for sub-points underneath those. Style it however you want visually – just make sure the underlying tag reflects importance, not font size.

Why it matters: Search engines and AI crawlers use your heading hierarchy to understand the structure of your content. A clean H1-to-H2-to-H3 outline makes your page easy to read and easy to summarize, which matters more than ever now that AI tools are pulling answers straight from well-structured pages.

Blank Image Alt Text Is a Missed Opportunity (Especially for Photographers)

If your website is image-heavy – and if you're a photographer, designer, or really any visual business, it is – this section is worth its weight in gold.

In Showit, you add image SEO by selecting an image and filling in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields. That SEO Description becomes your alt text: the written description of the image that search engines and screen readers actually read.

Most people leave it blank. So Google sees a file called something like “IMG_4471.jpg” and has no idea whether it's a wedding bouquet, a brand logo, or a picture of your dog. That's a missed chance to rank in Google Images and to give AI search tools context about your visuals.

Showit's help docs put it well: write your alt text like you're describing the image to someone who can't see it, in as few words as possible. “Bride holding white peony bouquet on stone steps in downtown Charleston” tells Google a story. “image1” tells it nothing.

Two things worth avoiding, both straight from Showit's guidance. First, don't paste the same alt text on every image – it confuses both users and search engines and looks spammy. Second, don't keyword-stuff. Cramming “Charleston wedding photographer best wedding photographer Charleston SC weddings” into your alt text reads like a ransom note and can actively hurt your Showit SEO.

Why it matters: Descriptive, varied alt text helps you show up in image search, makes your site accessible to people using screen readers, and feeds context to the AI tools increasingly deciding which sites to cite. It's free SEO sitting in a field you're probably ignoring.

Hidden Elements Are Still Loading Behind the Scenes

Here's a Showit setting that hurts you precisely because you can't see it.

When you hide an element in Showit – on mobile, on desktop, or both – it doesn't actually disappear from your page. Showit hides it visually, which means the element is still in your page's code, still loading, just tucked away from view.

A little of this is normal and fine. The problem is the pack-rat approach: building three versions of a section, hiding two of them “just in case,” duplicating text blocks so the mobile layout works, and never cleaning any of it up. Over time your page code balloons with stuff no human will ever see.

I'm guilty of this. My old portfolio had an entire abandoned “Featured In” section hidden on every page for over a year because I kept meaning to come back to it. It loaded on every visit. It just never showed up.

How to fix it: Do a hidden-element audit. If something is hidden on both mobile and desktop (meaning it shows up nowhere) delete it, don't just hide it. For elements you've genuinely duplicated to handle mobile versus desktop layouts, that's fine – just be intentional rather than letting the clutter pile up.

Why it matters: Extra code means a heavier, slower page. And page speed is no longer a nice-to-have, it's foundational. Which brings us to the setting that quietly hurts more Showit sites than any other.

Giant Image Files Are Wrecking Your Page Speed

If you take one thing from this post, make it this.

Images are, by a mile, the biggest cause of slow-loading websites, especially for visual businesses. A blog post with 100 photos at 2MB each forces the browser to load 200MB of data, which on an average connection takes a user 4 to 5 seconds just for the images. People don't wait 4 to 5 seconds. They leave.

Here's something a lot of Showit users don't realize: Showit automatically optimizes the images you place on your pages, but your blog manages images separately. So if you're running a WordPress blog connected to Showit, those blog images are on you. Upload full-resolution photos straight from your camera and you've built a beautiful, unrankable brick.

Keep image files at a max of 500KB, with an ideal target around 300KB. Compress before you upload using a free tool like TinyPNG or Squoosh, and your pages will feel dramatically snappier.

Why it matters: Google's Core Web Vitals – the metrics that measure real-world loading and stability – are now part of how rankings get decided. According to the 2025 Web Almanac, only 48% of mobile websites pass all three Core Web Vitals, meaning more than half the mobile web is still failing. The targets to know are Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds (how fast your main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds (how responsive the page feels), and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 (how much things jump around as they load). Oversized images blow up the first one instantly. Compressing your photos is the single highest-leverage Showit SEO fix you have.

Don't Treat Mobile as an Afterthought

Showit gives you the ability to edit and design your mobile version separately, which is a genuine gift – you get pixel-level control over how your site looks on a phone. But that gift comes with a responsibility most people skip.

Because the mobile view is a separate canvas, it's easy to design a gorgeous desktop site, click over to mobile, see that it's “mostly fine,” and call it done. Meanwhile text is overlapping, a heading is cut off, and a button is floating into the next section.

This matters more than it used to. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, and current SEO analysis points to mobile performance as a primary factor for visibility in AI-driven search results. The phone version isn't the backup – it's the main event.

How to fix it: Actually scroll through every page on the mobile canvas before you publish. Check that headings stay intact, tap targets aren't crammed together, and nothing important got hidden in the shuffle. Then preview it on a real phone, because the editor and reality occasionally disagree.

Why it matters: Most of your visitors are on their phones, and so is Google's primary crawler. A site that's flawless on desktop and broken on mobile is, as far as search engines are concerned, a broken site.

Tidy Showit SEO Settings Are How AI Finds You Now

It's worth zooming out for a second, because SEO in 2026 isn't quite the game it was a few years ago.

Search isn't just ten blue links anymore. People are getting answers from AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other tools that read your site, summarize it, and decide whether to cite you. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 1 in 5 Google searches, and recent data shows that only 8% of users click through to a website when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one. That gap is only going to grow.

And here's the encouraging part: all those AI tools rely on exactly the fundamentals we just covered. Clear titles. Logical heading structure. Descriptive alt text. Fast, clean, mobile-friendly pages. The settings that feel boring are precisely what make your content machine-readable – which is what makes it citable.

The work hasn't changed as much as it sounds. It's still about being clear, being fast, and being organized. The robots reading your site today are just a lot less forgiving of blank fields and bloated pages than they used to be.

None of these fixes require code, a developer, or a weekend retreat. They require opening a few panels you've been scrolling past and filling in the blanks – page by page, image by image. Start with your titles and descriptions, compress your biggest images, and clean up your heading tags. That alone will put you ahead of most sites in your niche.

Your website doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to stop quietly working against you.

Here's the thing about Showit: the same creative freedom that lets you build something genuinely beautiful is the same freedom that lets you control every Showit SEO detail that actually moves the needle – no rigid templates deciding things for you, no code required. Once your settings are dialed in, that freedom becomes a real advantage.

Ready to build a site that looks like you envisioned and gets found on Google? Try Showit free for 14 days and see why thousands of designers and small business owners trust it to power their websites.

And, if you want a deeper dive, check out this video on why one of our designer “Quit” SEO last year.