Squarespace SEO Tips for Beginners
One of the common questions that pop up in our Facebook group is how to optimize a Squarespace website for SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for getting websites found by search engines, but it’s one of those topics that has a lot of moving parts. SEO specialists put a lot of time and energy into studying and experimenting with what works and that can be a lot to take in if you’re an agency that creates websites for others, or if you’re a website owner that wants the best chance of getting found.
In Squarespace-land, there have also been rumors circulated in the past that the websites aren’t great for SEO. (Spoiler: that’s not true!) There are a few basic things you can do to ensure that your Squarespace websites are well-optimized for SEO - here are our top picks:
Download our post-launch SEO checklist for Squarespace sites here
On-page vs. Off-page SEO
It’s important to know the difference between on-page and off-page SEO techniques as both have an important role to play in your overall optimization:
On-page SEO - This refers to optimizing the pages of your website which send internal signals to search engines of their relevance. Keyword research and placement is an on-page technique.
Off-page SEO - This refers to actions that can be taken outside of your own website to impact your search engine results. Building high-quality backlinks to your website is the foundation of off-page SEO.
To truly optimize your website, you need to use both techniques but the place to start is with on-page strategies. Most SEO strategists agree that an excellent on-page strategy gives the most bang for buck.
Integrate with Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you to identify the keywords that are driving traffic to your website and provides you with an overview of how you rank. Squarespace was the first CMS to have an integration with the tool, helping website owners to gain new insights for refining their SEO strategy and optimizing their ranking.
When you link with Google Search Console, it is one click from within Squarespace. When you’ve verified your site, you’ll be able to see the Google Search Keywords panel within Squarespace Analytics.
(Source: Squarespace)
How important are keywords to SEO? Here’s an extract from Moz:
“Keywords are important because they are the linchpin between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. Your goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages (SERPs), and the keywords you choose to target (meaning, among other things, the ones you choose to include in your content) will determine what kind of traffic you get.”
An important thing to remember is that keywords are not a “one and done” exercise. When you first launch a website, you’ll use keywords based on your best guesses from keyword research you conduct at the time. After a period, you might find that those target keywords need to be altered, which is a good reason to use the Google Search Console integration.
Registering with Google Search Console is an important SEO step of itself. This is because it tells Google that your site exists, rather than them having to find you.
Put keywords in the right places
Keywords are one of around 200 ranking factors used by Google. They’re important, but they have to be used the right way. A few years ago, people used to “stuff” keywords throughout their content, hoping to attract more search engine traffic that way, however, this is now a great way to face the “Google slap.” That’s right, Google penalizes sites that stuff!
There are a few main places to put your keywords. On the pages of your Squarespace website, the headings play a key role in how it is organized and they work in a hierarchy. So your H1 should have your most important keyword phrases, then H2, H3 and so on. People often don’t really think about their headings or the order they’ll have them in until later, but it’s important to consider this early. You can use some well-crafted headings without having to pepper all of your content with the same keyword phrases.
To quote Neil Patel: “You definitely don’t need to repeat a keyword at least 7 times in the body copy anymore. This is a ploy that no longer works. And as any writer will tell you, it often makes the writing worse and less enjoyable to read.”
The image “alt text” is another key place. On Squarespace, the image caption is used for alt text or, if there is no caption, the file name is used. It’s a good habit to upload all images with a keyword-relevant file name in the first place as you probably don’t want to caption all of them. Under the inline layout, you can also choose to add an image caption, but then select “do not display caption.”
Squarespace provides the following list (in order of importance) of places to put your keywords:
Headings (eg, heading 1, heading 2, heading 3)
Captions and titles for Image Blocks, Gallery Blocks, Gallery Pages, and gallery sections
Enable HTTPS and HSTS
This sounds technical, but it’s not really. HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure and means that the website uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt website data, which is especially good for protecting your users who enter personal data.
HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security. It means that users will be sent to the secure version of your website.
Why does this matter? Since 2014, HTTPS enablement has been a Google ranking factor. One of their aims is to send visitors to safe, reliable websites which is why they have included that requirement.
It’s easy to enable your HTTPS in Squarespace; just go to Settings > Advanced and check “Secure (preferred)” and “HSTS Secure” as below:
Maximize your page speeds
Website speed is important for SEO for a couple of different reasons. First, it’s a ranking factor itself. Google can read how fast your website is and if it’s not up to standard, then this can impact your ranking.
Second, your website speed impacts other ranking factors, such as “dwell time,” otherwise known as “time on page.” This refers to the amount of time that a website visitor lingers before going back to the search results. Page speeds impact dwell time because people don’t hang around for slow load speeds. Google also measures your “bounce rate” which is the rate at which visitors “bounce” right back off your page. High bounce rates indicate that the page is either not great quality or not a good result for the keyword searched.
What impacts page speed on Squarespace websites? Here are a few things to monitor:
Image file sizes. You should mostly use compressed JPEG images, although some will render better in the PNG format. In either case, the file sizes should be no more than about 1.5 times the space they will occupy. Basically, you want them as small as possible without impacting the image resolution on screen.
File types. JPEGS are quickest to load, followed by PNG. GIFS take longer to load. Bear this in mind if you like to use GIFS in posts or on pages. It’s a good idea to limit how many you use on any given page so that you don’t slow it down too much.
Enable Ajax loading. Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) makes it so only the visible content will be loaded when someone visits a page. This makes them considerably faster to load, especially if you have a lot of cached content.
Use only reputable plug-ins and avoid running too many external scripts. Some scripts can bog your site down - you can’t avoid all script running, just make sure you’re only running what you need.
Turn on AMP if you have blog posts. This means “Accelerated Mobile Pages” and will speed up the loading of your posts on mobile devices. This can be found under Settings > Blogging > Use AMP.
Add meta descriptions
Squarespace has a couple of places where you can add meta descriptions. While these don’t directly impact ranking when you use keywords, the description is a signal of relevance to any visitors.
The meta description is the short summary of the page that appears on search results. Google shows 155-160 characters, so if your description goes on longer it will be cut off. It’s better to keep it short and highly relevant/engaging to the viewer.
On Squarespace:
To add a homepage meta description, go to Marketing > SEO > SEO site description.
To add blog post meta descriptions, hover over your post on the blog page, click “edit” and go to SEO tab. Enter the meta description where it says “SEO description.”
Use a good SEO tool
While you could rely on Squarespace’s SEO tools, an external tool will give you a more comprehensive view. For example, SEM Rush gives you a huge boost with research for SEO and insight into what your competitors are doing. If you can swing it, using a tool like this can give you an advantage.
Free download: Squarespace post-launch SEO checklist
Final thoughts
These are just a few SEO tips to get started. Like we mentioned, there are around 200 Google ranking factors, so that would be a lot to get through! Fortunately, many of them are taken care of during the setup of your Squarespace website.
Many people wonder where to start with SEO and we would begin with these basics, especially setting up keywords and descriptions. It is your words that ultimately drive search traffic, so it’s important to get them right.
User experience is also very important, which is where factors like page speed come in. With Squarespace, the templates have you well on your way to creating a user-friendly website anyway, but you still have to monitor the overall experience.
What do you think? What strategies have you used that have worked well?
