Squarespace and SEO - what you need to know
Hey, will my Squarespace site show up on Google?
“Will my website appear on page 1 of Google?” It’s a common question when talking about websites. If you’re investing in a new site design, you’re definitely going to want people to find your lovely new site!
With Squarespace, SEO is built straight into the site
SEO (Search engine optimisation) - or how Google ranks and lists your website - depends on many factors, but with Squarespace, many SEO features, such as metadata editing and automatic sitemap generation, are built-in. Visit The SEO features of Squarespace to get the lowdown.
However … There are things you can do to make your website work sooo much harder for you!
SEO is the process of making your website more attractive to search engines like Google so that it appears higher in search results when people look for relevant information. The goal is to increase your website's visibility and bring more organic (unpaid) traffic to your site.
The content you provide does the hard work, more-so than the clever back-end stuff, so incorporating these tips into your content will help massively!
SEO tip 1: Research the Right Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases that people type into search engines when looking for something online. To optimise your Squarespace website, start by researching and selecting relevant keywords for your content. Research the phrases your ideal clients would use, not just the techie jargon you might use yourself. These keywords should reflect what your website is about and what your target audience is searching for.
Remember, part of my web design services including working with my clients to research the best key phrases for their unique business.
SEO tip 2: Create High-Quality Content
Search engines love fresh, informative, and engaging content. Regularly update your Squarespace website with new blog posts, articles, or product descriptions that provide value to your visitors.
High-quality content not only keeps your audience engaged but also helps your SEO efforts. Your content’s quality, length, structure, and how often it is updated all play a part in how Google reacts to your pages.
If the content on your site is relevant, helpful, clear, and original, Google knows that it will be more valuable to people and gives it a boost up the rankings. Then, the more people see the listing and visit your site and read that valuable content, the more popular your site appears to Google. This is why things like consistent blogging and regularly updating the information on your website are so helpful for SEO. If your site just sits there gathering dust like a box of Christmas decorations in the loft, with no new content added for months, it essentially looks like a dormant site to Google, and your rankings will slip.
SEO tip 3: Optimise Your Content:
Once you have your keywords, use them naturally in your website's content. This includes your page titles, headings, paragraphs, and image descriptions. Squarespace provides easy-to-use tools to add and manage your content, making it simple to incorporate keywords. Ideally, pages should have at least 300 words, while 600-700 words is ideal.
Because Squarespace is a code-heavy platform (like all CMS sites), so you need to outweigh the code with content, so making your your pages and posts have a few hundred to a couple of thousand words is fabulous.
SEO tip 4: Customise your URLs and your Meta Description
Squarespace allows you to customise the SEO Title and SEO Description on each page. Click on the gear icon to the right of your page name and go to Settings/SEO and you’ll see where you can add your own SEO Title and SEO Description. Even if you don’t add them in, Squarespace and Google will do their best to fill this info in, but it is better for SEO rankings, if you add your key words strategically and manually.
URLs: Squarespace allows you to customise the URL of each page you create (the web addresse, i.e https://www.eaurouge.co.uk/blog/squarespace-websites-and-seo). Make sure your URLs are descriptive and contain 3-6 relevant keywords. This helps search engines understand what each page is about.
SEO Titles: Hover over the name of one of your pages or blogs in the left hand column of your Squarespace dashboard, clicking the three dots to the right of the name allows you to click on Settings then SEO - Squarespace then allows you to add another title as an SEO title. Make sure your URLs are descriptive and contain relevant keywords. This also helps search engines understand what each page is about and improves your site's SEO. Try to keep under 50-60 characters in your SEO title, so the whole title appears on google.
SEO Description: In the same Settings/SEO section Squarespace also allows you to customise each page’s meta description - again this is worth doing and you can add in loads of key words and phrases. Try to stick to 150-160 characters.
SEO tip 5: Mobile-Friendly Design
With a huge number of users accessing websites on mobile devices, it's essential to have a responsive design. If text gets too small or columns are unreadable on a phone, Google wont be happy! Squarespace templates are designed to be mobile-friendly by default, so your website looks great on smartphones and tablets, which can positively impact your SEO rankings.
SEO tip 6: Optimise and ‘Alt Tag’ your Images:
Images are an important part of your website, but they can also slow down your site's loading speed if they are not optimised. Squarespace automatically compresses and resizes images for you, but you can further improve your website's performance by using appropriately sized images and adding descriptive alt text to them. Check out my blog post all about image optimisation.
Alt Tags - add a description of your image in the Alt Tag section when you load an image in Squarespace. Google reads these, so they help with SEO. But they also improve the visual accessibility of your site, which also keeps Google happy!
SEO tip 7: Get Backlinks:
Backlinks are links back to your website pages from other well performing sites that are relevant to your products and services. Google prioritises websites with strong backlinks because if these websites trust you, so will Google.
Building relationships and collaborations with other businesses make for brilliant opportunities to refer website visitors back to your site. Building authentic relationships requires more effort than simply adding keywords to your text, but Google will love you for it!
A couple of warnings:
Socials - well you would think this would be the perfect place to start creating backlinks, but for some reason, SEO is not improved by Social backlinks.
Dodgy listings sites - Google knows and will be miffed with you!
SEO tip 8: Tell Google about your site:
Verify your site with Google Search Console - After you've verified your site with Google, you can manage your site’s presence in Google search results and review how visitors find you.
Request that Google index your site - This asks Google's bots to review your site and update search results with your new content.
Connect to Google Analytics - Track visits and other reporting on your site through Squarespace’s built-in integration with Google.