How to Improve SEO on Squarespace

Curious to know how to improve SEO on Squarespace? Whether you’ve been working with SEO (search engine optimization) for years or you’re just beginning and wondering where to start, here are five important ways we recommend optimizing your site with the Squarespace platform.

(And, if you’re interested, here’s why Squarespace is our favorite platform to create websites for little businesses, bloggers, and freelancers.)

What is SEO & Why Does it Matter?

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing your content’s visibility in program rankings. For instance, you write a blog post on a few specific topics. When someone searches Google with keywords regarding that topic, you would like your blog post to point out up near the highest of the list of search results, so they’ll see it, click thereon, and be connected together with your excellent post.

The reason SEO may be a method is that a lot of elements are often strategically addressed throughout your content production and promotion which will enhance your visibility to look engines and encourage them to rank you highly. Generally, program algorithms look helpful on the subsequent things:

• Relevant long-form content
• Relevant titles
• Relevant links
• Well-labeled images
• Referring links (the number of connections across the web that link to your page)
• Mobile responsive design
• Page loading speed

Ways to Boost Your Squarespace Website’s SEO

Here are our favorite techniques to boost your Squarespace website’s SEO. The same tips refer to other website platforms as well, though the back-end implementation may be a bit different.

Page Titles

Search engines prioritize page titles, blog post headlines, and the same, so it’s necessary to write sharp and descriptive titles that will help both people and search engine bots get the content they’re looking for.

(Pro tip: The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a valuable tool for testing out the meaning of different headlines on driving traffic and SEO.)

Squarespace page settings provide you to easily update (and differentiate) your SEO titles, navigation titles, and page titles. Here’s the difference:

• SEO title: indexed by search engines and looks in search results, so this is where you’ll want to add keywords you’d like the search engine to find
• Navigation title: links to the page in your navigation menus (so you’ll need to keep it brief, like About or “Blog”)
• Page title: (available on some templates) this provides you to use a different, usually longer, title at the top of your page than on your navigation menu (for example, “About” on the nav menu could become “About Our Company” on the page title); note that if you don’t customize your SEO title, your page title will appear in search results

Page Metadata

There are a couple of different elements of page metadata that can impact your search ranking:

Page description

Squarespace also involves SEO descriptions (and page descriptions on some templates). These descriptions may seem below your page title in search engine listings—which means prospective readers will likely be using them to determine if they’d like to click on your link.

For every page on your website, write a strategic, keyword-rich SEO description that describes the content on that page. Get these settings in Page > SEO > SEO Description. Get the SEO description for your entire site in Marketing > SEO > Site Meta Description.

URL

To improve how search engines can crawl and index your site, use clear, descriptive, and clean URLs. This means each page URL should include relevant keywords for your page/content, be as brief as possible, and have no spelling errors.

In some instances, like with blog post settings, you may need to freshen up any unnecessary information to optimize your blog post URLs.

Structure with Headings

Like they do with titles, search engines typically prioritize the headings on your website over its body content. Thus, your headers are essential in letting search engines know the major themes of your site and the specific content of each page.

Manage your site’s built-in headings (h1, h2, h3) to structure your content in a hierarchical order (with h1 at the top). And, be attentive to how you write headings: they should be clear and descriptive, with keywords from your post topic. This is not to say you should structure headings for search engines—they also serve an essential purpose for guiding readers through your content.

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Image alt-text

Search engine bots can’t read photos, they can only read the text—so adding alt-text captions to your images helps search engines to “see” them and understand their content.

In Squarespace, you can unite alt-text to most images, including those in image blocks, galleries, and product images. For image blocks, add a caption to the picture and choose do not to display the caption (though if you want to display the caption, that’s fine too, and it will still be indexed as alt-text). For galleries and products, the alt-text can be combined with the Image Title field in the image settings. For blog post thumbnails, the blog post headline is the default alt-text.

Note that image alt-text is also given along with the image as the default caption if someone pins a photo from your site to Pinterest.

Blogging

Blogging is one of our top tactics to boost SEO and grow your website traffic. Blogging is excellent for your SEO in several ways: it adds more relevant content to your site (so you have more opportunities to establish your themes and keywords with search engines); it shows search engines your site is active and regularly updated, and it’s more shareable than the average webpage, so can help spread your content better.

Even if you’re not a blogger, we suggest including a blog on your website for these purposes. You don’t have to post every day or write novel-length posts—just regular (weekly-ish) posts can help to improve your SEO. For new bloggers, we share more tips on setting up your Squarespace blog, writing useful blog posts, and five things to make sure you include in each blog post.

Categories & Tags

Whether on your blog, products, or galleries, Squarespace’s built-in category, and tag features can improve search engines accurately identify your content, developing its visibility. Improve your SEO by adding appropriate category and tag labels to any of your website elements that add this feature: blog posts, products, gallery images, etc.