A Good SEO Strategy Is Like A Garden That Needs Nurturing
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How does your garden grow?
With patience, care, and methodical action taken at the right time.
You can’t just scatter seeds, walk away, and hope for the best. To get strong, healthy plants to grow, you have to know when and how to plant. You need to water periodically.
And well before you can harvest the abundance from what you’ve sown, you’ll have to weed, prune, and nurture your garden to get the best, most beautiful flowers and produce possible.
SEO is not that different when you stop to think about it.
A good Squarespace SEO strategy requires you to plan what you’re going to do and go about search engine optimization methodically, not haphazardly. You can’t sprinkle a few keywords here and there into your content and call it done.
You have to take all the good SEO tips and tricks you’ve acquired over time and apply them systematically to get the harvest you’re looking for: better placement on searches, greater visibility online, and more targeted visitors coming to your site.
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Use Our Garden Analogy As Your Squarespace SEO Framework
Your Squarespace website is the soil in which you’ll grow your SEO garden.
Just as a beginner gardener who has read all the best books and articles about growing a bountiful garden has to take action, you have to take all the best knowledge you’ve acquired about search engine optimization and start applying it in real life.
Start taking a methodical approach to SEO to avoid mixing up best and worst practices. Create a framework that organizes all of this information into a coherent plan with actionable steps.
Stop Bouncing Between Random SEO Tips
The goal here is to stop bouncing between the latest, greatest Squarespace SEO tips of the day and instead, create a process that works well to gain traction and grow your visibility over time.
The best gardeners map out their plots of land, creating a roadmap for what to plant where, and when to plant.
As a business owner, freelancer, or Squarespace developer, you also need to create an SEO roadmap and stick to it. Instead of bouncing between scattered ideas, develop and follow your plan.
Let’s begin with the idea that your Squarespace website is a small garden, and each page on your site is a plant that needs careful nurturing.
The Process Of Planting
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It begins with the process of planting your garden, which translates to adding content to your site.
When you plant your garden, you have to pay attention to location to make sure large trees don’t block out the sun. You have to plant the right number of seeds to make sure that enough take but you don’t end up with an overcrowded space.
You also have to give your garden a certain coherency so that anyone who enters can easily navigate it and find what they’re looking for (perhaps a cook needs to find the cilantro from among all the other herbs for making salsa, for example).
Similarly, when you add content to your site, you have to:
Balance your pages with the right mix of substance and visual appeal so that large blocks of text don’t block out the key messages you want to illuminate
Plant the right keywords in each page so that crawlers find them and help your pages gain online visibility
Don’t plant so many keywords in a page that you end up paying a penalty because of keyword stuffing and overcrowding
Structure your whole site, and your individual pages, in such a way that users can easily locate what they need instead of giving up in frustration because the search is too hard
Set up your site correctly for search engine crawlers to be able to find you
Add New Content Methodically
There’s a right way to plant, and there’s a wrong way.
Plant a seed too deep, and the new plant will never surface to see the light of day. Plant a seed too shallow, and it runs the risk of washing away in the rain or drying out in the heat.
If you plant a seedling in poor soil, it will struggle to survive. You have to first prepare the soil – aerate it, nutrify it, mix in compost, rake it clean and level.
Guess what? It’s the same with adding content to your site. To grow a Squarespace SEO strategy that brings you results, you have to first prepare the soil – the site itself. How do you do this?
By taking care of behind-the-scenes search engine optimizations. Just as a gardener has to prepare the soil before planting, you have to prepare your website before populating it with content. You do this by:
Being intentional about each of your URLs, selecting names that accurately reflect the page and that search engine crawlers will find and recognize
Adding SEO enriched titles to each page
On the backend of your Squarespace site, adding unique, powerful descriptions to each “SEO Description” section
Persistent Nurturing Is A Must
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You’ve prepared your soil by structuring your website correctly, giving each page an SEO-friendly URL name, title, and description.
You’ve planted seedlings by creating pages users will find interesting and search engine crawlers will find relevant.
Like a good gardener who plants more seeds to replace any dead or dying plants, you’ve added the right types of keywords, in the correct frequencies, to keep your SEO garden growing.
What’s next?
It’s time to nurture your garden. You have to water it, feed it, protect it from pests and environmental extremes. For your plants to flourish, you have to provide them with ongoing care.
Your SEO garden is no different. For your Squarespace site to flourish, you have to keep building and optimizing your pages. There are several ways to do this.
Improve The Writing
Go back and re-read the pages you created. Are they the best they can be? Is the writing clear, engaging, and helpful? No matter how good the writing is, you can always improve it.
Add Targeted Keywords
Check each page for keywords. Did you remember to add them in? If not, go back and strategically place targeted keywords on every page. A good SEO strategy hinges on this.
Tag All Your Pages
You have the opportunity to add title tags and meta descriptions to every page on your Squarespace site. For SEO purposes, make sure you do this.
Tag Your Photos, Too
You can also tag all of the images used on your site. Again, for SEO purposes, tag your photos.
Optimize For Speed
Your Squarespace SEO will improve when your site loads faster. Learn how to optimize for speed through our speed tips guide.
Engage In SEO Self-Education
Just as planting techniques evolve and new, better ways of growing fruits, flowers, and vegetables develop each year, so too does SEO evolve.
Search engine optimization best practices are constantly evolving and adapting to a changing environment. To stay on top of new developments and make sure you’re applying the best techniques available, keep learning from SEO experts.
Don’t Forget About Pruning And Weeding
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Your job’s not done yet.
A gardener has to prune plants so they grow properly and produce the best fruits. Weeding also needs to be done to get rid of ineffective plants and allow the productive ones room to grow.
In your Squarespace SEO strategy, you need to allow for pruning and weeding, too.
Don’t Get Too Attached To Anything
First of all, don’t get overly attached to anything you’ve created on your Squarespace site. For better SEO, you may have to delete portions of your page, swap out images, or even remove unproductive pages altogether to replace them with better performing ones. Pruning your site is simply good SEO strategy.
Remove Dead Links
It’s so frustrating to click on a link and end up with a “Page Not Found” message. Don’t do this to your visitors. Check your links and remove any dead ones.
Remove Low-Performing Pages
Over time, you’ll discover that some of your pages draw people in and keep them engaged on your site for a long time. Others, however, have high bounce rates. People don’t stay long at all. Or these pages hardly attract any visitors to begin with. Get rid of these pages; they’re not serving you well. Redirect that traffic to another, more fruitful page.
Google prefers a few high-quality pages over many low-quality ones! Prune your site for better SEO.
Perform An SEO Audit
We offer a free site audit tool that will scan your site for 15 types of SEO issues and generate results you can use. Try our Squarespace SEO audit tool today.
Get Expert Help For Your Squarespace SEO Strategy
We’ve covered a lot of ground here, but we hope your main takeaway is the importance of developing a methodical SEO strategy to get the SEO results you’re looking for.
If you ever have a question that needs an immediate, quick answer, reach out to our Squarespace SEO experts.
