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After working on more than 300 Squarespace SEO projects, we know a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t.
Sometimes, very small tweaks to your website can have a huge impact on your SEO, and business owners miss them simply because they aren’t sure what to look for.
That’s why we wanted to share the top 12 most common mistakes we have seen with Squarespace website owners when it comes to their SEO on Google. Fortunately, a lot of these issues are really simple to correct. So, we’ll walk you step-by-step through how to fix them, and in-turn, fix your Google rankings.
We’ve separated our list into the most common and the most valuable types of fixes.
But first, why are we focusing specifically on Google? Because when it comes to search, Google dominates the market, maintaining almost 93% of market share. If you can get your Google SEO where it needs to be, you’ll thrive on other search engines as well.
If you need further assistance after reading this blog, check out some of our other guides and resources. Or if you have questions, feel free to reach out. We love seeing Squarespace owners succeed with SEO, and we’d be happy to help.
Ok, back to the list. Let’s get down to it:
Table of Contents in Detail Hide
The Top 12 Most Common Mistakes Squarespace Website Owners Make with Google SEO
1. Not Using Google Analytics
Trying to improve your SEO ranking without insight on your data is like driving blind. In order to truly move the needle, you have to a way to see what type of content your audience is connecting with.
For this, it’s a no-brainer to use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free platform (run by Google) that can help you find out what your most useful content is. It does this by giving you data in real-time about your website traffic, referral sources, your general audience, the types of devices they are using, and more.
The sooner you install Google Analytics, the sooner you’ll have access to this data. That will allow you to begin to see trends and make smarter decisions about your content marketing and SEO strategy.
2. Not Connecting The Google Search Console
It can be a little intimidating to have the power to tell Google what to do— but the Google Search Console actually allows you to just that! Google Search Console is an indispensable free tool that allows a website owner to directly request that Google to scan and index their website or webpage. Normally, companies do this after adding new content.
It’s true that Google will eventually get around to scanning your site anyway, but connecting Google Search Console helps speed up the process. It also helps Google keep an up-to-date record of pages and content, which improves the response to new content and helps to prevent errors within the Google search engine.
3. Not Removing Telltale Squarespace Signs
Obviously, we love Squarespace websites. However, it can be a big SEO mistake to leave behind telltale signs that your website was built on Squarespace. It can become confusing from a brand standpoint and tarnish your website’s credibility.
This includes:
Not removing "The Cube" Favicon - Every Squarespace comes with a stock "cube" icon as a stand-in for a custom favicon. No matter what you choose to replace this with (your logo, your initials, a picture of a cat) really doesn’t matter as long as it fits your brand. It may seem simple, but adding a custom favicon can go a long way in increasing your website’s legitimacy.
Not Removing Default Footer Content - Again, Squarespace is our jam. But seeing websites with ‘Made with Squarespace" or ‘Powered by Squarespace’ in their footer makes us cringe a little. Your website should belong solely to you and your business— in both title and presentation. This means that the less you mention Squarespace on your site, the more professional it will seem.
4. Not Adjusting Some Vital Settings
Have you ever gone to the chiropractor and gotten an easy adjustment that made a world of difference in your well-being? The easy, no-brainer settings that we will mention below are similar to that chiropractor. Making slight adjustments to these can have a huge impact on SEO performance.
Honestly, the time it takes to read these instructions and act on them should only take around 5 minutes. Don’t wait:
Turn AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on:
AMP is basically a blog setting in the back end of your site that helps your pages to load faster by creating a lightweight version of your site for mobile users.
Page loading speed has a big part to play in SEO. In fact, AMP results appear as top stories in Google with thumbnail images and headlines. And Google allows visitors to tap on the AMP result to quickly get an optimized mobile experience. Considering more than 50% of traffic now comes from mobile, you want to make sure this setting is set to ‘ON’.
To access this setting in the menu:
Go to Home > Settings > Blogging > AMP
Make sure that it is switched on
Enable HSTS - Google hates scammy websites just as much as we do. That’s why they prefer that you turn on HSTS. In short, HSTS is a setting that helps to improve security on your website.
To enable it follow these instructions:
Go to Your Website
Click Settings > Advanced > SSL
Make sure you select Secure and HSTS Secure
These are the most common quick- fixes to make on your Squarespace website to help you move the needle forward on your SEO.
Next, we’ll look at some of the move overlooked yet valuable SEO mistakes on Squarespace that you should dedicate some time to resolving.
The Most Overlooked Yet Valuable SEO Mistakes on Squarespace
5. Not Defining Your Keywords From the Outset
Keywords are the very foundation of SEO. They tell Google what your website is about and what type of visitors might find your website useful. However, a lot of website owners go into the process of creating their site without ever knowing which keywords they want to rank for!
Before you begin building your website, do —or have some keyword research done for you —in order to find out what top 5,10, or 25 keywords and phrases would be best for your SEO optimization.
If you can define them sooner rather than later, it will help you to craft a website that is fully optimized for search engines right from the get-go.
6. Not Focusing on Your Metadata
Metadata sounds pretty ‘techie’ but it is actually a simple concept to both grasp and implement. Metadata is basically short snippets of text that describe your site's content to search engines. It includes things like Image Alt Data and your Site Description.
When you write your metadata, you want to ensure you are writing it in a way that Google can easily understand it. This means including keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to the content you are describing. But they also have to make sense — search engines show meta descriptions below a page title in search results if they can't find other on your website content that's more relevant to a visitor's search terms.
You can learn more about how to write and implement metadata in chapter one of this comprehensive guide.
7. Not Improving Dwell time
Dwell time is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: The length of time a person dwells on a webpage after they’ve clicked a link on a search engine's result page.
Basically, you want customers to hang out on your website as long as possible. When they do, search engines get the signal that your site is both relevant and useful to the user they sent your way. The higher the dwell time on your website, the better your rankings will get for that particular keyword.
To increase dwell time, look at which pages are performing well in this area and which are not (Google Analytics is a big help with this).
If you find that some pages have a quick bounce rate, try doing an audit of your content there and testing out some new images/text. Keep tweaking and testing until you begin to see that users are not exiting quite as quickly.
8. Including Too Few Images
Speaking of dwell time, no one wants to hang around and read a website that’s just a big intimidating text block. Images help to break up your text and add more context to your content. Visually it’s more appealing, but it also makes your information easier to digest.
So, make sure you’re adding high-quality, eye-catching images to your site. But don’t stop there!
You can make your website images work twice as hard by adding appropriate image alt data (with keywords) to each. Image alt data, similar to metadata, tells Google what your image is.
This can help your image results become much more useful, which, in-turn, can lead to higher-quality traffic to your site. Google Images get almost 1 billion page views a day, which you can easily capitalize on by using image alt data that makes sense.
Check out this helpful guide to learn more about how to write and structure your Squarespace image alt tags for SEO.
9. Not Including a Clear or Prevalent Call to Action
A CTA is a recurring button that is prevalent throughout your site and tells your visitor what to do if they want to take the next step with your business.
To keep your CTA effective, try using the same one throughout your website in order to make it very clear to a visitor what they should do. You can really use a CTA on every page that makes sense.
10. Not Having Enough Anchor Links
Anchors away!
No actually bring them back.
Google loves anchor links as it makes it easier for their bots to navigate and find relevant information on your website.
An anchor link is essentially a web link that allows users to leapfrog to a specific point on your website page. As the name implies, it literally anchors two different locations on the internet or pieces of content together. For example, you could add an anchor link to the end of your blog page to your contact page.
And speaking of blogs, you should have one:
11. Not Having an Active Blog
There’s a million reasons we could share here about why having a blog is beneficial for your SEO, but for time-sake, we’ll just cover the top 3. (For more, or to check out our top tips for Blogging on Squarespace, head over to this guide.)
Blogging offers a prime opportunity to use keywords in your content and signal to Google that your website should be associated with certain topics
Blog Posts tend to be a great front door when it comes to gaining organic traffic. How many times have you been researching a subject only to find a helpful article that fits your query? (Like, perhaps right now?)
Blogs help to humanize your brand and gain trust from your audience. Blogs tend to feature more personal content that other parts of your website and that helps build credibility with visitors.
You don’t necessarily have to call your blog a blog. No matter what you name it, it’s a wonderful mechanism to publish fresh content and dramatically improve your SEO.
12. Not Including Enough Internal Links
Did you know SEO performance is affected by the number of times that a site links back to itself? Therefore, not adding enough internal links to your site could be harmful.
There’s a lot of opportunities to add internal links on your about or careers pages. Or, you can look for opportunities on each one of your webpages to add links to your services, favorite blog posts, etc. Your website’s footer is also an excellent place to implement an expanded menu, which Google counts as internal links.
Want More Helpful Tips About Squarespace SEO?
You can check out all of our guides and resources here.
