How to Rank on Google: Get Started Today

The majority of my clients and customers find me by searching “Squarespace designer” on Google and seeing my website on Page 1 of the results. So a common question I get is how their sites can rank highly too. 

The truth is, there’s nothing magical about it. It just takes effort and time. The good news is that if you are willing to put in the work, you can rank high on Google Search too. In this post, I’ll give you some tips to get started on that journey.

Keep in mind that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an asset built over time. It’s not a one-and-done solution. The single most important thing you can do is just get started. The next step is to continue to create relevant, valuable content and share it with your audience. 

The First Steps

Figure out your keywords

These are the words you want to show up in results for when someone types them into Google - essentially a search query phrase. There are three things to keep in mind when you are researching keywords:

1. Relevance. For example, if you help people stage their homes for sale in Austin, Texas you might want to go with “home staging austin texas”

2. Search Volume. How many people are actually searching for those keywords? If it’s zero, there’s no point in creating content around them. If there IS an audience, you’ll also want to consider…

3. SEO Difficulty. Is there competition for your keywords? How likely are you to rank for that keyword given the currently playing field?

A tool like Ubersuggest is free to try and great for honing in on keywords that have good volume and lower SEO difficulty. Our “home staging austin texas” has a low search volume, but easy SEO difficulty, so it might be a reasonable place to start. 

Use those keywords

Add your main keywords in your Site Title, so “Your Business Name: Home Staging for Austin Texas”

Include your keywords to your main site SEO description, under Marketing > SEO.

Add your keywords to text on your site, including page titles, descriptions, headings, body text, and image alt text.

For more information on how to add the keywords to your website, check out the Squarespace Knowledge Base article on Adding Keywords for SEO.

Let the search engines know you exist

Now that you have some keywords in place, let the search engines know it’s time to start crawling your website! 

First, you’ll want to verify your site with Google Search Console. This makes the built-in Squarespace analytics much more powerful and is the first step to indexing your site with Google. This part is easy! When you are logged into your Squarespace site, go to Analytics > Search Keywords, then click Connect in the popup and follow the prompts.

After that’s complete, you’re ready to submit your sitemap to Google. Follow the instructions here for indexing your whole site.

You should also verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools, because Google isn’t the only game in town.

Get backlinks to your site.

Whenever a quality website links to your site, you get an SEO boost! So share links to your site on social media, get listed in online directories, and do guest blog posts (like this one).

Here’s How To See The Real Payoffs

Having the basics in place is the perfect way to begin your search rank journey, but it’s just the first step. Next, you’ll want to create consistent website content that positions you as an authority in your field, and the best way to do this is through a blog:

1. Search engines love websites that are updated often. Creating a new blog post every week or two is a great way to do this.

2. Search engines also love great content. So the more content you create around your keywords the higher you will rank. 

It’s not a field of dreams

Unfortunately, websites aren’t “build it and they will come.” It does take good onsite practices and a solid content strategy to start showing up in search results.

But it is possible

With a little effort and some patience, you can increase your search rank. In my own experience, blogging was key for improved site rank and traffic.

Here’s a snippet of my site traffic from July 2018 - December 2019. I started blogging regularly in February 2019 and you can see that’s exactly when I started seeing an upward trend in site rank and site visitors.

If you are feeling stuck with blogging, or haven’t started yet, check out my Squarespace Blogging Course: Make Money with your Blog. I’ll teach you how to find blog topics and write posts to create passive income, attract more customers, grow your revenue, and increase your search rank along the way.

The Single Most Important Thing

The single most important thing you can do is to start working on SEO NOW so you can start enjoying the payoffs of better search rank - a more successful business.