Ultimate SEO Guide: Blogging in 2023 on Squarespace [Tips & Tricks from Over 300 Websites]
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Blogging is an incredible way to optimize SEO for your website. And it will continue to be in 2021 and beyond. However, if you choose to use blogging for this purpose, it’s important to also understand what it is not:
Blogging for SEO is not a quick fix
Blogging for SEO is not a one-and-done type of campaign
Blogging for SEO takes time, effort, and consistency
In short, SEO through blogging is built over time. And while Squarespace websites have many great built-in SEO functions, it’s still best to build on them with custom content.
When you’re running a business, time is your most precious asset. Therefore, it’s important to note just writing a few blogs with some keywords simply won’t help you achieve the type of reach you’re looking for.
If you want to establish better SEO through blogging, you have to commit to creating a content-rich website for Google to understand what you’re offering.
So, in this guide we’ll dive into the why, how's, and how-to of starting a blog on Squarespace that can make you a Google go-to.
Let’s jump in.
Table of Contents in Detail Hide
Why You Should Start Blogging on Squarespace
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Maybe you’re just dying to share all the impressive knowledge you have about your product and industry (which is awesome). But blogging has four other main benefits that make it a super powerful tool for SEO:
It Increases Organic Reach
A whopping 70-80% of people completely ignore the paid search results at the top of their results page and head straight to the organic listings. While this is not awesome news for Google advertisers, it's wonderful news for bloggers.
Every time you write a new blog, you have a fresh chance at being listed in an organic search result for a specific query. (We’ll talk more in-depth about how to achieve this below.) The more keyword-rich, SEO formatted content you write, the better your chances at showing up in these organic results.
Fresh Content Means More Indexing
One of the perks of blogging with Squarespace is that when you add new content to your site, Squarespace will automatically update your site map. Your Squarespace site map includes URLs for all pages on your site, as well as your image metadata. This makes it easy for Google to recognize that your website has new content, and it’s ready to be indexed for search results.
It Increases Backlinks
Backlinks work in two ways for SEO purposes. Basically, Google gives brownie points for legitimacy. So, when you add reputable links to your content, it boosts your SEO by associating that content with that reputable site.
Conversely, when you share your blog content on social media, newsletters, etc. and other reputable sites link to that content, that boosts your SEO as well.
It Builds Credibility with Google
When you add content to your website that helps build trust with your audience, it often leads to two outcomes: more website traffic, and repeat visitors. Both of these are SEO gold for Google. It shows them that people are attracted to your site, and that your content is worthwhile. Therefore, Google will raise your authority level in their algorithm, and you’ll be shown increasingly in search results.
Once that happens, it will lead to even more visitors, and your SEO will continue to compound!
Remember this golden rule: write for Google first, and your end-user second.
Why?
It’s important for Google to find you first, so that your audience can find you at all.
How to Start Blogging on Squarespace
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Now that we understand why we should be blogging, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to begin your blogging journey on Squarespace!
First, you’ll want to start by setting your blog up for SEO success. There are three main areas you should focus on for this:
Where you’ll be hosting your blog
Customizing the back end of your blog
Optimizing the front-end of your blog (including content and mobile optimization)
Hosting Your Blog:
Image Source: Squarespace
If you already have a Squarespace website, there are a lot of pros to just creating your blog on Squarespace as well (and not on a third-party site).
Squarespace has plenty of visually attractive, easy-to-use templates for their blog pages ready to go. You can set up your blog page without any coding knowledge, and you’ll have significant styling options available to get it precisely as you want it.
As we mentioned above, new content will be automatically added to your site map to be indexed, so there is no extra work you’ll need to do there.
To add a blog page to your Squarespace website, follow these steps:
In the Home Menu, click Pages, then click the + icon.
Under Collections, click Blog.
Select the blog layout you want. You can change this later.
Enter a page title, then press enter. You can change this later.
Then, once you’re ready to add a blog post, you can do so by:
In the Blog Page panel, click the + icon.
Add a title for your post in the Enter a post title field. (Titles must be 200 characters or fewer.)
Your new post includes a Text Block to help you get started. To add more blocks to the post, click an insert point.
After adding content to your post, click the gear wheel icon in the top-right corner to edit blog post settings like categories and tags, comments, settings, and thumbnail images. We’ll talk about best practices for this in the next section:
Customizing the Back end of Your Blog
In this section, we’ll talk about customizing the settings for the back end of your Squarespace blog page and your blog posts.
Customizing Your Blog Page Settings
To access your blog page settings in Squarespace:
In the Home Menu, click Pages.
In the Pages panel, hover over a page title, then click the gear wheel icon next to the title.
There are a few different tabs here that you can choose to edit. You’ll want to make sure you review the information under each of them.
Let’s touch on a few important settings to focus on for your SEO purposes:
Under the General Tab:
Be sure your blog page is enabled to be seen by viewers
If you want your blog to be the homepage of your website, you can choose the ‘Set as Homepage’ option. This is a popular option for photography websites.
You can create a custom URL Slug for your blog page. Or just leave it www.yoursite.com/blog.
Under the SEO Tab:
Write a search results preview that gives readers an accurate understanding of what your blog page is all about in 1-3 sentences. Include relevant keywords where you can!
For your SEO description, you write something akin to your search results preview. Here are more tips from Squarespace on writing SEO descriptions.
For your SEO title, write the title of your blog page as you’d like it to show up in search results. So, for example, if the title of your page is simply “Blog”, you can change your SEO title to something more descriptive.
Under the Social Tab:
Add a sharing image that compliments your blog. This image will show when your page is shared on social and will help generate more clicks.
Under the Feeds Tab:
Squarespace websites have built-in RSS feeds for all blog pages. When you publish content to your blog, its RSS feed automatically updates, creating the new content as an .xml file. This helps drive traffic to your new post.
Customizing Your Blog Post Settings
Similarly to customizing the settings for your blog page, you’ll also want to optimize some of your blog post settings for SEO as well:
Under the Content Tab:
Categories - Squarespace lets users add categories to organize your post based on its content. We’re going to dig into using categories a bit later in this post
Under the Options Tab:
Add a thumbnail image
Make your post URL slug something simple, concise, and easy to remember (and again, try to include keywords!)
Under the SEO Tab:
SEO Title - Add an SEO title for each post (just as you do for each page) of your website to inform search engines on what your post is about
SEO Description - Add an SEO description as well with relevant keywords (we get into this more in the sections below)
Under the Social Image Tab:
If your post has a main image, that image will usually be what shows up in social sharing. However, to ensure it shows up correctly, use the social image option to upload it at the recommended size.
Under the Share Tab:
As we mentioned above, sharing helps drive SEO. Squarespace allows users to automatically create an email draft about each blog post, or:
Automatically share your post to your social media profiles when you publish. To take advantage of these built-in features, just make sure you’ve connected all your accounts.
Under the Location Tab
If local SEO is important to your business (for example, you’re a local photographer), use the ‘Add a location’ feature for your blog posts.
*Pro Tip - Revamping old blogs is a great way to create new, relevant content without writing an entirely new post. If you decide to revamp an old post, just make sure you change the publish date after you’ve done so!
Optimizing the Front End of your Blog
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Once everything behind the scenes is good to go, it’s time to focus on the optimizing the front end of your Squarespace blog!
We’re going to touch on four specific areas you should focus on for SEO:
Mobile optimization
Page load speed
Image optimization
And internal links
Mobile Optimization
Did you know that more than half of online searches take place on a mobile device? That means if your blog is not optimized for mobile, you’re going to miss out on a huge chunk of traffic.
One of the best things you can do to help your blog be mobile friendly is to enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This will help users load your content faster (which we’ll discuss in more depth below.)
Here are some other quick tips for keeping your blog mobile-friendly:
Keep your pages (including images, etc.) to less than 5 MB
Set your letter spacing to less than 0px, otherwise your text might overlap on mobile
Use padding instead of spacer blocks to reserve white space (some spacer blocks don’t show up on mobile)
Ensure you have mobile styles enabled in Squarespace
In the Home Menu, click Design, then click Template Settings.
Ensure Disable Mobile Styles is unchecked
Keep your design simple and don’t try to include too many elements in your blog posts
Page Load Speed
For search engines, pages with faster load speeds are given preference over pages with slower ones. Don’t miss out on traffic by forgoing some simple fixes for this:
First, check your current load speed for your blog posts with a tool like Pingdom Tools.
(*ProTip: Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool is not great for Squarespace websites, or any custom CMS. It can actually give you negative results.) Your page time should be around 1-2 seconds max. If it’s any higher than that, take the following steps to try and speed things up:
Try reducing your image sizes
Limit your galleries to 50 images each
Limit Gifs and animations. Use .jpgs if possible
Enable Ajax loading (if you have version 7.0)
Arguably one of Squarespace’s coolest features is the fact that it automatically creates seven versions of every image you upload, each with a different width ranging from 100-2500 pixels. Then, Squarespace displays the corresponding image to each user depending on their browser size. This helps your site load faster.
However, you’ll also want to optimize your images by doing the following:
Image optimization
Many times, when users upload an image to their Squarespace site, the file name is something like DCS8302. But leaving it that way gives up an effortless SEO boost. Instead, simply rename the file using a keyword that’s relevant to your post.
Also, try adding alt text to your images. Alt text tells search engines what your image is displaying. You’ll want to use keywords in your alt text and make it descriptive for your blog. You can learn all there is to know about optimizing image alt tags in our Ultimate Guide to Squarespace Image Alt Tags here.
Adding Internal Links
Adding internal links to your blog content helps Google’s crawlers to find new and relevant content on your site more easily.
This is a pretty easy one to do as well, as much of your content will likely overlap. If you have an appropriate spot to link to another blog or webpage, take it! Just don’t overdo it. Keeping it to 3-4 internal links for a 2000+ word post is a good guideline.
Designing Your Blog for SEO
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When people think about SEO, they normally only think about content. However, design also plays an important part in your search engine success.
There are a few best practices when designing your Squarespace blog for SEO. Most center around readability, due to the fact that keeping readers on your page longer will help increase your rankings.
Here’s a few rules of thumb to jot down:
Use no more than 15 words per line
Ensure your blog has easy navigation
Use an attractive sans or sans serif font
Keep your line height between 1.3-1.7 pixels
Keep a strong contrast between the color of your text and your background. (For example, black text on a white background is always a winner)
Try not to have too many distracting items on your page. Text with a few simple images works best!
Understand Meta tags
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We briefly covered meta tags (also called SEO descriptions) in the sections above when talking about SEO practices, but they bare repeating! Understanding what meta tags are (and using them) will deliver a huge bang for your buck when it comes to SEO tweaks.
So, what exactly are meta tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content— not to users, but directly to search engines through a page’s source code.
To add a meta tag to your blog, simply:
Go to your Home Menu, click Marketing, then click SEO.
In the Search Appearance area, click the Home tab.
Edit the SEO Site Description field, then click Save.
To keep these as search-engine friendly as possible, employ the following best practices:
Keep your description between 50-300 characters
Use (but don’t overuse) keywords
When you’re writing your SEO descriptions, try to directly answer a query that you think your potential audience might search for. This will help search engines recognize you more easily as a direct search result.
Understanding Tags and Categories
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Again, many website owners tend to skip this primary step, but their loss can be your gain!
When you publish a new blog post, be sure to organize it by category, product, etc. Using tags and categories not only helps visitors navigate your site (and hopefully stay longer), but it helps search bots read your site as well.
Wondering what the difference is between tags and categories?
In general, you can use categories to organize your blog posts by type. For example, if you’re a photographer, your categories could be: Family shoots, Newborn Shoots, Weddings, Engagement Shoots, etc.
Tags you can use much more liberally based on your keywords— like hashtags on social media. For example, using the example above, your tags could be California wedding photographer, California Family Photos, San Diego Newborn Photos, etc.
Posting Frequency and Scheduling posts
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At the beginning of this guide, we mention that frequency and consistency matter when it comes to blogging for SEO. So, you might be wondering, how often should I post?
To be frank, this is going to vary! When experts suggest bloggers should post ‘regularly’ to enhance SEO, they sometimes mean twice a week, and other times mean once a month. There’s no hard and fast rule. Here’s what’s important instead:
All your posts should be full of quality information. It’s better to write 1 blog per month that’s quality than 3 per month that are only decent.
Try to keep a familiar rhythm when you’re blogging. If you are doing one post per week and you suddenly stop, it can cause a considerable dip in traffic and hurt your SEO.
Try to aim for at least one excellent blog post per quarter. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time building any momentum for your SEO.
Scheduling posts is an easy way to ensure you are posting at consistent intervals. You can batch write during slower times in your business and schedule the posts to go out later. This helps your readers know what to expect. Squarespace makes this pretty easy:
If you have version 7.0:
When you're done editing a post, in the Blog Post Editor, click Draft.
Select Scheduled.
Click the date next to Publish.
Choose a publication date and time. You can also use the slider to publish the post in a specified number of days from now.
Click Save.
If you have version 7.1:
When you're done editing a post, hover over Done, and select Schedule...
Choose a publication date. Use the slider to choose a specific time.
Click Schedule.
Conclusion
Achieving Squarespace SEO through blogging takes hard work and consistency. However, by implementing the strategies above, you’ll achieve results faster and more easily.
If you’re looking for a partner who can help you easily jumpstart your SEO check us out! Our team of real humans is ready and excited to help.
