The 5 Basics of SEO Squarespace for Newbies

You’ve built it — so will they come?

If you’ve created a website on Squarespace that looks amazing and functions flawlessly — that’s unfortunately only half the battle. Now, it’s time to actually start driving traffic to that website, and capturing that traffic starts with understanding and improving your SEO.

In fact, a whopping 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine!

Luckily, Squarespace sites are already optimized for search engines by default. But there are (simple) additional things you can do to help ramp up your site's ability to show-up in search results for your target customers.

In this guide, we’ve broken down our top 5 Squarespace SEO Tips to help you easily take the next steps in growing your traffic — and in-turn, your business.

1. Get Acquainted With Your Squarespace SEO Panel

Squarespace has all the SEO tools you need wrapped up in a nice, convenient panel. You can navigate to your panel from the home menu by choosing: home -> marketing -> SEO.

This panel offers a lot of cool tools to help build your SEO, but here are the 6 most important pieces to start with: 

• Add your site title - Keep it under 60 characters and include keywords

• Add your site description - Aim for 50-300 characters, and again, include strategic keywords

• Add your physical location - This will help improve your ranking for local searches

• Connect a custom domain - If you have one; this will replace the .squarespace.com URL

• Connect your social media accounts - This makes sharing your content easier

• Ensure SSL is enabled - This is actually found under the home menu -> settings -> advanced; but setting this up will ensure you aren’t penalized by search engines.

2. Optimize your On-Page SEO

When we refer to on-page SEO, we’re talking about the process of optimizing both the content and HTML source code of a single webpage.

Squarespace makes this pretty simple through their built-in SEO tools, which allow you to add a different SEO title and a unique SEO description for each different page of your site.

Keep your SEO descriptions short— around 50-300 characters— and use keywords that make the topic of each page abundantly clear. You can (and should) also add unique SEO descriptions for individual blog posts, products, and events.

3. Take Advantage of Squarespace’s Connectivity with Google’s Programs

Squarespace has a lot of built-in functionality with Google programs, and knowing how to take advantage of them can really help boost your SEO:

1. As a first step, you’ll want to verify your site with Google Search Console. This will allow you to manage your site’s presence in Google search results and track how Google users find your site.

2. Next, from the console you can request that Google index your site, which basically just asks Google to include you in their search results.

3. Then, you’ll want to connect your website with a Google Analytics account, which will allow you to track visits and conduct other forms of reporting to meet your marketing needs.

4. And lastly, you’ll want to fill out all of your Google My Business information, which gives users easier ways to contact you. 

4. Publish consistent, quality content through blogging 

If you’ve indexed your site with Google, it will automatically update its new search results to include your new content. This is why blogging is so important.

Continuously giving Google new, quality (and properly-structured) content to index for your site gives you more chances to show up in search results, and therefore, more chances to drive potential customers to your site!

5. Understand and utilize alt tags and content best practices

Like we said above, publishing new content on a consistent basis can be a huge factor in increasing your SEO. However, in order for it to work, it needs to be properly optimized for SEO.

Here are the top 4 things to keep in mind for publishing content on your site to make a difference in your search rankings: 

1. Add alt text to images - This is so often overlooked, but it can be a huge opportunity in capturing traffic. Adding alt text to the images used on your pages helps search engine bots better crawl and understand what the page is about.

2. Add tags and categories - Again, a lot of website owners will skip this very important 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.

3. Use keywords, but only where it makes sense- Using keywords in your content is great, but using keywords just for the sake of using keywords is bad. Search engines have caught onto a practice referred to as “keyword stuffing” where keywords either are overused or used out of context in order to gain traffic. They often penalize sites for doing this. So use your keywords strategically within your content only where they fit naturally.

4. Structure your content for SEO: Use titles, headings, bullets, and keep your content skim-friendly for your users.

Looking for more Squarespace SEO tips? Check out all of our helpful guides here.