How to Improve SEO on Your Squarespace Website
Whether you’ve been working with SEO (search engine optimization) for years or you’re just starting out and wondering “What the heck is SEO, and where do I begin?”—here are five key ways I recommend optimizing SEO on your Squarespace website.
But first:
What is SEO & why does it matter?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing your website’s visibility in search engine rankings.
For example, you write a blog post about a certain topic. When someone searches Google with keywords regarding that topic, you want your blog post to show up near the top of the list of search results, so they’ll see it, click on it, and be connected with your wonderful post.
Note: Though Google is still the crowned king of online search engines, it’s certainly not the only one, and an increasing number of searches are taking place on mobile via voice-activated searching with Siri and Alexa, which use Apple and Amazon search engines, respectively.
The reason SEO is a process is that there are various elements that can be strategically addressed throughout your content creation and promotion that will enhance your visibility to search engines and encourage them to rank you highly.
What are search engine algorithms looking for?
Search engine algorithms are massively complicated and factor in gazillions (okay, maybe not that many, but a lot) of details when determining how relevant your website content is to a given search query.
In general, search engine algorithms look kindly upon the following things:
relevant long-form content
relevant titles
relevant links
well-labeled, relevant images
referring links (the number of links across the web that link back to your page)
mobile responsive design
page loading speed
5 Ways to boost your Squarespace website’s SEO
Here are five simple ways to boost your Squarespace website’s SEO.
(The same tips apply to other website platforms as well, though the implementation may be a bit different, as I’ll specifically chat through some Squarespace features here.)
1. Write keyword-rich page titles & descriptions
Search engines prioritize page titles, blog post titles and the like, so it’s important to write clear and descriptive titles that will help both humans and search engines find the content they’re looking for.
Pro tip: The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a useful tool for testing out the impact of different headlines on driving traffic and SEO.
Squarespace page settings allow you to easily update (and differentiate) your SEO titles, navigation titles and page titles. Here’s the difference:
SEO title: Your SEO title is indexed by search engines and appears in search results, so this is where you’ll want to add keywords you’d like the search engine to find.
Navigation title: Your navigation title links to the page in your navigation menus (so you’ll want to keep it brief, like “About” or “Blog”).
Page title: Your page title allows you to use a different, usually longer, title at the top of your page than on your navigation menu (for example, “About” on the nav menu could become “About [Company Name]” on the page title); note that if you don’t customize your SEO title, your page title will appear in search results instead.
Your page title and navigation title can be found in each page’s General Page Settings, and the SEO title can be found in the SEO tab of your page settings.
When updating your SEO title over in the SEO tab, you’ll also want to update your SEO description, which you’ll see below your SEO title in your SEO page settings:
In real life, the SEO description will typically appear below your SEO title (or page title, if you didn’t update the SEO title for a given page) in search engine listings—which means prospective readers will likely be using them to determine if they’d like to click on your link.
So, keep that in mind as you’re writing a strategic, keyword-rich SEO description for each page on your website—the description should describe the content on that page, and be written for humans to understand (even though search engines will be using it too).
Find your page SEO description settings via Page > SEO > SEO Description. Find the SEO description for your entire site in Marketing > SEO > SEO Site Description.
2. Use an SEO-friendly URL
To improve how search engines are able to crawl and index your site, use clear, descriptive and clean URLs.
This means each page’s URL should contain relevant keywords for that specific page’s content, be as brief as possible, and contain no spelling errors or unnecessary content.
Each word in the URL should be separated by a dash. For example, this blog post’s URL is:
fivedesign.co/blog/how-to-improve-seo-on-your-squarespace-website
Squarespace will auto-populate your page, blog or product URL based on the title you entered when creating the page/blog post/product. You can always check or update the URL in your page, blog post or product settings.
Squarespace blog post URL settings
In some cases, like with blog post settings, you may want to clean up any unnecessary information to optimize your blog post URLs.
Some Squarespace templates include the publication date in the blog post URL, like so:
website.com/blog/2019-10-10/blog-post-title
This isn’t usually necessary, and complicates the URL from an SEO standpoint, so it’s best to turn off the date, which can be done via Settings > Blogging > Post URL Format. Then, your blog posts will simply be formatted as:
website.com/blog/blog-post-title
3. Structure your pages & posts with headings
Just like they do with titles, search engines prioritize the headings on your website over its body content. Thus, your headings are important in letting search engines know the major themes of your site, and the specific content of each page.
Use your Squarespace website’s built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3) to structure your page and blog post content with keyword-rich, hierarchical headings (Heading 1 is highest-level, then Heading 2, etc.).
Headings should be clear and descriptive, with keywords from your post topic.
This is not to say you should simply structure headings for search engines—they also serve an important purpose for guiding readers through your content, so be sure to write them for human eyes as well. 😁
Also note that, if you’re on Squarespace version 7.1, you’ll have four heading styles available on your site instead of three.
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4. Add keyword-rich image alt-text
Search engines can’t read imagery, they can only read text—so adding alt-text captions to images on your website helps search engines to “see” them and understand their content.
In Squarespace, you can add alt-text to most images, including those in image blocks, galleries and product images, though the method for doing so is a little different for each:
Adding alt-text to Squarespace image blocks
For image blocks, add a descriptive, keyword-rich caption to the image and in the image settings, select Do not display caption. (Though if you want to display the caption, that’s fine too, and it will still be indexed as alt-text).
Adding alt-text to Squarespace gallery & product images
For Squarespace galleries and product images, keyword-rich alt-text can be added to the Image Title field in the image settings.
Adding alt-text to Squarespace blog post images
For Squarespace blog post thumbnails, the blog post title is the default image alt-text.
Adding alt-text to Squarespace banner images
Squarespace banner images don’t have the option to add a title or caption, so their alt-text is simply the file name of the image you’ve uploaded. For Squarespace banners, label your image files as you’d like your alt-text to appear. For example, the banner image at the top of this blog post could be labeled improve-squarespace-website-seo.jpg or similar.
Note that image alt-text is also carried along with your images as the default caption if someone pins an image from your website to Pinterest. (So, strategically captioning images with alt-text is an element of your Pinterest SEO, too!)
4. Publish regular, relevant blog posts
Blogging is one of the very best strategies to boost SEO and grow your website traffic!
Blogging is great for your entire website’s SEO in several ways:
it adds more relevant content to your website (so you have more opportunities to establish your themes and keywords with search engines)
it shows search engines that your site is active and regularly updated
it’s more shareable than the average webpage, so can help spread your content better (especially if you use Pinterest content marketing—hint, hint! 😉), and the more people visiting your website, the better it looks to search engines
blog posts more likely to be structured as helpful nuggets of information that solve real problems people are actually searching for on the internet
Even if you’re not “a blogger,” I recommend including a blog on your website for these purposes. You don’t have to post daily or write novel-length posts—just regular (weekly-ish) posts can help to improve your website’s SEO significantly.
The goal is to craft plenty of helpful, keyword-rich blog content that relates back to your business products and services, and helps to carve out a stronger understanding of that content for search engines to see.
I’ve got lots more tips on setting up and optimizing your Squarespace blog—things like how to write good blog posts, creating a time-saving blog post template, and why you need a blog post “signature” (and what to include in it for SEO!).
5. Use plenty of internal links throughout your site
To make the search engine gods happy, you want to have lots of links pointing to your website content.
It’s great if these links are coming from large, highly trafficked sources (like if a popular publication links to you), but often that is a bit out of your control.
(Well, it’s in your control to write high quality blog content and promote your blog posts to the right audiences, which will improve your chances…but you can’t totally control the number of referring links those efforts will result in.)
So, another way to grow the number of backlinks to your pages is to link to them yourself, as relevant. This also serves the dual purpose of helping your readers better find additional content they’d also be interested in from you.
When linking to your own content, it’s best to use descriptive words in your anchor text (the highlighted text you’re linking from) that give a sense of the topic you’re linking to. For example, instead of saying “I explain how to add passive income to your business here,” it’d be better to say “Here’s how to add passive income to your business.”
Internal links are not necessarily equivalent to high quality external links, but it’s still helpful to show search engines that your website content is interrelated—it’s part of a larger, more connected web, so to speak.
A note on quality content
In addition to these little back-end tips for optimizing SEO on your Squarespace website, it’s also important to remember that your content matters substantially in SEO ranking.
The purpose of a search engine algorithm is to provide the most relevant content possible to the person searching for it. So, quality content (whether that’s a blog post, webpage, gallery, whatever) is absolutely essential to good SEO strategy.
Yes, there are some sites with poor quality content that have achieved great search engine ranking with other strategies, but long-term that likely won’t work as well—search engines are getting increasingly better at prioritizing quality and relevant content.
Your best bet for “good SEO” is to focus on producing useful and well-constructed content for your target audience and promoting it with the methods above, using keywords that your target audience would actually use to search for it.
One of the reasons I love Squarespace as a website platform is that it makes SEO very simple for beginners. While the world of SEO is certainly much larger than what’s covered here, if you follow the tips above you’ll be setting yourself up well for SEO success!
Improve SEO on your Squarespace website!
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