How to Improve Your SEO on Squarespace in 6 Steps
(This is article is submitted by Svitlana Andriishyna.)
Squarespace is a platform that helps thousands to create good-looking sites that can function well without the use of coding. But if you want your Squarespace website to be seen on the internet, your work doesn’t stop there.
You have to optimize your website for search engines to stand a chance. This guide will walk you through the essentials of improving SEO on Squarespace and provide tips on how to rank higher and receive more traffic.
Why SEO for Squarespace Is Essential
Google’s official SEO guidelines suggest that creating helpful content leads to success. While this is important, good content alone won’t get your eCommerce website ranked first for the keywords that bring sales. Search engine optimization will align your site with more detailed Google technical requirements and boost its authority.
With that, you can rank for more keywords, and bumping your pages higher in search engine result pages (SERPs) means you’ll receive more views and more clicks. This will improve your brand awareness, drive more traffic to the important pages of the site, and boost sales.
6 Steps To Improve Your Squarespace SEO
There are several aspects to Squarespace SEO tips:
Complying with Google’s technical requirements;
Targeting the right keywords for your business;
Improving website authority;
Producing high-quality content.
Let’s explore how a Squarespace site owner can excel at these and more.
1. Utilize Squarespace's Built-In SEO Features
One of the toughest aspects of SEO for a nonspecialist is technical optimization. Thankfully, Squarespace operates its optimization without your involvement.
Squarespace websites are built with SEO in mind. The platform provides clean HTML markup and URLs, is optimized for mobile and also uses a CDN to ensure users around the globe enjoy the same seamless experience on your website.
Consulting the Squarespace SEO checklist will guide you on what specific optimizations can result in an SEO-friendly Squarespace site. Important elements you can optimize with built-in features are:
Unique keyword-rich page titles and meta descriptions
Unique keyword-rich alt text for images
Custom readable image file names
Custom readable URLs
Enabled SSL certificate
Google will scan each of these elements for keywords to determine each page’s topic, which can be added via Squarespace’s SEO settings in the page editor. The alt text can be added in the image editor on the page.
An example of adding alt texts to pictures in page editor
Using dozens of Squarespace plugins can be useful for SEO. For instance, this plugin improves lazy-loading summaries and influences Core Web Vitals.
2. Optimize Your Squarespace's Site Content
Website content has to be helpful to the reader so that your target audience gains value from your content while your band earns respect and trust. As a result, the content will rank higher on SERPs as more people interact with and share it.
Informational content targets questions about your products or industry users might look for online, so cover topics with a unique personal take. For instance, using comparison tables or other interactive materials competitors don’t use.
But there’s more to content optimization than just creating great text.
Google scans your content for keywords to understand what it’s about and when to serve it for searches. This is a reason to perform keyword research and find keywords to match your pages.
Having multiple keywords to optimize each page ensures you maximize the traffic and search visibility potential of the page. Discover keywords with either the free Google Keyword Planner or a specialized SEO tool.
Adding keywords to the title and meta description tags as well as to headings, especially H1-H3, is also crucial.
If you need to create a lot of content rapidly, using an AI tool like the SE Ranking’s AI writing generator can help. You provide it with a few keywords, and it returns a list of topics that would be a good fit for that keyword.
In the editor, you can create an SEO brief for the article that is complete with keywords for optimization. AI content generator creates SEO-optimized text with GPT 3.5 Turbo based on the brief.
You can also use Squarespace AI writer, but it may take more work to make the results SEO-friendly.
Keep in mind that the best way to use AI writing tools is to create first drafts. If you’re using one, make sure to fact-check the generated text and edit it for clarity.
3. Create Internal Linking
Google discovers the web by following links. Once you submit your website for indexing, Google bots will visit it and crawl the links to note every page. If pages are not connected to your website with an internal link, Google won’t be able to discover and index them.
A good practice to make it easier to crawl and index your website is submitting a Squarespace sitemap. A sitemap is an XML document that contains links to the most important pages of your site. Google bots will use it to discover those pages.
You don’t have to worry about creating one, though. Any Squarespace template you use will automatically create a sitemap within a day after making changes to the site.
Another way is to use internal link-building to pass authority to the right pages. In most Squarespace websites, blog pages will receive most of the external links.
To make sure the most important pages on your site, the pages that describe your services or products, reap the benefits of your link-building efforts, do manual internal link-building. List your blog pages with a lot of external links, and link to your service pages from the text of the blog post.
Link them from a place where it makes sense contextually, using an informative anchor instead of simply using the word “services.”
4. Build Backlinks and Improve Your Domain Authority
Including the right keywords on your page means Google understands the page’s subject and will show it for the appropriate search term. But there are hundreds—sometimes thousands—of pages competing for the same keywords.
Google decides which pages should be shown on top based on multiple factors, a valuable one being website authority. It determines it based on how many trustworthy sites link to the website.
That’s why building links from trustworthy sites should be a priority after sorting out technical and keyword optimization.
You can build links with one of the following techniques:
Business directories. These sites store website addresses and contact data of local businesses and are free to submit your site.
Review websites. Similar to business directories, you can create or claim an account on review sites and receive a free link.
Blogging partnerships. You can find bloggers in your niche and use each other's content in your blog or get featured on each other’s blogs as guests.
Guest blogging. Writing a one-off contribution to a blog can produce both a backlink and exposure to their audience.
Journalism partnerships. Tip off journalists on industry news or give comments on sites like HARO.
Content that attracts links. Create content pieces that are likely to be linked to.
The last technique has the potential to attract the most links. You would create content worth linking to. Typically, it’s research, a case study, an industry trend overview, or an infographic.
When you distribute it, other writers and editors will link to it over time, giving you a lot of links without a lot of effort.
5. Use Analytics to Track and Improve SEO Performance
Once you implement this Squarespace SEO guide, track the performance and change your strategy as you progress.
Squarespace has a native integration with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). To use it, follow these steps:
Register at GA4.
Get a Google measurement ID.
Go to your Squarespace Developer tools panel.
Add the code in the External API keys section.
Go to the Cookies & Visitor Data panel and enable the cookie banner.
After a day, you’ll have access to Google Analytics metrics. After this, connect your Google Search Console (GSC). Squarespace eliminates the hard technical parts from this process. All you have to do is:
Go to Home menu > Analytics > Search keywords.
Connect to your Google account.
Click Allow.
Within 72 hours, you will have access to GSC data that shows what keywords searchers use to reach your website on Google. Squarespace will also send conversion and sales data to GA4, so you’ll have more information to process and base your SEO strategy on.
Focus on measuring the following metrics:
Overall traffic growth;
New vs. returning visitors;
Keywords your site ranks for;
Conversions and sales;
Best and worst performing pages.
Analyze your successes and failures, then conclude on how to improve your Squarespace SEO strategy.
6. Promote Your Content
Squarespace SEO doesn’t exist in a bubble. Promoting the content you create is essential to gain links and boost your site authority. With Squarespace, you have two easy options for doing that.
Integrate your social media accounts to allow easy sharing. Also, use Squarespace Email Campaigns and send newsletters with content and company updates to the subscribers.
This requires you to work on growing the newsletter subscriber list first. Experiment with different forms and their placements within content.
These shares don’t directly influence SEO, but they will improve brand awareness, and people who see the links to your site might link to it, boosting SEO.
Summary
SEO for Squarespace websites is a necessary step towards success. Thankfully, Squarespace provides the tools needed to achieve it.
With this platform, you don’t have to worry about much of the technical optimization. All you have to do is optimize your website for the right keywords, build external and internal links, and track your progress.
Don’t let your education on Squarespace SEO tips stop on this article. Listen to SEO podcasts and attend webinars to gain more insight and do SEO better.
About the Author
Svitlana Andriishyna is an Outreach Specialist at SE Ranking. As a constant learner, she loves when something exciting and new happens on her way.
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