20 Quick Squarespace SEO Tricks
I’ve heard this sentence a million times, “I have a new website, but my traffic isn’t increasing. Why is that?” Well, here’s the scoop: Increasing your website’s traffic takes time and consistent effort. If it was as simple as creating a new website and making it live, everyone would be ranking on Google and other search engines.
Today’s article will be all about Squarespace Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and some of the tips and tricks you need to know to start increasing your website traffic AND ranking for keywords you want your business to be known for.
What you can expect to learn in today’s article:
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Why does your Squarespace website need SEO?
20 Tips & Tricks that you can implement today to start working on your Squarespace website’s SEO.
A freebie that I created specifically for beginners like you to help you get started with SEO - this freebie is general information that can apply to anyone wanting to learn more about SEO and what you should do to get started. So for this guide you don’t have to have a Squarespace website for it to be useful, whoopee! :) Want the guide for when you’re reading through this article? No problem, click the photo or click here to get the guide and checklist, did I mention it’s free?
What is SEO and Why does your Website Need it?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting traffic to your website from free, organic, or natural search engine results. The goal of SEO is to improve your website’s positioning in search engine result pages.
Improving your website’s SEO is like building the foundation of your house, it takes time and consistent effort in order to get a high-quality result during the construction process. The foundation of your house is so important, if it’s not solid then your house could crumble! But very much so like a house, once the project is “done” you still need to maintain it in order for your house to stay healthy and in great shape. Keep reading to learn more about creating that solid SEO foundation for your Squarespace website.
Why is your search engine ranking important?
Easy, the higher your website ranks in search engines like Google or Bing, then more people will see it and click on it.
Is there a Plugin for Squarespace SEO like how Wordpress has Yoast?
No, there isn’t a plugin for Squarespace SEO like how Wordpress has Yoast. But honestly, Squarespace doesn’t need a plugin.
Here’s the deal, Squarespace was built with SEO best practices in mind, meaning you don’t need to add plugins on to your site to ensure some basic site functionality is working correctly.
This is what Anthony Casalena, Squarespace’s CEO said on the topic:
Pay close attention to the second paragraph, “Squaresapce is engineered to work propoerly without a sea of plugins, and you should not take the lack of a plugin for this to mean that we didn’t actually just build it right from the start. We actually scan the top installed Wordpress plugins regularly and ensure we simply do all of that in our core.”
20 Squarespace SEO Tips & Tricks
Tools I recommend to help with your website, even if it’s not hosted on Squarespace:
This tool will help you with your website’s SEO and gives you keyword ideas for your website. It will also recommend SEO errors to fix and gives you a place to search keywords to see if a certain keywords is a viable word you can rank for or not (some keywords are RIDICULOUSLY tricky to rank for unless you’re constantly creating content around it on your website).
Google Search Console is a tool that allows webmasters to add their website to the Google index crawler, see your site’s performance, and more. Essentially you’re having the Google robots crawl your website and index every piece of it so it knows who to recommend your site to along with what changes to recommend to you to help your website stay maintained. It will give you recommendations for mobile optimization changes as well for you website which is helpful!
Similar to Google Search Console, this is a tool that’s part of Microsoft’s Bing search engines that allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, see your site’s performance in Bing, and more. Essentially you can setup your account to have your website crawled, see what changes Bing would recommend, and have this as part of your “maintenance program” for your website to keep a solid foundation for your website’s SEO and help it continue to rank higher and higher over time.
Your website provider will also show your analytics, but it’s helpful to have Google Analytics attached to your website as well. Then you’re able to easily keep track of your analytics, bounce rate, what pages are trending, etc.
A bounce rate is when someone views a page and clicks off right away. Ideally you want your bounce rate to be a smaller percentage because that means people are clicking around on your website and finding value.
Overall these four tools are the top 4 I would for sure recommend starting to use at least on a monthly basis to keep track of your website’s foundations. Want to know what other tools I recommend? Download my free guide and website SEO checklist by clicking here.
Tips & Tricks for your Squarespace Website’s SEO:
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Accelerated Mobile Pages, creates lightweight versions of web pages to help them load faster on a mobile device. While AMP is not officially a ‘ranking signal,’ the speed at which your website loads on a mobile phone does matter in mobile search results.
So if you enable AMP, your website loads quicker, and therefore because of your website loading quicker, you rank higher.
To set up AMP visit settings > blogging & click ‘AMP enabled’
HTTPS (Security)
Know how every website you visit has a http://www.websitename.com? The new version is https://www.websitename.com. That added ‘s’ after the http indicates a secure website.
Google likes secure, so they’re giving a bump to all sites that switch their website over to the new secure https.
To set up HTTPS visit settings > website > security & SSL & under ‘security preferences’ select ‘secure (preferred).’
Domain
Choose a shorter domain that is keyword rich and goes with your website niche. Shorter domain names are easier for people to remember which means that you’re more likely to get higher direct traffic (i.e., someone types directly into their browser bar to get to your site).
Shorter domains are also easier to brand.
If SEO is a major focus, I recommend trying to buy the .com domain whenever possible, even if you have to invest more money to get it. You can still have a hugely successful website with a different domain ending but .com does have the highest potential for worldwide ranking and is the most desirable.
User Experience
Google isn’t just a little robot that flies over each webpage, taking in information at random. It’s constantly improving how it “reads” a website so that it is getting closer to acting like a human (in that way) every day. Essentially, the better the experience on your website, the higher Google will rank you. Your website should be easy to navigate and use and the layout should make sense.
Mobile Responsive
As more and more people browse on their phones, Google gives increasingly more weight to websites that are mobile responsive. This means that your site MUST work for people on smart phones, tablets, and other devices that aren’t traditional laptops or desktops. ALL sizes matter. Squarespace takes care of this for you because all of their templates are mobile responsive!
Footer
Your website’s footer is a great place to include content, links and extra features because they will show up on every page of the website. If you have space, it’s a good idea to include a brief (read: few sentences max) description of your website/business and even your location if you want to rank for a location in this section.
Short URLs
Especially if you are blogging, keep your URLS short and keyword rich.
Instead of domainname.com/squarespace-web-design-for-female-owned-business-owners-in-iowa (for example), stick with something short like domainname.com/squarespace-web-design
There is a proven correlation to URL length and keyword ranking in search results.
Internal Links
Best practice is that every post should have at least 2-3 links to other posts you have written. The goal here is to make those links natural and relevant without going crazy and adding links left, right and center. Again, focus on adding links that improve user experience because it makes it easier to get more of your content and spend more time on your website. Search engines also like it when you link to other content within your website because they see how you are adding value and self-referencing.
External Links
Yes, it’s OK to link to other websites besides your own! It’s through links that search engines establish how relevant your website is, which is why you should link to external content (e.g., websites, blog posts, videos, etc.) related to your topic. You might not know this but linking to your competitors and peers is actually a good thing because search engines then associate you with them so you might improve your rankings on certain topics.
Building backlinks
When it comes to backlinks and Squarespace SEO, it's all about quality over quantity. Search engines will reward you the more your website is linked to by other websites, SO LONG AS they are quality back links! Do not try to take a short cut and buy backlinks. Not only is this super shady and weird, it’s also rarely works in your favour.
Quality content
Don’t blog or create content just for the sake of doing it. Instead, focus on adding real value to your audience and think about WHAT they want from you. Try to answer questions that people might ask or choose topics that people are interested in, because if you create valuable content you will be rewarded with traffic and social sharing.\
Longer posts (2000+ words) typically rank better, so long as the content is actually valuable (i.e., you aren’t content stuffing) and is directly relevant to search queries.
Long tail keywords
Short tail keyword phrases (1 or 2 keywords) are ALWAYS harder to rank than long tail keyword phrases (3 or more keywords). As you grow your Squarespace website, you will have better results if you focus on a long tail keyword SEO strategy when creating content for site and blog.
Post Frequency
Create blog posts and content as often as you can while being consistent. When search engines see that your website regularly and consistently publishes new content, they will consider that in their rankings. If you are having trouble coming up with and sticking to a content calendar, there are some great resources available online.
Image alt text & descriptions
Alt text: Search engines will always crawl the image alt tags so you should make sure to set this up on the Squarespace back end any time you add an image to a page or post. Get familiar with how to do this so that you can quickly do this every time you upload an image to your website.
Description: Search engines can’t crawl images but they CAN crawl image descriptions which is why you should always clearly describe what the image is of. For one thing this will help your post ranking, but it will also get the image itself ranked by the search engine, which could in turn drive traffic to your website.
Image size
Images that are too large will take too long to load, and that is one of the biggest reasons why a website might load slowly. Keep your file size small (recommended under 1.5MB) and compress or resize as needed before you upload them to a page or post. I use TinyURL to compress my images too so I ensure that all images are a smaller size.
