SEO for Squarespace

A guide compiled from resources across the web. SEO for Squarespace

Intro

You’re here because you’re ambitious. You’ve got a great site, designed well, with a clear user journey, and now you need eyeballs – lots of them. This guide will walk you through a proven strategy for optimization. We’ve drawn the best bits from the best resources in the world and made them relevant to the Squarespace platform. Fulfil these 20 steps (some of which need regular TLC), and you’ll have prepared your site for the golden goose: traffic.

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Infrastructure

Let’s start by looking at how you can set your site up, using Squarespace’s back-end, to rank as highly as possible. Squarespace have integrated some great tools into the platform that go unnoticed by many!

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1. Website & Tagline

Don’t do this on autopilot and just throw your brand name in these boxes. These boxes tell what you’re about. Choose the words you want to be found for! What will your customer type into google? Integrate these words into your Website Title and Tagline.

2. SEO Panel

Complete it... simple! The majority of Squarespace users don’t ever populate this area of their site.

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3. Blogging Panel

Change ‘Post URL Format’ to ‘TITLE’ (%t). By doing this, search en- gines will pick up keywords relating to your post rather than just the date.

4. Easy wins.

Ensure you have enabled ‘Simple Liking’ and ‘Accelerated Mobile Pa- ges’.

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5. Business Information

Under Settings > Business Information, add your address and busi- ness info to your website’s settings. If your business’ location is im- portant for your business, use map blocks where suitable to drop your business location around your site, and prompt search engines.

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6. Layout & Design

Ensure your user experience is clear and simple. Draw users through a journey by simplifying your site layout, removing unnecessary content or navigation options, and end with a clear call-to-action. These are basic steps, but they will ensure your visitors are interacting with your site, and highly active.

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Content

SEO should always be in the back of every web de- signer or content manager’s mind.

7. Headings 10. Engage

Include keywords in your website’s headings; h1, h2, Create good content. This might seem obvious, and and h3. These are words relating to what you want to sometimes laborious, but it will engage users and, be found for. Which words will your customers search consequently, increase site activity. Site activity is al- to find you? ways being measured.

8. Blog Titles & Excerpts 11. Giveaways

Again, use keywords where possible. Draw out the The easiest way to get new users to your site is an most important words from your blog post and inclu- offer of a freebie. New users grow traffic, increase re- de them in the title. Even if you don’t want an excerpt, ferrals, and consequently boost your website’s search they’re important for keywords! rank.

9. Blog Posts

Here’s one I bet you didn’t know – search engine do- cumentation recommends that blog posts should be at least 300 words long.

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12. Pages

You’re probably getting the message now; be strategic with keywords in your page titles and descriptions - on all pages, including galleries and blogs!

13. Custom 404

Create a custom page and set it as your 404 page. Simply put, this keeps visitors on your site for longer and thus, increases site activity - a key SEO metric. Do your best to re-direct users back onto your site, to ensure you don’t lost them.

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14. Name Images

Give each of your images a keyword-heavy name. This is valuable even if you aren’t displaying the captions/titles. Ever searched for your brand on google images? Images are an important way of telling se- arch engines what your website is about. Don’t leave the filename box blank, or leave it with the automatically populated title – use strategic keywords related to your your content. Do this for image blocks, galle- ry blocks, gallery pages.

15. Image File Sizes

Large images will reduce site speed; a key metric google uses for indexing sites. Ensure image resolution is less than 60mp. Helpfully, Squarespace automatically creates varied resized images, however, the have a simple guide for sizing your images here: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206542517-For- matting-your-images-for-display-on-the-web

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Search Engine Setup

Several methodical steps to take to ensure search engine favorability.

16. Verify 19. Google My Business

Setup a Console account and verify Sign Up for Google My Business. This is completely your site. Use Squarespace’s guide here: free and will have the effect of attaching your website https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/arti- to a google-registered business. cles/205813918 https://www.google.com/business/resources/

17. Index 20. Add your Sitemap

At the bottom of the guide referenced in step 16, is a Add your sitemap to Google and Bing. section called ‘Step 5 - Index your site’. Squarespace Locate your sitemap by typing your URL into your labels this step as optional, but it is essential. Follow browser address bar, and adding /sitemap.xml to the the steps to complete. end of your domain. For example: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml Go to google’s webmaster tools, under ‘Site Dash- 18. board’, click Crawl, and then . Click, add a sitemap, and add sitemap.xml to the end Set up Google Analytics and add your tracking ID to of the domain. Then, click submit. your Squarespace site, under Settings > SEO. On Bing, sitemaps is under ‘Configure My Site’. Click, ‘Submit a sitemap’ and enter your whole do- main, followed by /sitemap.xml

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Link Building

You’ve likely heard about link-building before - likely from terrible sales emails that promise you 10,000 hits from high authority sources. Really, link-building is not that complex, and does not need to create any risk for your business.

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21. Social

Be present on as many social platforms as possible. This means you are findable. It also creates link-relationships with ‘high authority’ websites (in fact, some of the highest authority websites on the web!). This is good for site-trust, and thereby, search engine indexing. Have these social links available on your site (use social icons regular- ly) to allow active users to create connections between the sites.

22. Invite Sharing

Get visitors to post and share your content on their social networks. Again, this creates a ton of traffic to your site from high authority sour- ces. Prompt your visitors to share your site. And, if appropriate, enable the Pinterest Pinit button on your website (under the marketing tab).

23. Share Icons

This will be our only plug, promise! Install our Share Icons plugin to ensure users always have the option to easily share your content. Or, use an alternative solution from soft- wares like SumoMe.

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24. Use Platforms

Post content on other platforms – tumblr, yahoo voices, and forums likes reddit.

24. Partnerships

Create strategic partnerships with other websites that you can share traffic with (it will add inbound links from external sources for both par- ties). Aim for brands that have similar customer groups and find ways that each part can add value to the other. Two brands are stronger than one. Partnerships like this will have the same as effect as Instagram pods (users who like and comment on each others’ photos to create traction).

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Complete

Squarespace does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to SEO, but, you need to know how to get the most from the platform. The goal of this gui- de is not to guarantee #1 spot on google, rather, it should give assurance that if you have com- pleted the steps, you’re using all of Squares- pace’s SEO-friendly features, and you’ve set your website up to be optimized on search engines.

Now, just keep doing what you’re doing,

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