5 Quick & Easy SEO Tricks for Squarespace to Implement now
Squarespace is bad for SEO
I hear this A LOT. This is the number 1 argument for Squarespace nay-sayers.
And I get it (kinda). Squarespace isn't THE BEST for SEO, but not *one* platform really is. SEO it a long game which involves many moving pieces.
In my experience, Squarespace has been pretty good. But at the same time, I've put in the effort to maximise all of the little SEO opportunities that Squarespace gives us, because a lot of the time, they're pretty simple to implement!
So what is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is basically techniques to optimize your website so that it performs better in search engines (like Google). The better your SEO (and higher your popularity, of course) the higher up the list or more often your website will be shown on Google.
This is seriously valuable stuff. People Google stuff ALL of the time. I mean, I Google basically everything. I’m that person who shuts down everyone else's arguments by yelling “omg just google it!”. Sometimes I even forget I have a working brain and if someone asks me a question, I’ll just Google it, literally, instead of thinking. I know, it’s super millennial and useless of me, but it’s true, and it’s just what people do now!
But it’s a great way to gain exposure for our websites, so let’s make the most of other people not using their brains.
SEO sounds kinda complicated and can be really intensive, but Squarespace makes SEO basics simple.
The tips I’m showing you today are the easiest and quickest ways to boost your SEO. Doing these things can make a big difference to your search engine ranking, they’re crazy easy to implement, so I strongly suggest doing them NOW if you haven’t already.
PS. With anything involving SEO, you’re not going to see instant results, Google takes a while to re-rank (I mean, there’s a lot of websites to get through, right) so just be patient, but you should see results of your hard work eventually.
Also, I always believe bar far that the best thing you can do you for your SEO is create content / create a blog on your website. These tweaks are awesome, but if you really want to rank on the first page, you gotta start creating content!
More posts about Squarespace SEO that you might be interested in! 👇
Optimize your images for Squarespace SEO
The Ultimate Blog Post SEO Pre-Publish Checklist (for Squarespace)
How to Optimize Your Squarespace Blog Posts for SEO
Squarespace SEO Tip: How to optimize your URL slugs (& why you should)
Add and optimize your Site Title
How to add your site title:
In Squarespace 7.0:
Add your Site Title under Design > Logo and Title.
In Squarespace 7.1:
Add your Site Title by clicking EDIT on your site, then EDIT SITE HEADER along the top. Click Site Title and Logo and add your site title here.
It’s important that you add a site title here. It’s crazy how many people forget to do this. Make sure you write the name of your business here (not your name, or something else random).
If you are adding a logo, that’s great, but you still need to add your site title! The site title will show in the browser and also in search engines.
Optimize your site title for SEO:
I also recommend adding some keywords to your site title! For example, my site title is:
Big Cat Creative | Squarespace Templates
Our businesses biggest offering are our Squarespace Templates. The more I use keywords like “squarespace” and “templates” on my website, the higher I will rank for those words in Google, so adding them to my Site Title shows Google that really is what my business is about.
Here are some more examples of how you could add keywords to your site title:
Michelle Lambert Creative - Logo and Brand Design
Stacy Parker Photograph - Portraits and Newborn Photographer
Alyssa Jude - Coach for Female Entrepreneurs
Here is how I have it in the Site Title editor:
PS. I also added a tagline which is available on 7.0. I’m not really sure if this was helpful, and it didn’t display anywhere, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to add some keywords there. Depending what template you are using, this tagline may display on your website. Most cases you can remove the tagline from displaying by unchecking it under the Style Editor. If you can’t do that, just remove the tagline all together, it's not a biggie!
And here is how it shows up in Google:
Site-wide Search Engine Description
This is where Squarespace gets crazy-cool on us, and gives us a spot to enter our exact Search Engine Description. This is what comes up when people see us on Google.
In the sidebar click on Marketing, then SEO
In the SEO panel you will see a place where you can enter your site SEO description. Enter a description of your business and website here. This description will show under your website in Google, and it will help Google understand what your site is all about.
Use one or two short sentences and remember to use your keywords!
Here you can see an example of my Search Engine Description displaying in Google:
There are also some other SEO settings you can play around with in this panel, though I recommend keeping everything as default for now! We’ll jump into SEO Page Descriptions next.
Page Titles and Descriptions
Just like we added the Title and Description for the whole site, we now need to go in and add Page Titles and SEO Descriptions to every page on our website. This sounds exhausting, especially if you have a lot of pages, but Squarespace actually makes this a pretty painless process.
In the sidebar head to your Pages panel and click the little cog on the right hand side to make edits for a particular page. I’ve chosen my services page.
You can see below you have 3 options,
Page Title - what the page is actually called, what will display at the top of the website when you’re on that page
Navigation Title - what displays in your Navigation and Menus around your site
URL slug - what the URL will be (eg www.yourwebsite.com/url-slug)
Make sure these are all filled out and nice and clear. The slug should be short and simple, and avoid having any numbers in it. eg:
PS - if you want to learn all about optimizing URL slugs, we have a whole separate post on that!
Once you’ve checked those, head over to SEO in the same page (or Index) settings panel:
Now we can edit all of the SEO settings of this particular page.
SEO title: This is what will show in Google (example below)
SEO Description: Write 1-2 short sentences about what is on this particular page — try to relate it back to your main biz purpose and keywords.
Hide page from Search Results: Here you can also toggle your site on/off to show in search engines. This is super handy! Most of your main pages you will want to have showing in search engines, of course — but if you have a page that is for customers only or something you’d rather keep hidden, you can toggle off the search engine results here.
And this is an example of what some of my different page descriptions look like in Google:
I recommend going through all of your pages and checking all of the titles and names, and then adding a description for each!
Clean up Your Not-linked Pages
Now, I bet ya didn’t know about this one (maybe you did, but I didn’t for a while).
So it turns out, Google doesn’t love the clutter you’re collecting in your not-linked pages section. While Google loves a large website with lots of content, it doesn’t like duplicate content (which there might be some of in your not-linked section if you’ve designed the same page a few times over) and it doesn't like pages that aren’t linked to or from anywhere.
When I first read this tip I went a looked at my not-linked pages and realised how much clutter I had been collecting in there.
Just because it’s not linked anywhere on your website and people can’t really see it, doesn’t mean that Google can’t see it.
So go through your not-linked pages and delete any pages that you don’t want anymore. If you’re hesitant to delete any, you can also just ‘disable’ the pages by clicking on the little cog and checking ‘disable page’. This will remove it from anyones sight (even Googles) and if you want to bring it back you can just ‘enable’ it.
Hide your Index page sections from SEO (7.0)
This tip is a bit of a mystery. This isn’t something that you can easily find information on, but with lots of experience and digging, it’s been verified by Squarespace that if you are using Index pages on Squarespace 7.0, you should hide these individual page sections from SEO.
If you’re using Squarespace 7.1, this tip isn’t for you, so you can skip this! Similarly, if you are using Squarespace 7.0 but aren’t using index pages in your design, then you don’t have to worry about this either!
Index pages are a bit strange, in that they are basically a collection of individual pages stacked on top of each other inside a sort of folder (the “index page”)
The index page holds all of these individual pages together and creates one “super” page (and no, that isn’t the official term for it!).
But because the pages inside the index are also regular pages, they can stand alone. So, if you leave your index page and sections as-is, and leave all of the SEO turned on, then search engines will see your index page and sections, and it will index (same work, different meaning!) your pages as one long super page, and also as all of the individual pages sections.
Ideally, we just want Google to index the one, long, super-index page, rather than all of the individual sections. If Google indexes our individual sections, these will show up in Google as single pages, and people will be able to click on them and go to the 1 index section, which will probably look really weird when it’s out of context. Also, Google won’t be very impressed with these page sections individually, as they probably don’t contain much good information.
So, we need to turn these off for SEO. Easy!
Go to your Pages panel and see your Index Pages
Click on the little cog next to your page SECTIONS (NOT the entire index pages, just the page sections within it)
Click on SEO on the pop up
Then hide page from SEO - turn this on so now the page section will be hidden from Google.
Do this with all of your sections
Make sure to leave the whole index page ON for SEO, so then the entire page as one will be indexed
Bonus SEO Tips!
Here are some tips that take a little bit longer than 5 minutes to implement, but they’re totally worth mentioning if you want to take your SEO to the next level!
Bonus tip 1: Optimize your images
Google likes a site that loads fast, and having a lot of really large images can seriously slow down your site, which can really affect your Search Engine ranking.
Google also likes to know what images are, and it can’t do that by just looking at the image, it has to have a description attached to it.
There’s a few ways that you can “optimize” your images, I’ve actually written a whole in depth post on it.
The 2 main points are:
Make sure your images aren’t too big, the general rule of thumb is under 500kb.
Make sure that your images are titled/named.
If your images are too large, your website will take a long time to load. If your website takes a long time to load, it goes down in the search engine rankings.
If your images aren’t named, Google will have no way of knowing what your images are about, so they won’t ever show up in anyone's search and they won’t account towards your overall SEO. If you do name your images, you’re adding more keywords and descriptions to your website and Google will be able to “read” the image and recognize what it is, so they can sort it into it’s appropriate place in the Search Engine ranking, this will improve your overall SEO. This is also known as adding “alt” text, so if you hear that term, that’s what they’re talking about!
Check out this article to see how you can easily resize your images, and also easily rename your images!
Bonus Tip 2: Blogging Blogging Blogging
I didn’t want to include this as a ‘quick and easy’ tip, because, well, it’s not quick or easy, but if you’re really want to get people to your website and boost your SEO, blogging is where it’s at. Check out the post “why you should be blogging for your business” if you don’t believe me. I couldn't write a post about SEO without mentioning blogging (twice)!
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