Squarespace SEO 2022: Optimized Your Website
How can I learn pixel optimization in Squarespace quickly & accurately? A lot goes in ranking a page but Squarespace site's SEO can be as easy as learning the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.
Search engine optimization is a process by which a search result is ranked higher. Squarespace uses various marketing tactics to enhance its website visibility in search engines. There are SEO-friendly features built into every Squarespace website: Search Engine Optimization is always included in an average SEO site: The best practices are commonly known by search engines like Google.
Squarespace is a Web Developer, CMS, blogging platform, and hosting service. As a tool, there are plenty of free options. It benefits many business owners and bloggers who are looking for a quick way to build a functional website. However, as with any website, it is important to focus on your SEO strategy when developing Squarespace sites. It features fewer plug-in services and customization options than most CMS systems thereby making it an important solution for Web Design novices.
In this article, I will be running you through some Squarespace SEO tips that you can use to rank locally as I have for keywords like; web design, SEO, and more.
In addition to this, I'm also going to be showing you how to use these techniques to rank nationally in search engines. We will be covering the basics, like optimizing your page title tags, optimizing your meta descriptions, changing your alt tags. Anything you're gonna want to do on a Squarespace website and the pages on your site. So if you ever have a client that is on Squarespace or if you want to build your own Squarespace website, you're going to be able to easily do it after reading this article.
How good is Squarespace SEO?
Squarespace is recognized by most users as an excellent website developer for Squarespace template designs and website development. A site may also have better SEO benefits that Google and other search engines can provide you such as better site rankings and more targeted traffic on search engines. SEO quality depends very simply on the website builder used. All of our tests are conducted by us using these features and you may check what our rating is below. For example, I can list the SEO advantages that Squarespace offers for their websites - and give them extra suggestions if they would benefit them themselves.
Getting Started on Squarespace
The first thing that you will notice on Squarespace is all of the different columns.
We'll start everything off by changing our title tag. All you have to do in order to change your page title is to go to the marketing tab.
After locating the marketing now, you will now have to go to that SEO tab.
Now all you need to do is scroll down and look for the "SEO Title Format". From there you have a couple of options, you can either do "%s", which lists the name that you've specified in your site title as your title tag for this page, or for your page on your homepage or you can do "%p" which just lists the title of the page when you go to change the site title in your settings for that page. I personally use %p because it's a lot easier to just go to settings and just pull the title tag straight into the title tag up on the website.
When you do your title tags on your Squarespace site you want to make sure to do a couple of things. You have to make sure that your main keywords are pulled to the left of your tag and to the right of your tag you might want to put some sort of call to action to give them an idea of what they are about to click themselves into.
Make sure you format your title tags correctly.
Search engines look at its content and make it a key resource for indexing an Internet page. Your title appears as the largest component of a search result as well as at the top of the browser window. You should therefore ensure that your page and post titles do not become vague and ideally your title. Let us take each of them individually. To put things into perspective, If you have Joey's Music shop which is situated in London and is focused on vintage guitars sales, you would probably use a title page that includes the phrase ‘Vintage guitars'.
Use headings properly when formatting site content
Headings are a popular mistake of non-developers who build and update their own websites using Squarespace. Instead of using header text, they include bold or capitalized text in the site's headline. There are certain problems with this: first from an aesthetic viewpoint usually it seems awful. The second makes access to your site less accessible for visually ill people who use screens to access your articles. Search engines are especially aware of this when finding out what a piece of content says. In fact, one H1 for a page could have your focus keyword. Make sure you read about headings and how to apply them effectively to your copy before uploading content.
Add meta descriptions to your pages
Meta descriptions give brief summaries of web pages and usually appear beneath clickable links on the resulting search. Google explains that meta descriptions don't affect ranking but they could increase engagement with your post as you read it. The process of adding a meta description varies slightly with your product webpage, normal pages, or blog posts.
Adding strong meta descriptions to your content is very important for SEO professionals to be on the lookout for the best results in search engine rankings. For example, adding a Meta description to your website's site homepage or a regular.
The thing about Squarespace sites is the drawback here is that you don't really get to specify your meta description easily with some of the templates. Sometimes, anything you specify in the page description for the page will be pulled into the page itself so if I say "The best web design in Colorado" as the description and then put a link, it's going to show up in the actual home page with a button from the link I placed in.
Now when I go and look at what this page actually looks like from a meta description standpoint, you'll see that the meta description will look a bit jumbled up. But at the end of the day, you shouldn't be too worried about this because search engines like Google, for the most part, pull your meta description dynamically anyways, meaning that it chooses its own meta description that it wants to pull for your website regardless of how you specify it.
So if you go type in "site:" followed by your website right on the search bar we can actually see on the search results what Google is pulling, we'll see that Google is not actually pulling what we specified. So it's not a huge deal if the site description is a bit off.
Increase your ‘dwell time'
‘Dwell Time’ is a phrase that is used by SEO professionals to refer to the long period of time a user spends on a piece of content before they return to search results. This indicating that a content's content will be satisfying to users will increase your chances when a site searches Google for content. It makes sense to design and populate your Squarespace site to keep your users interested for as long as possible. Create great content either by creating informative, in-depth blog posts or showcasing spectacular product images, Give people a reason to stick around on your site.
Service Pages
Moving on to service pages, we're going to see our navigation title, we obviously have to match that to what the page is all about. Moving on, we have our URL slug, this is important because you want your page to represent what people are trying to find. You don't want your URL to be 10 words long, you want your URL to be about 3 words per file URL path. So let's say you have web design services, you may go ahead and go with "web-design-services/graphic-design", this is completely acceptable. You don't want to have more than three words per file URL.
Always create a 301 redirect if you change the URL of a page.
The search engine in effect treats each link to a page just as votes. If you change the URL for a page it is imperative that you created a 301 redirect to it. For example, it lets Google know where the new URL should be situated and safeguards existing votes' authority over existing ones. To create 301 redirects in Squarespace, on the home menu click settings > Advanced click URL Mapping. Add your redirect using the following formulae: /old-URL->/new-URL 301 (see screengrab below for a sample) Note that in step 3 I don't include the domain name.
Social Image
What social image does is if we wanted to share something or if we want to share our page on social media and try to get some social traction and organic traffic on to our Squarespace site.
In order to do that, we would just go ahead and add an image, if we already have an image we can go ahead and use that but if we don't Squarespace has a gallery of free-to-use photos that we can utilize. Once you've chosen a picture you can now add it to your site and now when we share it on social media we can see what it looks like.
We can now go ahead and go to Facebook Debugger, plug in our Squarespace site URL. If the website prompts a message that says "This URL hasn't been shared on Facebook before", you can just go ahead and press the "Fetch new information" button.
Once the page loads, you can see whether the image actually got pulled. So that's how you specify your open graph data, just simply by going to social image and selecting the image you prefer. This technique helps you in managing how you appear on your social media accounts.
The Internal Link Strategy
Next up we're going to be talking about the internal link strategy, what this basically means is that the more you can internally link your pages to your other pages that you want to rank, the easier those pages will be able to rank. So if we go into each of the sub-pages, my service pages.
One of the many reasons why I make these service pages is that I want to link these new service pages back to the homepage with anchor text that says whatever I'm trying to rank.
How to input links in your text is relatively easy, all you have to do is go to the specific page or blog post and press "edit" highlight the text you want to put the link in, and press on the link icon and you can go from there.
Citations
Every listing of your company on directories like Yelp.com Foursquare and Citysearch will act as citations for searches. They offer many options if you're looking to obtain links in websites that your visitors may need to see.
Google personalizes local searches based on contexts for example other recent local searches. You don't need to be on countless directory sites like you once were but going 20 to 30 sites can provide value before you begin reducing costs. Then take the time to verify that your listings are current and true and NAP is less important than a decade ago.
If you need further help in citations for your Squarespace site, you can head on to this website where you can avail yourself of services that can help you in building up to 100 local citations. This is how I rise up from the sandbox quickly and make sure that the website I am managing will not show up at number 30 on search engine results.
Schema-Markup
Schema markup is one of the many local SEO efforts that can help your site rank. Schema is the code applied to the site for search engines to return more user-friendly results. Schema tells search engines' algorithms what your data can mean rather than just what they are trying to search for.
This information can help search engines' algorithms figure out exactly what an online business or company is based on as far back as possible, helping it find the right queries for google searches.
To optimize your schema markup in your Squarespace site, you can go to the "Settings" -> "Business Information" and from there you can fill up your business hours, your physical location, your email, your phone number, etc.
This will basically pull into your schema markup that Google and other search engines.
The way you can test this schema markup is to go to Structured Data Testing Tool on Google and open up your URL. From there you can see two different types of data and a variety of errors and that's because the markup on Squarespace SEO is not perfect but that is absolutely fine. The markup is only a small part of the ranking it's insignificant for the most part.
However, paying attention to your markup is still better than doing nothing at all. Filling it out if you have a local business that you're trying to rank will not hurt.
Adding Images To Your Website
In this section, we are going to be talking about one of the most powerful Squarespace SEO features such as adding images to your website and making sure that there is alt text. These images with the alt text can help you rank higher, for the most part, if you have really low keyword difficulty, if it's really easy to rank in your area, then adding images with alt text might not be necessary, but it's still good to know that these kinds of techniques can help you rank higher for when you are dealing with more difficult keywords.
How to add images in Squarespace is really easy, all you have to do is go to the page or blog posts you want to add your image to and click on "Edit", create a new image line, click on the bubble, and press on the image icon, search for an image from Squarespace's vast gallery or upload your own, the filename is what's going to be pulled into as the image alt text, so you must label it accordingly. Press apply and you're done, a very easy step to optimize your page.
If you can compress the image, do it since this will help you have a faster site speed as well as accelerated mobile pages. You can figure this out by testing your site speed. You can do this by going to GTmetrix and entering your website's URL to the GTmetrix homepage. The tool will analyze the webpage's speed, if it loads for two seconds and above, you might need to optimize your images better and compress them.
one of the easiest ways to grab the image you've taken from Squarespace is by going to your own website and pressing right-click, then click "inspect element", click where the image is at, copy and paste the URL to your search bar, go to the image and save it.
Go to a site like TinyPNG and from there you can compress your image without sacrificing its quality. Doing this process will immensely help you in making your site load faster.
Call-to-actions
One more thing you have to consider while building your page is to have one of these SEO features called call-to-action buttons on basically every page. These buttons work perfectly in guiding your page visitors navigating through your site.
When placing these call-to-action buttons, you want them to be above the fold, meaning that if somebody hits your website, you want your buttons to show up without your page visitors scrolling down. This must be done most especially on your highest-traffic pages.
Page Footer
Your page footer might be at the bottom but it certainly is not the least of your concerns.
you have to change your footer to make sure that it has your name, your address, and your phone number. this adds credibility to your website and it's another place to get a citation going so Google will know where you are at.
Google My Business SEO
Let's talk about Google My Business because you want to not only rank organically but you're also gonna want to rank in the Maps so the way you rank in Google Maps is pretty simple.
A Google My Business Account helps make your business more visible and authoritative in Google Search and on Maps. Then you can share photos of your establishment, product, or service, essentially boosting up your digital marketing efforts.
GMB gives you the ability to change your business details including phone numbers and hours of service to ensure your customers always have the latest information. Your next step is to optimize GMB for SEO.
Here's how you can set up your GMB if you still haven't set it up yet:
Add your location in GMB
Select "Add single location"
Choose whether you want this to be a "service area", meaning the address doesn't show, or do you want it to be a physical address where an actual establishment is. If your business doesn't really have a physical store or address, what you can do is buy a membership at an establishment like a co-working space in that area, and get your letters sent there.
Next up, you have to put in your business name.
Press "Next".
Get all of your information in.
The only thing you have to watch out for in your GMB is two things; you want to make sure that you're responding to reviews and you also want to make sure that you're adding photos of your location and your team. This is a way for Google and the users to see that what you have is an actual address even if it's a service area.
Perform keyword research.
How can I increase my Squarespace SEO? You would need to do keyword research on search engine terms to optimize website content. You need enough data to choose a ‘sweet spot’ where searches are well received that generate a good amount of traffic but aren’t already so popular that some other sites dominate.
The easiest way to get keywords is to use one of the best keyword-driven web resources in the business such as the powerful SEO tools Semrush or Ahrefs. These allow you to enter in some keywords and give you everything above statistics for them.
Generating Reviews
In terms of generating reviews for your page, what I personally do is use a tool called ManyChat. What Manychat can do is create flows so that when people opt-in to some sort of free resource, let's say you create a web design checklist or a sort of tutorial, you can bring people in and have them automatically leave you a review after they grab your template. You can send them a message saying that they could leave you a review if they like your template.
These kinds of SEO efforts are a way you can easily start bringing in reviews and you can even have these reviews come to your website so you can actually rank the website higher organically as well because the more user-generated content you can get on your website, the better you do.
Final Thoughts
In finality, these are some quick Squarespace SEO efforts tips for you. If you have any more questions you can always reach me through all of my channels that I will link down below.
If you want to learn more about Squarespace SEO tips, you can check out this video: