Squarespace SEO (2023) — Simple Guide to Ranking | 12 Key Steps
Hey there, it’s Matt Walsh from Style Factory,
the go-to site for ecommerce reviews and advice. In this guide to Squarespace SEO, I’m going
to walk you through the key steps you need to take to ensure that your Squarespace site
ranks highly in search results. So stay tuned to the end to get all our tips
on how to increase your site’s organic traffic and sales. But before I get going, a quick reminder to
subscribe to our channel and click the notifications bell. This means you won’t miss out on any of
our Squarespace content going forward. OK, let’s start with something that's quick
and easy to do, but also very important — telling search engines that your site exists.
One — register your site with Google Search
Console and Bing Webmaster tools. Registering a site with Google Search Console
and Bing Webmaster Tools is a key starting point for Squarespace SEO. By registering your site with these services,
you’re telling Google and Bing about your website and helping it to get indexed faster. Once you’ve registered your site with these
two services, you then need to submit a sitemap to them. Helpfully, Squarespace generates a sitemap
automatically for you — it’s simply yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. In both Search Console and Bing Webmaster
Tools, you submit this sitemap URL by going to your site’s dashboard, and then clicking
‘sitemaps.’ Two — ensure your Squarespace site is loading
quickly. Search engines give fast sites preference
over slower ones. To ensure that your Squarespace site loads
as quickly as possible, avoid using a large number of web fonts on
your site use image compression tools like Tiny Png
to reduce the size of your store’s pictures keep use of external scripts on your store
to a minimum switch off animation effects Three — do your keyword research.
A vital part of improving your Squarespace
site's search rankings is ensuring that your store’s pages and products contain the keywords
that people are actually searching for. This means performing keyword research. Keyword research involves finding out three
things: the keywords that people are using when looking
for sites or products like yours the volume of searches for those keywords
how difficult it is to rank for each keyword When you have these three pieces of information,
you can identify ‘sweet spots’ – keywords that are popular enough to generate a good
amount of traffic, without being so popular that there are lots of other sites already
dominating search results for them. Getting this data involves using dedicated
keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. These let you find out how popular your preferred
keywords are, and how difficult it will be to rank for them. You’ll find links to some videos about how
to use Ahrefs and Semrush for keyword research in the video description, along with free
trials for both products.
Four — get your page and product titles
right. One of the most important elements of a web
page is its title. Search engines treat it as a key piece of
information when categorizing your content, and your title shows up as the largest component
of a search result. You should ensure that your Squarespace web
page titles are never vague in nature, and always start with your target keyword. To edit your home page title in Squarespace,
click Marketing > SEO in your site’s dashboard. Then, use the options provided to enter your
home page title. To edit other page titles, just navigate to
your page in your Squarespace dashboard, click the cog icon and the SEO tab. Then, edit your title using the ‘SEO Title
Format’ field provided. Editing titles for products and blog posts
involves a similar process — you’ll find a link to our guide on doing this in the video
description. Five — use headings properly. Instead of using bold text to break up the
text for your Squarespace pages or products, always apply Heading 1s, 2s, 3s and so on
to do so.
This will make it much easier for search engines
to index your content accurately, and will also make it more accessible to any of your
store visitors who have a visual impairment and use screen readers. Six — use engaging meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are the summaries of web
pages that appear under page titles in search results. Although Google says that they aren’t a
ranking factor, a well-written meta description can encourage more clickthroughs to your website. And because the clickthrough rate of a search
result IS considered a ranking factor, it’s important to get meta descriptions right. Your meta description for your Squarespace
products and pages should: be short (120 to 156 characters in length
is best) be accurate
include your target keywords. To edit your home page's meta description
in Squaresapce, click Marketing > SEO and enter it into the ‘SEO site description’
field provided. To edit a meta description for other types
of pages, locate your page, post or product in your Squarespace dashboard, access its
SEO settings, and use the same ‘SEO site description’ field to enter the relevant
information.
Seven — ensure your product titles and descriptions
are unique. A common way of speeding up the process of
adding content or products to a Squarespace site involves using the 'Duplicate’ option. While this is a quick way to add a new page
or product to your Squarespace site, it can lead to a lot of similar or even entirely
duplicated titles and descriptions being created. This is something that search engines algorithms
don’t like, so always remember to make your titles and descriptions as unique as possible. Eight — optimize your alt text and image
names. Search engines don’t just examine the words
on your website when indexing it — they factor in its images too. To do this, they look at two bits of data
associated with your pictures: ‘alt text’ and file names.
To add alt text to images on Squarespace pages
or posts, it’s usually a case of navigating to your page or post, locating the relevant
picture and double clicking on it. You’ll then see a box appear containing
an image alt text field. Enter your alt text in here, making sure that
it contains any necessary target keywords — while still making sense to those using
screen readers. As for optimizing file names, this involves
a similar process — locate your image, double click on it and enter a file name into the
‘filename’ field provided.
When doing this, ensure that your focus keyword
is in the file name, and that the file name is short. Now, it’s worth saying that the process
for editing alt text and file names varies slightly depending on whether you’re working
with embedded images, background images or product images. There’s a link to a resource in the video
description which explains the different processes in more depth. Nine — use clean URLS. Using ‘clean’, SEO-friendly URLs is something
that is encouraged by Google. Clean URLs are short, simple and easy to understand. For example, if you were selling a blue guitar
on your store, it would be better to use a URL slug of blue-guitar for the relevant product
page instead of something long and complicated. To edit a URL in Squarespace, go to the page,
product or post you wish to edit, access its settings, and locate its URL. Then, enter your URL into the 'URL’ field
into the box provided. Now, if you are changing an existing URL,
you’ll need to create a redirect to it.
You can do this in Settings > Advanced > URL
mappings. Doing so prevents users (and Google!) encountering
broken links, and lets Google know that you have changed the URL. Now, changing the URLs of pages that aren't
currently performing well in search results is usually fine — but if you’re thinking
about changing the URL of a page that IS already ranking highly, it’s often best to take
an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix’ it approach. Changing the URL of a popular page can also
affect its 'social proof', because it will reset the stats displayed on your social shares
counter for that page to zero. Ten — add rich snippets to your products
and pages Rich snippets are pieces of 'structured data'
that can be added to your content to help search engines and users understand what a
page is about. Rich snippets provide additional information
about the content of a product, page or post — for example, star ratings, author or prices. To do this you’ll need to manually add some
Schema markup code to your Squarespace pages or products.
You’ll find a link to a resource to help
you with this in the video description. Eleven — use your Squarespace blog to drive
traffic. Sites that feature in-depth, informative blog
posts on topics that people are interested in tend to perform much better in search results
than those that don’t. Squarespace comes with a really good blogging
tool, so make sure you make the most of it — you should aim to regularly post high-quality
posts about key topics in your product niche. You can learn more about how to blog effectively
in our video about increasing blog traffic. You’ll find a link to this in top right
corner of the screen, or in the video description below.
Twelve — build backlinks to your site. Backlinks are links from another site to yours,
and they are a really important part of SEO. This is because search engines view backlinks
as ‘votes’ for the quality of a piece of content. Generally speaking, the more backlinks you
have to the products and pages on your Squarespace site, the better they’ll rank in search
results. To get backlinks, you usually have to ‘reach
out’ to other site owners in your niche and persuade them to link to your content. This can be hard — but it’s easier to
do if the content you’ve created on your store is really strong.
One thing that you should generally avoid
doing is buying links — search engines are wise to this practice and can penalize your
site in search results if they discover evidence of it. Link swap schemes can be risky too. And that’s it: 12 key tips to help you improve
your Squarespace SEO. I hope you’ve found this video useful, but
if you’re interested in learning even more about how to boost your rankings, check out
the free Style Factory SEO toolkit. This contains a host of useful resources including
downloadable cheatsheets and extended free trials of popular SEO apps, and you’ll find
a link to it in the
video description.
