7 Quick And Easy SEO Improvements For Squarespace Websites to Implement Right Now
SEO improvements for your Squarespace website!
Today is the day that we’re finally sharing SEO tips and tricks to set up your website for success right from the start! SEO is quite a big and scary topic itself when you just want to drive some traffic to your website, start booking clients, and grow your business. We’ve all been there, but luckily for you, we’ve mastered the techniques we’re about to share with you.
We often see our clients struggling with SEO, and what are the best ways to improve their SEO score. As online presence experts, this is the kind of work we do for our clients on web design projects and online presence consulting sessions, and today we’re also sharing these tips and tricks with you totally for free!
Alright, let’s get straight to it! Read the post, start implementing these improvements on your Squarespace website, and enjoy all the organic traffic coming your way.
7 Quick And Easy SEO Improvements For Squarespace Websites to Implement Right Now
WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
But what is SEO? It seems very techy and complicated but it’s really not! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it’s a term introduced to define the improvements that people do to their websites to make them rank higher as possible on a Google search page.
Is SEO really that important? Yes, it is and let us explain why with some statistics:
53.3% of all the websites traffic coming from organic search (BrightEdge)
91.5% of people will click on a website that is listed on the first page of search engine results (SEJ)
So, can you already understand how relevant SEO is for the success of your website?
Is Squarespace SEO Friendly? Yes!!!! Squarespace not only is SEO-friendly but it also has already a few built-in features that will help you set up your website's SEO. Among those features are:
SSL Security: All Squarespace websites have SSL certificates, so a secure connection between the website and the users is always guaranteed. This is one of the features that search engines like Google prioritize. With this benefit, you will always rank first than someone that doesn't have it.
Mobile-friendly: Every single one of the themes in Squarespace is responsive, which means that they will automatically resize to fit the display that you are using, so as you can imagine mobile screens are included. Google loves websites that are mobile-friendly.
Sitemaps: A sitemap includes all URLs and images metadata for SEO indexing, and Squarespace offers an automatic sitemap making it easy to update.
HTML and URLs: With Squarespace, the HTML markup and URLs are easy to index.
Now that you know what SEO is, why is it important for your business, and that Squarespace is SEO-friendly, let’s move on to the 7 Quick And Easy SEO Improvements For Squarespace Websites to Implement Right Now.
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7 Quick And Easy SEO Improvements For Squarespace Websites
1. Website Title And Description
The primary SEO fields in Squarespace are the SEO title and description. This is such an important step to improve your website’s SEO because this is how your visitors see your website in the search results and how search engines prioritize your website. These two fields will help Google and other search engines, understand the general subject matter of your business.
This is considered one of the most important steps to improve SEO rankings, but you would be surprised how many people forget to do this. So, make sure you write the name of your business and also include the most important keywords you want to rank for as your tagline. For example, our website title is BrandSetGrow - Online Presence Experts.
To add an SEO website title:
Home Menu - Click Design - SEO
Search Appearance area - Click Home
Edit the SEO Site Description field - Click Save
Home Menu - Click Pages - Home page
Hover over the Home page title - Click to edit the page
Click Edit Website Header
Click Site Title & Logo
Enter the site title in the Site Title field - Click Save
To add an SEO website description:
Home Menu - Click Marketing - SEO
Search Appearance area - Click Home
Edit the SEO Site Description field - Click Save
2. Page Titles and Descriptions
Now that you have the most important SEO fields filled in, it’s time to move on to the page title and descriptions. You now need to go to the pages settings of your website and add Page Titles and SEO Descriptions to every single page on our website. This sounds like a lot of work especially if you have a lot of pages, but we guarantee it’s not as bad as you think considering the reward you’re getting in the future.
PRO TIP: Don’t forget to optimize your URL slug under the General tab. For example, change your URL slug from brandsetgrow.com/portfolio1 to brandsetgrow.com/portfolio.
To add an SEO title and description for a specific page:
Home Menu - Click Pages
Hover over the page title - Click to open page settings
Click SEO tab
Enter the description in the SEO Description field - Click Save
3. Build Up Backlinks
Collaborating with other brands to build your domain authority is crucial to building your domain authority. Backlinks are so important for SEO improvement because they indicate to Google that another person finds your content so valuable that they are willing to link it within their own content.
Backlinks are places where your website is linked to another website. Let us give you an example, if someone blogs about a service or product that you offer and adds a link to your website, that is a backlink.
PRO TIP: You can build your backlinks by looking for guest blogging opportunities and features on websites with high domain authority. Pitch your content idea to other business owners that are experts in your area and that already have high traffic to their website.
4. Create Quality Content
Posting new content is really important for your business, but do you actually know why? Creating quality content is especially important for SEO
The best outcomes of producing quality content are the improvement of your website’s SEO score and driving organic traffic to your website. When you produce and publish lots of content you’ll reach more topics, answer more questions, and reach more people.
Now, when you publish relevant content constantly you’re not only increasing the amount of content on your website, but you are also helping Google choosing your website to answer someone's questions. This happens when you’re using keywords that your readers are searching for, as the number of keywords used will help you rank higher or lower on the search results pages.
So as you can see, creating quality content can be extremely beneficial for your business, it is a great way to generate traffic to your site, and put you in contact with possible future clients.
5. Optimize Images
Images?! Seriously?! Yes, images also contribute to your SEO ranking, so make sure every single image that you upload to your website is fully optimized in terms of naming and size.
Naming your images is just a simple and easy way to make your images more searchable. Think about it while you’re searching on Google will you search for "prowebdesigner01.jpg" or you're going to search for "Professional Website Designer"?
This is where changing the file name can help search engines identify the content of a page, and point users in the right direction. Make sure you’re also providing value and that the description makes sense, as this will help you be found in Google Image Search.
PRO TIP: Instead of uploading an image to Squarespace and then renaming it, upload the image to Squarespace already with the correct name.
In terms of image size, make sure you’re using size-optimized images. PNG images are usually much bigger files than JPG, exporting your images in the best JPG quality will do the job. Heavy images will make your website slower, and that impacts your SEO and user experience. After all, who has time to wait for a website to load?
6. Clean Up Not-linked Pages
There' are surprises everywhere and this one is one of them! So, everyone knows that Google loves a large website with lots of content, but did you know that it doesn’t like clutter or duplicated content?
Maybe you’ve created a page that you don’t even remember what for, so clutter and duplicated content is most likely to be in the not-linked pages section. Yes, the not-linked section is not visible to visitors but Google can “see it”.
To avoid this you have two options: the first one is to delete and the second one is to disable the page if you don’t feel comfortable deleting all the information. This action will remove the clutter from the visitor’s eyes (if they can find it!) and most importantly Google.
To disable a not linked page:
Home Menu - Click Pages
Scroll down to the Not Linked section
Hover over the page title - Click to open Page Settings
Under the General tab, switch the Enable Page toggle off - Save
7. Verify Your Website With Google Search Console
Another way to get your website to rank higher is by submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a free service that helps you manage your website's presence in Google search results. By submitting a sitemap you’re providing Google with your website’s publicly available page URLs and image metadata.
Before your Squarespace website can be crawled and indexed, you need to connect your domain and verify your website with Google Search Console. This is the most technical step, but it doesn’t need to be difficult.
To do this last step, follow the instructions below:
How to connect your Google Search Console account
Home Menu - Analytics.
Click Search keywords
Click Connect in the panel's pop-up.
Log into the Google account you want to connect to your website
Review the permissions - Click Allow
Wait 72 hours for the data to populate
How to index the whole website by submitting a sitemap
On the Google Search Console dashboard select your website
Click Sitemaps
Under Add a new sitemap, enter your sitemap URL
Click Submit
Final Thoughts
That’s it - the 7 quick and easy SEO improvements for Squarespace websites to implement right now!
These are fairly easy to follow and quick to implement steps to improve your Squarespace website SEO right away. The average time people are spending online is increasing rapidly, it’s important to put your business in front of your ideal audience, but without SEO that is simply not possible.
Now it's your turn to tell us, do you already have any of the improvements mentioned above implemented on your Squarespace website? What are the steps you’re going to implement on your Squarespace website? Have you missed any SEO Squarespace improvements on this list? Send us your answers, and any other questions you might have, and we’ll do our best to answer them.
If you want to start working on your online presence, and learn the 5 steps on how to do it, be sure to check out and sign-up for our free training!