A Squarespace SEO Agency
Squarespace provides you with a number of tools to help you boost the ranking of your website through search engine optimisation (SEO).
As an agency with 35+ Squarespace sites on our books, we've done conversion tracking, PPC landing pages, and SEO work all specific to Squarespace, and without any major challenges.
Read on for a few practical tips for optimising your Squarespace site for search engines. If you're in the market for an SEO-specific agency with Squarespace experience then hit us up.
In fact, our SEO retainers for Squarespace are among our happiest clients as we consistently deliver higher YOY traffic growth for them.
Anyway, below are a few Squarespace SEO tips from us, and they're quite general given that our 35 Squarespace sites are all very different in both form and function.
Squarespace SEO optimisation tips
All your URLs should be clean and simple. You can edit this in the blogging and SEO sections of your site (which affects a large number of pages) or on an individual basis in the 'Options' tab on pages and your blog posts. They should be easy for humans to read and ideally contain your focus keyword. By going to the page settings whenever you create a new page and changing your URLs to an appropriate length and style, you can keep on top of your page URLs.
The description for each page should be customised. As well as the URL, it is accessed from the page settings. Remember that what you write in the description might be visible for users not only in search engines, but on your site, depending on the Squarespace template you've gone for. This makes some Squarespace templates less SEO friendly than others! Some pages will show your description in the banner (we have some custom code to hide this though, if you find this a chronic issue)
The content of your website should be structured and styled with the use of ‘headings’. Search engines use headings to distinguish between sections of content on a page, like the outline of a long essay. It is key for your website. Do not use headings for style purposes, as this can result in whole paragraphs being deemed a 'heading' even though it's just an introduction to a page. Try to use 'bold' or keep the heading sentences short if you need to use them for aesthetics. They should be primarily function over form. Proper use of headings also makes skim-reading your content much easier for your users.
Tags and/or categories added to your gallery images, products, and blog posts are real problems with Squarespace. Squarespace creates tag and category pages where relevant content is listed, but this is invisible in search engines as these pages are blocked by the Squarespace Robots.txt file (which you can't edit - annoyingly!). Don't despair - for effective SEO here, the best route forwards is to use Squarespace summary blocks. Create pages which WILL be indexed, and bring through your products/blogs/images by tag or category there.
For your images, you might want to consider adding ‘alt text’. ‘Alt text is the description of an image. It is particularly useful to the search engines as they cannot read images but can read the text; alt text tells search engines what the image is about, making it possible for the image to be included in the web search.
To achieve the goal of ranking higher in the web search, consider using the Squarespace blog feature. Use it to push news and information out, and to keep your site 'fresh'. The more recent quality content you have, the higher chance you have of being ranked highly by search engines. To get the most out of the blogging feature you should continuously and consistently add new content to your website. Don’t forget to structure it with the headings and add tags and/or categories too!
Squarespace automatically creates lighter versions of the website for mobile and other devices to speed up page loading. Search engines tend to prioritise sites that are compatible with all devices so this is a definite place where Squarespace wins!
While Squarespace covers all the technical aspects, it is quite easy to get carried away with all features available and a variety of different tasks that need to be done.
Here at 3B digital, we have extensive experience in working with Squarespace websites whether marketing microsites or just company websites. We created, have optimised and now maintain more than 35 Squarespace websites for our clients and would be happy to put our acquired knowledge into helping you boost your website ranking ASAP.
