Because of its easy to use platform and aesthetic templates, Squarespace has been a widely used website builder among many small businesses. With that said, because of its static nature, you may not be able to fully optimize your site as you would with other platforms like WordPress. Lucky for you, there are several ways you can capitalize on Squarespace’s easy to use platform without sacrificing your site’s SEO.
To learn all the tips and tricks, we sat down with eight small business leaders and asked them to share their secrets to how they optimized their Squarespace site. Keep reading to identify ways you can expand your site’s reach!
Create and Maintain a Custom Domain
Squarespace is a fantastic tool for entry level entrepreneurs that has a wide range of SEO opportunities. The best tip for optimizing SEO while on Squarespace is to create and maintain a custom domain. Squarespace has the option to eliminate the generic domain (squarespace.com) and add a custom one that is more specific to your business. By doing this, business owners can make sure that their personal website is being referenced and that customers can easily find their website in a Google search.
Blake Murphy, Montauk Services
Determine Keywords and Stick to Them
As with many other platforms, choosing the best keywords will benefit your SEO efforts. Choose a small group of keywords to target that aren’t dominated by any major corporations and stick to them throughout your SEO process. As you integrate these keywords into your site, in blogs or product descriptions, you will gradually see your rankings improve.
Dan Reck, MATClinics
Take Your Time
Take the time to utilize Squarespaces’s SEO features. Squarespace sometimes gets a bad rap when compared to WordPress, but my best tip I can give is that you get out of something what you put in. With a clean, structured interface that is user friendly, Squarespace is well equipped to boost your site’s search engine rankings if you are willing to take the time to learn about the website builder and put the time required into optimizing your site. For a quick start on where to best spend your time, Squarespace has created an SEO checklist, and even posted their own guide to increasing your site’s search engine visibility.
Kayla Centeno, Markitors
Add Optimized Content
Squarespace is built in order for search engines to properly index their sites, but adding optimized content to your site will aid in people finding you. Creating relevant content with strategically used keywords will increase the visibility your site has on search engines.
Rex Murphy, American Pipeline Solutions
Optimize Your Images
Every image you upload to a blog article will be indexed and crawled; they can show up on rich snippets and Google Images (which helps to drive CTRs)—and it’s essential to optimize for them. Start with a descriptive name with hyphens in between words for every image that you upload, e.g., how-to-pet-a-hamster-tutorial-1. Depending on your plan, you can also add an “alt tag”—which feeds more information to Google on your image’s content.
Hung Nguyen, Smallpdf
Google Search Console
Like other website platforms, Google Search Console is your best friend when using Squarespace. You can use it to submit a sitemap, check indexing and spot any issues. Additionally, it’ll tell you search queries that you can then use for future content on your Squarespace site.
Liam Quinn, Reach interactive
Focus on Article Titles
Squarespace is a great drag-and-drop website builder and has everything you need to design beautiful sites. My best Squarespace SEO tip is to focus on the titles of your articles. The title is one of the biggest factors in determining if your content will rank or not, so it should be considered carefully and given attention.
James Pollard, The Advisor Coach LLC
Vary Your Content
Squarespace sites usually benefit from their faster page-load time than WordPress and also can be turned responsible in a very easy manner. It’s important to note that text is no longer the primary unit of content on the web, so make sure to vary your content types in your Squarespace site. Search engine crawlers are more intelligent now, they have been giving more preference to the pages with visual materials including infographics, videos and downloadable PDFs.
Rameez Ghayas Usmani, PureVPN
