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.