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Squarespace SEO. It’s one of the most hotly debated topics in the online marketing world. Is Squarespace good for SEO? Is Squarespace bad for SEO? How can I be sure that my website won’t land on page 168 of Google search results if I build it on Squarespace?!

In this post, I’m going to give you 25 tips that will boost your Squarespace SEO and have you raking in organic search traffic in just a few months. I’ll also give you the lowdown on Squarespace vs. Wordpress SEO and why focusing on SEO is so important if you want your business to be successful. 

Why is SEO important for business?

If you’re looking for something, where is the first place you go to find it? I’d venture a guess that more often than not, you turn to Google. And that’s exactly what your ideal clients and customers are doing. If you’re not easy to find on Google, you’re losing business to competitors who are.

SEO isn’t the only tactic you can use to market yourself. Many a strong business were built by referrals, and social media marketing can also be an effective strategy. But referrals aren’t always the most reliable source of steady business and maintaining visibility on social media requires constant effort.

SEO is one of the best online marketing tactics to focus on for two reasons:

  1. It sends you pre-qualified leads. When someone arrives on your site from Google, it’s likely because they were searching for exactly what you have to offer. That means they’re more likely to buy from or hire you than someone who discovered you on social media. 

  2. It’s sustainable over the long run. It only takes two-and-a-half hours for your Facebook posts to get 75% of the total impressions it will ever receive. And then it will fade into obscurity. On the other hand, you can hold your position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for years if you play your cards right.

Clearly, SEO is a marketing tactic worth investing your time in. The question is, which platform will give you the best return for your efforts?

Is Squarespace good for SEO?

An Ahrefs study found that 45.5% of Wordpress websites receive organic traffic from Google compared to 15.1% of Squarespace websites. Furthermore, 8.1% of Wordpress websites received 100+ monthly organic visits vs. just 1.6% of Squarespace websites. 

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Squarespace must be terrible for SEO!” Well, not so much. The authors of the study cautioned that the data is skewed by a relatively small number of Wordpress websites that rake in massive amounts of organic search traffic. 

After accounting for the skewed mean value, the research team found that there’s only a small difference between how high Wordpress and Squarespace sites rank on Google. The team’s conclusion–“Based solely on our study, we can’t say whether one CMS is better than the other.”

Another factor that this study could not account for is the skill of the website owner. On average, Wordpress users tend to be more SEO-savvy compared to people who use drag-and-drop website builders like Squarespace or Wix. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the platform. It just means users aren’t taking advantage of its full capabilities. 

Here’s the bottom line. Wordpress allows for more control over the technical aspects of SEO but most users don’t have the time or expertise necessary to take advantage of this.

The truth is that you could drive yourself crazy trying to optimize every aspect of your Wordpress site for SEO and it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. I know, because this was me five years ago. Since building my Squarespace website 2018, I’ve seen my position in the SERPs continue to climb and organic traffic to my site has grown considerably. Plus, I’ve saved so much time, which is a reward in and of itself!

Let’s get down to business with these 25 tips to boost your Squarespace SEO!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. When you click on an affiliate link and make a purchase, I receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Affiliate links are marked with an asterisk (*).

1. Enable HTTPS and HSTS

In 2014, Google announced that having a secure HTTPS version of your website would be a ranking factor. And it’s more important now than ever. So what is HTTPS exactly?

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. In ye olden days of yore (i.e. before 2014), HTTP was the standard protocol that governed transfer of data from web servers to browsers, so that users could view websites. The problem is that the data being transferred was not encrypted, which meant hackers could easily access it. That’s bad for you and anyone entering personal data into your website. HTTPS solved this problem by using a Secure Sockets Layer (more commonly referred to as SSL) to encrypt this data. 

HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security and it basically ensures that visitors will always be sent to the secure version of your website. This is safer and can actually have a positive impact on your website performance as well.

If all of this sounds a bit technical, don’t worry! Enabling HTTPS and HSTS on your Squarespace website is as easy as checking a box. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Go to Settings > Advanced > SSL in your site panel. 

  2. Check Secure (Preferred) and HSTS Secure

 
 

That’s it! Your website is now secure. 

2. Increase Page Speed

In 2018, Google announced that page speed would be a ranking factor moving forward. Page speed has always had a huge impact on user experience and conversion rates but now it’s critical to maintain visibility in search engines as well. 

Before you make any changes to your website, check your page speed to get a baseline measurement. Ideally, you want your website to load in less than a second. Realistically, that’s pretty hard to do unless your website is all text. Anything over three seconds is the danger zone! 

Multiple factors can influence the accuracy of speed tests, so I recommend running a few speed tests over a period of time and taking an average. I do NOT recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It has issues accurately measuring the speed of Squarespace websites. 

How to Give Your Page Speed a Boost

  1. Resize and compress images. Large image files take forever to load. Resize your images to about 1.5x the size of the space they will occupy. (This will prevent pixelation on ultra high-resolution screens.) Then, use TinyJPG to compress your JPG and PNG images before uploading them to your website.

  2. Use the right image file type. JPGs load faster than PNGs and SVG files load faster than anything for simple graphics. Embedded GIFs take longer to load. Read more about image file types here.

  3. Use CSS instead of images. If you want to add a colored background to an index page section, using CSS will make your page load faster than uploading a large image file. Sometimes CSS is the better choice for performance, so if you have the skill, use it. 

  4. Remove unnecessary scripts. Every external script you add to your website slows it down. That includes third-party plugins, fonts, Google analytics, etc. You can’t eliminate all external scripts from your site and you still want to have functionality. Just keep page speed in mind when deciding which plugins and integrations are really necessary.

  5. Watch your font usage. Using too many fonts, even the basic fonts included in the style editor, can slow your website down. Sticking to two fonts is a good rule of thumb. You can also improve the performance of your fonts using the Squarespace Font Optimizer.

  6. Turn on AMP for blog posts. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and it basically speeds up the load time of your blog posts on mobile devices. Go to Settings > Blogging and check Use AMP to activate.

  7. Add custom thumbnails for videos. When embedding videos using the Video Block, upload a custom thumbnail image. If you don’t, Squarespace has to fetch data from YouTube before your visitors even press play, which slows things down. 

  8. Enable Ajax loading. Enabling Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) makes it so that only visible content is loaded when someone visits a web page. It makes loading blog posts and other heavy pages with lots of text and images much faster.

Squarespace’s server is pretty fast, so if you follow these guidelines, your website should perform well.

3. Do Keyword Research

The foundation of any SEO strategy is knowing which keywords to target. And to find good keywords–keywords that people are searching for and that you actually have a shot at ranking for–you have to do keyword research. 

Click here to Read my keyword research guide for details on how to find the best keywords for your website.

4. Optimize Your Title Tags

The title of your website should contain the primary keyword or keyword phrase you want to rank for. Including your focus keyword in the beginning of the title tag will give you a bit more of a boost than if you were to stick it at the end.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have an interior design studio called Chelsea Studio located in Miami. Interior Design Miami - Chelsea Studio is a lot more SEO-friendly than just Chelsea Studio.

You can customize how your title tags are formatted by going to Marketing > SEO. 

 
 

To change the title of a page:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Hover over the page in the lefthand panel and click on the gear icon. 

  3. Click on SEO in the lefthand panel of the popup.

  4. Enter your page title where it says SEO Title.

Enter a unique title for every page on your website. 

5. Add Unique Meta Descriptions

According to Google, meta descriptions “should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about.”

Adding your focus keyword to your meta description won’t directly impact your Google ranking but it does signal relevancy to searchers. Plus, it does directly impact your ranking on other search engines like Bing.

There’s no character limit on meta descriptions but Google truncates long descriptions. For best results, keep it between 75 and 150 characters. 

To add a meta description to your homepage, go to Marketing > SEO and enter your meta description where it says SEO Site Description.

To add a meta description to a blog post (Squarespace 7.0):

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Select your blog page.

  3. Hover over your post in the lefthand panel and click Edit.

  4. Click on the SEO tab. 

  5. Enter your meta description where it says SEO Description.

 
 

To add a meta description to a blog post (Squarespace 7.1):

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Select your blog page.

  3. Hover over your post in the lefthand panel and click Edit.

  4. Click on the gear icon in the upper righthand corner of the page.

  5. Click on the SEO tab. 

  6. Enter your meta description where it says SEO Description.

To add a meta description to a product:

  1. Go to Commerce > Inventory.

  2. Select the product on the list.

  3. Click on the SEO tab.

  4. Enter your meta description where it says SEO Description.

 
 

To add a meta description to an event:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Select your events page.

  3. Hover over your event in the lefthand panel and click Edit.

  4. Click on the SEO tab. 

  5. Enter your meta description where it says SEO Description.

To add a meta description to any other page on your website:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Hover over the page on the list and click on the little gear icon. 

  3. Click on SEO in the lefthand panel of the popup.

  4. Enter your meta description where is says SEO Description.

It’s important to add a unique meta description to every single page, blog post, and product on your website. Here’s what will happen if you leave the meta description field blank:

  • Pages - Your homepage meta description will be used instead. This causes duplicate meta descriptions, which is bad for SEO. 

  • Blog Posts & Events - Your excerpt will be used instead. This is fine as long as your excerpt is optimized for search. 

  • Products - Your product description will be used instead. This is fine as long as your product description is optimized for search. 

6. Optimize Your Index Pages (Squarespace 7.0)

If you have index pages on your website, you’ll need to optimize them differently from other types of pages. This is because the sections within an index page can appear all by their lonesome in search results. This is bad, because it takes the section out of context from the rest of the page. 

To fix this problem, you’ll need to optimize the index folder like you would any other page (see above for info on how to optimize page titles and add meta descriptions). Then, hide all of the pages within the index folder from search engines. Here’s how to do that:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Hover over the page within the index folder you want to edit and click on the gear icon. 

  3. Click on SEO in the lefthand panel of the popup. 

  4. Toggle Hide Page from Search Results on. 

 
 

Doing this will ensure Google looks at the entire index page as a whole and doesn’t count each section as its own page. 

7. Clean Up Your URLs

When you create a new blog post or product, Squarespace automatically generates a default URL and it’s not pretty. Here’s an actual URL Squarespace generated for one of my blog posts: 

https://katescott.co/blog/o37k7slo6myj0matwmce9iuznurh8u

Not only is this URL long and ugly, it has no keywords, which means it won’t help me rank on Google. 

Here’s the URL I created for this blog post:

https://katescott.co/blog/squarespace-seo

Here are the three characteristics that make this such a great URL: 

  1. It’s short. Google doesn’t like long URLs, so instead of using the whole title of my blog post, I kept it short and to the point.

  2. It contains my focus keyword. This will help me rank higher in the SERPs.

  3. It separates words using dashes. Google can’t read the individual words (and keywords) in your URL if you lump them all together or separate them using underscores. Dashes are the way to go. 

To edit the URL of a page:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Hover over the page on the list and click on the gear icon that pops up. 

  3. Add the new URL under URL Slug.

To edit the URL of a blog post (Squarespace 7.0):

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Click on your blog page in the lefthand panel.

  3. Locate your blog post and click Edit.

  4. Click on the Options tab.

  5. Add the new URL under Post URL.

 
 

To edit the URL of a blog post (Squarespace 7.1):

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Click on your blog page in the lefthand panel.

  3. Locate your blog post and click Edit.

  4. Click on the gear icon in the upper righthand corner of the page.

  5. Click on the Options tab.

  6. Add the new URL under Post URL.

To edit the URL of a product:

  1. Go to Commerce > Inventory. 

  2. Click on the product.

  3. Click on the Options tab.

  4. Add the new URL under Product URL.

 
 

To edit the URL of an event:

  1. Go to Pages.

  2. Click on your event page in the lefthand panel.

  3. Locate the event and click Edit.

  4. Click on the Options tab.

  5. Add the new URL under Event URL.

8. Check for Broken Links

Broken links signal that a website is out of date, which can hurt your search engine ranking. The easiest way to check your site for broken links is to use the Check My Links Chrome extension. It will highlight any broken links in red. Do this on every page of your website.

Remove any broken external links or replace them with links to fresh sources. If you find a broken internal link, update it and set up a 301 redirect from the broken link to the correct link. If any links to the old URL exist on other websites or social media platforms, the redirect will ensure visitors end up where they belong.

9. Have a Link-Building Strategy

The number and quality of backlinks to your website is one of the biggest ranking factors that will influence your position in the SERPs. That’s true whether your site is built on Squarespace, Wordpress, or any other platform. 

You could just wait around and hope that people will find you, like your content, and link to it from their website, but that isn’t a great strategy if you want to rank on page one sometime this century. Before we get into how to proactively go after backlinks, there are a few things you should know.

  1. The authority of websites that link to you matters. A backlink from The Huffington Post will do a lot more for your Google ranking than a link from your best friend’s hobby blog. Both are good but one will give you a much bigger boost.

  2. Editorial coverage is better than guest posting. Guest posting is a great link-building strategy (We’ll talk more about this in a minute.) but organic editorial coverage will have a stronger effect on your ranking. 

  3. Backlinks from websites in a similar niche are preferable. If you’re a creative entrepreneur, backlinks from other websites in the creative entrepreneur space will have a more positive effect on your ranking than a link from Jerry’s Hardware Emporium.

  4. Sketchy link-building strategies can hurt your ranking. Backlinks from link farms or websites that have been penalized for spam activity can actually hurt your ranking. It’s also a bad idea to buy backlinks unless you’re purchasing a listing in a professional directory specific to your niche or location. 

Guest posting is the easiest way to build backlinks. And despite the fact that it’s not quite as impactful as editorial coverage, it’s still a very effective strategy. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Start by searching for websites in a similar niche to your own. You can also post in Facebook groups to find website owners who are looking for guest posts! Choose websites whose target audience is your ideal client.

  2. Look for a “Write for Us” or “Submissions” link on their website. It will probably be in the footer. 

  3. Follow the submission and editorial instructions. Some websites require you to submit a pre-written guest post while others just want you to pitch an idea. Plan out your post carefully beforehand!

What if a website doesn’t have a page asking for guest posts? You can still reach out to the owner via email or their contact form and ask if they’re open to guest posts. You might get lucky!

Publishing amazing content on your own website can also help you passively build backlinks in the long run. (We’ll talk more about blogging for SEO below.) The more valuable your content, the more likely it is people will want to share it. Just don’t rely on this method alone.

10. Build Internal Links

Internal linking is when you link to a page on your own website from another page on your website. Internal links can direct link equity throughout your website. What this means is that if another website links to a page on your website, some of that SEO juice can be spread to any other pages through internal linking. 

Internal links can also increase the amount of time the average visitor spends on your website and reduce your bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave after viewing only one page). Both of these things have a positive impact on your search engine ranking. 

How to Build Internal Links

There are a few ways you can build internal links on your website. The easiest is to add a “related posts” summary block at the bottom of each blog post. Add links to related blog posts within the body of your post as well.

Creating pillar content is one of the best internal linking strategies you can adopt.Pillar content is essentially a super comprehensive blog post or article on a specific topic that links to a bunch of other related blog posts on your website. Pillar content often has a clickable table of contents at the top of the page (like this post!).

 
 

11. Add High-Quality Outbound Links

Link to authoritative sources and some of that authority will rub off on you. For example, earlier in this post I linked to Google’s Webmaster blog, the ultimate source of authority (at least in Google’s eyes). 

Google also views high-quality outbound links as a trust signal. Google’s main objective is to deliver relevant, high-quality results to searchers, so trust is an important ranking factor. 

12. Consistently Create Quality Content

Blogging is catnip for search engines. Publishing quality content on a consistent basis signals that your website is highly relevant and can help you rank for a lot more keywords than if you just had a few static pages on your website. 

If the idea of writing multiple blog posts a week makes you feel completely overwhelmed, don’t worry. Google values quality and consistency over quantity. It’s better to publish one two-thousand-word, incredibly valuable piece of content once a week than three half-assed five-hundred-word posts a week.

Read my post on blogging for SEO for more info on how to optimize your blog posts for search engine discovery. If you’re not sure where to start, read my post on how to write a killer blog post.

13. Update Your Old Blog Posts

Old blog posts are an SEO goldmine. The key is to find blog posts that rank #4-10 in the SERPs and optimize them so that they start ranking #1-3, where they’ll receive a lot more clicks. 

How do you know which posts are ranking #4-10? There are a couple ways to do this. You can use Squarespace Analytics or Google Analytics.

How to Find Old Blog Posts to Optimize Using Squarespace Analytics

  1. Go to Analytics > Google Search Keywords. You’ll see a list of all the keywords you rank for on Google along with your average ranking position for that keyword over the last 30 days.

  2. Look for keywords with a #4-10 average ranking. The keyword should clue you in to the post it’s linked to.

 
 

Here’s an example. I rank #6 for the keyword phrase “Squarespace Lightbox anything plugin.” I know that must be linked to the post I wrote about Squarespace plugins. The question then is can I optimize this blog post for that keyword so that it ranks #1-3?

How to Find Old Blog Posts to Optimize Using Google Analytics

  1. Open Google Analytics in one tab and Google Search Console in another. (We’ll talk more about signing up for Google Search Console later in this post.)

  2. In Google Analytics, click on Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in the lefthand panel.

  3. Click Month to view stats for the last 30 days. 

  4. Scroll down and type /blog in the search bar to filter out any pages that are not blog posts. 

  5. Choose a blog post that has a lot of pageviews. 

  6. Copy the URL and hop on over to the Google Search Console tab. 

  7. Click on Performance in the lefthand panel.

  8. Click + NEW > Page to add a new page filter. 

  9. Paste the URL of your blog post and click Apply.

 
 

You’ll be able to see all of the keyword queries that send traffic to your blog post. This detailed information can help you decide how best to optimize your old post. Here are some ideas:

  • Add your keyword to the blog post title, meta description, image alt text, and first paragraph if you haven’t already. 

  • Resize and compress images to make your blog post load faster. 

  • Update your blog post to make it more relevant and comprehensive.

  • Add internal links to to your post from newer relevant blog posts.

Just don’t change the URL of your blog post. That will only cause visitors coming in from social media to land on a 404 error page. 

14. Use Headers to Structure Your Content

Headers have a few SEO benefits.

  • They make your text scannable and more dynamic, which means visitors will stick around longer. This increases dwell time, which has a positive impact on your search engine ranking. 

  • They help Google read your page and understand what it’s about. That’s why including your target keyword in a header is so beneficial to SEO.

  • They make it easier for Google to turn your content into a rich snippet, which is something we’ll talk more about later in the section on Schema markup.

Make sure you have only one H1 tag on each page. For blog posts, that will automatically be your blog post title. Include your focus keyword in the H1 tag. 

You can use as many H2 and H3 tags as you want as long as the content is structured in a logical way. For list posts, you can make each item on the list an H2 tag, like I’ve done here. It’s a good idea to include your focus keyword in at least one H2 tag on each page. 

A note about Squarespace 7.1: Squarespace 7.1 has four headings, which are labeled Extra Large Heading (H1), Large Heading (H2), Medium Heading (H3), and Small Heading (H4).

15. Remove Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can kill your SEO. The best way to prevent this from happening is to make sure your content is original (no plagiarizing!) and check to see if other websites are stealing or scraping your content. 

Accidental plagiarism is rare but if you want to double check to make sure you’re not regurgitating someone else’s copy, Grammarly Premium* has a built-in tool that checks your copy against over 16 billion web pages. 

Use Copyscape to check if your copy has been plagiarized or reposted on another website without your permission. If it has, you can issue a DMCA takedown notice. 

16. Optimize Your Images for Search

Images have a huge impact on SEO and can help you rank on Google image search results, an undervalued source of traffic. 

Here are the four things you should do to every image to optimize it for search:

  1. Resize. As I wrote in the section on page speed, larger images take longer to load. Resize for better performance.

  2. Compress. Compress your JPG and PNG images. This further reduces the file size and load time.

  3. Rename. Include your focus keyword in the image file name. And always use a dash (rather than an underscore or space) to separate words. For example, instead of DSC2471.jpg, try online-marketing.jpg.

  4. Add alt text. Alt text is meant to describe your image for the visually impaired. Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn’t distinguish between alt text and captions, so this can get a bit muddled. Add your focus keyword to the image alt text. 

To add alt text to an Image Block:

  1. Hover over the image and click Edit.

  2. Click on the Design tab.

  3. Make sure that Inline and Caption Below are selected.

  4. Under the image, write your alt text where it says Write a caption here…. You may have to move the image edit window to see this.

  5. If you don’t want your image alt text to show, select Do Not Display Caption in the dropdown menu. 

  6. Click Apply.

 
 

To add alt text to a Gallery Page image (Squarespace 7.0):

  1. Go to Pages and click on the gallery page.

  2. Hover over the image and click the gear icon.

  3. Add your alt text where it says Title.

 
 

To add alt text to a Gallery Block image (Squarespace 7.0):

  1. Hover over the Gallery Block and click Edit.

  2. Hover over the image and click the gear icon.

  3. Add your alt text where it says Enter an image title…

To add alt text to a Gallery Section image (Squarespace 7.1):

  1. Hover over the gallery and click the image icon.

  2. Click on the image you want to edit.

  3. Enter your alt text under Description.

 
 

To add alt text to a product image:

  1. Go to Commerce > Inventory.

  2. Click on the product.

  3. Hover over the product image and click on the gear icon. 

  4. Add your alt text where it says Enter an image title…

Currently, you cannot add alt text to blog post or event thumbnail images. 

17. Add Video to Your Marketing Toolkit

Did you know that video makes up 80% of global Internet content consumption? Adding video to your marketing toolkit can dramatically increase your online visibility and give you a bump in the SERPs to boot.

Don’t get me wrong. Video content is not a replacement for traditional blogging. But embedding videos on your site can give you a serious edge over the competition.

The best way to incorporate video into your blog content is to embed the video and provide a written version below it. Here are some examples:

  • Record a video tutorial and then write out the steps (with images to illustrate!) below it. You can see an example of how I do this on my website here.

  • Turn the camera on while recording your podcast and then post it on your blog with the transcript below it. 

  • Do a video Powerpoint presentation and write it out as an article as well. Include both in your blog post. 

The great thing about options one and three is that you don’t actually have to show your face on video. This is a great place to start if you’re camera shy!

18. Grow Your Social Media Following

SEO is about strategy and proving value…but it’s also a popularity contest. The bigger footprint you have on social media, the higher you’ll rise in the SERPs. 

Connect your social media accounts.

The first step is to connect your social media accounts to Squarespace. To do this, go to Settings > Connected Accounts. Connecting your accounts allows you to add social blocks to your site and automatically share content to your social media accounts when it’s published.

 
 

Add social share buttons to blog posts. 

If you want people to share your content, you have to make it easy. The best way to do that is to add social share buttons to your website. You can do this natively in Squarespace or add a plugin like Sumo.

To add social share buttons in Squarespace (7.0):

  1. Go to Marketing > Share Buttons.

  2. Check the share buttons you want to enable.

  3. Go back to the home panel and click on Pages.

  4. Select your blog in the lefthand menu. 

  5. Go back to the home panel and click on Design.

  6. On your blog page, click on any blog post. 

  7. Click on Site Styles in the lefthand panel.

  8. Type “share” into the styles search bar.

  9. Adjust the settings to your liking. You can display share icons above or below your content. 

 
 

You can also add share icons to products, events, and album pages in some 7.0 templates. Learn more about share buttons here.

Currently, you cannot add native share buttons in Squarespace 7.1.

I prefer Sumo share buttons because they’re big, bold, and sticky. This makes it much more likely that a visitor will see them and take action. Click here for instructions on how to install Sumo share buttons on Squarespace.

To add a Pinterest “Pin It” button to images on hover:

  1. Go to Marketing > Pinterest Save Buttons.

  2. Select one of the options in the dropdown menu.

  3. Save your settings.

 
 

Add social media sharing images.

Squarespace automatically uses your thumbnail image for sharing blog posts, events, and products unless you specify otherwise. For other pages, your logo is the default. Using the right image can increase the number of shares your content receives.

To add an alternate site-wide social sharing logo in Squarespace 7.0, go to Design > Logo & Title.

 
 

To add an alternate site-wide social sharing logo in Squarespace 7.1, go to Design > Social Sharing.

 
 

To add an alternate sharing image to blog posts (Squarespace 7.0):

  1. Go to Pages and select your blog from the list.

  2. Hover over your blog post and click Edit.

  3. Click on the Social tab and upload your image.

To add an alternate sharing image to blog posts (Squarespace 7.1):

  1. Go to Pages and select your blog from the list.

  2. Hover over your blog post and click Edit.

  3. Click on the gear icon in the upper lefthand corner.

  4. Click on the Social tab and upload your image.

 
 

To add an alternate sharing image to products:

  1. Go to Commerce > Inventory.

  2. Click on the product.

  3. Click on the Social tab.

  4. Upload your image and click Save.

 
 

To add an alternate sharing image to events:

  1. Go to Pages and select your events page.

  2. Hover over the event and click Edit.

  3. Select the Social tab.

  4. Upload your image and click Save.

You can only upload one social sharing image, so determine where you usually get the most shares. If it’s Pinterest, upload a vertical image. If it’s Twitter or Facebook, upload a horizontal image.

Build your social media audience.

The first step to building a robust social media following is to choose which platform to focus your efforts on. If you’re a solopreneur, don’t try to master them all. You’ll only drive yourself crazy and have mediocre results across the board. Click here to read my guide on how to choose the right social media platform for you.

The best way to grow your social media footprint is to provide value to your followers. People want to share amazing content! Personally, I’ve found that Pinterest is the easiest platform to gain traction quickly without too much effort. Should you choose to focus your marketing efforts on Pinterest, these posts may be helpful: 

19. Provide a Way to Contact You

Adding contact information to your website is a trust signal that can subtly influence your ranking. You can do this simply by adding a contact form to your website or by adding more specific details, like your business address, phone number, and email address. 

For privacy and security reasons, I only recommend adding your address if you have a shop or office space outside of your home. I also recommend using a contact form instead of an email address. Spam bots routinely scrape email addresses from websites. You don’t want to be the target of a spam attack!

To add your business contact information, go to Settings > Business Information. You can add your phone number, email, address, and business hours.

 
 

20. Don't Forget About Local SEO

Local search results can be a powerful way to reach potential clients and customers in your geographic region. Providing your contact information is the first step to ranking locally but there’s more you can do. 

The first step is to add local keywords to your website. For example, instead of “Floral Designer - Steph Hargrove,” try “Floral Designer Washington DC - Steph Hargrove” for your site title. Add your local search-friendly focus keyword in your homepage meta description too. 

If your business has a commercial office or retail space, Google My Business is about to be your new best friend. With Google My Business, you can sign up for a free local business listing, invite customers to leave reviews, and show up on Google Maps search results. 

 
 

Unfortunately, Google My Business does not allow the use of a P.O. Box as your business address and is increasingly cracking down on business owners who try to use a UPS Box address. 

21. Focus on User Experience

Giving your website visitors a great experience will make them want to stay on your website longer. This increases dwell time, reduces your bounce rate, and has an overall positive impact on your SEO. 

User experience is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of things. Here are just a few to consider:

  • Page speed (which we talked about earlier). 

  • Intuitive website navigation.

  • Aesthetically pleasing design. 

  • Easy-to-read fonts. 

Working with a Squarespace designer will ensure that your website meets high UX standards. 

22. Check for Mobile Usability Issues

If you sign up for Google Search Console (more on that below), you will be notified if the mobile version of your website violates any mobile usability guidelines. This can include:

  • Text that’s too small to read. 

  • Clickable elements that are too close together. 

  • Content that’s wider than the average mobile screen.

Squarespace is fully mobile-responsive, so it’s unlikely that you’ll run into any of these issues but it can still happen, especially if you have custom styling on your website. 

If you have one of these issues and you don’t know how to code, contact a Squarespace designer who can help you fix the problem using CSS. If you’re a DIYer, you can read my tutorial on how to customize your mobile site.

23. Add Schema Markup to Your Site

Schema markup allows Google to extract specific types of data to display as rich snippets in search results. Here’s an example of what a rich snippet might look like:

 
 

Rich snippets can include information like product reviews, tour dates, thumbnail images, and more.

Rich snippets tend to rank higher in search results and attract more clicks.

You can add schema markup for many types of content, such as:

  • Articles

  • Events

  • Products

  • Local business info

  • Book and movie reviews

Squarespace automatically adds schema markup to your products and business contact information but you can manually markup to other types of content as well. There are two ways to go about this.

Method 1: Google Structured Data Markup Helper

Google Structured Data Markup Helper (or, as I prefer to call it, Tool of the Unnecessarily Long Name) generates JSON-LD markup. Here’s how to add the markup to your website:

  1. Select the type of content you want to markup and enter the page URL. 

  2. Tag your content using the highlighter tool and copy the resulting markup.

  3. Open the Structured Data Testing Tool and paste your code to check for errors. 

  4. Add a code block at the top of the page where you want to add the markup.

  5. Paste the markup in your code block and click Apply.

  6. Save your page. 

 
 

Method 2: Google Data Highlighter

If adding markup code to your website seems waaay too technical for you, using Google Data Highlighter is a great alternative. It doesn’t add schema markup to your page but it does help Google understand how your content is structured so that it can better display it in rich snippets.

You can highlight a specific page or use any page as a template to tell Google how to read similar pages on your website. 

 
 

Highlight each section of content and tag it appropriately. 

 
 

Google needs to index your page before you can highlight it, so either wait a week or so after publishing new content or submit your new content via Google Search Console for faster indexing.

24. Sign Up for Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that, in Google’s own words, “helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.” Here are some things you can do with Google Search Console:

  • Submit your sitemap when you first launch.

  • Submit new pages for faster indexing.

  • Verify that Google can crawl your website.

Here’s what Search Console does for you:

  • Notifies you of any mobile usability issues. 

  • Highlights any page speed issues.

  • Monitors your site for security issues.

  • Collects data on your top search keywords.

Squarespace makes it easy to connect your website to Google Search Console.

  1. Go to Settings > Connected Accounts > Connect Account.

  2. Select Google Search Console from the list.

  3. Login to your Google account and click Allow.

 
 

25. Don't Over-Optimize Your Site

You know that popular kid at school who thinks trying too hard just isn’t cool? That kid is Google. And over-optimizing your site can actually result in being penalized.

Here are some mistakes you want to avoid if you want to avoid being kicked out of the cool kids club:

  1. Keyword stuffing. Don’t use your focus keyword too many times in your blog post, footer, or any other page on your website. You can use a keyword density checker to make sure you’re not overdoing it.

  2. Using keyword-rich anchor text for internal links. Internal linking is good. Using the exact same keyword in your target page URL and anchor text is bad if you do it a lot. For example, if you’re internally linking to a blog post at https://yourwebsite.com/beginner-blogging-tips, don’t use “Beginner Blogging Tips” as the anchor text.

  3. Pointing too many internal links to top level pages. It’s okay to link to the homepage or any other page in your primary navigation, just don’t do it too much. It’s best to have a 1:1 ratio. So for every link to a top level page, you want to have a deep link to a blog post or other type of content.

The Best Way to Approach Squarespace SEO

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this monster post, I applaud you. (No, really. Very few people have that kind of attention span anymore.)

If you feel totally overwhelmed right now, stop for a sec and take a deep breath. You don’t have to tackle everything on this list to improve your SEO ranking. Even I don’t do everything on this list. I’ve never worked on my local SEO or done much in the way of video marketing and I’m still climbing in the SERPs. 

Choose one thing and work on it. And when you feel like you’ve done everything you can with that strategy, pick another one. Start with the basics–security, site speed, keyword research, meta descriptions–before moving onto the more complicated stuff like schema markup and developing a backlink-building strategy. Before you know it, you’ll notice a significant bump in your incoming search traffic and your sales. 

If you need help with your Squarespace website or want to book a consulting session, reach out and let’s talk.

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squarespace design, Online MarketingKate ScottSEO, Squarespace Tutorial