Squarespace SEO Guide: How to Optimize Your Blog for Higher Rankings

Squarespace was founded in 2003 by Anthony Casalena, who worked on this project all alone in his university dorm room and made it functional by the year 2004. With a great success history behind the origin of Squarespace, the main idea behind creating this website development platform was to make it easy for its users to create a blog that is easy to make and easy to rank using its built-in SEO features.

Initially started as a platform for blogging, later on in the year 2013, Squarespace expanded its features and incorporated e-commerce, enabling its users to sell their products and services online on their websites using Squarespace.

Let us have a look at how to optimize Squarespace for blogging and increasing Squarespace visibility online to boost your blog’s success!

Why Choose Squarespace For Blogging?

When it comes to blogging, especially for beginners or small-scale businesses who want to introduce their business online, Squarespace blogging can help them a lot in scaling their business or blog’s growth online by using the built-in SEO on Squarespace. 

Setting up a blog and getting it running is really easy on this platform. You get access to built-in templates with drag-and-drop elements to design your blog within a few minutes.

Setting Up a Blog On Squarespace

Setting up a blog on Squarespace is not complex. We are going to break it down into the simplest checklist that you can follow:

• Choose the blogging website plan you wish to continue with. Squarespace offers four plans to its users.
•  If you are planning to start a blog as a hobby then a basic plan would be okay for you, but just in case you wish to expand your blog into a business model and you might want to consider open up your ecommerce store online, we will suggest you to go with the business plan instead because the basic plan does not include store creation, hence it is better to start with a proper future forecast of your blog and business before making any decision.
• Once you have decided on your route, the next step will be finding a domain name for your website. Make sure your domain name showcases your business and also includes keywords that your audience might be looking for online to buy your services.
• A domain name can be directly bought from Squarespace, as it is a part of its web hosting services. You can also get your domain name free for the first year if you purchase the annual plan from Squarespace. However, this does not restrict you from getting the domain name from them; if you have a domain name bought elsewhere already, you can transfer it to Squarespace easily.
• Squarespace offers a Business Name Generator service, which helps you brainstorm business name ideas if you are still struggling to find a business name.
• Squarespace offers a variety of award-winning templates from which you can choose. Choose a template that best fits your business idea and then add your domain name to it to make it accessible to your audience.
• The easy drag-and-drop features will allow you to design your website pages the way you wish to create them. You can change the imagery or add and move elements on the page however you want.
• Create and publish your first blog post. When starting up your blogging journey, keep one thing in mind: content is the king. SEO on Squarespace or any other blogging platform is solely based on your content strategy; hence, your content is going to be your pillar of success in the online world.
• Assign categories and tags to your blog posts and make sure that your blog is customized in a way that makes it easy to navigate for your audience.
• Keep your content consistent. You never have enough content when it comes to blogging or promoting your business online.
• Keep your SEO on track and monitor it regularly by auditing your website using the built-in Squarespace SEO Analytics Tool.

Now that you have gone through the checklist of setting up a blog on Squarespace and you know what needs to be done, let’s move on to the Squarespace SEO guide by The Digital Advice.

Squarespace SEO Guide

If you have your brand strategy and content ready to go online, SEO on Squarespace is going to help you get acknowledged by search engines in the easiest and quickest possible way. It provides you with built-in SEO features and not just that, with analytics tools for consistently monitoring and keeping your SEO in check.

Before moving to our Squarespace SEO guide, if you are still unsure about search engine optimization and want to understand it deeply, you can read our detailed guide on SEO for beginners before moving forward with this article.

Generally, when it comes to optimizing Squarespace, things become very easy because it has its SEO features that help you to optimize Squarespace. However, along with these, there are certain SEO aspects to improve Squarespace’s visibility that you need to consider.

Let’s have a look at what is already available and what Squarespace SEO you need to do from your side as a blogger.

Built-in SEO Features By Squarespace

As mentioned earlier, the biggest perk of starting a blog with Squarespace is having the built-in SEO features that help you make your website more visible online. Major features comprise the following:

Clean URLS

Clean URLs are readable and do not include any query strings. These often include your keyword and provide an understandable and easy-to-read URL to both readers and search engines. Clean URLs are also straightforward to index; crawlers can easily crawl and index them, and they provide structure to your website.

Squarespace provides automatic clean URLs, making your website easy to navigate for both your users and search engines.

SSL Certificate

SSL certificates ensure that your visitors know the connection they are forming with your website is secure. SSL certificates are a very important factor to consider in your blog’s SEO because search engines consider them a ranking factor for websites, and websites have them prioritized in getting ranked and shown in SERP.

• Squarespace provides SSL certificates to all its users’ websites; you just have to make sure that it is activated for your website.
• If you want to make sure if SSL is enabled on your website, you can access the SSL Panel in your settings to check if it is enabled. If not, you can allow it to yourself.
• Once enabled, it may take 48 hours to update the setting. During this duration, you might see an error message within the domain settings on your website, but you should not worry about it. It should be considered normal and will disappear once the SSL certificate is enabled.

Automatic Sitemap

Squarespace also generates automatic XML Sitemaps for all the URLs and images that are available on your website, making indexing easier and faster.

Automatic Redirects

Sometimes users create multiple domains and connect them to a single website, which helps because:

• Multiple domains develop multiple ways for the audience to reach you.
• Competitors cannot duplicate your domain name to cause you harm.
• Increase in traffic to the blog by increasing the audience using multiple domain links.

Automatic redirects are also a great built-in feature of the platform, whereby if you have register multiple domain names for your blog, you get redirects to your primary domain.

Although search engines look at this behavior as spammy, Squarespace, by redirecting all your different domains to your primary domain, makes this practice acceptable and does not let this negatively impact your SEO.

Schema Markup (Proper Website Structure)

Search engines love websites or blogs that have structured data. Squarespace provides Automatic schema or structured data for different types of content on your website, like

a blog post, product listing, or event. This structured schema is not editable, but this structure makes it easier for search engines to understand your content in a better way, and helps it to show your results in search results.

Mobile Website Optimization

As per a report by Statista, by 2024, mobiles will generate 62.54 percent of website traffic globally, which means half of the traffic on websites comes from mobile phones.

Having a mobile-friendly website is a ranking factor by Google and other search engines. All the templates available in Squarespace are said to be mobile-friendly, automatically providing their users with additional customization options as well. This makes SEO on Squarespace viable and easy for its users.

Squarespace AI

This feature is the most impactful feature that helps a beginner to optimize Squarespace in various ways:

• It helps to generate image alternate text suggestions based on your brand image and keyword requirements.
• By generating automatic metadata, it saves time for the users, which can be used for further work on their blog.
• It also helps to create a website copy that translates your brand identity in a way that speaks to your business and generates conversions for your products by highlighting their features in the best possible way, resonating with your brand and its presence online.
• Squarespace AI helps you increase your blog traffic and improve your rankings in SERP.

Page Loading Speed

Squarespace blogs or stores have a speedy loading time, up to 3 seconds or less. This makes them ideal to load faster, providing a great user experience. Fast page loading speed is a high-ranking factor for search engines.

In order to maintain a fast loading speed on your website, use images that are smaller in size to help keep your page loading speed intact and quick.

SEO Customization for Squarespace Visibility

Now that we are aware of the SEO options available on Squarespace and how to use them, the next step is to look at the SEO practices that you will need to work on by yourself to optimize the Squarespace blog effectively.

Titles & Meta Descriptions

Titles and metadescriptions are essential for seo as they appear right below your blog links in the search engine results. Having them optimized is the key to getting your visitors searching for keywords on your website to click your link, not your competitors’.

• Keep your Titles below 60 characters and your meta descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.
• Make sure to include keywords based on your user intent in your title and meta descriptions.
• Consider using long-tail keywords in both. Long-tail keywords are usually used by many users with the introduction of voice search globally. Hence, targeting long-tail keywords can give you an edge in search results compared to your competitors who have not yet considered them.

Keywords

Keywords play a key role in your SEO, especially in on-page SEO. You must integrate and use keywords that resonate with your brand image and that show the intent of your audience.

• Keywords are generally the words that are being typed into search engines by the audience.
• You must conduct keyword research based on your niche and find keywords that will not only promote your brand, blog, and products but also show the user intent of your audience.
• You can use various keyword search tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest & Semrush.
• Also, search for long-tail keywords that your audience is using.
• A complete research on the keywords of your competitors cannot be ignored during the keywords research, as this not only helps to find out what is helping them but also how you can use the exact keywords to gain an advantage over them and rank higher than them in SERP.
• Using zero search keywords also helps you to generate a high rank in SERPS. These are the words that no one is yet using, but they could be utilized in the future by the audience to search. I/f you produce content using these keywords along with other keywords, in the future, when searches around zero search results keywords happen, you gain the edge to have written about them, and this can get you a snippet spot or rank you on the first page for being the only website targeting the keyword.

Content Creation & Consistency

SEO will also require you to update your content regularly. Being consistent in posting means using more keywords, hence creating more visibility for your blog online.

Updating Old Content

SEO on Squarespace or any other blogging platform is not based on a few settings and generating new content daily. Repurposing your old content by making changes to it and

updating new keywords or information with changing years is an ideal strategy to improve your blog SEO and Squarespace visibility.

Image Alternate Text

Alt text in images can be important for many factors, like:

• Providing search engines with the image content
• An accessibility option helping people with visual aids to understand the image descriptions with the help of a screen reader.
• Providing image detail in textual form for those with slow internet speed.
• Along with all the above-mentioned benefits of alt texts, they can act as a great way to enhance the SEO of a website.

As per Google’s John Mueller, image alt text is a ranking factor. Alt images allow search engines to understand the content of blog images and index images in search results. Images, when indexed for specific keywords, can also help a website rank.

Integration of Google Search Console

Integrating Google Search Console is an essential part of SEO improvement. By integrating this free tool from Google, you can combine both platforms to see the SEO results in one place. This helps to see which keywords you are ranking for, which page your website is ranking for, which pages are indexed, and which pages have broken links.  It makes it easier to manage your website and fix any changes that are required.

Monitoring SEO for Future Improvements

Squarespace provides you with a built-in analysis tool that helps you to monitor your metrics and analyze your website to keep an eye on any improvements that are required to help you stay on track with a great SEO strategy and a better Squarespace blog visibility.

404 Redirect and SEO

The 404 page appears on your website when a page on your website cannot be found, and has not been redirected to any other link. This leads to redirecting your user to a page with a 404 error. You can use this 404 redirect as an opportunity for SEO. This 404 page can be customized. Along with the 404 error message, you can provide important links to your other essential blog pages that will be useful to the visitor. This way, you reduce the frustration of your users and enhance the navigation of your website, indirectly helping with your SEO.

Link Building (Outbound Links)

After creating a blog, posting content, and doing all the on-page SEO on your website, the most crucial factor to skyrocket your website’s rank and authority is to get backlinks from websites with high Domain authority and credibility online. There are many strategies for doing so, including:

• Guest posting for a famous website and asking for them to place your link on their website to create link juice can be a great strategy of outbound linking
• Post the links to your blog on your social media accounts.
• Use interesting infographics within your blog content that people find shareable, thus generating more shares to your blog post and creating more outbound links.
• Reach out to famous influencers in your blog niche and ask them if they can share your blog links on their social media, generating backlinks and bringing new audience to your blog.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is indirectly related to your blog’s SEO for Squarespace websites. By posting links to different blog posts in your new content, you help create a navigation structure that allows crawlers and search engines to navigate better and understand the important pages of your website. This also creates a good user experience when you place these links in a way that they are helpful for your users. Internal linking also helps engage your users to spend more time on your website, which indirectly boosts the SEO of your blog.

Verify with Bing Webmaster Tool

Google may carry the advantage of being a widely used search engine, but this does not mean that other search engines do not have any weight in the ranking of a new blog or website. Just like you integrate and use Search Console to index your Squarespace website with Google, you will also need to use Bing Webmaster Tools to index your website on the Bing search engine. This will help you boost your Squarespace visibility on search engines other than Google.

Local SEO (Adding Location & Google Business to Blog)

Local SEO helps your business if it is physically available somewhere. You can register your business on Google, add your details like email, website, address & phone number, and add it to your Squarespace blog using a text block in the Contact page or your blog footer. 3

Final Remarks

Squarespace is an excellent choice for beginners who want to blog and for e-commerce. If you are an individual who wants to create their website or a new small scale business that wants to create an online blogging website and promote their business online, then Squarespace’s easy to use drag and drop templates and flexible pricing plan will help you to make the most good looking, professional and fast speed website that will not only provide a best user experience but will also have an equal chance of ranking online in top SERPS.

This blog post has enriched you with all the information regarding the built-in SEO features of Squarespace and the guidelines for SEO that you can use to scale the growth of your Squarespace blog online.

You can also find the SEO analysis and guidelines for other website builders on our website, including the Wix Optimization Guide & Ultimate WordPress SEO Plan, if you are interested in learning about these.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, Squarespace provides an easy-to-create website, enabling its users to create a website and make it live, increasing their chances to rank high in SERPS using the built-in SEO features.

Yes, all the templates available in Squarespace are automatically designed to be mobile-friendly, making it an ideal platform for beginners.

Absolutely, Squarespace provides great built-in SEO features, including structured data, automatic sitemaps generation and indexing, mobile-friendly templates, AI help to generate Meta tags and descriptions, etc., that help your website to fulfil the criteria to rank in SERPS.

Yes, all blogs are SEO friendly because they follow a structured, built-in SEO structure of the platform, making your blog and its content SEO optimized.Yes, you will need to conduct keyword research and use keywords manually within your content, meta tags, and meta descriptions to improve your Squarespace optimization.

Yes, it can be optimized for local SEO by creating your business profile on Google Business and integrating it into your website’s schema markup for location-based content.

No, such tools cannot be used with Squarespace as it has its own built-in SEO features that, along with manual keyword, off-page, and local SEO, are enough to rank your Squarespace blog in SERPS.
Yes, initially created as a blogging platform, Squarespace has incorporated Squarespace Commerce since February 14, 2013, which allows users to sell their products or services directly from their Squarespace websites.