SEO Basics for Squarespace

SEO

Sep 4

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Optimize your squarespace website for Google search results

If you’re looking for a checklist to take you through all the SEO things, look no further. Download my FREE SEO checklist right here!

In case you didn’t know, SEO is super important for your website! There are a few simple tricks you can use to make sure you’re making the most of your website and Google Search keywords!

Before we get started, let’s cover some basics.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it’s making sure your website is set up with the keywords people are searching for to find someone who does what you do.

Optimizing your website includes several steps. And it can seem overwhelming. Especially if you haven’t been doing it from the start. (If that’s you, it’s ok!)

But once you’ve got all the main things optimized, the only thing you have to do going forward is make sure any new pages or content are optimized as you add them.

So we’ll do one big sweep of your site to get it going. Then you’ll just take care of the rest as you go! Simple!

And Squarespace makes it SO EASY to optimize pages. Let’s get to it!

Squarespace SEO Site Basics

These are the key things you need to have in place on your website. Basically you want to have the specific words people search for in as many places on your website as you can.

The trick though, is to not just stuff them in random places. You don’t want to have a string of keywords run together in the caption of a photo. They need to make sense and be readable. So these key locations are are super important.

Site Title - The name of your site of course! Perhaps this is your name if you’re a personal brand. Or it can be your business name. It’s important to have this filled in even if you use a logo in your header. Because it’s the text that will be indexed by Google.

Now would also be a good time to add a favicon! These now show up in Google search results so having one will help tremendously with brand recognition. It also makes your site look more polished in general because you have a customized icon in tabs and search bars.

You can also add a social sharing image here. This is the image that will be displayed whenever someone shares something from your site.

SEO Description - Each page on your website can have it’s own SEO description. This is the description that shows up in Google search results under the page title. Using keywords in this section boosts your Google search ranking so make sure you’re using the words that your ideal client is searching!

Check Page and Title Formats - You can control how your site info looks in search results! By default it’s usually something like Page Name - Site Name. But with Squarespace you can go in and customize how this looks. This is super important so that you have a coherent look across all of your pages as they show up in search results. It also ensures that you know what content is being shown to potential customers before they even get to your site.

Connect to Google Analytics - This may seem obvious but I think it needs repeating. Connecting your website to Google Analytics lets you go back and see ALLLLLLL the data Google has for your site. You can see what searches bring people to your page. (Hint - These are the KEYWORDS people are looking for that find your site! So use them!) You can see how long people stay on your site. What page they usually see first. Where they come from. All of this data is more than valuable when optimizing your site for Google searches.

Don’t forget to download your SEO for Squarespace checklist! You can grab it here.

Important SEO Extras

I’ll level with you, these really aren’t extras. They are important too, but after you’ve set up the stuff we talked about earlier.

Make strategic updates - It’s important that as you add new content to your site, you make sure any new pages are also optimized for searches. Make sure any new page titles, SEO descriptions, etc are all ready to go on new pages from the start so you can get maximum exposure once Google has indexed your new pages.

Redirect broken links - This is important if you’ve changed the slugs (the part of a URL that comes after the first /) for any pages on your site. For example, if your About page was delanasimmons.com/about-delana but you changed it to delanasimmons.com/about, you’ll need to create a redirect from /about-delana to /about. This way if you have any /about-delana links floating out in cyberspace (and let’s be real, if you’ve ever posted them, they’re still out there somewhere), they get directed to the new, correct page.

Custom 404 page - But let’s be real, it’s difficult to keep up with and create redirects for every single possible broken link out there. So a custom 404 page is dynamite to have in these situations! If someone clicks a broken link, they’ll get taken to a page with a custom message from you that tells them where else they can find info from you! Otherwise they’ll get a generic broken link page and may not come back to your site! No good!

There are so, so many other things that need to be done to make sure your site is optimized at the highest level! But for the sake of this blog not becoming a short novel, I’ll cut this one off here. :)

Grab a complete checklist to optimizing your website for SEO right here!