5 Simple Tips to Boost your Squarespace SEO
Imagine being able to drive traffic to your website while you sleep and generating new client leads on autopilot… It’s an introvert’s dream, right?
That is the power of organic search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO - which is the strategic and intentional process of structuring your website and content in a way that makes it easily discoverable by search engines, AKA Google.
Optimizing your Squarespace website for SEO is not as complicated as you may think.
While SEO can get super technical, these quick Squarespace SEO tips I’m sharing today are simple, straightforward and easy to implement.
I know, SEO is not sexy and is probably the last thing you’re thinking about. But what if you viewed SEO as a long term investment that could pay massive dividends?
One that, over time, would drive high-quality traffic to your website and put your new business leads on autopilot.
A worthwhile investment, don’t you agree?
One of the many reasons I recommend Squarespace as the best website platform for service-based business owners is due to the number of in-built SEO features designed to help improve your Google ranking.
Before we dive in, it’s worth reviewing how Google works and the key factors that influence how websites are ranked (and will help score you that coveted spot on the first page of Google!).
Google ranking factors.
There are hundreds, scratch that, thousands of factors that impact Google search results. Rather than going into the nitty-gritty of these (this is where it can get super technical and overwhelming) it’s helpful to understand at a broad level, the main contributing factors that will help your website get found on Google.
First up, let’s get clear on Google’s main goal:
Serving the best, most relevant content to users based on their search inquiry.
Think about it - the reason why Google is the number one search engine in the world is that it consistently delivers high-value content and information to users, fast. It has built its reputation on being the best resource for finding information on the internet.
And in order to be the best, most reliable resource, it has to have a clear set of factors with which to rank content on the internet.
These can be split into 2 main categories:
01. On-page ranking factors.
These are factors that you are in direct control of and are related to the way your website is structured. This includes the content appearing on the pages of your website; and how well (or not) your site has been designed and optimized for the best possible user experience.
The great news is, these are all things you have control over and can easily integrate into your overall website and marketing strategy.
02. Off-page ranking factors.
These are factors related to the links you have pointing to your website domain from other website sources on the web.
Basically, the more links you have pointing to your website from high-quality sources, the more reliable and trustworthy Google will deem your website.
Every website has what’s called a “domain authority” and the higher your domain authority ranking is, the more likely you will have your content ranked for specific search terms.
While you can help influence this by doing things like guest blogging on other websites and participating in interviews, it’s largely out of your control.
The good news is, you can indirectly influence this by consistently creating high-value content that encourages people to link to your website because they deem it a valuable and reliable source of information.
The quick wins that I’m sharing with you today are all related to the on-page ranking factors, i.e. they are all things that you have direct control over to optimize your SEO - and better yet are quick and easy to implement.
Let’s dive in!
01. Optimize the file size and file names of all website images.
Did you know that over 20% of U.S web searches happen on Google images? This is a massively underutilized way to drive organic search to your site.
File names:
To make your website and blog post images Google-friendly, ensure the naming convention follows this format:
image-title-description-keyword
You’ll want to include the dashes between each word so that the Google bots can interpret them. The bots cannot read words in a long string, but they can identify them if you add these dashes in!
For example; on an image of the Golden Gate Bridge showing the morning fog, the naming convention on your image could be: Golden-Gate-Bridge-Morning-Fog
You need to consider people who are searching for very specific things, so the more descriptive you can be, the better.
Image file sizes:
Image file sizes impact the loads times and speed of your website, both of which will impact your SEO rankings.
Best practice is to ensure all images on your website and blog are no more than 500Kb. If you’re using Photoshop to create your images, ensure you export images for the web and reduce the file size.
If you’re using Canva, always export your images as .jpg files so they are smaller files suitable for the web.
If your images are large file sizes you can easily reduce the size of your images using a tool like Tinypng.
A handy tool you can use to check the speed of your site is Pagespeed Insights Tool which will give you helpful tips on improving the speed of your site.
02. Optimize URLs: keep them short with descriptive keywords.
Within the platform, Squarespace allows you to easily update the URL slug of every page on your website, including your blog posts.
This is a super quick win because this will take you less than a minute to update and can yield you brilliant results.
Your goal with each URL slug is ensuring it’s short and contains relevant keywords.
To update the URL slug on your Squarespace 7.1 website, go to Pages > Then click on the gear icon of the page you want to update > then you have the ability to update the page name and URL slug via the Settings panel.
For general pages like About and Services, you can leave them as they are. However, for certain pages where keywords matter, you should update the URL slug to ensure it's optimized for SEO.
For example, if you offer hypnotherapy for anxiety, you could create a slug that is:
hypnotherapy-for-anxiety
You’ll also want to update the URL slug for all of your blog posts, ensuring these are short and using relevant keywords that your audience will be using to find content.
When you create a blog post, Squarespace will automatically create a Slug for you, but you can edit this by going into the backend of your site here: Pages > Blog > Blog Post > Content of your blog post.
The trick is to use a hyphen to break up each word, so that search engines can read the text.
Ie. sydney-harbour-bridge
vs.
/sydneyharbourbridge
03. Optimize Your Page Titles and Site descriptions.
One of the ways Squarespace makes it easy for you to optimize your site for SEO is by providing form fields in the backend so you can easily update them with descriptive keywords.
Site title:
This should be no more than 3-5 words that clearly describe what you do. Your Site Title pulls through in Google organic search results and displays next to the name of your site. While this is not one of the main SEO ranking factors, there is evidence to suggest this can help boost your ranking results by using relevant and specific keywords.
In Squarespace 7.1 you update this by going the “Edit Header” section of your site > Site Title and Logo.
Update your Site Description:
This should be a short description of your site between 50-300 characters. On a SERP, your site description displays underneath your site title and can help boost your SEO ranking by optimizing it with relevant keywords.
This is also a great opportunity to help drive traffic to your site as people will be enticed to click if the description is relevant and targeted towards attracting your specific audience.
In Squarespace update this by going to Marketing > SEO Appearance:
Hot tip: Two of my favorite tools to discover keywords are Ryan Robinson’s keyword tool and the Chrome plugin Keywords Everywhere.
04. Internal linking using keywords.
Link building is a core pillar in SEO which refers to the inbound and outbound links on your website.
In future posts I will share strategies that can help to build high outbound links back to your site, but equally important for SEO is linking to internal relevant content.
Why?
Because Google always wants to provide users with an exceptional experience and does not like dead-end content i.e pages that contain no links.
So, when creating blog content and pages on your website, consider where you can strategically link to content that helps users find what they are looking for.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post on goal setting, within that blog post you may link to another related blog post about achieving your goals.
When linking to relevant content, avoid anchor linking on vague and non-descriptive words such as “here” or “find out more”.
Google recommends using anchor text within your own site is useful, descriptive, and relevant.
Be intentional and strategic about your internal links by linking to content using descriptive words that people will be searching for eg “achieving your goals” or “goal setting tips”.
05. Create a custom 404 page.
Have you ever clicked on a link to read an article or blog post and then got a message saying ‘page not found”?
Super annoying right?!
When people come across a “page not found”, what’s the first thing they normally do?
They click right off your site and go somewhere else!
Unfortunately, sometimes broken links are hard to avoid, especially if you’re updating or deleting old blog posts and reconfiguring pages on your website.
Here’s the thing: not only are broken links terrible for SEO, they’re also potentially damaging to your brand as they make your website appear less credible.
Yep, Google does not like dead-end content and if it finds broken links on your site, it will immediately impact your domain authority.
Google’s algorithm is designed to create an exceptional experience for users.
Your goal is to avoid broken links on your website and keep people hanging around.
What’s the best way to do this?
Create a user-friendly custom 404 page to safeguard against broken links.
First up, what is a 404 page?
A 404 is a redirect page on your website that Squarespace will automatically send people to if a user has tried to click on a link that is no longer active on your site.
Why is this important?
Because if a user lands on your site and clicks off straight away, it impacts your bounce rate.
Having a high-bounce rate is a signal to Google that the content on your site does not match what the user is looking for, and therefore negatively impacts your SEO and domain authority.
You want to avoid this at all costs!
Given the main goal with your 404 page is to help your users connect with the information they are looking for and avoid them clicking off your site, there’s few items you should include to ensure an optimal user experience.
Best practice is to include the following on your 404:
A short welcome message that helps connect the user with the information they’re looking for.
Search bar so people can easily search your website.
Your latest blog posts.
Keeping it light and entertaining is a great way to cultivate connection with people!
So there you have it, 5 simple and easy to implement tips to boost SEO on your Squarespace website that will help you put your traffic and new leads on autopilot.
I hope you’ve found these useful; please let me know in the comments below how you go!
