Knowing the Basics of a Squarespace SEO Checklist
Today’s world is mostly digital and having an amazing website just isn’t enough. Being found is. There is no point to having a beautiful website with all your offerings, services and portfolio of projects out on display if people can’t find you. Having optimal SEO (search engine optimization) built into to your website not only ensures that your website will rank well with Google and other platforms, but it will allow for potential clients and readers to find your content. If you’ve read any of my posts, you know that I am a Squarespace fan and it is my platform of choice when designing web projects. Though Squarespace does offer built in tools and features that support SEO, understanding how to leverage them effectively can make a significant difference in your site's traffic, credibility, and overall success online. Though there are a lot of tips out there on how to use SEO to improve visits to your sites, in this post, I’m going to share my basic Squarespace SEO checklist with you and how I work to better optimize my content.
1) START WITH THE BASICS:
SEO TITLE AND DESCRIPTION
You’ll want to have your website’s SEO completed not only for your homepage, but for every section thereafter. So, if you have a “Services” tab, you’ll need to set up SEO for that. If you have an “About” tab, you’ll need to set up SEO for that as well, and so on.
To set up SEO for your main page (your home page), you’ll need to log into your Squarespace account and scroll down to the very bottom where you see the gear icon.
Click on that and it will open a new menu.
On this menu, click on “Marketing” to where you will now see “SEO Appearance”. Here is where you’ll want to fill out a title and description for your website.
I’m not going to get into keywords as that is a whole other blog post, but you’ll want to research relevant keywords for both your title and your description that will help you rank in Google.
Here is a very important piece of the SEO puzzle that you should know: your title should have between 40-60 characters in it (this includes any spacing between words) and your description should have between 150-160 characters as well. And did I mention your SEO title should have your business name in it as well? That means that your business name is included in those 40-60 characters. Your business name should appear FIRST in the title so that when you show up in Google searches, your business name appears first. Why is this important? Because Google will only read and display that many characters in their search engine. Anything longer than that will simply get cut off and you don’t want any relevant information to get cut off.
Squarespace should already have your business name included in the title, but if it doesn’t, simply type in %s. That tells Squarespace to put your business name (or webpage name) before your title description. I usually separate my business name with a pipe line ( | it’s the line above your backslash key that’s above your “Return” key on an English keyboard).
Next, you’ll want to do the same thing for every tab in your website.
To do this, go back to the main menu and under WEBSITE, select your PAGES option.
Next, you’ll have your list of pages. Hover over one of the pages tabs on the right-hand side until the little gear appears and click on that.
You will see a menu pop up and in it, you will see an option to select SEO. You will want to repeat the same SEO process for your menu/tab items as you did for your main (home) page. The same rules apply: 40-60 characters for the title (and that includes your business name) and 150-160 characters for the description. You’ll want to include keywords here as well.
The only difference between your menu pages and your home page is that now your business name will come after your SEO title. Squarespace should have this set up for you this way but if it’s not, you’ll want to exit out of that option, go back to the gear option at the very bottom of the WEBSITE menu, click on “Marketing” and then “SEO Appearance” and where it says “Pages”, your SEO Title format should be %p—%s. This tells Squarespace that your page title comes first followed by your business name.
If you need some tips on how to do keywords for SEO, I suggest reading this article on Hubspot that walks you through how to do that.
URL STRUCTURE
Another important item to include in your Squarespace SEO checklist is having a good url structure? What is a url structure? It’s the description that is included after your dot com, dot net, dot org, etc so that potential readers know what they’re about to read. It also helps Google narrow down information so that when you type in a query about something specific, it knows where to direct you.
So, say you’re wanting to find a recipe for a moist dark chocolate cake. You might type in the words “recipe moist dark chocolate cake” and voila! Google shows you all the recipes that have this. This didn’t just happen by way of magic. Someone on these webpages included these keywords in the backend in SEO but they also might have included it in their url. So, when you click on any given website, it might look something like this: jenniferscakes.com/recipe-dark-chocolate-cake.
Best practices for a great url structure is that it should be 4-6 words and all the words should be separated by hyphens. If you type in “recipedarkchocolatecake”, Google will read that as ONE word and it makes no sense. But if you separate it with hyphens, Google now knows how to read it properly.
Where do you set this up?
Go back to your “Pages” option under “Website”
Hover over the gear of the section where you’re wanting to add the url, click on it and it will open another menu.
Go to URL SLUG and type in your 4-6 keywords here.
ENABLE SSL SECURITY
Google likes websites that are safe (they show up as https://, the “s” is very important to have) and this feature can be turned on in Squarespace. They make it really easy and you don’t have to do anything except flip a digital switch.
To do this:
Go back to the WEBSITE option of your page and scroll down to the bottom to find that settings gear again.
Click on “Developer Tools” and then “SSL” on the right-hand side.
Select the “Secure” option and you’re all set. Quite simple.
2) ON PAGE BEST SEO PRACTICES
USING CORRECT HEADINGS
When you set up your webpage, you selected fonts and then assigned those fonts to headings. Squarespace will give you four headings that you can select and these should be used in hierarchical order. As part of a good Squarespace SEO checklist, every page should have an H1 (Heading 1) because this tells Google crawlers what that page is about. And every subtopic (especially for blogs), should then be assigned H2, H3, and H4. This is very important when using correct SEO practices.
OPTIMIZE IMAGES
Nothing slows down a webpage more than heavy images. And nothing makes Google dislike you more than a slow webpage. Loading times are important for optimal SEO and therefore, your images should be optimized. What does this mean? Each image should be no more than 250 kB. So if you have Photoshop, compress those images. And if you need extra help, I suggest going to TinyJPG. They compress images quite nicely without losing quality.
Once you upload your images to Squarespace, you’ll want to name them with your keywords (if you can) or something that closely describes it. Don’t upload them as IMG_978.jpg. That tells Google nothing. Name them with up to six words and use hyphens between them. Remember that chocolate cake recipe we were looking for? Best practices would be to name it dark-chocolate-cake-on-stand.jpg. Or something similar. And use a .jpg extension, not a .png.
Another important thing to remember to do with your images is to give them alt text. This is a descriptive way of telling Google what the image is really about (context), and it also helps describe the image to people with visual impairments. You’ll want to try and use your keywords here as well. So, let’s take that same chocolate cake image and now let’s tell Squarespace: “frosted chocolate cake displayed on a white cake stand next to white plates and cutting knife”. That’s pretty descriptive.
Where do we add alt image text? Once you’ve uploaded an image, it will give you the option to add it.
INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL LINKING STRATEGY
Google loves it when you make reference to other pages (external) because it lets it know that you know how to find your outside sources. Remember the reference I made to Hubspot’s website several paragraphs above? That’s an external link. And the best way to use external links is to use your words. I hyperlinked Hubspot as my external link. Google likes that. Don’t use things like “click here” or “go there”. Use actual words to do your linking.
Do the same when referencing things in your webpage. Is a potential client on your “Services” page and you want them to see your portfolio? Don’t say “Click here to see my work”. Be more creative and say, “Want to work with me? Check out my portfolio of projects.”, highlighting “portfolio of projects.
3) IMPROVING SITE PERFORMANCE
MOBILE FRIENDLINESS AND RESPONSIVE DESIGN
I shouldn’t have to tell you that most searches happening today aren’t happening on a desktop computer. They are happening on mobile devices. With that being said, you want to make sure your webpage and your [blog] posts are mobile friendly. Squarespace has the option for you to see what your layout looks like in mobile view and you’d be surprised how much of it isn’t necessarily intuitive. You definitely want to make sure your images are at 250 kB or lower (if you can, without losing too much resolution) because that will slow download times. Remember, Google doesn’t like slow websites. And make sure your layout is how you need it to look. You’re obviously designing in desktop mode. Make sure your mobile mode looks good as well.
4) TECHNICAL SEO AND INDEXING
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
You’ll want to make sure your webpage is being indexed correctly on Google. To do this, you’ll need to set up your website on Google Search Console. There are quite a few steps involved to do this and this article will walk you through how to do it, step by step.
FIX BROKEN LINKS AND REDIRECTS
Broken links on your website can potentially damage your SEO score. Why? Again, because Google doesn’t know where to go. So you’ll need to make sure all of your links go somewhere, and if they don’t, redirect them somewhere. This is called a 301 redirect and it’s very easy to do.
So what is an example of a redirect? Let’s go back to that chocolate cake example. What if your url was, in fact, recipedarkchocolatecake and you want to fix it to recipe-dark-chocolate-cake? You fixed in the url but the thing is, the old url is still out there, and Google can find it even if you already changed it. So now we need to tell Google that when it finds the old url, it needs to take a detour to the new url.
How do we do this?
Go back to the main menu of your webpage and scroll down to that little gear icon at the very bottom.
Click on it and then click on “Developer Tools” and then “URL Mappings”.
The formula for this is old url -> new url redirect type. So if our website name is jenniferscakes.com/recipedarkchocolatecake it will need to be changed to this: jenniferscakes.com/ recipe-dark-chocolate-cake.
In the URL Mappings box and using our formula, you need to type in jenniferscakes.com/recipedarkchocolatecake -> jenniferscakes.com/ recipe-dark-chocolate-cake 301. Don’t forget to add the -> and the 301 at the end.
Now when Google lands on an url that no longer exists, it knows to go to the new url.
The same is true for creating a 404 Not Found page. Say you created a page and then deleted it. It might still be out there and when someone clicks on it, some generic page will pop up showing them that that page no longer exists. You’ll want to create a page just for this with some kind of messaging that explains that the page, in fact, no longer exists. You’ll want to help them by giving them a prompt to go back to your home page. If you don’t do this, you risk the potential of that person leaving your website altogether because they don’t know what to do.
How do you create a 404 Page?
Go to your “Pages” option and scroll to the bottom to the “Utilities” section.
Click on “System Pages” and then on “404 Page”. Here, you’ll want to design some kind of messaging that lines up with your brand that lets your visitor know that the page they’re looking for no longer exists.
Give them an option to go somewhere, usually back to your Home page. You’ll want to give this page a url name as well and then, we have to redirect the no longer existing pages to this 404 page.
Do the same thing as when you were redirecting (go back to URL Mappings) and input these 404 pages. It will look like (making up a fake website as an example): thisismywebpage.com/original-page -> thisismywebpage.com/404 (insert your url for that 404 page here) 301
5) OFF PAGE SEO AND CONTENT STRATEGY
BLOGGING FOR SEO
One of the best ways to improve SEO on your website is to write a blog about your niche. Pick topics that will generate a lot of hits. This involves searching for keywords and using tools that are available to do this. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not going to get into how to search for keywords as that is another topic altogether. I do recommend you visit Lauren Taylar’s website that I mentioned earlier. She does a much better job at breaking down and explaining it.
The important thing about blogging is that you have to be consistent. It can take up to six months for you to start to notice that SEO is working and this will only happen if you stick with it and you are consistent. The norm is to blog twice a month. So do your research ahead of time so that you’ll have topics lined up and you won’t feel the pressure to write something out of thin air. Also, make sure your content is around 3000 words. Google loves seeing content that has a lot of meat to it and this will help your ranking.
BACKLINKS AUTHORITY
Not only does Google like when you use backlinks to other external sites, it really likes it when someone else backlinks to yours. When someone refers to your page in their webpage, that is telling Google that you must know what you’re talking about because someone is referring you. This really helps with your ranking.
This is another topic that could be a separate and in depth blog post so I found this article that explains it pretty well.
6) MONITORING & CONTINOUS IMPROVEMENT
TRACK SEO PERFORMANCE
SEO is not something that you just do once and then let it go. As I mentioned before, you must be consistent and it takes a lot of time and effort in order for you to start seeing any results. As technology changes and grows, you must change and grow with it. That means you must stay on top of your SEO and make any necessary adjustments. One way to do this is to make sure you have your Squarespace website connected to Google analytics. This measures who is visiting your website, how long they stay on, where they’re clicking and what blogs they like best. This is important information because it allows you to make changes as your website continues to evolve. This article in Squarespace is an excellent resource that walks you through how to connect your Squarespace account to Google analytics.
REGULARLY UPDATE CONTENT
It’s important to update your content to make sure your keywords are getting hits. If you notice one keyword works better than the one you originally had, it might be a good idea to branch off from it. This is especially true in blog posts. Let’s say you write a blog post on how to design a brochure in InDesign (I actually did, one post back) and it does really well. You can then branch off of that to talk about the different types of brochures and how they can be used as marketing materials. You would still have to search keywords to make this content that will generate visits, but you get the idea.
I hope this quick summary helped you understand a little bit more about how SEO works and why it’s an important tool to work with if you want to get visitors to your webpage.
Want a quick reference guide to everything I talked about here? Download my SEO Checklist and start making those necessary adjustments.
