Squarespace SEO — The Definitive Guide and Checklist

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In this Squarespace SEO resource, we provide a simple, step-by-step guide that you can follow to ensure that your Squarespace website ranks highly in search results.

There are two ways to use this resource. You can either watch our video tutorial, below, or read the whole post (which goes into the tactics described in a bit more detail). For best results, we recommend doing both!

Ok, let’s dive in — with a look at how to tell search engines that your site exists.

1. Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Registering your Squarespace website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is the first thing you need to do to improve its visibility in search results.

By registering your site with these two services, you are telling the two major search engines that your website exists and are ensuring it gets crawled.

This process is very easy — but if you need help, there are two resources available for Squarespace users that will guide you through the process:

Once you’ve registered your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, it’s important to submit an XML sitemap to both services — this helps them index your site accurately and lets them know which of the pages on your site are the most important.

Helpfully, Squarespace generates a sitemap automatically for you — the URL for this on your Squarespace site is simply www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml — and you just need to give Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools this link.

In both services you do this by going to your site’s dashboard, and then clicking ‘sitemaps.’

2. Ensure you’re using SSL

In 2014 Google announced that it wanted to see ‘HTTPS everywhere’, and that secure HTTPS websites (i.e., those using SSL, ‘secure socket layer’) were going to be given preference over non-secure ones in search engine results. 

So it makes sense, where possible, to ensure that your Squarespace site is secure — and doing so is very simple, because Squarespace issues free SSL certificates to all its users.

To enable yours, just go to Settings > Developer Tools > SSL and switch SSL on (see screenshot below).

HSTS

If you are enabling SSL on your Squarespace, it’s best to tick the accompanying HSTS option too (which you’ll also find in the SSL settings — Settings > Developer Tools > SSL).

HSTS forces browsers to always load the secure version of your site; it makes the most of your https status, making it much harder for potential attackers to access or impersonate your site.

3. Register your site with Google Business

Creating a Google Business profile is one of the easiest things you can do to ensure visibility in local search results.

When you set up your profile, you supply your business address to Google. Google then sends a card to your business address containing a PIN which you use to verify the address.

Once that’s done, within a few days you may see your Squarespace site included on the ‘map pack’ that Google displays when users in your area enter a search for your type of service.

Google typically highlights 3 businesses in its map pack — whether or not yours shows up there will depend on your niche and location — if you don’t make the top 3, your business should be visible when a user clicks on the ‘More places’ link at the bottom.

(You can check out our guide to local SEO for more suggestions on how to ensure your site ranks highly in local search results.)

Now, let’s take a look at page speed.

4. Ensure your Squarespace site is loading as fast as it possibly can

Page speed is a signal used by search engines to rank websites, with fast-loading pages given a preference in search results over slower ones (this is particularly important where mobile pages are concerned).

Now, your options with regard to page speed are a bit limited on Squarespace. This is because it is a ‘hosted solution,’ which means that rather than being able to buy your own hosting, you must use Squarespace’s (which doesn’t give you fine grain control over site loading times).

That said, site speed is not exclusively about server speed, and there are quite a few things you can do to make sure your Squarespace pages load as fast as they can:

For more information and tips on improving Squarespace site speed, check out our guide to speeding up a Squarespace site.

5. Do your keyword research!

So far, I’ve broadly explained some of the technical tweaks you can make to your Squarespace site to give it the best chance of performing well in search results.

However, while technical improvements can definitely help your content rank more highly, they’re only part of the picture.

One of the best ways to improve the performance of your Squarespace site (or indeed any site) is to make sure that you are publishing content that people are actually searching for.

To do this, you’ll need to perform keyword research — a vital part of crafting an SEO strategy.

Keyword research typically involves finding out three key pieces of information:

When you have these three pieces of information, you can usually identify the search terms to optimize your content around (whether that’s new content or existing content).

This is because you have enough data to find a ‘sweet spot’ – search terms that are popular enough to generate a decent amount of traffic, without being so popular that there are already lots of other sites dominating search results for these phrases.

Getting your hands on this data involves using a dedicated keyword research tool like Semrush or Ahrefs; these let you enter keywords and provide you with all the above stats for each one, along with lots of other useful information, including:

Once you’ve identified the right keywords for your Squarespace site, it’s time to look at the things you can do to your Squarespace site that will help it perform well for them.

6. Increase your ‘dwell time’

‘Dwell time’ is a phrase used by SEO professionals to refer to the length of time users spend on a piece of content before they return to the search results.

The general consensus is that the longer your dwell time, the more likely your content is to perform well in search results. This is because a lengthy stay on a piece of content indicates to search engine algorithms that it is satisfying user queries.

So, it makes sense to create and populate your Squarespace site in a way that keeps users engaged for as long as possible.

Here’s how:

7. Use simple, relevant URLs on your Squarespace site

Using ‘clean’ URLs with a relevant structure is encouraged by Google.

Clean URLs are short, simple and intelligible: as an example, if you were selling red guitars, it would be advisable to use a URL of www.yourdomain.com/red-guitars rather than www.yourdomain.com/prd/p223/1456_red_gtr.

You’ll find more information from Google on simple URL structures here, but the key things to remember when creating them are:

In Squarespace, the method for creating URLs differs depending on the type of content you’re creating.

Important: if you change a page’s URL, it’s essential that you create a redirect for it too, so that search engines know that the URL has changed. Let’s take a look at that now.

8. Always create a 301 redirect if you change a page’s URL

Search engines effectively treat each link to a page as a vote for it — generally speaking, the more links pointing to a page, the higher it tends to appear in search results (I discuss this in more depth below).

So, if you change the URL of a page, it’s essential that you create a ‘301 redirect’ to it. This lets Google and other search engines know where the new page is located, and preserves the value of any existing ‘votes’ for its authority (it also avoids your site visitors encountering broken links and any ‘page not found’ errors).

To create a 301 redirect in Squarespace,

Note that in step 3, I’m not including the domain name — i.e., to redirect www.mysite.com/page1 to www.mysite.com/page2 you would enter /page1 -> /page2 301 into the box provided.

9. Ensure you’re formatting your title tags correctly

One of the most important elements of a web page is its title tag — search engines treat it as a key piece of information when indexing a page, and your title shows up as the largest component of a search result (as well as at the top of browser windows).

So, you should ensure your Squarespace page and post title tags are never vague and ideally start with your ‘focus keyword’ — the phrase you want to rank for in search.

As a simple example, if you ran Joey’s Music Shop, located in London and selling vintage guitars, you would be better off using a page title that includes the phrase ‘Vintage Guitars London’ instead of opting for a more conventional (but less SEO-friendly) ‘Joey’s Music Shop’.

A good page title tag for the above would be ‘Vintage Guitars London — Joey’s Music Shop.’

(As discussed above, there are various keyword research tools that can help you find out which phrases are actually searched for by search engine users — big hitters include Semrush and Ahrefs).

The process for adding title tags in Squarespace is slightly different for your home page, regular pages, blog posts and products — so let’s look at each in turn.

Editing the home page title

To edit home page title tags, you need to go to Marketing > SEO Appearance. Then, select ‘Home’ and enter a page title into the ‘SEO Title Format’ field.

Editing a standard page’s title

To add or edit a title for a regular page in Squarespace,

1. Go to the Website>Pages.
2. Hover over the relevant page title, and click the cog icon.
3. Click SEO, and then enter your page title into the ‘SEO Title’ field as per the screenshot below.
4. Click Save when finished.

Editing a blog post’s title

To add a title to a Squarespace blog post,

1. Click Website to go to the Pages section and navigate to your blog and the relevant post.

2. Click on the ‘Edit’ button beside your post title and then Settings.

3. Click the SEO tab.

4. Enter your page title into the ‘SEO Title’ field as per the screenshot below.

5. Click Close.

Editing a product’s title

To edit a product’s title:

1. Click Commerce > Products.
2. Locate the relevant product, click the three dots beside it, and then the ‘Edit‘ link.
3. Scroll down to the ‘SEO and URL’ section (under the ‘Marketing‘ heading) and click ‘Edit.’
4. Add your title in the the ‘SEO Title’ field.
5. Click Apply, then Save.

10. Add engaging meta descriptions to your pages

Meta descriptions provide short summaries of web pages, and usually appear underneath the clickable links in a search engine results page.

Although Google says that meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, well-written ones can encourage more clickthroughs to your website — which in turn raises the clickthrough rate (CTR) of a page.

The CTR of a page is considered by SEO experts to be a ranking signal, so adding strong, keyword-rich meta descriptions to your content is very important.

As with page titles, the process for adding meta descriptions varies slightly for your home page, regular pages, blog posts and products.

Home page meta descriptions

To add a meta description to your home page, you’ll need to go to Marketing > SEO Appearance, then populate the ‘SEO site description’ box with your meta description.

Regular page meta descriptions

To add a meta description to a regular page:

1. Click on Website to go to the Pages section.
2. Hover over the relevant page title.
3. Click the cog.
4. Click SEO.
5. Enter your meta description into the ‘SEO description’ box.
6. Click Save.

Blog post meta descriptions

To add a meta description to a blog post in Squarespace:

1. Click on ‘Website‘ and locate your post in the ‘Pages‘ section.
2. Hover over the post title, then click the ‘Edit‘ button that appears.
3. Click the SEO option in the box that appears.
4. Enter your meta description into the ‘SEO Description’ box.
5. Click Close.

Product meta descriptions

To add a meta description to a Squarespace product,

1. Click Commerce > Products.
2. Locate your product, click on the three dots beside it and then click Edit.
3. Scroll down to the ‘SEO and URL‘ option (under the ‘Marketing’ section), then click Edit.
4. Use the ‘SEO description’ field to add your meta description.
5. Click Apply followed by Save.

11. Use headings properly when formatting site content

Ignoring headings is a common mistake made by non-developers who build and update their own websites using tools like Squarespace. Instead of applying headings (H1, H2, H3 etc.) to text, they add bold or capitalised text to break up site content.

This causes quite a few problems: first, from an aesthetics point of view it usually looks pretty bad.

Second, it makes it harder for visually impaired visitors to your site using screen readers to access your content.

And finally — and of most relevance here — it makes it much more difficult for search engines to index your content properly. 

So make sure you read up on headings and how to apply them properly to your copy before you upload content to your site!

Adding headings in Squarespace is very easy: when editing a page, you just highlight a piece of text and then choose your desired heading from the formatting drop down menu.

The most important heading on your page is your ‘Heading 1’ or ‘H1’, as search engines pay particular attention to this when determining what your content is all about.

There should only be one H1 per page, and it should always include your focus keyword.

It’s a good idea to break up your content with H2s and H3 headings too, however — and to include relevant keywords in these.

12. Add alt text and optimised file names to your images

There are three main reasons for adding ‘alternative text’ — commonly known as ‘alt text’ or ‘alt tags’ — to your images:

You should aim to add alt text that works for screen readers AND search engines — a description that contains your focus keywords but it is still perfectly understandable to anybody who is using a screen reader.

Below I’ve outlined the process for adding alt text to standard Squarespace images, but for a complete guide to adding it to all the other image types, check out Squarespace’s full guide to alt text.

Adding alt text to image blocks

To add images to ‘normal’ Squarespace images — i.e., those inserted via the Squarespace ‘image block’ — you need to:

1. Double click on your image.
2. Scroll down to the ‘Image Alt text‘ field.
3. Enter your alt text.
4. Click on another site element (some text or blank space) to close the image options.
5. Click ‘Done‘ in the top-left corner of the page to save your changes.

In addition to optimizing your alt text, you should also optimize your image file names. This is easily done for regular images — just double click on the image, and enter an appropriate filename in the ‘filename’ box provided.

The filename you use should ideally include a word that you are trying to rank for, or text that accurately describes the image.

So for example, if you have a picture of a green car on a page, give it a filename like ‘green-car.jpg’ rather than ‘gcpicture.jpg.’

Click elsewhere on the page once finished, and then on the ‘Done‘ link at the top left hand corner of the screen.

13. Add rich snippets to your Squarespace site

Rich snippets — pieces of data that can be added to your site to help both searchers and search engines understand what a page is about — are an important part of how your website behaves in search results (check out this Search Engine Journal article about rich snippets to find out why).

Rich snippets typically feature visual clues about the content of a page or post – for example, star ratings, author, prices, FAQ and so on – which appear just below the page/post title and before the meta description:

They are typically generated through the addition of ‘Schema markup’ – HTML code featuring tags defined by Schema.org (a collaborative project between Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex aimed at helping webmasters provide more accurate information to search engines). You can read more about Schema here.

To add schema markup to a Squarespace site,

As with other changes you make to your page, you may need to wait a few days — until your content has been recrawled — before you see your rich snippets appear in search results.

(You can sometimes speed this process up a bit by submitting your pages to Search Console for reindexing).

14. Focus on creating strong content and building backlinks to it

This goes for all sites, not just Squarespace ones!

Sites that feature in-depth, informative posts on topics that people are genuinely interested in tend to perform well in search — and particularly so if there are lots of external links (or ‘backlinks’) pointing to them.

You’ll find some more resources on how to go about creating strong content and building links to it below:

One thing worth remembering is that before you invest time in creating great site content and building backlinks to it, some keyword research is always a good idea.

This helps you get a strong understanding of the niche topics that people are actively searching for, as well as how hard it will be to rank for a particular niche.

Again, keyword research tools like Semrush can help you with this.

15. Remove duplicate content

You should ensure that there is no duplicate content on your Squarespace site. Having multiple pages with very similar content on your site can negatively affect rankings.

So, ensure that each piece of content on your site is not only strong — but unique.

Tools like Siteliner and Screaming Frog can help you identify and remove duplicate content on your site.

16. Make good use of internal links

As discussed earlier, if a post or page gets a lot of links, this is a signal to Google that it’s a high-value article — and the search engine will rank it accordingly.

This goes for internal links as well as external links, so if there’s a piece of content on your Squarespace site that you particularly want to achieve a good search ranking for, it’s a good idea to link to it from other pages on your site (especially those that already rank highly).

17. Assess the quality of your on-page SEO

Although there aren’t really any SEO plugins like Yoast available for Squarespace (something that often prompts people to choose WordPress instead of Squarespace), there are still many third-party tools you can use outside of Squarespace to run checks on your SEO efforts.

Hubspot provides a useful list of some of the leading ones here.

And it’s worth noting that Yoast has a ‘real-time content analysis‘ tool that you can use. This allows you to copy and paste your content and your focus keyword into its SEO checker, which then generates a report outlining what you’ve got right and what you need to address.

Tip: for more in-depth advice about monitoring the effectiveness of changes you make to pages on your site, you might want to read this guide to SEO testing.

More Squarespace SEO advice

The above tips should definitely help make a difference to the your Squarespace’ site SEO, but they’re only scratching the surface of search engine optimization!

If you’re interested in learning more about the whole topic, or finding out more about SEO best practices, then please do subscribe to our mailing list. You’ll then receive all our exclusive, easy-to-action tips on to improve your search ranking. Just complete the form below to access our SEO advice.

Any thoughts on Squarespace SEO?

We hope you’ve found these Squarespace SEO tips useful and that they help improve your Squarespace site’s search engine rankings — but if you have any questions at all, feel free to leave a comment below. We’ll do our best to give you some quality SEO help!

Also, if you’ve enjoyed the article we’d be really grateful if you could share it on social media — or, if you run your own blog or site, it’d be great if you could consider linking to it 🙂