5 SEO Quick Wins for your Squarespace Website
👋 This article is for the non-designer that now manages their own Squarespace website
Not only do I design Squarespace websites, I also run a little side hustle for improving Squarespace website SEO. Don’t delay – you can put each of these wins to work today to help search engines and your audience find your website, faster.
I’ve invested in a few tools to help me drill down to the granular level, but I am happy to share a handful of these super easy DIY SEO tasks that you can do yourself, on your own Squarespace website.
Need help? I’m a certified SEO for Squarespace ‘expert’.
1. H1 Heading
“H1” is the first heading style search engines will scan for, followed by H2, H3, and so on. Like Highlander, there can be only one. One H1 per page. Your H1 heading should be your page title, as seen on the page itself, and should be between 40-60 characters and 5-12 words long. H1 page headings (titles) should also give the reader a good crystal clear idea of what they will find on that particular page, or in the case of a home page, what your business or website is all about.
2. Meta Title & Description
Optimize your meta title and description in each page’s Settings/SEO tab, located in the ⚙️ (cog) icon next to a page or post in your lists. This is what search engines display. Your meta description should be 150-160 characters long, and be compelling enough to encourage a click to your website.
Hot Tip: Squarespace will tell you if/when you’ve met the character/word count benchmarks within that Settings/SEO tab for meta descriptions and titles.
3. Image Names
You should name your images exactly as what they depict, and include keywords that you want to rank for, prior to upload. For instance, an image of a tablescape of entrees should not be named IMG_1234.jpg — that has zero SEO value. Instead, it could be named antonias-tacos-phoenix-mexican-food.jpg. You get the idea. Most/all of your images should not be larger than 250kb, for best SEO and also faster load time.
Hot Tip: Squarespace allows you to change an image’s name when placing into a page.
4. Image Alt Tags
Squarespace gives every image you upload an opportunity to tweak its SEO and ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) value. Beyond naming the image correctly, you’ll need to add an ‘alt tag’ to the image. This alt tag shows search engines what the image depicts and assists screen readers (for visually impaired viewers) by describing what the image depicts and where it will point to if linked. Alt tags should act like full sentences that a human/screen reader can read and understand instantly, not a jumbled string of keywords.
Hot Tip: No need to preface the alt copy with “Photo of”, etc. Screen readers already tell the viewer that.
5. Your Content
Last but not least, your COPY — including body copy, subtitles, menus, captions, FAQs, forms, etc — is the easiest place to improve and capitalize on SEO. You’ve already identified certain keywords you want search engines to discover you by (haven’t you?) and you’ll want to include them IN your copy. In actual normal sentences and paragraphs, not just buried behind the scenes in meta descriptions.
🔥 HOT TIP: Aim for at least 300 words per page for search engines to bother indexing the web page.
I hope these tips can get you started on SEO improvement for your own Squarespace website. Start now with your freshest, most relevant and keyword-soaked blog posts and the pages that do your heavy lifting: Home page, About, Services, FAQs, Store, etc.
BONUS 🔥 TIP
Looking for more insight on how your web pages score with SEO? Use the same tool I do (although I use the Big Kahuna Does-All-The-Things premium version): SEOspace. SEOspace is the primo number one SEO scoring and implementation plugin for Squarespace. It has literally transformed my website and so many others to rank better on search engines.
The SEOspace free version will take your hand and walk you through a handful of easy steps to apply to your Squarespace website to change how search engines - and your customers and intended audience find your website.
