Squarespace has become known as one of the best eCommerce platforms for your business, with an easy-to-use website building system, an all-in-one content management. However, to make your site successful, you don’t just need it to look professional – you must also learn how to optimize your Squarespace for SEO content. This is the content that helps to dictate where your site appears in the search engines, and it is vital if you want your site to reach a wide array of customers.
Setting up your SEO can appear to be a daunting process, but it becomes more familiar as you work on your site, and by following this guide, you should be confidently implementing your Squarespace and SEO strategy in no time.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the process of creating and managing content with the intent of helping your web pages to rank higher in search engines – typically with a strong focus on Google. It has three main components that you need to focus on:
- Quality of traffic to your site
- Quantity of traffic to your site
- Organic results
You achieve these three components through the use of keywords, the structure of your domain, your website structure, and the use of applications such as Google Analytics.
When compiling search engine results, Google (or any other search engine) will create an index which is then fed through an algorithm. The algorithm will match the collected data in the index with the search and base its results on this. Hence, you will have to include certain features on your site that attract the Google index. Ranking factors include:
- Keyword usage – at both domain level and page level
- Social metrics – the number of shares and interactions your site has
- Domain and page-level links
- Page structure
All these different factors impact your SEO success. It is important that you pay attention to every one of them, and ensure they are all equally optimized on your Squarespace site.
Guide on How to Optimise Squarespace for SEO
1. Keyword Research and Optimization
Keyword research and optimization are vital when looking at how to optimize Squarespace for SEO. You must clarify what the search terms are that your audience uses and use this information to optimize your own keyword usage.
There are different types of keywords that you will use – your more common and competitive keywords are referred to as “head” keywords. For your more niche topics, you will likely be using longer keywords that contain multiple words – these are referred to as “long-tail” keywords, and they are far more specific. For the best organization, classify your keywords and create a document with these keywords listed. Start with keyword research, then move on to your optimization.
What is Keyword Research?
Researching your keywords is essential to successfully optimize them for SEO. It should involve a five-step process:
- Note down the mission of your business – what do you market yourself as to your customers? What do you want your customers to remember your site for?
- Write down all of the keywords you want to be discovered for. Make sure that the keywords that you are using are aligned to the keywords that your customers are using in their searches.
- Look at search intent – try to look at the intentions your audience has when using certain keywords in their Google searches. Are they trying to find information? Navigation? Researching before buying, or researching to buy instantly? These factors will help to determine your keyword choices.
- Determine a keyword strategy – you must use your research to properly plan how you are going to implement your keywords. Ensure you have a clear spreadsheet of your keywords and key phrases, alongside your information about the search intent of your audiences.
- Create landing pages for these keywords – This is the bridging step between keyword research and keyword optimization – your keyword strategy should help you to prioritize which landing pages to create first. For the most important of your keywords and phrases, you will have cornerstone content articles that provide the best possible information and content about the topic of the keyword in question.
What is Keyword Optimization?
Keyword optimization is the next step after your keyword research, where you implement your keyword strategy. It is important to note that your keyword strategy should not be static – it should be evolving and adapting with both your business and your website.
You should implement your keyword strategy not only in your written content but also in your website’s title tag. Follow the format of Business name | Keywords | Location (if applicable). For example, if you are selling a website design service, you should put the keywords “Website Design” in the keyword section of this structure.
How Should You Use Keywords for Squarespace?
Ensure that all of your main and most important keywords have landing pages and create unique content for your Squarespace site. When looking at how to optimize Squarespace for SEO, it is important to avoid keyword stuffing. It ruins your user experience and does little to improve your SEO.
Create unique content that combines the keywords that your clients are using with content that will support your business – this should not be short pieces of writing with little purpose. Make your content count in order to gain more interactions with your clients and help them with their search intent. Remember not to overlook your images. Rename the images on your site to also include your keywords.
2. Site and Page Structure
Having a good site and page structure helps search engines to understand your site. It makes sure you are not competing with your own SEO content. Have sound internal links (regularly check that they are still functioning as they should) and avoid any duplicate content. Your site should be structured like a pyramid, with the top of the pyramid being your home page, which will link to other pages, which in turn link to others lower down in the pyramid structure. It is important to ensure that your website addresses for each page also follow this pyramid structure.
Your main page should be yourdomain.com.
The next level of the pyramid would include pages such as “about us” or “services” – these should then read as yourdomain.com/about-us or yourdomain.com/services.
After this, you would branch out further down your pyramid: yourdomain.com/services/individual-service.
This makes your site easier to navigate for search engines. You should also interlink relevant pages in order to help search engines understand how the different pages of your site relate to each other.
If you are struggling with forming the structure of your site, start by focussing your efforts on your cornerstone articles – the articles that fit the mission and purpose of your business the best, and the articles that you want to be ranked the highest in the search engine. Make sure that you keep these cornerstone articles up to date and with the correct keywords.
If you change your SEO strategy, make sure that you edit your Squarespace site accordingly. Update the article or page, merge it with newer content, or if the page is now obsolete, do not keep it on the site.
3. Optimize Your Copywriting
It is important that when looking at how to optimize Squarespace for SEO, you look at the quality and organization of your copywriting. Do not attempt to optimize your SEO keywords to the point where your content is not readable.
Structure your content properly with headings. Only use your H1 heading once per page as the title of your content. However, utilize your H2 and H3 headings multiple times throughout your page in order to create a clear, easy-to-follow structure for your audience. Not only is the lack of clear content structure a common web design mistake to avoid, but the ability to write high-quality content can also motivate and convert customers into shopping on your site.
Make sure that your copywriting is targeted properly at your selected audience. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What information are you trying to convey to your audience?
- What will be the central message that your audience will take away with them?
- Is it clear what the purpose of your article is?
- Are there any action points (things that your audience does) that you want to convey?
These will help you to properly target your content to the correct audience as well as assisting you in creating unique and engaging content. One important part of organizing your copywriting is clearing out pages that you do not need or use. These can severely impact your keyword optimization and clutter your website.
4. Google Analytics
What are Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free services offered by Google that help you to compile the relevant data about your website traffic and users. As over 90% of search inquiries run through Google, this makes Google Analytics and Google Search Console two of your most valuable tools. The data collected will help you to continuously adjust and maintain your SEO strategy to be fully optimized.
How Do You Set Up Google Analytics on Your Squarespace Site?
Setting up Google Analytics on your Squarespace site is a surprisingly simple process and because of this makes Squarespace one of the best eCommerce platforms available at present. All that you need to do is go to your main dashboard and look for the link named “Analytics”. If you click through, you will see various different prompts that help you to set up a Google Analytics account.
Squarespace is fully integrated with both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Search Console assists users in checking the indexing status and resulting visibility of their website. It is again very easy to set up on your Squarespace site. After setting up your Google Analytics account, click on “Google Search Keywords”, and you will be shown a prompt to set up Google Search Console.
Conclusion
Overall, when looking at Squarespace SEO Tips, there are many different actions that you must take. However, it does not need to be a complicated or stressful process. Split your SEO strategy into different sections, making sure to include keyword research and optimization, organization of site and page structure, optimized copywriting, and Google Analytics.
These different aspects of SEO all work together to improve your ranking in the search engines through the better quality of traffic through your site, higher quantities of traffic, and organic results. By following our recommended tips on how to optimize Squarespace for SEO, you can use this popular website domain and builder to help promote and market your business, targeting and reaching potential customers.
For many Squarespace customers, optimizing their site may seem like a challenging task. There are many digital marketing agencies that can recommend and conduct the recommended optimization tasks on your behalf, helping to ensure that your site is at its optimum health and able to be found within the ever-growing sea of sites fighting for online visibility.
Have you recently attempted to optimize your Squarespace for SEO? Or perhaps you are currently looking into improving and optimizing your site? We would love to hear from you and discover your experiences, comment below and share your experiences with fellow readers today.
Source: Technians Blog- Squarespace for SEO
About the author:
Rinki Sharma, A Sr, Digital Marketing Professional having 5 years of solid experience in SEO, SMO, Digital Marketing, Sales, etc. currently working in a Digital Marketing Company in Gurgaon. Loves to Write on various topics related to marketing, SEO SMO, etc.
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