Is Squarespace Good for SEO?
The short answer —yes! SEO is tricky to understand. Wordpress has taken advantage of that, and convinced users that a magic plugin can simply be attached to your website and BAM! perfect shiny search engine results. Experts know, that’s simply not true!
In order to optimize any website, whether it’s Wordpress or Squarespace (or Wix or ShowIt, etc.) there’s a lot more that goes into keeping a good rank with search engines. Squarespace get’s a bad rep for SEO pretty much only from people that don’t understand SEO and want a half-assed plugin to just minimize their image file sizes and call it a day. I know it’s annoying to hear, but in all honesty, that’s not really going to do much for you.
You need both on-page and off-page SEO to really ensure a great ranking. You also need to be publishing new engaging content on a consistent basis with optimal use of keywords and beautifully optimized images. Your plugin is going to be worthless unless you also register your website with Google Business, Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console (submitting your sitemap and keeping that up-to-date), get an SSL Certificate, and optimize your URLs and H1 headings. You also need to generate so much interest that other people talk about you to help you rank higher. This is where off-page “backlinks” come to play. This means that the more other websites and social media sites link back to your site, the better you’ll rank.
Web designers sometimes get too caught up in making something beautiful with all the bells and whistles and millions of added code snippets, but this unfortunately can be very impractical and can hurt your search engine results. Whenever possible, try to let your content be the star and everything else can be more minimal and simple to ensure top site speeds and better ranking. For example, it helps to us a web-safe font or Google font. Custom fonts tend to need to load the entire character set for the font, and can really slow down load times which can hurt your rank. Using a web-safe or Google font can help with site speed because they will load much faster. You also have to check that your website design is optimized for accessibility with good contrasting colors and appropriate sizing of fonts (a lot of designers might actually get this part wrong —Google doesn’t care if it “looks cool” it needs to read well).
Great articles on this topic:
Great videos explaining how to work with SEO within Squarespace:
Major Changes for Squarespace SEO in 2021 | Quickstart Guide for Beginners [7.1]
How To Do SEO for the First Time | SEO Guide for Marketing Managers
Squarespace has all of these different features you can update to improve your SEO:
Site title
Google Index
Bing Webmaster Tools
Readable file names
Meta title
Meta description
Custom URLs
Headings
Image alt text
Speed and uptime
Mobile friendly
301 Redirects
SSL encryption (HTTPS)
Sitemap
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Fonts
Social media integration
Search engine instructions
Canonical tags
Structured data
AMP support
Custom Favicon