Squarespace SEO may not be as easy as it is on other platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify that have more SEO-friendly templates, or on WordPress where it’s possible to make changes to basically any aspect of the website.
With that said, here’s a high level guide for how to do it right.
Step One: Keyword Research
The first thing you need to do is find the keywords you want your website to rank for. They should be relevant to your business and have transactional or commercial search intent. Moreover, search volume should be high enough without difficulty being too high.
Step Two: Optimize Your Site
Once you have a list of target keywords selected for your Squarespace store, as well as an SEO strategy in place, it’s time to actually make the optimizations that will improve your website. In no particular order, you will want to:
- Select and designate specific URLs for those target keywords.
- Optimize the page titles and headers on those URLs with those keywords.
- Find and replace duplicate manufacture category and product page copy with original copy optimized for your target keywords.
- Draft original copy for your metadata fields, including a new meta description.
- Create evergreen CMS pages like FAQs pages to inform your customers.
- Start creating blog posts about topics relevant to your customers as well as to those target keywords you identified at the outset.
- Perform a content gap analysis so you can find areas for improvement and get the ball rolling on that; this is a great SEO tip, and not just for Squarespace websites.
- Share and promote your content on social media.
- Include target keywords in URLs when making new pages for your Squarespace site.
- Compress all images before uploading them to the website.
- Add alt text and SEO-friendly image file names for all images.
- Run your pages through PageSpeed Insights and make recommended changes, where reasonable; faster web pages benefits your user experience and positively impact your SEO efforts.
- Buy and install/configure an SSL certificate.
- Do outreach to companies in your industry/manufacturers/suppliers to see if they will trade links with you.
- Add internal links to product pages that you think represent cross-selling opportunities.
- Arrange or rearrange your megamenu so that it makes sense and is easy to navigate.
- Install a plugin that enables search functionality if your current site doesn’t have it.
- Integrate a widget that displays all your social accounts on your website.
- Update your theme if you think you need an improved mobile responsive design.
- Implement schema markup if you have not done so already.
- Submit your website’s sitemap to Google and other engines so that it’ll be easier for them to crawl and index your pages.
- Optimize your Google My Business listing if you have not done so already.
- Manually request indexing for any pages that are important but which have not been indexed yet.
While this checklist is not entirely comprehensive, it represents a good place to start. Get started with these items today and you’ll start to see your website’s performance increase organically, moving higher in the search results over time.
Step Three: Tracking Performance Through GSC and GA4
Lastly, you want to make sure tracking is configured for both Google Search Console and Google Analytics. First you need to make sure your tracking is set up for these SEO tools so you can actually follow growth in the search engine rankings. Then, you’ll want to watch over it.
You’ll want to see organic website traffic improving over time through GA4, and as for Google Search Console, you’re going to want to see impressions and clicks increasing over time.
Working with a Squarespace SEO Company
Some eCommerce merchants choose to work with Squarespace SEO companies just because they have the resources and expertise to optimize websites for the target keywords selected. Get in touch with a Squarespace SEO company in your industry today if you need further guidance.
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