One of the first things you hear about after designing a website is SEO. Search Engine Optimization includes practices and strategies that help you gain traffic from search engines such as Google.

Google themselves said “Of course, there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website. Paid media, social posts, and display advertising are just a few. But, when done well, SEO can provide an important — and cost-effective — strategy for organic growth.”

So, we can conclude that the main goal of SEO is to improve your ranking in Search Engines in order to drive organic traffic to your website.

So, is Squarespace good or bad for SEO? In the past, Squarespace has gotten a bad rap for SEO when compared to other platforms like Wordpress. I think the main reason for this is because when doing a side by side comparison, like this one by Ahrefs, people often look at a bunch of different sites on Squarespace and Wordpress and compare their average rankings. When doing a comparison like this, Wordpress often wins out. The problem is that Squarespace attracts a lot of smaller businesses with less SEO knowledge than Wordpress. So a side by side comparison is really comparing the SEO skill of the companies who use the platform rather than the capabilities of the platform.

To determine whether Squarespace is good for SEO, a better analysis would be to look at the top ranking factors and whether Squarespace is able to help you rank for them. In this blog, I will go over the top 12 ranking factors discussed by First Page Sage and compare them to Squarespace.

#1: Consistent Publication of High Quality Content (26%)

Consistently publishing high quality content is the highest ranking factor of SEO. When one of your posts is shown in a search, Google will watch the searchers’ behaviour to see if they like your content. Therefore, it is not enough to just get your post shown in a search. You want to ensure that when a user clicks on your post, their behaviour communicates back to Google that they enjoy your content. This means providing a good user experience and high quality content to keep them on your page. Some articles suggest twice a week is the optimal amount. However, others believe that the quality is more important than the quantity.

Can Squarespace help you with this? Absolutely. Squarespace’s Blog Pages are a great way to consistently publish content whether it be written, videos, or podcasts. I mean… your currently viewing a blog posted on a Squarespace Website.

#2: Keywords in Meta Title Tags (17%)

Keyword research can be a challenging part of SEO. Therefore it is important to take the time to develop a keyword strategy. Programs like Semrush, Hubspot, and SE Ranking can be really helpful in knowing what keywords you already rank for and what keywords would be important for your business. These keywords need to then be used all around your site in various ways.

Google has decided that one of the most important places for your keywords is in your Meta Title Tags. Squarespace uses your Page Title or SEO Page Title as the Meta Title Tag. Therefore to ensure you have keywords in your Meta Title Tags, make sure you fill out the SEO Tab for each page using keywords from your research. Take your time to develop thoughtful titles that draw searchers to your site. However, do not keyword stuff your titles or you will fall into a clickbait style of writing that could harm your SEO.

#3: Backlinks (15%)

Backlinks are links to your site from other reputable sites. These communicate to Google that another resource finds your content valuable. The best way to get backlinks is naturally; meaning that you continually publish high quality content that people want to link to. It doesn’t involve any additional action by you. You could also be a guest blogger or work with other companies to encourage them to link to your site. You could also provide links to your own content in Forums or other blogs. However, be careful that these are authentically done or you could be flagged as using unethical tactics and Black Hat SEO.

If you are following the first two ranking factors, then getting Backlinks while using Squarespace is definitely possible.

#4 Niche Expertise (13%)

Any site that has 10+ authoritative pages revolving around the same topic is seen as being a niche expert. This means that Google sees your website as being an expert on that topic and is more likely to show your site when keywords relating to that topic are searched.

By centering your Squarespace content around a specific topic, you are more likely to been seen as an expert by Google. One of the best methods for planning your content for SEO is to use the Hub and Spoke Model.

#5 User Engagement (11%)

User Engagement refers to how a visitor interacts with your content. This includes the time they spend on your site, commenting, and sharing your content on social media. The best way to increase user engagement is to ensure that you are proving a good user experience and high quality content to keep them on the site. The more the user can engage with your content the longer they will stay on the site.

To know how your site is doing in terms of user engagement make sure to add Google Analytics to your Squarespace site and pay attention to page views, what content is coming out on top, your bounce rate, and users time on your site. To add Google Analytics to your Squarespace site, check out this blog post.

#6 Internal links (5%)

An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page on your website. Users will use these internal links to navigate your website and so will search engines. This allows the search engines to see what content is related. The more links a page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. This means that good, authentic internal links are important for your SEO.

Internal links are super easy to use in Squarespace. For example, check out the “Here are some other posts you may like” section at the bottom of my blog posts. These are internal links to other blog posts, similar to this one. Not only does this help keep users on my site for longer, but it uses an internal link to connect similar blogs and places me as an expert on my main blog themes.

#7 Mobile Friendly / Mobile First Website (5%)

I would hope by now that most designers know how important having a mobile friendly website is. In 2019, Google made a shift to not only mobile friendliness by mobile first. The majority of google searches are now done from a mobile device. This means that mobile visitors need to be the primary target of your website design.

The good news is that Squarespace makes this super easy, especially now that we have more access to the mobile design with Fluid Engine. All you have to do is make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site (no hiding blocks on mobile using CSS!) and that you use high quality images that are optimized for the web.

#8 Page Speed (2%)

Google has always prioritized user experience and a big part of that is Page Speed. The typical standard is no more than 3 seconds. If your site is loading slower than that, the main culprits are images and third party javascript. PageSpeed Insights Tool is a great tool for determining your ranking on mobile and desktop. I also like to use Pingdom Tools to see how big my page is overall (keep it under 5MB) and to see a breakdown of what it taking up the most space.

If you want to learn more about Page Speed and Squarespace, check out this blog post here.

# 9 Site Security / SSL Certificate (2%)

Google wants to ensure that the sites it is showing to its users are ones that are safe. Sites that are not secure will not be shown in searches. In Squarespace, there are two settings you need to turn on to help your site be as secure as it can be. The first is to make sure your SSL Certificate it turned on. Go to Settings > Advanced > SSL and make sure you have selected both Secure (Preferred) and HSTS Secure.

Then go to Settings > Advanced > Website Protection and make sure you have Clickjack Protection turned on.

#10 Schema Markup/ Structured Data (1%)

Schema Markup is code on your website that helps Google to better understand your website’s pages. If you’ve ever done a Google Search and a site showed up with a link to other sites underneath it, it most likely has Schema Markup.

Squarespace automatically adds schema markup to your site, but you can also add your own. There are lots of Schema Generator’s available, I like to use this one.

#11 Keywords in URL (1%) and #12 Keywords in H1 Tags (1%)

As discussed above, keywords are super important for SEO. In Squarespace you can also place keywords in your URLs and your H1 Tags. I suggest only one H1 on each page.

In conclusion…

While Wordpress and other platforms may have tools and plugins that can help you implement SEO Strategies, Squarespace has the capability to help you achieve good scores for all 12 top ranking factors. Therefore, I can confidently say that Squarespace is good for SEO when used alongside best practices.

Is Squarespace Bad for SEO?