9 Tips to Improve Your Website’s SEO Rankings from a Squarespace Expert
Increasing your website traffic depends on a strong SEO strategy that helps search engines prioritize your content over competitors. While creating informative, reader-friendly content is the core of SEO success, you’ll also need more refined tactics to give your website the polish required to boost rankings.
Squarespace Enterprise customers can work with a dedicated account manager (who is both a product and SEO expert), to achieve the advantages of a search engine-optimized site. Enterprise customers can schedule custom SEO consultations with an account manager who shares best practices, evaluates their site’s SEO strengths and weaknesses, and assists in implementing improvement recommendations.
Here are nine winning strategies from Squarespace senior account manager Graham White to help you increase your website’s SEO visibility.
The top 9 SEO strategies
1. Use headers strategically
When you’re parsing your content into sections, be intentional in leveraging headers and subheaders. This informs search engine crawlers which text is most important to your site’s SEO value. For example, any text you designate as Header 1 in Squarespace’s blog editor or text blocks will tell search engines that it best represents your page, and crawlers will categorize it accordingly.
Subheaders like Header 2 and Header 3 also prioritize text to search engines, although to a lesser degree. These are most commonly used as subheaders, with Header 2 denoting a more specific topic than Header 1, and Header 3 being more specific than Header 2. Employ a mix of header types to both make your content more skimmable for readers and to clearly share the focus of your pages with search engines.
Leverage as many headers as needed without fear of overwhelming SEO crawlers. While abundant headers may have caused SEO issues in the past, search engines are now smart enough to index them appropriately.
2. Keep URL slugs clean
Search engines look for content that appeals to humans, so keeping your site URLs tidy and readable will earn you points. Check to make sure that your URL slugs—the latter part of your links following their domain names—read logically and don’t contain irrelevant characters. Search engines will penalize URL slugs containing random numbers or nonsensical phrases.
3. Add meta descriptions
Your site’s SEO description, or meta description, gives search engines a quick overview of its content for efficient indexing. This is the text description viewers see accompanying your page link in search results, so make it compelling and click worthy. Stick to under 300 characters, and model your writing after what you see is already working for your high-ranking competitors.
If you don’t add your own SEO descriptions with preferred keywords, search engine crawlers will attempt to decipher your web pages’ informative value and create these descriptions on your behalf. Squarespace provides an efficient way for you to take control of your SEO descriptions and add them to any page without knowing code.
4. Add unlinked content
While your homepage and navigation tabs offer finite room for linking content, don’t feel limited by layout restrictions. Search engines still recognize and index unlinked pages, which contribute to your overall SEO value. The quality of your content is essential here and outshines quantity—you don’t need to publish a high volume of pages to improve your rankings. Search engines favor unlinked pages that clearly relate to your audience, regardless of how many you include.
5. Regularly post and update content
SEO rankings prefer websites with dynamic content, so refresh your site with new blogs, links, and images on a frequent schedule to prove its continued value. Don’t feel you need to go overboard here—simply publishing a new blog on a bimonthly or monthly basis is enough to show crawlers that your site is active and offers visitors new information.
6. Increase your domain authority
With the immense volume of content available online, search engines use domain authority to separate high-value websites from their lower-value counterparts. Your domain authority is impacted by the quality of the links you include (are you linking to other sites with high SEO value?) along with the quality of websites that link back to your content.
For example, if a respected brand or influencer links to your content on their website, search engines perceive your site as higher value. You can build these types of content relationships through the likes of guest blogging and promotional partnerships. Producing quality content also improves the chances that your links will appear organically on other sites with good domain authority.
7. Set up URL redirects and custom 404 pages
If you’re migrating to Squarespace from another CMS, you’ll want to retain as much of your site’s established SEO authority as possible. Creating custom 404 pages and URL redirects prevent your website visitors from being stopped by broken links, which devalue your SEO rankings.
8. Add image alt text
Image alt text refers to captions that describe your website images for visitors who may be visually impaired and using screen readers. Not only does it make your website more accessible, but it also makes your site more attractive to SEO crawlers—so don’t skip this simple step for any of your images.
9. Work with an SEO expert
If your site has a substantial amount of pages and content, you may benefit from working closely with an expert who can provide custom SEO guidance. The most helpful partners review your URLs, SEO descriptions, and any SEO-related fields in your CMS to ensure that they’re optimized for search results. If you’re re-platforming web pages to Squarespace from another CMS, they’ll also help you preserve your established SEO authority by creating URL redirects for you.
By showing keen attention to SEO detail and a diligent effort to follow the tips provided, you can feel confident that you’re persuading search engines in your favor. While taking each step may not be enough to sway your rankings on its own, the sum of all efforts working together will lead to improved results.
