Squarespace SEO tips: 5 steps to get more traffic to your website
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the key strategies you can use to attract more traffic to your Squarespace site. If you’re an absolute beginner to the topic, I recommend having a read of my earlier post on using SEO to get more traffic to your Squarespace website. If you’re ready to delve into some specific recommendations that will set you apart from the competition and help you get more people onto your website, read my Squarespace SEO tips below.
1. Add a blog to your website and post often
A good blog can form the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Why? Because it’s a place for you to post fresh, original, relevant content related to what you do which is something Google likes and rewards, and therefore which can help your audience find you. So what should you be writing about? Simple - think about the problems and concerns of your target customers, and write about how you can help address them. Your blog is a place to demonstrate your expertise and experience in helping solve the issues that plague your ideal clients. Doing so will help you:
connect with your target audience
demonstrate that you understand their problems
show that you have the expertise and experience to help them move solve their issues and achieve their goals.
In order words, a blog can help you get more traffic to your website - but it can also help you build ‘know, like, trust’. What is that, you ask? Well, the premise is simple. Before someone will do business with you, they need to feel like they know you, like you and trust you. By writing helpful content that addresses the common concerns of your target customers, you start to be seen as the go-to source for information, and you build a relationship with your audience by giving them something of value and not just trying to sell them your latest product or service. Long term - they are more likely to want to do business with the expert that has helped them.
2. Make your blog load faster on mobile search
Google likes fast-loading pages, and when people search on mobile, it will prioritise results that load quickly. How can you take advantage of this? Easy - use Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP. AMP is a framework that helps create faster-loading webpages for people browsing the internet on their mobile devices. It does this by serving up a stripped-back version of the page to mobile users that eliminates elements that can slow the page down without compromising on the actual content shown. By turning on AMP in your Squarespace blog, you will speed up the loading time of your blog posts for mobile users, and create a much better user experience for people reading your posts on the go. And it couldn’t be easier to do:
How to turn on AMP in your Squarespace blog
Go to the Blog preferences panel
Go to Accelerated Mobile Pages
Click the check box next to ‘Use AMP’. And that’s it!
This is a simple upgrade I do for all my web design clients. It provides a much better user experience, reduces your bounce rate and improves your site’s visibility in mobile search results.
3. Use internal links to help visitors and Google discover more of your content
Internal linking is an underestimated SEO technique that can significantly impact your Squarespace website’s search rankings. What do I mean by internal linking? Very simple - an internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page also on your website. Links interconnect your pages and posts and in doing so they can help search engines like Google to understand the organisation, structure, breath and depth of your content, so that more of your pages gets crawled, ranked and displayed in search results when people do related searches.
To get the maximum effect from your internal links - be sure to use keywords as your anchor text. What the heck is anchor text you ask? Simple. It’s just the visible, clickable text of the link. Some people link ‘click here’ to connect pages. Instead of doing that - make the clickable link using actual keywords related to the content you are linking to. So if you want to link to your latest blog post about SEO - you would use something like “Want to improve your SEO? Read my blog post on how to optimise your website for Google”, putting your link on the part in bold, which is probably the title of your blog and is also a keyword phrase someone might actually type into Google. Using keyword in your anchor text and internal links is an easy tactic to maximise your SEO impact, while also helping anyone reading content on your site to find even more information that might be helpful or interesting to them.
4. Harness user generated content for SEO
User generated content like reviews, testimonials and blog post comments can offer proof and engagement signals both to website visitors and to search engines. Encourage customers and visitors to share their thoughts on your Squarespace website and showcase these prominently on the relevant pages. User generated content not only brings unique material to your site but also demonstrates to search engines that your website actively engages with its audience, which can have a positive impact on SEO performance.
5. Generate an XML sitemap and share it with Google and other search engines
An XML sitemap is a document that outlines all the pages on your site along with metadata for each page like its last update date and frequency of changes. Squarespace automatically creates an XML sitemap for your Squarespace site, which you can then submit to search engines to help them find, crawl and index all the pages on your website. The quicker search engines crawl and index your site, the quicker you will start to show up in search results. Want step-by-step instructions? Read my blog post on How to submit your new Squarespace website to Google.
By integrating these simple steps, you will be well on your way to getting more traffic from Google to your website AND providing more value to your site visitors and potential customers.
