SEO for Squarespace
All Squarespace sites are built for clean indexing by search engines, but the content you add to your site and how you present it plays a big role in how well people can find you. In this workshop, we discuss what you can do at a bare minimum and how to upsell a monthly retainer (if that’s what you want to do).
Timestamps:
00:05:00 The SEO Checklist
00:30:00 SEO Keywords
00:37:00 Retainer packages for monthly content creation
00:40:00 With your clients, how much time do you put into developing SEO strategy into the website build, as something that would be included in your package?
00:44:00 Do these words need to exist as blog posts on your site? Or just somewhere on your site in general?
00:55:00 Backlinks, images, and loading times
Essential SEO
Sometimes SEO feels really overwhelming, but as a web designer, I feel there are just some essentials that you should know and the rest are if you want to upsell SEO retainers.
SEO Checklist
There are a lot of “SEO Checklists” out there, but I found the Squarespace SEO Checklist is the best for Squarespace. It’s pretty extensive, so here’s what I would do for every site:
Mark on the cal when you make any SEO changes so you can see if there have been any changes (page views, bounce rate, new visitors).
Research Keywords beforehand (see below)
Bare Minimum SEO
using the Squarespace SEO ChecklistAdd a site title and description
Add SEO page title, descriptions, and social sharing images for each page and collection
Create a custom 404 page to keep people on your website
Ensure SSL is enabled
Check URL slugs reflect the content of the page (they are just a random string of images)
For redesigns and existing URLs, be cautious of renaming URLs as you might lose traffic. You can always create a URL Redirect, but just make sure you do that!
For location based businesses:
Add the address somewhere on the site (About, Contact, footer)
Create a Google Business Profile.
Verify your site with Google Search Console
Request that Google index your site
Verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools
Connect to Google Analytics - often your client will be like whattawhatta? So just create it under your account and then you can always give it to them later. You want GA to collect data for as long as possible so it’s best to do this once you’ve launched the site.
Clean up code
Remove anything you don’t use. A lot of people add javascript and forget about it.
Redundant CSS and Javascript
Shorten your CSS
Test: remove your code to see how it affects page speed.
You can also use Chrome Developer Tools to check Page Speed, Page Load Time, and Image Sizes:
Network tab ❶
Click the Disable Cache box to simulate a new person coming to your website ❷
Reload the page (CTRL/CMD+R).
See the Image Size ❸
Number of kilobytes transferred should be under ~5MB ❹
DOMContentLoaded time should be under 2-3 seconds ❺
Extra SEO
(see below why I think this is extra)
Package SEO
I typically add Essential SEO as a line item to my scope of work by default. To calculate, I suggest timing yourself on how long it takes you to write and add an SEO Title, Description, and Social Image as well as optimizing an image file size and adding alt text.
Then, in your Project Estimator spreadsheet, add the total number of pages and estimate the number of images. For images, I’ll often guess X images per page. In Section 4, I walk through the Site & Content Inventory where you’ll have a better idea of how many images you have access to!
Sometimes, clients have a ton of images and they can’t budge on their budget. In the Site & Content Inventory, I have a blurb for the client on how they can optimize their own images. Sometimes, they’ll attempt to do it and then end up just paying me to do it.
SEO Keywords
Doing keyword research is helpful for when you are write Site/Page Titles, Descriptions, Image alt text, and if you plan on upselling a Monthly SEO Content Strategy (below). There are so many ways to do this here are a few FREE ways:
Longtail Keywords
Long tail keywords are search terms that are usually three or more words long, and are more specific than generic terms.
The difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords comes down to popularity. Many people search for short-tail keywords, while few search for long-tail keywords. However, it’s much harder to rank for short-tail keywords. Imagine trying to rank for the word “Realtor” vs. “Los Angeles Real Estate Agent”.
How to Find Keywords
Your human brain!
What longtail keywords do you think people would use to search for you? Brainstorm 10 (think about your services, products, industry, location)
Google
Auto-Search (Google Alphabet Soup)
People Ask
Related Searches
Competitors
Google “Site:<competitor name>”
Add to the end of their URL: /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml
Pinterest
AHREFS Keyword Generator
Chat GPT: Help me come up with a topical map for my blog that has the best change of helping me rank for long tail keywords that are specific to my keyword “XXX”, and give each a SEO friendly title. Provide a list of 50 titles, and prioritize transactional intent topics. Next to each title, add the best longtail keyword phrase that title should be targeting. Do not duplicate keyword phrases.
SEO Content Strategy
You can also upsell a monthly retainer package for SEO Content Strategy. The cost can range from $1000/mo - $50K/mo+. Just really depends on your clients budget and how much they value SEO (aka you’ll need to show them it’s converting). Below is the bare minimum package, but if you want to dive deeper into his I would suggest taking our Digital Marketing Course to create in-depth Audits and/or our Creative Copywriting Course to beef up your copywriting with KPIs and keywords in mind.
SEO Audit (use the SEO Checklist)
SEO Analytics and opportunities to optimize:
Page Speed
Page Views
Bounce Rate
Pitch writing X pieces of long-form content (see keywords above)
Pitch X Backlinks (although I find this is more PR).