Is Squarespace SEO friendly?

Truly, this is one of the biggest myths floating around the internet about Squarespace, and it’s something that has strangely pervaded pop-culture (meaning, it’s something everyone seems to randomly know without any experience or evidence).
When I tell people I’m a Squarespace website designer now, the **very first** thing they [often] say to me is “…I thought Squarespace was bad for SEO though?” 🤦‍♀️
Friends, I am here to personally reassure you that this is not true, and that **Squarespace is very SEO friendly.**
In fact, when I switched my website from Wordpress to Squarespace, **I noticed a massive improvement in my website’s SEO + Google ranking.**

Not because one platform is inherently better than the other, they’re both solid platforms, but Wordpress is much more complicated and in my opinion has a higher learning curve. Sometimes having so many options is too overwhelming - my SEO sucked when I was on Wordpress because of my lack of knowledge about a whole range of things separate to Wordpress. For example, the hosting provider I was using was really cheap, which was affecting the load time of my website & making it really slow > and having a slow loading website will negatively impact your SEO. But I just didn’t know what hosting provider to switch too (to many options, to overwhelming).

One of the reasons I love Squarespace is because it simplifies that process for me - hosting & security is natively included and not something I ever have to worry about.

Busting this myth is something I’m really passionate about - simply because I believe Squarespace is one of the best website platforms out there for creative small business owners to use.

Squarespace might not be the right platform for everyone, and larger businesses might still benefit from additional features available on Wordpress, but it’s still a platform worth considering.

Why is SEO important?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is like the secret sauce that can make or break your online presence. Just like the perfect sauce can transform a dish from bland to delicious, a proper SEO strategy is the essential ingredient that makes your website visible and appealing to search engines, helping it to rise to the top of the search rankings and attract more visitors to your site.

Without a good SEO strategy in place, your website is likely to get lost in the endless sea of online content and fail to attract the attention of your target audience.

SEO isn't just about stuffing your website with a bunch of keywords, though. It's about creating high-quality, valuable content that your target audience wants to read and writing it in a way that search engines can easily understand.

If you're a small business or creative solopreneur, having good SEO is especially important - usually our budgets are tight, and learning how to navigate the world of paid advertising can be expensive and time-consuming. Optimising your website & content marketing strategy for good SEO is a slow burn, it takes time to build - but it’s the kind of investment that can pay off for years to come.

And if you’re going to invest that time into your website & building a good SEO strategy, it makes sense that you want to use a platform that is going to help you do that.

Let’s look at what Squarespace has to offer.

Squarespace is a beautiful platform to use.

There, I said it.

It’s just really beautiful to look at, to use, to navigate, and to create on.

Wordpress just ain’t (that’s my personal opinion).

An important part of any SEO strategy is having a content marketing plan, that includes consistently/regularly adding new (and valuable) content for your target audience. This shows search engines that you’re fresh & relevant, and the more time people spend reading that content - the better!

But as a creative solopreneur or small business owner, we’re usually the ones creating that content, and being able to create said content on a platform that you actually enjoy using makes a huge difference to your ability to publish content consistently/regularly.

BLOGGING IS PAINLESS

After I switched my photography biz to Squarespace, I started blogging regularly because I enjoyed it. As a person who loves to see the things I’m creating unfold before me, being able to create my blog post ON my blog and see it exactly how it looked really thrilled me.

Having to create blog posts in the back end of Wordpress, and then having to constantly refresh a separate page so I could see what the blog post looked like (to check the layout and what it looked like) just did my head in. I hated it!

And I truly believe that blogging regularly had the HUGEST impact on boosting my SEO/Google ranking for my photography business, because I was showing Google that I was a current & active business that was publishing content people were interested in. AND I was often lazy, not even adding any text besides one location based keyword 🤣. Within about 6-12 months, I started noticing that I was consistently ranking on the first page of Google for multiple keywords, and suddenly - Google became my #1 source of work (and I have never paid for a single Google Ad).

Squarespace’s native tools.

Let’s look at some of the SEO tools that are natively built-in to Squarespace.

AUTOMATIC SITE MAPS

Your XML sitemap is basically a table of contents, that includes all your page URLs and image metadata, that’s easy for the Google-bots to read (a.k.a index).

It’s something you have to manually submit to Google - but once you’ve provided them with the link, you can set and forget about it because Squarespace will update your sitemap (at that link) for you.

Free SSL Certification

Squarespace has a range of built-in security measures, including a free SSL certificate that you can turn on with the press of a single button in the backend of your website. Squarespace also updates them discreetly in the background - gone are the days of forgetting to update your plugins and risking the security of your website.

What is an SSL certificate, and why is it important?

Simply put, it’s a digital certificate confirming that all the content on your website is secure, and is safe to be downloaded onto other people’s computer (in their browser of choice).

In reality, it’s something you might notice when looking at website urls - a website that isn’t protected by SSL will begin with “http” and a website that is protected will begin with “https”.

Google includes SSL security on it’s list of “must haves” for good SEO - if you don’t have it enabled, it’s going to negatively impact your SEO.

FAST LOADing times

The longer it takes for your site to load, the more Google will downgrade your SEO.

Generally speaking, I find that most websites hosted on Squarespace perform really well with loading times. Squarespace will also automatically resize any images you upload to optimise them for smaller screens and mobile, overall helping your pages load faster too.

When I was with Wordpress, I was using a really cheap server/hosting provider - and one day I realised that the home page of my photography website was taking almost 30 seconds to fully load for the first time…😵 and nothing I did helped to reduce it.

Finally, I decided to take the leap and transfer (a.k.a rebuild) my website on Squarespace, but I added more photos and more written content - and the home page was fully loaded for the first time in less than two seconds 🤯.

Is Squarespace mobile friendly?

Squarespace has really prioritised its mobile responsiveness, and I love it.

There’s even a feature in edit mode where you can view the mobile version of your website. It also allows you to easily drag + drop + resize your blocks in a totally different order to the desktop version of your site. Anything you do on the mobile version edit mode, won’t impact the desktop version. It’s glorious! It gives me the “ahhhh” of satisfaction every time I use it.

But there’s no YOAST for Squarespace!

If you’ve ever spent time learning about Wordpress, you’ve probably heard about Yoast for Wordpress which is an amazing & very comprehensive SEO plugin.

Nothing similar exists for Squarespace, BUT I would argue that the simple SEO tools built in to Squarespace are all that the average small business owner needs to create & maintain a solid SEO strategy.

On every page, and blog post, Squarespace has given us the ability to:

add a title for navigation and a separate SEO title that will show up on a Google search page;
create an excerpt and a separate SEO meta description;
customise the URL slug;
add a social image (so whenever someone shares a page or post link on Facebook, you can set a specific image to show up with the link);
set a location (either general or specific) and because it’s something available in the settings of every page or post, you can target different locations. For example, a wedding photographer might share photos from a wedding, and set the location for the ceremony or reception venue or general location, and this helps Google understand that this particular post is relevant to people searching for wedding photography at that venue or in that general location.

Yoast for Wordpress is super fancy, but the fancier something is the more complicated it is to learn, understand, and use on an ongoing basis. These tools might sound pretty basic - but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t even do the basics (like me, because I took one look at the Yoast plugin and then immediately ignored it because it was too overwhelming for my AuDHD brain 😅).

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