10 SEO Pro Tips to Boost your Squarespace Website Ranking
Everyone talks about SEO these days and with good reason: people use Google and search engines to find answers and services. Many people are intimidated by SEO and I was no exception when I first started out. It was only when I noticed that I had landed on page one of Google that I looked at my own practices and realized that I had unwittingly done a lot of things right when it came to my SEO.
10 Best Practice SEO Tips from a Pro:
Optimize your Website. This includes configuring your Squarespace SEO settings (from your dashboard go to > Marketing > SEO) and using keywords in strategic places, like H1 and H2 and page descriptions. Also, go into your page or blog post settings and click on the SEO tab and add a great title and compelling description, this is a great place for keywords as well. Make sure though that you keep the language natural, Google does not like keyword stuffing or duplicate descriptions.
→ Click here for my free step-by-step guide on how to optimize your website.
Get your website indexed. Sign up to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap for indexing. In Squarespace the sitemap URL is always https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Update Your Website Regularly. Google loves active sites and if you’re anything like me then you love tinkering with your site!
Check your Website for Broken Links! Broken links throw 404 errors and if you have a lot of them Google won't like it! Here is a great website where you can get your links checked. Fix or remove any broken links, or redirect any pages that no longer exists but might still be linked somewhere. This way your visitors still see a valid page and Google is happy, too.
Customize your 404 page. Create a fun and useful 404 page that keeps visitors on your website by offering a search function and links to other pages on your website. Give the page a /404 slug and connect to it via > Design > Not Found/404 Page. Click here to see an example.
Get your business listed in Google My Business and Yelp. This is a must for businesses with a physical address and even if you work from home and don’t want to list your address (for obvious reasons!) you can define a service area as long as you work with local clients. Start here with Google My Business. Another good place for driving local traffic to your business and website is Yelp! Get started here.
Blogging! I don't blog as much as I probably should but a handful of my posts drive a lot of traffic to my website. Blogging is a great tool for boosting your SEO if you enjoy writing and sharing content. What should you blog about? How-to post are some of the most effective
Turn on AMP. Go to > Settings > Blogging and check Use AMP. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and was developed by Google to speed up the loading time of web pages on mobile devices. You earn Goople pus point for serving content in AMP format. In Squarespace AMP is used for blog pages.
Guest Posts. I've written guest posts and also host my own. As with blogging both are great strategies for driving traffic to your site.*
Get High Value Inbound Links. These are links from reputable high traffic website. These could be professional organizations you work with, or articles you write on platform like Medium, Quora or Huffington Post. In my case, for instance, I have high quality links from Squarespace Market Place, Online Courses directory and Squarespace Circle.
Get found on Google!
Are you feeling a little intimidated by SEO? You are not alone! The great news is that SEO is mostly the result of good habits and some basic strategies.
I’ve been on page one for years and in this course I share detailed step-by-step guidelines that have helped 100s of entrepreneurs get found on Google!
“I stepped in and took your course, and it made a huge difference – we finally cracked PAGE ONE on Google!” –Alistair Tutton, Food Photography
