How To Optimize a Squarespace Website For More Organic Traffic

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt along the way on improving this site.

Use the SEO tab in Edit post to setup Title and Descriptions: By doing this, you are providing <title> and <description> tag elements to search engines rather than letting them auto-generate titles/descriptions for your pages. Having unique titles per page is crucial in terms of on-page SEO.

Squarespace website - seo tab in blog post.JPG

Create custom URL’s instead of using auto-generated URL names: From SEO perspective, this helps in terms of having your primary and secondary keywords iwthin the URL’s as well [besides titles and descriptions].

Decrease page load times: In using site templates, the code is always a bit bloated and results in a larger page size and dependencies between various elements. However, you can try to reduce page load times at your end. Besides having compressed images, you can also focus on minimizing the effort in loading embedded videos. In this blog post, I covered how to decrease page load time for pages with embedded YouTube videos by using a custom video thumbnail instead of fetching the thumbnail, title via YouTube API. In the test I ran on my page, doing this change resulted in the page loading 30% quicker. If you have a lot of videos, this could be really beneficial to your site. A faster loading website [especially on mobile is crucial]
Use https:// version of your site [i.e. Create SSL certificate]: To do this, head over to Settings > Advanced > Security settings and enable it. https:// is the preferred version for search engines.

squarespace website - switch to https.JPG

Connect your site to Google Search Console and submit sitemaps: You can verify your site by placing the Google Search Console in the header code injection area. Once verified, you can now submit sitemaps when new content is published. Example, this site’s sitemap is located here: https://analyticslog.com/sitemap.xml . You can use GSC to get the top keywords that are mostly missing in GA [unless you connect GSC + GA] plus get alerts on crawl errors and how to improve your website for Google Search.

Show related posts: For a blog such as this one, it shows related posts based on categories/tags entered and keywords used in posts. It’s much on point and you can add it to your site template by heading over Blog > Settings > Advanced and activating the related items. If you already have a user on your site, might as well so them other content that they might be interested in [and therefore, come back to your site later].

Automate email campaigns: In each blog post, you can add a newsletter module and decide to connect it to external services such as Mailchimp. Squarespace websites have an RSS version that can be plugged into Mailchimp to automate email campaigns and send emails at a set frequency. Mailchimp crawls through the RSS feed to know if there has been any new content published. Example, RSS link for my site is here: https://analyticslog.com/?format=rss . You can find this in Mailchimp > create campaigns > automated. The email field can pick up post titles / descriptions that you decide to use in the Options tab of your individual posts.