Lately, the Brad Good team have noticed one area of the website development process that could use a lot of help and attention on is SEO. Fortunately, Squarespace has a pretty solid foundation built-in to its platform, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some tips and tricks that can help boost your search rankings.

See below for our 5 step guide in helping improve your SEO ranks in Squarespace.

Step 1: Make your website “SSL”

SSL as a ranking factor that will make sure that anyone who is visiting your website will be directed to the secure version of your website. If you are building a new website in Squarespace with a newly purchased domain, then this is a no-brainer to make your website secure. Plus, Google Chrome will show any visitor the “not secure” sign before entering any unsecured web page.

Luckily, ensuring your site is secure is very straightforward in Squarespace. You just go to Settings > SSL and Security and switch SSL on.

Step 2: Register Your Domain With Google & Bing

This is one of the most important steps, if not the most important SEO steps is to register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. When you register your site with Google and Bing, you are letting the two major search engines that your website exists and are ensuring it gets indexed.

Please note that when you register your domain with Google, you should register both the www and non-www version of your domain (i.e., www.yourdomainname.com and yourdomainname.com), and if you’ve got a secure and non-secure version of your website, the http:// and https:// versions of each.

Again, Squarespace makes it pretty easy to register with both of these services and they put together a quick easy to follow guide as well which you can read more below

• Register with Google Search Console

• Register with Bing Webmaster Tools

Step 3: Format Your Page Titles

Beyond indexing your website with Google and Bing, another important SEO tip is to make sure your title is properly labeled on your Squarespace website.  One way of doing this is to make sure that your page and post titles aren't generic and should start with the keyword phrase that you want to rank in the search.

For example, if you run a taco stand and it is located in San Diego, your page title shouldn’t be labeled as “Our Taco Shop”, but would be better off using “Best Tacos In San Diego.”

Don’t worry if you need help coming up with some page titles based on keywords and search descriptions, there are a lot of great guides out there that can help you through the process.

Step 4: Don’t Forget The Headings

We have noticed that a lot of Squarespace users commonly ignore properly applying the proper headings (H1, H2, H3 etc.) to their text. This is a problem because it makes it more difficult for search engines to index your content properly

When you are editing any page on your website, all you need to do is highlight the piece of text that you want as the header and properly select H1, H2, H3, etc. for one of your choices.

Step 5: Backlinks Build Trust

In our opinion, this tip is one that is crucial in boosting your SEO but very few talk about it. You can do all of the tricks above, but if you don’t have quality content on your website or have any credible sources backlinking to your site, then it isn’t going to help.

Two trusted sources, Kissmetrics and Moz put together guides on how to properly build quality content and also great backlinking strategies. The point is unless you have quality content that is engaging to your readers, why else would they want to visit your website and share it their friends?

For example, if you are a blogger and want to drive more traffic back to your own blog you should reach out to your favorite publications and ask to guest write for them in return for a backlink to your website. The more quality backlinks you get, the more Google and Bing will see your site as a credible source and in turn boost it up in the rankings.

Tying it All Together

SEO is a process. It isn’t something that can be done in 1-2 hours and left along. Sure a lot of these steps above you can tackle in a few hours, but the strategy and content development aspect of it take time to build.

Hopefully by following our steps and insight, you can apply this to your SEO strategy. If you have any questions or need any extra help, send us an email!