Squarespace SEO Resources and Tips

Gone through a couple SEO checklists for Squarespace already? They’re a good place to start, but the hard truth is that just ticking off an SEO checklist won’t get you very far. Here are eight tips for Squarespace SEO that will take you deeper into the SEO game and help set you up for lasting improvement.

1. Use headings the right way for SEO

2. Don’t use too many categories and tags

3. Use the newer Squarespace image blocks with care

4. Fix your schema markup

5. View automated SEO scans skeptically

6. Slow site speed might not be hurting you much

7. Eliminate unnecessary scripts

8. Alt text for images on Squarespace is easier now—with exceptions

A lot of the attraction of Squarespace has to do with the design elements. Gorgeous templates are a big draw. And Squarespace is particularly well suited to designers, artists, photographers, and businesses that want to display their work in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Which is all well and good. But Mr. Google is a dour fellow. Gorgeous fonts and great images don’t seem to move him very much. He’s mainly interested in words. And what he really likes to see is words that are natural (or at least seem natural) and well organized.

A big part of that organization has to do with the pages on a website and their relationship to each other. That’s your site architecture.

But individual pages also need to be organized. On the page level, headings are the crucial organizing element.

Headings (also sometimes confusingly known as headers, because they exist between header tags) are numbered to indicate their relative importance. And those numbers actually mean something to search engines. Headings should exist in a hierarchy which ideally cascades down in a rational way. It’s not crucial that there be one H1, a couple or more H2’s, and even more H3’s. But that’s one good way to build a sensible header structure.

So here’s a tip: care about what search engines care about and figure out the header hierarchy for pages on your Squarespace website first. Do your work on the aesthetics of the website around that.

Of course, you do want a good user experience, so don’t take this tip too far. If your site is ugly, you’re not doing anyone any good. Still, if you want a website with good SEO, you’ll want to make sure your header hierarchy is a priority, not an afterthought.

2. Don’t use too many categories and tags

There’s a mistaken idea out there that tags are the same as keywords. They’re not.

The concept of a keyword relates to the significance of words for search. Tags and categories on a Squarespace site might be keywords as identified either by you (aspirationally) or by Google (if it ranks you for one of them). But they might not be.

What they actually are is meta data you have chosen to organize your content with. Even though there is often very good reason for overlap with keywords, that doesn’t mean they are the same thing. And they are certainly not meta keywords, which they are sometimes confused with, since both are words you add to your site that work behind the scenes.

So here’s the tip: don’t go piling on tons of tags and categories to your site and your posts. It’s not going to help your SEO, and it may very well hurt. And not just because you are keyword stuffing.

Among other reasons, it’s because when you add a tag or category in Squarespace, you’re actually adding what’s called a dynamic page to your website. And that page may compete with other pages on your site for Google’s attention.

Just let that sink in for a moment. When you add a category or tag, you add a page to your website. Are you sure that’s what you want to do?

You should add categories and tags when you are actually using them to help organize your site, not just to denote content in some way.

Fortunately, Squarespace added the option to no-index tag and even category pages in the SEO tab of the main blog page. That means you can be sure you aren’t adding extra dynamic pages you don’t want to Google’s index. But it’s a complex issue, among other reasons because you still don’t want tons of no-indexed pages on your site.

For more on tags and categories, check out our article on how to use tags and categories for SEO. And if you’re interested in keywords, check out our post on how to use keywords in Squarespace.

3. Use the newer Squarespace image blocks with care

There are five newer image blocks in Squarespace: poster, card, collage, overlap, and stack. (Until a couple years ago, only inline image blocks were available). All are designed to integrate text with images. And they’re a great addition to Squarespace’s design toolbox, even if their rendering on different devices can get a bit wonky.

The problem with them for SEO purposes has to do with the two forms of text available, which Squarespace calls the “title” and “subtitle.” The title looks like a header, being larger than the body text (the “subtitle”). Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Remember, for search engines, a header is not text that happens to be styled larger than other text on the page. Rather, it’s text that falls within a header tag. But these image blocks don’t put what they call “titles” in between header tags. So for Google, they’re just a bit of text.

Does this mean you shouldn’t use these blocks? No. The SEO tip here is just be aware of what you are doing. If they play a prominent role on the page, or you really think you need a header somewhere, think about making a different design decision.

4. Fix your schema markup

What is schema markup? To quote one of our articles on schema, “Schema markup is code for structured data that helps search engines understand what your website and your enterprise are about. It's a way of addressing search engines directly in order to help them better understand the content on your website and return richer search results. Squarespace adds Schema, which is really an agreed-upon framework for structured data, to all websites.”

Unfortunately, Squarespace’s implementation of schema is missing some required fields, and produces errors in others. Someday, it will clean up all the problems with schema markup on its sites. But it hasn’t happened yet.

As of this writing, several different schema types on Squarespace websites, including Event and Product schema, produce errors in the structured data testing tool. At times, this has provoked disturbing emails from Google if you have a Google Search Console account, which you should.

Let’s not overdramatize this. Schema is a matter of growing but still fairly limited importance for SEO. It’s a small ranking factor, if at all—though this is a matter of some dispute.

Still, error-filled schema can’t be good. And for events and products in particular, you may be missing out on having Google return the best rich results, like your event being listed right in your knowledge panel.

So here’s a tip. If you decide it’s a matter worth fixing, and you’ve already dealt with the biggest issues on your site, pay attention to schema markup. check out our article on fixing problems with Squarespace’s schema markup.

5. View AUTOMATED SEO scans skeptically

A lot of folks freak out when they see the results of third-party SEO scans of their Squarespace sites. These include SEMrush, Woorank, and Ahrefs. Sometimes, there's good reason to. A lot of sites have serious things wrong with them, and these scans can point up important problems. But you also get a lot of issues flagged that are not that important. Then there are Squarespace-related issues that do matter, but are things you just can't do anything about.

SEMrush is a good example. They will send you monthly emails pointing up alleged “errors” on your site. If I didn't know better, I would think most Squarespace sites are in worse condition than they really are. The worst misdirection is flagging for "toxic backlinks," which freaks out clients who are determined to use Google's disavowal tool as a consequence—rarely a good idea.

Ahrefs is my favorite SEO tool by far, but if I took their Site Audit too seriously I would be very worried. Squarespace sites which use folders in the navigation generate 302 (temporary) redirects, which causes most pages to be marked by Ahrefs as "unhealthy." It's an unfortunate issue with Squarespace that folders work this way, but its effect on SEO is likely to be quite minor. You wouldn't know that from your site's "health score" though.

SEO scans routinely flag issues on Squarespace sites which are unlikely to be serious:

• Incorrect page in sitemap

• Issues with unminified Javascript or CSS files

• Low text-HTML ratio

• No hreflang and lang attributes

• Duplicate H1 and title tags

• Toxic backlinks (assuming you have not paid for links)

Then there are flagged issues that may be problems you can work on, or may not be. They require you to actually investigate and see if they are real and can be fixed, or are things you can't do anything about. Potential real problems on Squarespace sites include:

• Pages with low word count

• Pages with temporary redirects

• Pages with no or too-short meta descriptions

• Pages with more than one H1

• Broken external/internal links

• Too much/not enough text in title tags

• Images without alt attributes

• Slow page speed

• Small font sizes

• Tap targets too close together

I find these scans most useful to check for broken links, internal or external, which may have cropped up over time or due to user error. They are also helpful for finding missing or inadequate meta descriptions and duplicate content.

7. Eliminate unnecessary scripts

Although investing too much attention to site speed can be a waste of valuable resources, it makes sense to try to speed it up where you reasonably can. I already mentioned image sizes and fonts, which is standard advice. But there are a few more things you can do. They just involve sacrifices you might not want to make.

Run Pingdom's speed test, which is the one I prefer, on your site. You’ll see a “load time,” but don’t take that too seriously. It’s not precise and will vary with each scan—even from the same location. Instead, look and see how many "requests" there are. The fewer the better. Under 50 is pretty good for a Squarespace site. Page size should be under 2mb if you can help it and ideally closer to 1.5mb.

Scroll down to the File Requests section, and increase "entries per page" to 100 or more so all your requests show. Uncheck the "Rising" box at the top, and choose sort by "Response Total Size." Now you can look at everything that gets loaded on your page, from images to fonts to scripts, in order of size. Hover over each one individually to see what they are. In most cases, you will be able to identify what the item is related to by identifying the plain English contained in the long file name. For example, if you see the word “commerce” in it, it’s a script related to commerce.

Make sure you don't have any images that are too large. Now look at the other stuff that clusters near the top. Also pay attention to items farther down that take a particularly long time to load.

Here are a few possible candidates for elimination, because they are large, take long to load, generate too many scripts, or just don't do enough for you:

• Commerce

• Blog Comments

• Maps

• Simple Liking

A feature like Commerce may simply be necessary for your business. But if it's not really doing anything for you, consider eliminating it (by deleting all Commerce-related pages and blocks), because the script gets loaded for every page regardless of whether you are using it (including blog posts), and it’s a resource hog. Squarespace's Comments system is also a resource hog. It can be eliminated in the Style Editor by turning off comments. So is the Map Block, which loads a ton of scripts. If you're not getting many simple likes, eliminate the option in the Style Editor and get rid of a script.

And don’t forget to use a custom thumbnail for videos. If you don’t, you’ll load a bunch of unnecessary scripts related to YouTube.

You may see third-party plugins that are big resource hogs as well. Considering that Squarespace is not very fast in general, you may want to reconsider whether it's worth having them. Examples might include review plugins that no one uses, or cutesy visual plugins or stuff that uses jQuery that doesn’t really help with conversions. You'll see them all in the File Requests section.

8. Alt text for images on Squarespace is easier now—with exceptions

There used to be a lot of confusion around about how to add alt text to images in Squarespace. That was because Squarespace had no simple way to enter alt text for image blocks but a weird rule: the caption to an image became its alt text, unless there was no caption, in which case the filename acted as alt text.

The problem was that a caption is not really a description of an image, but more of a remark. So if you used a caption the right way, your alt text would likely be inappropriate (as with the caption for the cat image in this section). And you were stuck with it.

The situation is completely different now with the introduction in late 2021 of a new tab to enter alt text in the image block.

Side note: Squarespace has an unfortunate history of doubling up functions like this, but has been moving on from it. It used to use its so-called Page Descriptions for meta descriptions, which was one of the main problems with doing SEO for Squarespace, until they fixed it.

Now Squarespace has added the ability to add alt text directly to images in image blocks, which is good news.

The only remaining issue is alt text in a few other locations, such as thumbnail images or the Media tab in a page’s Page Settings. With these images you’ll want to make sure the filename of the image you upload will be suitable as alt text, because that’s where the alt text is going to be pulled from. There is still no way to enter alt text directly for these images.

One step forward at a time.