Squarespace SEO: 10 tips to show up in search
Here’s the process I followed to build my travel blog on Squarespace
I worked as a digital content manager for several years before starting my own travel site. With my knowledge of the industry and SEO, I grew my blog to nearly 100,000 sessions in less than one year.
Following the right SEO practices means you can grow your audience through organic traffic from search results.
This is my favourite marketing strategy as it doesn’t require the constant attention of social media, or the upfront budget of paid advertising.
Is Squarespace bad for SEO?
One of the biggest myths about Squarespace is that it’s bad for SEO.
Well, any site can perform poorly in search if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Squarespace can rank in Google as easily as any other website, built on any other CMS. Google doesn’t penalise blogs based on the platform you’re using.
While it might be true that Squarespace can carry a bit of extra code due to the nature of the platform, that doesn’t mean you’ll never rank in Google. If you know what you’re doing with SEO, you can still grow your website — and. it will involve a lot fewer headaches than trying to manage your content in Wordpress.
Ignore the people who say Squarespace is bad for SEO, monetisation, or whatever else they like to say. A lot of bloggers follow the same templated advice just because that’s what has been kicking around the internet for years.
My best tip; test everything yourself.
I grew my travel blog on Squarespace fast enough to reach Mediavine requirements within a year, by staying consistent and following SEO best practices.
These are my best tips for beginner travel bloggers using Squarespace.
1. Connect to Google Search Console
The first and most important thing you can do is connect your site to Google Search Console.
In marketing teams, people love to throw around phrases like “what gets measured gets managed,” and while I hate corporate speak, this is an important part of SEO.
You need to track your site’s performance to be able to make meaningful optimisations.
Google Search Console is a fantastic free tool that will help you track clicks from search results, giving you data on click through rates, high performing keywords, and popular pages.
To connect Google Search Console with your Squarespace site, here’s what you need to do:
Go to your Home menu, then Analytics.
Click Search keywords
A panel will pop up; click Connect
Log into the Google account you want to connect to your site
Select Allow.
It can take a few days for data to start to populate within your Google Search Console.
2. Create optimised blog page layouts
The ideal is to have a blog page that is coherent and logical for the reader.
For example, an easy flow from introduction, to related sections that all expand on a topic.
Blog pages should be narrow enough to read easily
Headers should cascade in a logical order (from H1 to H2, and so on)
Design your page for your reader, not search engines.
3. Understand how to use keywords
There are many keyword research tools out there — most of them are pretty expensive.
I recommend signing up for free trials, but don’t feel like you absolutely need a keyword research tool to make progress on your site.
I grew my travel blog using only free tools like Ahrefs Keyword Generator, and the free version of SEMRush. You can also use Googles Keyword Planner, which is a great tool as it is the closest to Google’s actual data (the other tools either extract their numbers from Keyword Planner or are essentially just guessing).
Honestly, the tools are important but not the be all and end all.
Key takeaways:
You don’t need a paid tool to get started with keyword research
Identifying keywords is as much about understanding user intent as it is about looking at search volume
You can always refine keywords once you have published a blog post
4. Create helpful content
Key takeaways:
If it can be written by an AI tool, it’s probably not that helpful
Your content should be unique. What can you add to the conversation?
Before writing on any topic, I ask myself one question; is this valuable?
Travel blogs are most helpful when they are offering information that can’t be found anywhere else on the internet. For example, what were your personal experiences of a place?
You might be able to talk about what a destination is like as a solo traveller, or with a family.
A few things to remember:
The most important part of SEO is creating genuinely useful content. There is no number of tips and tricks that will work if your content isn’t helpful.
A platform alone isn’t enough to boost (or hinder) your SEO. Optimising your website is a holistic approach that takes many factors into account. There is no one magic fix.
SEO takes a long time, in terms of content creation and waiting to see results. This can make it hard to attribute direct actions to SEO — just something to keep in mind when you hear people say their traffic increased because of changing platforms.
If you found this helpful, you might also like to take a peek at my other tips on blogging on Squarespace:
