The best Squarespace SEO tools and plugins (free and paid)
These are the tools I use almost every day on my Squarespace site.
SEO tools are an important part of getting good results in search. You need to be able to track performance for visibility and to understand where you can improve.
But — you don’t need flashy tools.
I’ve used many SEO tools in my career in digital content marketing and while they can be great for large, complex sites, you can get a lot of good information from free versions of those tools.
This is a summary of the SEO tools and plugins I use regularly for my Squarespace website.
I can’t claim to have used every single tool on the market, but these are the ones I’m familiar with and that work for me.
Built in SEO tools and features
The beauty of using a platform like Squarespace is that you really don’t need to think too hard about technical SEO (for example, making sure your site uses HTTPS and is mobile optimised).
The platform kind of does it for you, so you can focus more of your efforts on on-page SEO — which essentially means producing stellar content.
Factors like page speed are definitely important for ranking, but if you’re not producing great content, you probably won’t rank in search results — even if your website is technically very slick.
When publishing your content, you can make the most of the built-in SEO features on Squarespace, which will set you up well from the get go.
SEO page settings
Each time you publish a new page or blog post, you can adjust the meta title and description (in Squarespace called the SEO title and SEO description).
Whenever you’re publishing a new blog, make sure you double check the URL. This isn’t an SEO tool per se, but it is an SEO best practice.
Analytics
To be honest, I don’t really use the analytics feature in Squarespace. I prefer to use Google Analytics (more on that below).
But, Squarespace integrates directly with Google Search Console, which is awesome. If you’re new to digging around in analytics tools, it’s a really clean and easy interface, and you can pull data on search terms and visit numbers without a lot of effort.
Squarespace SEO plugins
Plugins can help your SEO efforts by giving you feedback on individual pages.
I think the desire for Squarespace SEO plugins comes from people who are familiar with Yoast on Wordpress, and are looking for an equivalent.
Squarespace doesn’t really do plugins in the same way as WordPress, and you can manage your content and site audits through other tools (like those listed below).
In terms of optimising your on-page content, following SEO best practices will generally get you to where you want to be. Stale, duplicate, incorrect, or low quality content is what is going to damage your search performance — not failing to hit all the recommendations provided by a plugin.
I actually think too much interference from plugins hinders your ability to write for people. If you’re thinking too much about how often you’ve used a certain keyword, your writing might end up sounding forced. If you’re writing around a topic, you’ll probably end up using all the right variations anyway.
Having said all that, I think using a plugin can be good if you’re new to SEO and want the guidance — it can act as a kind of checklist. I don’t think you need to obsess over getting a perfect score with any plugin, but you can use it to check your work, which is handy if you’re doing most of it alone.
SEOSpace — All in one Squarespace SEO plugin
There’s only really one Squarespace SEO plugin, and that’s SEOSpace.
This plugin was developed by Henry Purchase, who had a travel blog on Squarespace before moving into SAAS.
Even if you don’t sign up for the plugin, SEOSpace has a blog full of information on SEO specific to Squarespace.
Other free SEO tools I use for my Squarespace site
Google Search Console
In my view, Google Search Console is the single most important SEO tool for your blog.
You can get an incredible amount of data out of it.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is intended more for paid search activities, but as far as free tools go, it’s also pretty good for organic search.
This is the key source of data for Google keywords (and where a lot of other SEO tools extract their data from) so it will give you a good idea of search volumes and competition.
Ahrefs
The paid version of Ahrefs is pretty powerful — I used to use it when I was a digital content manager for a website that had 10,000+ pages.
But, as a small independent publisher, I also find all their free tools, and the free version of the paid tool, pretty great too.
Site audit — I recommend using Ahrefs as a tool to track your broken links and redirects. This is mainly what I use the Site Audit for (a lot of the other errors or issues aren’t resolvable). I also use it to track the organic keywords I’m ranking for.
Keyword Generator — this free keyword tool gives you a good place to start from
Website Traffic Checker — this can give you a brief overview of how well your competitor’s sites are performing (although it is by no means accurate, really just a finger in the wind type of assessment).
Ahrefs SEO extension — I love using this to quickly assess competitor’s pages, from the last published date to the word count.
SE Ranking, location changer
SE Ranking is an SEO tool with a whole suite of features, but I use only one — the location changer.
I want to get mostly US based traffic to my travel blog, as this is the most valuable audience (and therefore most desirable to advertisers). The US is also one of the core markets of travellers to New Zealand, along with Australia.
I use this tool to test SERPs in the US — it lets me see what the results actually look like.
ImageOptim 2
Compressing images is important on Squarespace, as it’s one of the things you can do to keep the site speed reasonable (slow site speeds are possibly the biggest gripe people have about Squarespace SEO. Honestly pretty unfounded, as you can see from this Backlinko report. But, it’s worth keeping an eye on image sizes anyway).
After resizing my images in Lightroom, I drop them into this desktop app and it removes any unnecessary junk to keep the image files as small as possible.
I try to keep all images to less than 300kbs.
Paid SEO tools
SemRush
I use the free version of SemRush to do occasional keyword searches (you get 10 free searches a day) and to look at domain overviews of my competitors.
If you found this helpful, you might also like to take a peek at my other tips on blogging on Squarespace:
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