Why I started a travel blog on Squarespace (and how it’s going)
I ignored all the advice saying Squarespace is bad for blogging — and built a successful site anyway.
My Squarespace travel blog gets more than 50,000 monthly visitors — almost 100,000 in the highest traffic month.
It took me less than a year to grow my travel blog to this level.
I started my own site because travel writing is a precarious profession. Having my own travel blog has allowed me to secure a different income stream, while expanding my presence in search.
I now make regular monthly income from my travel blog.
If you’re thinking about starting a travel blog on Squarespace, I’d love to share my journey with you. Despite what a lot of people say, it is possible to grow a travel blog on Squarespace and make money.
Here’s how I did it.
Why Squarespace?
In some Facebook groups, you’ll see most travel bloggers shouting loudly about how Wordpress is the best platform for travel blogging. Some will try to convince you that the only option for a successful travel blog is to run it on Wordpress.
I strongly disagree.
Squarespace is much easier to use and more intuitive than clunky Wordpress.
The blog template designs in Sqaurespace are also a lot more flexible and unique – I can recognise a Wordpress site a mile away as most bloggers use the same theme and plug ins.
I think Squarespace is beautiful and the templates I see appeal to my design loving brain.
If you have never managed a CMS before and are new to publishing content on websites, I can highly recommend using Squarespace.
Having a simple editor makes all the difference — there are so many other aspects of digital publishing you’ll need to learn, that saving yourself time and energy on getting familiar with the backend system is a godsend.
But the main reason I built my site on Squarespace: I was already paying for the domain. I had a Squarespace site for years as a portfolio for my freelance travel writing, so I started publishing content almost as an experiment, when I learned how much money travel bloggers were making.
It turned out to be easier to publish content and start ranking than I thought, so I carried on using the same platform and domain.
Now, one and a half years later, I have grown my appreciation for Squarespace as a platform alongside my travel website.
How I grew my Squarespace travel blog to nearly 100,000 monthly views
For some reason, a lot of people seem to think Squarespace is bad for SEO. My website is proof a Squarespace site can thrive in search.
Google doesn’t take into account the platform content is published on, so if you have valuable content and a site that is easy to navigate, there’s a good chance you’ll see success in search.
My process for growing my blog traffic was straightforward; consistently publish quality content.
There is a bit more detail than that involved in SEO, including carrying out keyword research, understanding my audience intent, and analysing the results. I already had some solid knowledge of SEO and content management from my career as a digital content manager for travel brands.
My main tips for growing traffic would be these:
Focus on developing content in one niche first — this will help you grow more quickly.
Learn the basics of keyword research, but don’t let this dictate everything you do. You should focus on understanding your audience instead, and making sure you are offering value. For example, when I write an itinerary post, I know my audience is searching for ‘two week itinerary in X’, but I don’t deliberately use this phrase 10 times in the post. If you’re writing on a topic, you’ll naturally use the right keywords.
Stay consistent — you don’t have to publish on a set day each week, but writing as many blog posts as you can is important. Not only do the impacts of your efforts start compounding after a while, but the more data you have, the more you can learn. You can pivot away from content that isn’t working and dial up what does work, but only if you have enough content out there to learn from.
A few things to note: I didn’t start off from nothing
There are a few caveats to my story, of course.
I already had a tiny bit of traffic coming in to my blog from posts I had published ages ago, on the topic of travel writing. It wasn’t a lot, but I was getting between 500 and 1000 clicks a month.
I also have experience in SEO and content writing from my professional life. Before launching my full time freelance travel writing career, I worked as a content manager for large travel brands.
That means I started my site with a pretty solid knowledge of SEO, how to carry out keyword research, the importance of audience intent, and so on.
I also already had good backlinks pointing to my site, from the freelance writing work I’ve done for publications, from huge names like National Geographic Travel.
These things meant I wasn’t starting from zero, but I truly believe that if you create good content, you will see success in SEO.
The pros and cons of using Squarespace for a travel blog
No website platform is perfect; no matter where you choose to launch your blog, you’re going to run into pros and cons. These are the ups and downs of using Squarespace, that I have encountered at least — I’m sure some people have more complaints, but so far this is my experience.
Pros
The blog editor is easy to use. It’s really that simple, it’s just so clean and straightforward.
There are SEO features built into each post.
Cons
Most of the downsides of using Squarespace for a travel blog are related to the constraints of the platform.
There are some niggles that mean Squarespace really isn’t efficient for publishing a lot of content. For example, you have to add alt text individually to image blocks each time you use an image — there’s no way to make sure the alt text of an image asset automatically populates when you use it.
While Fluid Engine means Squarespace pages can be easily customised, blog pages are still somewhat limited, like the 7.0 editor.
You can’t save draft changes to a blog post before publishing, which means you end up editing published posts in real time.
To easily add affiliate links, you need to be on a Business Plan (there is a plugin you can use, but it requires a custom code injection, a Business Plan feature).
Starting a Squarespace blog
Sign up for a free trial (you have 14 days to play around with templates)
Pick a simple template and start building out content
Start writing and publishing as much as you can. It probably won’t be very good at first, and your blog layouts might not be the best, but the only way to refine your blog is to keep publishing and iterating. It took me almost a year to finally land on a page layout I actually liked, so in the meantime get some posts up so you can start getting some Google traffic.
Thanks for reading this far! I hope this helped you pluck up the courage to start a travel blog on Squarespace. If you have more questions for me, please feel free to get in touch.
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