How to improve SEO on your Squarespace site
Having a website that looks amazing is great right? But kind of pointless if no one’s going to it. Truthfully, how a website looks should be secondary to how it works.
In order to attract a lot of people to your website, you should focus on two things:
Make sure your website is compliant with search engines
Give people a reason to visit your website regularly. (No one’s going to visit your site without having a reason to go on it
General Digital Marketing Advice
You will need to give your audience a reason to be visiting your site, so a blog is a great place to start. But I would also consider being active on social media to go alongside this,
You also won’t want to be doing this in a way that’s contrived, and a waste of your/ other people’s time. Use social media to engage with people who are similarly interested in the same subject matter as you. Follow other people who are having open discussions online, comment on articles that interest you, join in on the conversations. It’s here that you will find your niche readership and those who would be interested in reading your blog and signing up to your newsletter.
Your website will be secondary to this. Before I explain about how I would improve your SEO, I’d first like to explore a little bit about how and why it works.
What’s SEO all about?
Google has a really complicated way of deciding which information is the most relevant to what people are searching for. They try extremely hard to show people what they want to find (which is very nice of them!), and therefore make it hard for people who are trying to cheat the system.
There are large corporations, like Amazon, who spend millions on trying to cheat this system and it actually works really well. Massive teams are responsible for learning about how Google is making these decisions, (which is always changing) and making sure the websites comply. Google also offers a small ‘boost’ for people who decide to pay for ads, and companies will chuck a huge amount of money at it. The effectiveness of paid ads, however, is questionable. Google are very transparent about which posts have been paid for, which naturally has an impact.
This does give those companies an edge though, as paid ads have another purpose: gathering data. Google will tell you how many people have seen the ad, what they were searching for when they saw it, some information about who they are, and whether or not they clicked on it. Once you’ve seen that information, you can start playing around with the wording of your ad, and track what people respond to. Knowing this information, the company can then go through their website and make sure these keywords are peppered throughout, so audiences will eventually end up on the page organically - without payments.
So! With that being said, we know we definitely don’t want to pump millions into your site, but what we can do is 1) change anything that google might be penalising you for 2) give people a reason to visit your site i.e. provide the information that they might be googling for.
General SEO advice
1. COPY
You need to think about all the possible key words that someone might search for on Google where your site will be the answer. If I searched for ‘best-selling historical fiction WWII Holland’ on Google and then found the website of my recent client, Imogen Matthews, I would buy it for sure!
Barre the title, you can also get these keywords in elsewhere in the copy. You need to keep the Google searchee in mind and tell them about the things they’re going to be looking for.
2. SEO
All of these keywords and vital information can also be plugged into the titles and descriptions in the backend of your website, which you can access by hitting the cog icon next to your page.
Implementing SEO would look something like:
Although it may look like a tiny change, this extra information could be key in getting people to click on Imogen’s page on Google as opposed to a different page. Now they can immediately see that her books are award winning. They might also be an Oxford resident and this could spark a curiosity for them.
3. GOOGLE COMPLIANCE
The other thing I mentioned earlier, is that Google can penalise you if it doesn’t like your site, or if it thinks your site is untrustworthy or hard to use. Also, it likes to think that you are on board with what they are trying to achieve. You can show them that you are all these things by:
Completing a Google My Business Page
Completing a Google Search Console Page
Completing a Google Analytics page
Completing a Google Adwords Page
All of these things are going to be useful to you as well. This is where you will get the data, which will help inform your keyword implementation.
4. BACKLINKS
Make sure that ANYWHERE, your name or your product is mentioned, your website is linked. This is basically just a PR exercise of Googling yourself and emailing every place that you’re mentioned to try and get them to add the link. If Google sees that lots of places are linking to you, they will think you are the real deal and boost your site’s prominence.
As I mentioned before, SEO can be a full time job and you really don’t want to overdo it. But by implementing these small tweaks, you should find that your site will gain more traction. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
