SEO for Squarespace: Optimize Your Online Presence

1. Introduction: Are you a small business owner, entrepreneur, or solo creative who wears all of the hats? Have you heard of CEO? But maybe you aren't sure where to start to increase your visibility online? Do you have a site on square space? If so, then I would love to help. Hi, I'm Kathleen Lyons. I'm an artist and digital marketer based in Nashville, Tennessee. I graduated from Audubin University and started my career as a graphic designer outside of Chicago. Today, I work by day as a digital marketer and spend my nights and weekends pursuing my creative career. I sell my artwork on print, on demand sites such as Society Six red bubble spoon flower, as well as my own Etsy shop. For more than a decade now, my expertise has been in the digital space, from marketing to website development, AB testing in the all important yet sometimes mysterious SEO I've worked with and provided strategies for businesses ranging from small start ups, two Fortune 500 companies with projects ranging from basic SEO, much like what we'll go through today, to full content marketing plans. Today I'll be introducing you to some SEO basics outlining the features that square space offers. And showing you where you can immediately start enhancing, to increase your visibility online. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started. I'll see you on the next lesson. 2. Class Project: It's class project time. Okay, And this lesson we'll be talking about our class project. For this class, your project will be to create an SEO plan for your square space website using the templates in the resource section. Don't worry if you're not on square space, all of the resources and principles will still apply for materials. You'll simply need to access a square space website. If you're new to this platform, you can actually start a trial and create a demo site for this project. Again, if you're not on the platform, if you're on Wordpress, et cetera, as long as you have access to your website, you should be able to follow on just fine project steps. So we're going to set up or access our website. We'll review the site and identify opportunities for SEO enhancements and then use the templates to create a plan to optimize for visibility. Lastly, you want to share your work. Ideally, we share our plans, a screenshot of your SPP or your ICP. However, if you're not comfortable sharing those, it's totally fine. Let's do some behind the scenes of working. Or even better, if you can show where your search results are and serves the search engine result pages. Grab a screenshot of where you come up and search and share that. If you have questions or need more tips, please feel free to reach out. I'm happy to help. I'll see you on the next lesson. 3. SEO Basics: In this lesson, we'll be talking about SEO basics and we can't get much more basic than a definition. This is where we're going to start. Search engine optimization EO consists of practices used to increase the ranking of a site in Serps, which are the search engine result pages to maximize the traffic to the site. Now I think when we think search engine, everybody says Google, and that is true. That is the top search engine. But there are others, and that includes being in Yahoo. Those are the major players in the space. Additionally, there are leaders in the space that can share their expertise and have tools, you can find out more on their websites. I would recommend checking out some rush and Z. Now that we have a quick definition of SEO, the search engines that are available and some of the industry leaders, let's talk more about these practices. The primary pillars of SEO consist of accessibility, quality content, keywords, user experience, structured data and schema. And a lot of these work together. Think keywords, quality content, those go hand in hand as well as structured data schema as part of structured data. But these are the primary areas we'll be looking into now. These are the practices we want to work on. However, on the flip side, there are practices that we don't want to do. These are considered black hat, which is duplicate content, automated content keyword stuffing, where it just feels like you're saying the word over and over again just to get the ranking or cloaking or seeking redirects where a user thinks they're going one place and they end up somewhere they don't want to be. Or just something that they didn't expect. As well as buying links. Bang links is a big no no. As well, we want to earn those shares and cross links. We want to be building content that makes others want to promote our work, not buy them. Now we have our definition, pillars, practices. We want to do some things to stay away from. But at the end of the day, why is SEO important? Seo creates so much opportunity for our traffic. In fact, in a Mas article linked in Your resources, SEO may have 20 times more traffic opportunity than some pain tactics. Be sure to check it out as you're downloading your resources. Key takeways. Seo is the practice of improving a site to increase its ranking and serves and maximize traffic to the site. The top search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Mas and S. Rush are great resources for industry news and expertise. Optimizing for search engines creates more opportunities to bring traffic to your site. I'll see you all on the next lesson. 4. Accessibility: In this lesson, we'll dive in more about accessibility. When we talk about accessibility, we actually mean accessibility for bots and crawlers as well as people. We want to make sure that our users can find us too. The best place to start is to ensure your site is indexed KA, visible to crawlers. There's a quick way to do this, right in the Google browser. So we'll go through a demo of that. And then if you're not coming up, I will show you exactly where in the square space platform to make that adjustment. First things first, we're going to come up here to our search bar and type in, you're going to have a carrot. And then site colon. And this is already filling it in for me. Arts Lyons.com You'll essentially fill in the same query site, colon your website name.com and then close it. If you're familiar with code, you're just closing your tag when we hit Enter. If our site is indexed, it will come up here. In the top part, we'll be able to see that our website is visible to the crawlers and to our users. If you didn't show up, don't panic. I will show you exactly where in square space to make that adjustment. So once we land in our dashboard and on our site, we're going to go down here to the bottom left in Settings and we're going to see site availability. Now mine is set to public. You can look. There may be password protected or private. If it's private, that is exactly why you're not showing up. If it's public, you likely were able to do the query and see your site come up. If you're looking to be public and you're looking to be found, make sure that this is selected. In addition to ensuring your site is public, we'll want to go to the very bottom of this list. Skip down to where it says crawlers, and this is where we're going to make sure that we're also visible to search engine crawlers. You can also decide if you'd like to be available for AI companies to use your content so they can scan and improve their accuracy as well. I have both of these toggled on, and if your search engines was toggled off, it may be impacting your search. So we're familiar with Srps and how our pages come up and there's a title and a link, and a little description. Other ways that we show up in the search engine result pages are through snippets, rich results and image search. I'm sure most of us have seen these pop up. It's usually how I search myself. These appear as paragraph lists, tables, videos, and images. Having quality content increases your chances of being selected and appearing in these types of results for the queries. That obviously makes sense for your content, but we have to make sure that those are accessible first. So keep in mind that image search takes into account various factors like the image name, the alt text, even the surrounding text. Image names can help search engines understand your content. It's best to name your file something relevant and descriptive to your image. Try to keep it to five words. Use hype instead of spaces, and only use lower case letters. I have a few on my site, so let's take a look and I will show you a couple examples. Okay, so we're back in the dashboard. I'm going to go to the upper left and hit Edit, so that I am an edit mode for my site. And I'm going to scroll down to a couple images I have here where I have my other skill share classes showcased. And I'm just going to click on this first image on the right. This image I've already uploaded, so I can go in and edit, or double check. This is where you might look into your site and look for opportunities. I'm looking here, it says embroidered clothes and accessories. Jpeg I'm looking good. I have four words. Everything's lower case with hyphens, but I want to go down here to the bottom. We'll go over all text soon. But you can also change your file name here if maybe you uploaded it and you want to keep the original image name so you know in your your assets where it is, but you want to improve it for SEO, this is where you can make that adjustment. In addition to the file name we mentioned all text. All text actually describes the image and it's available and very important to SEO. All text helps users who may be using a screen rater due to vision impairment. This allows them to understand the imagery on your site without necessarily seeing it in square space. You can add all text to most images. Let's take a quick look. Let's jump back into these images. I know we saw it while we were looking at the image title. Again, select the image, hit your edit, the little pencil there. And then we can scroll down and there is image all text available. And again, there is a link here that you can read more on square space. This again, they're talking about accessibility for visitors. Giving a little more detail if you would like, go ahead and read a bit more and there and get some of their tips as well. But we'll do a quick overview here. I'm saying an overview shot of colorfully embroidered shoes, pencil back ball cap shorts and sweatshirt. Ideally here, I'm making this clear enough that someone who maybe is vision impaired or using a screen reader can understand what the content of this image is. In general, the recommendation is to use a maximum of 125 characters. And this is because many of the screen readers stop reading at that character count. Additionally, if you have images that are text based, I suggest using a contrast checker to make sure that you're meeting accessibility standards. So I mentioned Webaim.org contrast checker, and that's what I have pulled up here. But I want to show you. So these hex values are what we're going to use, but I'm going to show you how to get that from your image. Typically, I'm using Photoshop, but I realize a lot of us don't have that, so I'm going to use image coolorpickure.com I'm going to choose one that I have on my desktop. This is something where we're looking at text on a background, so we want to see our background color is this E. Let's make sure that that works. I'm going to copy that because that's my background. I'm going to put it over here in this value. Then black, I think we know is going to be reading pretty well on white. But this pink, I want to double check, I'm going to get one of these lighter values. That's going to be our foreground color, we're going to check to see. Now this is interesting because we're seeing some fail, some pass in here. It will give you different ratios, so your normal text would fail with these backgrounds. However, the large text, which is what we have in that image, does pass. Again, working with these is really helpful, and if you have control over lighter or darker, you could go ahead and tweak this and bring it down. Now it passes for normal text. Alternatively, we could have lightened the background to help that pop. These are new hex values that you could give to a designer or to whoever is coding your site so that they can make those changes on your website. Again, if you're looking at your site, most of mine is black with red. These are pretty bright and contrasty. However, if you have a site that maybe the background in the text is a little bit closer, I would definitely recommend double checking that with the contrast checker. Again, you can get these in your site styles. I believe your colors are in here. This is the same hex code here. I want to check this. Actually, we're seeing a fail on some of the smaller ones. I'm going to go through here, I think most of mine is fairly large. Where we have the links it would pass, but I can make the change to deepen this until it passes, then I can make that change across my site very easily. I can just pop that in here and make the change again. This is another opportunity as you're going through your site to make small changes. Let's go over a few key takeaways. Indexing your site ensures it's accessible to search engine and visitors. Having quality content increases your changes to appear in Serps through snippets such as paragraph list, image, or video. Using descriptive image, file names and all text can help users with vision impairments understand our content, making it accessible to everyone. I'll see you on the next lesson. 5. Quality Content: In this lesson, we're going to talk more about leveraging keywords and creating quality content to help improve our SEO. Let's start by identifying keywords and developing content that is relevant to your business and your audience. We want to be careful not to begin writing for bots or crawlers. To do this, I suggest starting with your ICP, your ideal customer profile, and keep them in mind as you're creating content. There's an ICP template available for you in the project resources, so I'd suggest filling that out and then jumping back in. Okay, we're back on the class page. And I'm going to scroll down here to our projects and resources. That's the second tab here. And we're going to go into read more and scroll to the bottom where we have some links. Now you can also download if you prefer to write out, you can download the templates, but we're going to start with the ICP template. I'm actually going to use it online, so let's go to our ICP, and this is on Google Docs. All you need to do is go to file, make a copy, and then you can rename this whatever you'd like and hit Make a copy. That way you have your own version and you're not writing over what's existing for the template and you can keep it private. So again, we're talking about identifying our ideal customer profile, our ICP. And this is so we can know who we're talking to when we create our content. And it helps us just have a more natural tone and be more conversational, which is great for SEO. So take some time to think through who you your business, your services, how are they helping others? Who are you speaking to? And use some of these to help identify and you can even name this person. I know there's some that will give them a name there, different audience types, but, and there may be more than one. So don't feel limited, but go through and just think about who are you talking to, age range, location, any of these statuses, education, salary, pain points. Maybe there's a service that you're providing that you are actually serving them with. So think through those, fill this out, and then we will jump back in to our lesson. Now that you have your ICP in mind, let's use a single page plan to outline your content. This is also available in your project resources and should be applied per page of your site. As you're writing your content, be sure to use your keywords that you've identified, but make it natural. Avoid keyword stuffing. And always when you're writing, not only keep your audience in mind, but aim to be creating content that will earn shares and cross links. And remember, pages rank for keywords, not sites, so it's so important to take the time on each of your pages. Okay, so we're back on our project page again. We're going to scroll down to the bottom in this project and resources section and grab our single page plan. So now that we have our ICP in mind, it's really important that we do one of these for each of the pages on our site. We'll start at the top here. Page title over here as well. On the left, I've given you some guardrail. 60 characters is the ideal amount. In here you'd write in your page title, which is your H one, It's the first text that's visible on the page. This is your introduction, your title, your main topic, URL slug. Again, all lower case with hyphens. This is the URL that will follow your primary domain such as RZ Lions.com slash about the slug here is about keep those in mind as you're building your pages. And if you need more, say about continue to use that lower case with hyphens format. Again, indexed indicate whether the page should be index or no index, no follow. This is going to impact if it's visible to search engines or not. Keyword identifying and listing your primary keyword and secondary keywords is super important for SEO. These are the search terms that you're wanting your audience to leverage to find your page via the search engine. When they type in a certain query, your page is what would come up and then navigation title, again, 30 to 45 characters as recommended. Page title is what you will see in the tab of the browser meta description. This is some of the structure data we'll talk about. You're going to insert a description about the page that you'd like to appear in the search engine results. Let me jump out and show you what that looks like in square space. This is going to give us the description for our full site. So if you go into marketing SEO appearance, you can go down through here. They do supply a few tools for you to use as well. There's SEO checklist, Google search keywords. That is something I would highly, highly recommend looking into as you're determining your keywords. And down here you see search appearance. This is my primary, this is my home page domain. My title is Artsy Lions, that would have been my page title and my URL. And my actual domain is Artslyions.com And then this is the description that I have chosen to have come up when it is shared via social or an attack. So that's what's below here. And then if you're wanting to go by page, let's go to about in settings, there is a place here, it's SEO. So what we just went through is for your whole site per page, you'll want to go in and do SEO. Okay. Let's jump back into our SPP. Again, social image or link this applies as well, just where we were. Let's look at that. Social image is what I mean is what's being shared when you share that page, let's go. It's just under below. It's just below SEO, it's a social image. And here's where you can choose the image. And again, this is the prefew, this is what we've been talking through. This is where you're controlling exactly what gets shared, when it's on Facebook or in a text message, et cetera. This is where we want to make those adjustments. And so you can have better control over how people are seeing your service, your brand, and your company in general. So down here I could remove this, I already have one, so I'm not going to take it out. But it would give you an option to upload a different photo, otherwise if you haven't selected one, this will auto pick from the page. It will still pull an image from the page and you may be totally fine with what it's auto selected. But again, this just gives you more control. Okay. Let's jump back to the SPP image Alt tags we went through. I would add rows as needed. Add a row and do as many images as you want. Make sure that you're doing a file name and description optimization per image on your site. Lastly, we're going to put in our page content. Include your image links and anything that can represent the outline of the page as well as the actual content as you're writing through, you're creating H ones or H two's. So I would recommend copying this and creating more of a structure so you can say this is each two and then keeping this type of text as your paragraph. And that'll make it easier too if you're working with a team so they understand, they get a little bit more of an idea, but however you want to represent your page and what it's going to start looking like. All right guys, that's how I would recommend using this section. And again, this will drop down and expand. You can also delete my example page and then just start with this clean one. There was a clean second page for you all you have just a completely empty one. Or if it helps, use this first page where it outlines exactly what you're supposed to be inputting into each of these sections. Go over some key takeaways. Identify and use keywords that are relevant to your business, but make sure to keep it natural. Don't keyword stuff. Keep your audience in mind as you write content. Use the ICP template to define this for your business. The SPP will help outline your page and ensure you optimize your pages from the start. I'll see you on the next lesson. 6. User Experience: In this lesson, we'll talk about user experience and how we can improve the experience for the visitors interacting with our sites. One of the benefits of square space is that all of the templates are responsive. Having a separate site for desktop and mobile is an old practice and can actually negatively impact your ranking. A responsive site allows users to access from any device, whether it's desktop, tablet, or mobile, making it an ideal user experience. Let me show you a example so you can see exactly what I mean. We're back on square space and I want to show you a quick example of what I mean of responsive versus a desktop and mobile site. Again, keep in mind you won't have to worry about this if you're on the square space site. It is an old practice. But just so we're all aware, I'm going to scroll down and just choose one of these templates. We had this one earlier, and so here we're actually able to see a desktop icon and then a mobile icon. Now previously there was a practice where we would have Arts Lions.com and it would be a desktop version. And then for mobile, it would be a separately fully coded site that was like Martz Lions.com So I would have two websites, so one would be for users accessing from a mobile device, and another one would be for anyone coming through on a desktop. So they would have a completely different experience. The difference with square space is that we're seeing a desktop. I'm on a desktop, so this is what we were seeing when we click the desktop icon. But when I go to move this, so this is what we call breakpoints. You're going to see the Tax shift images shrink. So say this was an ipad or some sort of tablet. And then all the way down to the smallest itty bitty, where we start getting a hamburger menu here. And the navigation and everything has collapsed down. That makes it responsive, versus this being a fully separate mobile site. You can see it expand and contract as we hit those breakpoints. This may be mobile versus tablet. When we're seeing this navigation change, I would recommend going through and playing with those just so you have an understanding of what visitors are seeing based on the device when they visit your site. Square space has done the heavy lifting for us with the responsive site. But we have some work we can do. Let's start by evaluating our site template and the ease of use. This means considering the navigation of your site. Is your primary nap sticky? Are the categories intuitive to your users? Are there cross links that may help your visitors move through your site more easily? Assessing this and implementing changes to create an optimal user experience can help improve your SEO. Okay, so I've pulled a couple of the templates from the popular website templates, So these are on square space. So I pulled this one, so as we're evaluating ease of use, we also want to think through what our service or our project is. So this has a navigation pretty basic. There's two, there's menu and there's a reservation. This makes sense. So this is clearly for some sort of restaurant or food service where you're wanting to book a table or you're wanting to look at the menu. This is a one pager essentially with a couple links. This one makes sense if you have a small business, you're really just trying to get them in the door. It's not something where you want them to spud a lot of time on the site. On the flip side, if it's a service where maybe they're doing a little more research. There's another example where it's a little Comets Academy. Here we're looking at the navigation. This is sticky. So when we talk about a sticky navigation, this didn't go away when I started scrolling. Whereas in our previous example, as I scroll, I lose that navigation. So this is ideal if there's people that you want coming to your site and spending time on the site. Maybe it's not something where you want them to visit the site and then come on in. Maybe it's somewhere where they're going to buy a service online or they're going to do research and then purchase. So think again about how you want your users and your audience now that you've identified that ICP, how you want them to navigate your site in the hero here. So this is a hero banner. There's a primary CTA, and that's where we're going to have the button that is the most important, the top action that we want our users to take from there. This is giving some more supporting information. And so the structure of this is pretty good. Think of other ways that your users may be considering your service or your product and link to those. If it's a blog article that's explaining more about your business or the type of industry, or if it's a product type or a showcase of a new product or something like that or service. Go through those. And again, at the bottom here we're seeing ease of use. Just this is a great template as far as CO goes because we have a link farm and we're able to get to all of the pages on the site from here as well. So not only did the CTA or the navigation follow us through the site, but there's also a link farm at the bottom. As far as ease of use, I'll give this one a pretty good rating. Again, this is also good for the type of service it is. So keep that in mind. It doesn't always have to be one way or the other. It's going to be unique to your business and what it is you want your users to do with your website. Lastly, images have a huge impact on the speed of your site, so give it a boost by uploading and optimize images according to square space. This means banners that are no wider than 2000 pixels, content images that are about 1,500 pixels, but no smaller than 750 pixels wide and under 500 kilobytes. When we're talking about images, I am typically using Photoshop. And if you're working with a designer or an agency, they're likely using Photoshop as well. But I wanted to give an option. I know a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs are bootstrapping and doing it themselves. So there is a free image resizer from Adobe Express where you can upload an image and resize it. This will help you optimize your site speed. Let's do an example here. So this is going to, let me drag to change the scale of it. If I need to adjust it based on the size that I'm creating for, I can do that. One to one is obviously great for the Instagram platform, Facebook may have different, or if you're working on your site or there's a custom where you know that you needed a specific site or a specific size. Here's where when we're talking about keeping it 2000 pixels or 1,500 pixels. We could do that here, keep it there, and then download. Our download is complete just over 5,550 kilobytes, which is the recommended amount. I would say this tool would be ideal if you're going to be resizing and uploading images on your own. If not, just check in with your team if it's an agency or if it's a designer to ensure that they are optimizing your images for your site so that the speed can help you improve your SEO. Let's go over some key takeaways. A responsive design allows users to access your site from any device. Ease of use will improve your SEO by allowing users to intuitively navigate your site. Speed can impact your SEO. Uploading optimally sized images can improve your site's performance. I'll see you on the next lesson. 7. Structured Data: In this lesson, we'll go over structured data and schema. Structured data is really telling the search engines what type of page it is. Square Space has an auto generated data structure to help Google classify these, and it is not editible within the platform. Square space uses blog, post, event, local business organization, product, and website. You can read more about it on square space. Structured data also includes schema markup, which we've all seen as the title, description, and image that appears when we share something on social or even in a text. This is specifically in open graphs and it can be controlled by each page and square space. Let's jump in so I can show you a quick example. I swear back in the dashboard and I have gone from home to website over here, so just the top. And from each of these pages we can start determining the meta description, the image and all of that good stuff that shows up when we share a page. So again, this is by page within here. This is actually going to take me back out to that larger setting. So SEO. And then if I edit website SEO because this is my home page, it's going to take me to the broader page. So we looked at this earlier in the lessons, this is updated. This is the page title, which is really my site title, and then the URL and the description. That'll show up. If this is shared, I'm going to X out of this since we already went through that one and show you another one. Let's go to About Portfolio. This is another place where I can determine how this shows when it's shared. Again, we're seeing our page name followed by our site name and then our URL. The slug here is portfolio. Then here's where there's a description. This is fitting this box almost perfectly. My character count looks pretty good. And then I'm also able to switch up the title or the description as needed. If I were going to make changes to this page, I could, or if I were going into a different direction with my artwork, I could update this as needed. And then again here we're seeing hide page from search results that is tuggled off because I want this to be visible. However, again, if we're talking about a specific page that's either password protected or there's a specific audience that you're giving a freebie to, this is where you could hide that, and then only those who have that specific URL will be able to access it. Again, social image, this is what's shown when this page is shared. So that's something that I have determined in a way that I can show a little more broadly what's going on versus the search engine choosing an image or two on its own. So let's look it about and then we'll look at our link as well. Again, under SEO, I can see my page, my site title, this. I could probably massage a little bit and make a little bit longer. So we want to make sure that this is fully eligible when it comes up and serves. Ensure that you are updating this and using this hide page or no index as needed. Out of curiosity, I'm going to Google Arts Lions portfolio and see if this will pull up. Okay, When we say Sps, this is what we mean. This is the search engine results page. I put in arts Lions portfolio. And thankfully, I am at the very top, and my Pinterest is not too far below. I've got a few of these here in the top, which is great news for me continuing to work on an SEO. And then unfortunately, it is linking to my home page. I'm at least coming up in those search engine results, but there's always room for improvement. Lastly, unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do if you have, so I have pages here, these are your site pages. And then I also have links. These link out to other sites. So my take a class actually takes you to the Skillshare website. So in here, the best I can do is as the link title and then the URL. And I also have this toggled on to open a link in a new tab so that I still have users on my website, but they're able to visit and check out my classes on Skillshare. Again, square space gives us a lift by classifying our pages. And then we can also continue to help identify for the search engines by specifying the title, description, and image. This is important because this is where the rich cards, rich snippets and knowledge panel are pulled. After gathering that information from our structured data, Google is able to serve those quick takeaways. Structured data helps define your site's content For search engines, Square space auto generates the structured data for your site. However, you can control your schema for pages, including the description, title, and image shared on social platforms. Search engines pull from structured data to display results, such as Rich Stippets. I'll see you on the next lesson. 8. Final Thoughts: Okay, we did it. We've gotten through some SEO basics. We've learned about some of the practices and some of the nonos ways that we can start thinking about our audience, writing content for them, using our SPP's, and continuing to optimize our site. I'm glad that you're taking this step in SEO. It is so important because it gives so much more opportunity to drive traffic to your site, identifying your audience and making sure you're speaking to them and not crawlers also helps improve that, not only for the sites but just for your users in general. And enhancing the features of square space offers is quick and easy. You just need a plan. Continue to research and optimize your site. Keeping your content fresh and relevant to your audience increases the opportunities for cross links and shares as well. Be sure to post your final SEO plans, SPP's ICPs, or maybe some of your behind the scenes. Even your search results would love to see it in the project section and keep on optimizing. Thank you again for joining me in class today. I hope this was helpful and truly that each of you are able to start building more of your online presence. Please feel free to reach out and if you have a moment, please review and follow me on Skill Share. I would love to hear your feedback and have the opportunity to engage with you. I'll see you in the next class.