Congratulations: you’ve just made your first jump into online sales and built a website for your business on Squarespace. Now what? How do you make sure you’re ranking for those sweet, sweet high-value keywords and getting the traffic your site richly deserves?

Step I:
Make Awesome, Targeted Content

Ultimately, there’s no way around this one, on Squarespace or anywhere else: if you want to rank on Google for the best keywords that drive the most traffic, draw the most eyeballs,make your company mountains of money, and generally have an awesome brand with a solid reputation, you need to have content people actually want to read. The JEMSU content team is awesome at making this happen if you don’t have time for it yourself, but you can also try your hand at writing: the main thing is to focus on what’s going on in your industry or niche, and do you have something to offer.

Here’s how this works:

Using tools like AHREFs, Answer the Public, and Keywords Everywhere, plus your own knowledge of what’s relevant, popular, or undeserved in your industry, design and plan out a ‘content calendar’ and new page ideas for your site. If you’re a lawyer who specializes in immigration law, example, write an article about the specific mechanics of something like an O1-A Visa, if you’re a financial company, delve into a specific tax or financial product that doesn’t have much written on it, or, if you’re a Bike shop, write an article about specific products, trails, and individual bike brands: the trick here for ‘little’ companies without much site authority is to choose something sufficiently niche, but that also has search volume, ‘buying’ intent associated with a product or service you offer, and something that you have a strong expertise in. Again, being niche is critical, It’s impossible to overexaggerate how important good targeted content is: once you have that in place, it’s time to polish it up!

Step II:
Optimize The Most Important Squarespace Technical SEO Elements

The best content in the world won’t get far if your site is struggling with indexability, speed, user interface, or other issues. Squarespace out of the box tends to be well optimized, but there’s a few key things to keep in mind. Run down this checklist as you add pages to your site:

– Add A Page Title

As always, make sure your title contains the maximum semantic combinations of the target keywords you’d like to rank for, while still remaining beneath approximately 60 characters. A good structure is:

*Target Keyword* | *Secondary Keywords* | *Brand Name* [if space allows]

As an example, JEMSU uses

Denver SEO Company | Digital Advertising Agency | JEMSU

This ranks not just for ‘Denver SEO Company’ and ‘Digital Advertising Agency’, but also the semantic variants ‘Digital SEO Company, Denver Advertising Agency, SEO Agency Denver, Advertising Company Denver’ etc., etc. : try to replicate this same structure in the titles of your pages and articles.

– Add a Site Description

To add an SEO site description:

1. In the Home Menu, click Marketing, then click SEO.
2. In the Search Appearance area, click the Home tab.
3. Edit the SEO Site Description field, then click Save.

– Verify your Site with Google Search Console:

1. In the Home Menu, click Analytics.
2. Click Search Keywords.
3. Click Connect in the panel’s pop-up.
4. Log into the Google account you want to connect to your site. If you have multiple Google accounts, ensure you select the correct one.
5. Review the permissions, then click Allow. 
6. Wait 72 hours for the data to populate.

– Ensure your Business Location is optimized for local search and that your location is crystal clear to Google:

To add a Location:

1. In the Home Menu, click Marketing, then click Location Management.
2. Click Add Location.
3. If you already have a Google My Business listing, click Import From Google and follow the prompts. Otherwise, click Create New Location.
4. Enter your Business Name.
5. Enter your Business Location. If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar location, but instead offer deliveries or services to a specific region, you must still enter an address in this field. You can hide the address from view in the next step.
6. If you offer deliveries or services to a region outside of your business address, switch on the Service areas toggle.
7. If you don’t have a physical location, switch the Show address in listing toggle off, and enter one or more zip codes under Serviced Areas.
8. Add Categories to identify the type of product or services your business provides. At least one Primary Category is required, and can add up to nine more. These are Google’s categories and can help your business appear in search results. To learn more about categories, visit Google’s Help Center.
9. Add your contact information, business hours, business description, and a logo or cover image (optional). Follow Google’s photo guidelines and business description guidelines to avoid errors when connecting to a Google My Business listing.
10. Click Finish.
11. After you finish creating your Location, publish this information by connecting to Google My Business:

1. In the final screen of the Location Management window, click Connect to Google My Business.
2. Log into your Google account, and click Request Verification.

– Set up a Custom URL and Domain:

Custom domains and a bespoke URL containing your brand give your site a professional look, and makes you dramatically easier to find. There’s a dedicated Domains panel where you can do this:

> In the Home Menu, click Settings, and then click Domains.

Assuming this is a brand new site:

1. Go to www.squarespace.com/domain-name-search.

2. Search for the domain names you want, or enter any words related to your idea. Possible domains will generate in the results below with their prices.
3. Click the domain you want to purchase and add it to your cart. To purchase multiple domain names at once, click additional domains in the search results. 
4. Follow the prompts to verify and complete your registration.
5. Review the automatic renewal date and our terms and conditions, then complete your purchase.
   
   If you have an existing domain or custom URL you want to transfer, especially if it’s a high DA or longstanding site that’s worked for you, I highly suggest you transfer it:
   
   1. Begin the transfer process in your Squarespace site’s Domains panel:
6. Confirm that you’re logged into the correct Squarespace site.
7. In the Home Menu, click Settings, then click Domains.
8. Click Use a domain I own.
9. Enter the full domain name you’re transferring in the Enter domain field, then click the arrow.

Click Transfer Domain.

6. In the Authorization Code field, paste the authorization code, then click Save and Continue.

– Connect your Social Media Accounts and Syndicate content for Publication

If you have an active social media presence, make sure to leverage that to create awesome content for your site by syncing up your posts on your site with your media accounts:

1. In the Home Menu, click Settings, then click Connected Accounts.

2. Click Connect Account.
3. Choose a service and enter your login credentials.
4. Click on the account you just connected.
5. For Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, ensure Show Push Option is checked.
6. For Tumblr, select a Primary Blog from the drop-down menu.
7. For Facebook and Pinterest, select a push target.
8. Create a default post format to customize the text of the post.

9, Click Save.

10. Repeat these steps for each account you want to connect.
    
    – Create a Custom 404 Page
    
    While squarespace has a default 404 page, it’s ideal to have a custom branded page so that individuals who get lost or navigate to a broken page can easily find their way back to your website:

1. In the Home Menu, click Design.
2. Click 404 Page.
   3. Build out a custom 404 page (keep the head navigation in place if possible!)
   
   – If you have a ‘Big’ site or want a ‘Quick and Dirty’ optimization, control the ‘default structure’ of your URLs and Page Title Formats:
   
   1. In the Home Menu, click Marketing, and then click SEO.
3. In the Search Appearance area, click the Home, Pages, or Items tab.
4. Edit the SEO Title Format field to include any of the variables below.
5. For the homepage, you can also add an SEO site description.
6. When you’re done, click Save.
   
   You can use boolean operator-esque variable terms and structures to automate this:
   
   The most useful of which are:

%s – The site title

%p – The page’s SEO title (or page title if there is no SEO title)

%i – The SEO title of an individual collection item like a blog post, product, or event (or the collection item’s title if there is no SEO title)

You can also append or precede with custom text. For example, if you set your homepage title format to %s | Denver Candy Shop, your site title will always be followed by that text.

– Set Custom URL structures for the Blog (*and beyond!)

URLs should be clean, readable, keyword-rich, and above all, short! Setting a custom URL can make the difference in competitive industries and help you come out on top in the battle for search rankings. To change this on Squarespace:

1. In the Home Menu, click Settings, then click Blogging.

2. Edit the Post URL Format using the variables below and any custom text.
3. To remove a variable from the URL format (for example, %y, for year), click into the Post URL 4. Format field and delete the variable.

Again, the most commonly used variables that we use here at JEMSU when optimizing a page are:

%t – The post title

%m – The creation month for the blog post

%d – The creation date (day of the month) for the blog post

%y – The creation year for the blog post

– Ensure your SSL is set to ‘secure’

SSL or ‘Secure Socket Layer’ is a security cryptographic protocol ensuring your website and users are safe from hackers, spoofers, and other internet ne’er do wells: how it works is complex, but for now, just know that google favors ranking pages with a ‘Secure’ SSL type. To do this on squarespace:

1. In the Home Menu, click Settings, then click Advanced:
2. Click SSL.

3. Under Security Preference, choose your settings. In most cases, I recommend checking Secure and HSTS Secure. Some special situations might need the Insecure option.
4. Click Save.
5. It can take up to 72 hours for the update to complete. For third-party domains that aren’t connected yet, it may take a bit longer (see the above area on domain registering and switching).
   
   – Verify and Index your Site using Google Search Console
   
   This is good advice even off Squarespace, but it’s particularly important here. By submitting the sitemap manually, you can expedite the process of indexation and thus generate those traffic increases much faster than waiting for the Google Crawler to do it the old fashion way (i.e. by spidering through several billion individual sites)
   
   Fortunately, Squarespace makes this pretty easy:
   
   1. On the Google Search Console dashboard, select the site you’d like to index from the property menu in the top left corner.
6. Click Sitemaps.
7. Under Add a new sitemap, enter your sitemap URL.(this is auto-generated by Squarespace: use the following format http://sitename.squarespace.com/sitemap.xml , or simply append sitemap.xml to a custom domain name!) 
8. Click Submit to request Google index your site.
   
   If you’ve only updated or added a single page recently, you can also request indexation with only the one page:
   
   1. On the Google Search Console dashboard, select the site you’d like to index from the property menu in the top left corner.
9. Click URL inspection.
10. Enter the full URL of a page that hasn’t been indexed and press Enter or Return.
11. Click Request Indexing.
12. Repeat for any additional page URLs.

And there you have it! This is the Complete Guide to Optimizing your Squarespace Website! We at JEMSU hope this helped simplify the process of optimizing your site for you. If this still looks overwhelming or complicated, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts on the JEMSU SEO team and we’ll walk you through it together! Either way, good luck, and happy ranking!