Three SEO Best Practices for Small Businesses (on Squarespace!)
Let’s bust a commonly held small business website myth: that Squarespace is inherently terrible for your SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization for y’all new to the website game!).
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization - meaning the tools and tricks we designers and copy writers use to help a website rank higher on search engines like Google or Bing. As you’ve begun your research into how to design a website for your small business, you’ve likely come across this idea that Squarespace makes it difficult for you to rank high.
To be completely and transparently honest, it doesn’t matter what platform you are on: small businesses have a hard time with SEO simply because they are DIYing it. Search Engine Optimization is a whole industry in it’s own right, especially with the advancement of AI enhancers. It’s a difficult field where results are never really guaranteed, no matter which small business website builder you are on.
I will say that with Wordpress, you can select one of dozens of plugins that claim they will optimize your SEO for you - Squarespace doesn’t operate on plug ins, so you have to manually ensure your website is opted in to all the search engine opportunities your small business could be benefiting from. However, even if you did download a Wordpress plugin, I’d still recommend manually going through an SEO Checklist because how else would you ensure the plugin is doing it’s job?
For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume you have chosen Squarespace as the website builder on which to design your small business website. Squarepace provides a thorough SEO Checklist right here, with plenty of suggestions and guides - almost too many maybe.
If you are just starting out with website design and SEO for a small business, it can be overwhelming to consider all the different angles you can tackle this challenge! Instead, start here.
3 SEO Best Practices For Your Small Business Squarespace Website:
Define a keyword strategy to pinpoint the terms relevant to ranking your small business website among searches common among your target market.
Ensure all images currently online as well as any you plan to upload meet SEO standards.
As you upload blog posts, concoct clear and concise URL slugs.
Meeting these three points first will set you up for success by providing a foundation of knowledge to help you understand more in depth guides as well as get your website started on it’s path to high ranking from jump.
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(Sound daunting? If you were able to do enough research to find this webpage, I can just about guarantee that you are fully capable of following the steps I’ll outline below. But if it’s really just not something you want to do, I’m totally here for you. I can put together a website package for your small business hosted on Squarespace, but please remember that SEO is a long game and results will not be guaranteed.)
Keyword Planning
No matter what type of copy you have on your small business website, before you write any of it you need to know what keywords are important to your target market.
Think about how a search engine works: a potential client of yours types in a question to Google and clicks on the most promising looking listing.
In order to appear in this initial search at any rank, you need to make sure your website contains the keywords included in the question that your potential client typed in.
Start by compiling a list of questions your small business has the solution to. Examples may be: ‘where can I buy homemade jewelry near me’ or ‘how to build a website for my small business?’
From those series of questions, focus in on repeated phrases and words. These are the terms your website needs to include throughout in order to rank in those key questions!
For a bonus round, click here here to head to Google Trends and do a quick search for the terms you’ve begun to gather, looking at their performance over the last 90 days to track if this actually is a commonly searched term. You can even scroll down to see ‘Related Queries’ and ‘Related Topics’ to help generate new ideas for keywords that need to be implemented in the design of your small business website!
Now, the obvious place to include those terms is the copy or text used on your website, but there are a few extra locations you can sneak them in.
Images - File Names and Alt Text
Google Image Search is major, y’all. A client searching for solution to their problem that sees a beautiful image of your product on Google will not only click through to your small business website, but be primed to purchase at that very moment.
There are two places you can utilize keywords within your images to help them show up in searches: the file name and the alt text.
The file name can obviously be planned before you upload it, by naming your image files on your desktop with clear, explanatory names. However, even for images already on your website, Squarespace has you covered!
Log into Squarespace, then select the Assets panel under Website. Click the three dots that appear to the right of an image to select Rename. Type in a new file name using only letters and numbers, with hyphens instead of spaces. Be sure to include those keywords here!
The Alternate Text or Alt Text is a little trickier!
Alt text appears on the rare occasion that there is an error that prevents your image from loading, but it also is read by screen or text readers - the devices those who are hard of seeing may be using to access your website. Therefore utilizing alt text actually boosts the website performance for your small business in two ways: it helps with SEO in general and specifically increases the accessibility of your product!
To add alt text, head into the Squarespace editor of the page you are looking to update. Select the image and hit the Pencil icon to open the image editor. Under Image Alt Text add a brief description of your image! A text reader will read this sentence aloud to the person using it, so be sure it adds context, not confusion.
This description must be brief and direct for a search engine (or text reader!) to understand it. Best practices include:
Avoiding terms like ‘photo of’ or ‘image of’ as it’s already apparent that you are describing an image
Using 125 characters or less
Include those keywords discussed previously - but only when applicable. Google is not a fan of keyword stuffing!
3. URL Slugs
Bloggers, this tip is gonna be one you must utilize to get those posts you have planned to the people who need them!
When posting a new blog (in addition to ensuring all the copy your readers will access includes those keywords!) you can pop your relevant keywords in one other place: the URL slug or Post URL as Squarespace calls it.
Access the settings tab for a blog post by clicking the three dot menu to the right of it’s listing in Squarespace and scroll down to Post URL. Here Squarespace will have generated a URL for you based off your blog title that may have resulted in an awkwardly long and overly wordy length. Delete any excess words and add in those keywords if you can; do keep in mind that you want a URL to be short and easy to access!
The three above strategies are definitely long term practices you want to engage in to improve the SEO of your small business website over time, but they are not simple solutions. SEO is a long game in a field that’s changing even as I type this.
For a very long time (by internet standards, so like 10 years!), there were firm practices in place you could use to help boost your spot and it was much easier to sort of game the system by setting up your website pages in specific ways. However, in the age of rapidly expanding AI functions and Google’s near constant restructuring of personnel, the ranking system is no longer anywhere near as clear cut.
Now you have AI summaries and data pulls to contend with as people spend less time scrolling through Google’s results to select the best source and instead just trust whatever is listed in the top paragraph.
It’s a changing landscape - yes, the Old Ways may still have benefits, but frankly we don’t know yet how this is going to play out in the long run. We don’t even know what the Google front page is going to look like in a month much less next year!
For your small business to make the most out of it’s website, I advise investing in expertise and in minds keeping abreast of latest developments. Once I’ve built you a beautiful website designed for your current business needs, I strongly recommend signing on for a management package where for a monthly retainer fee you have access to my services for making regular website updates and ensuring you are in line with current SEO best practices. If you plan on maintaining a regular blog page or portfolio, this service is invaluable and will save you literally hours of drudgery.
However, if you aren’t already a client of mine, you can keep benefiting from the free and fresh advice regarding building websites for small businesses that arrive on this blog weekly! Thank you for reading; click below for more helpful entries.
