7 Steps to Add SEO to Your Squarespace Blog Posts
Want to skyrocket your hard earned content to the first page of Google? Well, it’s not rocket science.
Susan sent me a question on how to add SEO to your website step by step so I recorded this training video on Instagram Live. Since we work almost exclusively with Squarespace these days, I’ve created this tutorial on that platform. That said, these SEO concepts can be applied to any platform!
Here’s a step by step checklist you can follow for each post you make. Watch the video below to see exactly how to add SEO to your Squarespace blog posts to rank higher. You can do this! Or, delegate this to a team member or your VA. But don’t labor hard over content without making sure it’s getting the attention it deserves. In just a few minutes, you can polish up the SEO of your blog post so it sparkles on Google for the world to see and find you through.
Recorded Live Training
1.) Add title
# + adjective + descriptive/geographic keywords
The title should include SEO rich keywords and create intrigue with a well chosen adjective. Throw in a number to establish credibility if it’s an educational or tutorial post. Try to think about what people might search for in order to find your content. Instead of naming a post “Autoresponder Tips,” try calling it “3 Amazing Ways You can Make Your Autoresponder Cover for You While You’re Out of the Office” See how much more appealing that is? Plus, it will pop up in searches more because we’ve included both Out of the Office and Autoresponder. If your post is tied to a geographic location, the title is the spot you want to highlight city/state or more specifics like the actual venue, coffeeshop, or restaurant.
2.) Write post
> 300 words + natural keywords
The word count of your blog post needs to be a minimum of 300 words for SEO purposes. The longer, the better. But if the burden of writing longer posts will prevent you from doing it, be realistic and keep it short and sweet. Even if you’re doing photo rich blog posts or a post containing a step by step video, make sure you have a minimum of 300 words of text.
Avoid stuffing your blog post with keywords. Instead, try to naturally incorporate keywords and phrases people would be Googling to pull up your content.
3.) Add tags
4-6 phrases
In the tags section of your post, add 4-6 phrases (the fancy term for this is long tail keywords) people would google to pull up this specific content. Not general things they would google to find your site, but specifically this article. Here’s an example of the tags I’ll add to this post:
SEO for Squarespace blog
improve blog post search rankings Squarespace
Squarespace blogging checklist for SEO
make your blog posts show up in Google Squarespace
Optimize blog posts for SEO
Add meta to Squarespace
These are all things I think people would be searching for in order to find this content. Brainstorm what you think people would be typing into Google, and then add these phrases 1 at a time (separated by commas) to the tags section of the post.
4.) Add alternate image titles
alt image titles for SEO/Pinterest
In image, add in the "optional" image title box to be the caption you'd like to show up on Pinterest if someone pins it. Keep in mind this serves double duty to tell Google what it's looking at, so try to use keywords in your Pinterest description that will tell Google how to index the image.
5.) Add categories
1-2 max
Think of categories as the bucket all your articles of this type live in. Try to put your blog posts into 1 category, 2 max.
For example, I will put this blog post in my “website” category, since these are tips to help you use your website better. It’s not necessary for me to have an SEO category, since this type of narrow category would result in far too many categories in my free training library. Try to keep your total number of blog categories on your site to under 6.
6.) Change the post URL
remove the date
Under the “options” tab of your post, change the post URL to remove the date and just include your keyword rich title. This helps Google index this content better.
7.) Add thumbnail image and excerpt
use the first 1-2 paragraphs
Add a post excerpt and a thumbnail to your post. I recommend simply putting the first paragraph of your post here. Hopefully, you’ve already done step 2 and this paragraph already naturally has several keywords woven into it.
That’s it! & quick and simple steps it only takes a few minutes to add to make your Squarespace blog post rank higher in Google.
Want to learn more on SEO? I’d be remiss to not mention resources I’ve learned foundational SEO through over the years! Davey & Krista offer SEO consulting and I heard them give a talk on SEO a few years ago on Wordpress, and they have a lot of deeper dive content available as well, such as this tutorial. Our clients all have the option to work with our friends East Taylor Creative on a one-to-one SEO training session tailored to their site. Lindy and Jason are amazing, and they really improved my understanding of SEO as well! We love working with them on SEO training for our clients! Finally, Squarespace has great tutorials, and if you’d like to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s their guide.
