Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines

Tips to make your site more discoverable in search results.

Last updated January 7, 2025

This guide shows you how to use Squarespace's SEO-targeting features and other tools to increase your site's visibility to search engines. For more SEO best practices, visit SEO checklist.

Tip

Register for our SEO with your Squarespace site webinar where we'll focus on SEO best practices and how you can use our built-in tools to boost your site’s discoverability. We’ll demystify SEO, and discuss how to choose strategic keywords, and structure text headings.

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Use search tools to maintain updates

Search engines won't notice changes to your site instantly. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site's search presence. Whenever you make major changes to your site, you can request that a search engine re-index your content by using these services:

Customize page and site titles

Search engines typically prioritize the following content from your site in this order:

  • Site title
  • SEO titles
  • Page titles
  • Blog post titles
  • Headings

You can set default title formats for the homepage, collections (like blog, products, and event pages), and collection items (like blog posts and events). These titles also appear in browser tabs and search results, so it's important to write them so they’re friendly to both humans and search bots. To learn more, visit Changing title formats for SEO and browser tabs.

Differentiate SEO titles and navigation titles

Every page in your site has an SEO title and navigation title. You can edit these titles in page settings.

  • SEO titles - These appear in search results and browser tabs, and are indexed by search engines. We recommend for each page. SEO titles are a good place to promote keywords for search engines. You can also add SEO titles for individual collection items, like blog posts, products, and events.
  • Navigation titles - These create links in your navigation menus. It's best to keep these short, like "About" or "Contact."

To learn more, visit Editing page titles.

Tip

If there's no SEO title, the page title displays in search results. In version 7.0, page titles appear on your site in some templates. This text will be seen by search engines.

Add keywords strategically

As you add text to your site, include words and phrases that match the search terms people use to find sites like yours. These keywords help search engines display your site as relevant to the people looking for those search terms.

Your keyword strategy depends on your site and the visitors you're trying to attract, and it's important to add keywords in a clear, natural way that makes sense to humans.

To learn more, visit Adding keywords for SEO.

Structure content with headings

Use heading text formatting to organize pages. Like titles, search engines typically give headings a higher priority. Clear headings that describe the content that follows make it easier for search engines to detect the major themes of your site. At the same time, they help visitors skim your page and quickly find the information they're looking for.

As a general rule, you should use headings in descending order to funnel visitors from the broadest information to the most specific. Keep in mind:

  • Ensure you're using heading sizes consistently on the page and across your site.
  • Don't use the same text for multiple headings.
  • Optimize your headings with keywords.
  • As long as headings are structured and consistent, you can use the same type of heading multiple times on a page. Refer to the screenshot below for an example.
  • When possible, avoid using headings to create formatting effects, such as pull quotes. If you must use headings to create pull quotes, ensure your quote includes content important to the page, like keywords.

How you organize your site depends on your content, but here's one example of a well-structured page:

headings.png

headings.png

Add alt text to images

Alt text is text associated with an image. This text displays when people hover over it, and makes your site more accessible.

Search engines use alt text to identify the content of a page, because bots can only read text. By adding alt text to images, search engines understand what the image is and they can include it in relevant searches.

When adding alt text, ensure you follow our alt text best practices.

Add tags and categories

Search engines scan tags and categories to identify what products, blog posts, or gallery images are about. Adding tags and categories that accurately describe the item could help it appear in search results. Tags and categories also help visitors use your site, and appear in your site's search results.

Tip

Only the collection items above support categories and tags. It's not possible to add categories and tags to portfolio sub-pages, gallery sections, gallery blocks, or other sets of content.

Start blogging

You can add a blog to any Squarespace site. Blogging regularly helps search engines consider your site active. Even if you're a business and not a blogger, adding a blog page and updating it regularly with relevant content could benefit your SEO while building your brand.

When adding blog posts, use tags and categories, and structure your posts with Heading 1 and Heading 2 formatting. Squarespace automatically gives blog post titles Heading 1 formatting on all version 7.1 sites and most version 7.0 templates.

As you write blog posts, think about your target audience and what they might be searching for to find a site like yours. Add content that would appeal to them, and optimize the posts with keywords, especially in post titles and headings.

Reduce page loading time

How long it takes for a page to load may affect its ranking in search results. Whenever possible, we recommend reducing your page size for faster loading.

List your physical location

If you're a business with a physical location, listing your address on your site could help visitors find you in location-based services. There are many places where you can add your location:

Add site and page descriptions

You can add SEO descriptions for your site, individual pages, and certain collection items. These descriptions may appear below the title/link in search results, depending on the search terms used.

Visitors read these descriptions to decide if they want to click the result. To make your site inviting, we recommend keeping your descriptions short, relevant, and readable.

To learn more, visit Adding site and page descriptions for SEO.

squarespace_example.png

Ensure SSL is enabled

When SSL is enabled, the custom URL starts with https. This means visitors access every page of your site with a secure connection. Search engines consider SSL important and may penalize sites that don't have it enabled.

If you're unsure if SSL is enabled for your site, check the SSL panel and confirm it's set to the Secure setting.

More help

SEO strategy falls outside of the scope of Squarespace Customer Support because search engine technology frequently changes and everyone's marketing needs are unique. Because of this, we can't guarantee results like ranking changes or listing appearance in a search engine.

While we're unable to provide specific SEO advice through email and live chat, there are other ways you can get more SEO help:

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  • Get help from our community

  • Get help from our community on advanced customizations.

  • Hire a Squarespace Expert

  • Stand out online with the help of an experienced designer or developer.

Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines