Built-in features that can improve your site’s position in search engine results.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your site's ranking in search results. While the factors search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use to rank sites are kept secret and change often, we build all known SEO best practices into every Squarespace site.

As the host for millions of websites for over a decade, we’ve implemented various strategies to help your site appear in search engine results. Squarespace has the technical side covered for you—there's no need to search for plugins or use custom code.

This guide focuses on the SEO-friendly features that are included by default and work automatically on every Squarespace site. Some SEO features need to be enabled or rely on your text input. We'll cover those features in How you can use Squarespace's SEO-friendly tools.

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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Site map

Squarespace automatically generates and links a proper sitemap.xml, which lists every URL and image metadata on your site with proper priority for perfect indexing. To learn more, visit Your site map.

Clean URLs

All pages and collection items on your site have static URLs that are easily read and indexed by search engines.

Automatic redirects for multiple domains

Connecting multiple domains to one site is helpful because it gives visitors more ways to find you, captures common misspellings, and keeps competitors from registering similar domain names. 

Using multiple domains won't hurt your site's SEO. In the past, it was common to use multiple domains with important keywords in the URL to increase traffic. Search engines sometimes flag this behavior as spammy, because bad actors have been known to duplicate their site content using multiple domains, giving themselves an unfair advantage in searches. However, Squarespace ensures that this practice won’t hurt your site’s SEO by automatically redirecting multiple domains to a single, primary domain. 

For example, if you make www.example1.com your primary domain, and fully map www.example2.com and www.example3.com to your site, www.example1.com will display in the address bar no matter what URL a visitor used to reach your site. Also, www.example1.com will be the only domain to display in search results. A visitor could also visit a page at either www.example1.com/about or www.example2.com/about to see the same page but with URLs reflecting multiple primary domains. 

With this in mind, having multiple domains connected to one site is an asset. Creating many domains gives visitors more ways to find you, captures common misspellings, and keeps competitors from registering similar domain names. 

To learn more about using multiple domains in your account, visit Managing multiple domains.

Structured data

Structured data helps Google understand and classify pages and their content. Squarespace automatically generates structured data using these schemas:

• Blog post
• Event
• Local business
• Organization
• Product
• Website

It's not possible to edit or remove this data.

Automatic tagging

All meta tags for pages and <link> tags for RSS feeds are automatically generated. Images contain proper <alt> and <title> tags, improving search engine indexing.

Squarespace automatically adds <alt> tags to image descriptions. For most images, if there is no description, <alt> tags are added to the filename instead. To learn more, visit Adding alt text to images.

Google rich image search for products

Squarespace structures product information so Google can display additional information in rich search results. These search results can include the product name, product image, description, price range, availability, and product URL.

Built-in mobile optimization

Google's technology gives mobile-optimized sites a higher priority in search results. As such, all mobile-friendly Squarespace sites are also search engine-friendly. As long as you don’t disable mobile styles or overload your site with too much content, your site is ready to be found in mobile searches.

Clean HTML markup

Squarespace produces pages with clean HTML markup indexable by search engines. For example, <h1> and <h2> HTML tags are automatically added to headings and other key text on your site.

How you can use Squarespace’s SEO-friendly tools

For some of Squarespace's automatic SEO tools, you'll need to enable them manually or edit text in built-in fields before they'll affect your site. This includes:

• AMP - Enable AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, to generate lightweight versions of your blog posts with AMP formatting that loads faster on mobile devices. AMP works with Google to prioritize results in mobile searches.
• Built-in meta tags - When you add SEO descriptions to your pages, Squarespace automatically adds HTML <meta> tags to help search engines identify your site's titles and page content.
• SSL certificates - All Squarespace Domains and third-party domains include free SSL certificates when connected and pointing to Squarespace sites. Ensure SSL is enabled in your domain's settings, as sites that aren't SSL-secure may be penalized in search engine rankings.

For more on optimizing your site for search engines, follow our SEO checklist and visit Increasing your site's visibility to search engines.

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:

• Attend an expert-led SEO with your Squarespace site webinar.
• Get advice from the community in the Squarespace Forum.
• For hands-on help, hire a vetted SEO expert to build your site with SEO in mind.