You may have heard that if you have a website, you need to focus on your SEO. And, in case you don’t know what that means, ‘SEO’ stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s basically a way to get your website to display in search results for a given topic or keyword, without paying for ads. So how do you optimize your SquareSpace SEO? SquareSpace comes with a few pre-built features that you should take advantage of to increase your search engine optimization.

Ahem… if you have a WordPress site, head over here to learn about using the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize WordPress SEO.

Special shout out to my client Kaleigh Cohen for allowing me to use her spin class site KaleighCohen.com for this instructional post and video 🌟

In the video I show you:

0:56 ➡️ Locating and using the main SquareSpace SEO panel

1:16 ➡️ Where to find the SquareSpace SEO checklist

2:40 ➡️ Using Moz to select the best keywords

4:14 ➡️ Where to access the SEO settings for individual pages

5:25 ➡️ General SEO keyword ideas

Prefer to read about it? I got you.

SquareSpace SEO Native Features

There are three things that you should pay attention to for you SquareSpace SEO: your main website SEO settings, the SquareSpace SEO checklist, and the page SEO settings.

Main Site SEO Settings and Checklist

Both your main site SEO settings and the SquareSpace SEO checklist are accessible from the Marketing tab.

Once you click on Marketing, you’ll see both SEO and Location Management as the top two items in the menu. Obviously, for the purposes of this post, we’ll be focused primarily on the SEO piece. If you have a physical location, or see clients in-person, the Location Management tab is also something you should explore.

Once you click SEO, you’ll see two things: your main site SEO settings, and the SquareSpace SEO checklist.

As you can see, the SEO checklist is at the top of the menu. (You can also access it directly here.)

Below it, you can see the website title that will display in search engine results, and the main website description. These are the main site settings for indexing by search engines and a great opportunity to plug in your keywords. As you can see, in this example, the main keyword focus is ‘free online cycling classes’. Her name and business name are also prioritized, as well as ‘certified spin instructor’.

Note: You’ll have to scroll down to enter in the website description.

Individual Page SEO Settings

The main SEO panel will edit the page title and description for the homepage in search results, but it’s also a good idea to customize the SEO settings for each individual page. To access page SEO settings, simply click on the gear icon that appears when you hover over any page name.

Once you click on the gear icon, you can select SEO in the pop up menu. This opens up a tab from which you can edit the page SEO title, and the page SEO description. You can use this opportunity to craft a helpful description for potential viewers that also uses your keywords.

How to Choose SEO Keywords

In order to choose keywords to optimize your SquareSpace SEO, you need to try to put yourself into the mind of your potential client / customer / viewer. What would they search for that your website would be a great fit for? In the example of Kaleigh Cohen Fitness, we chose things like ‘indoor cycling classes’, ‘free online spin classes’, ‘certified spin instructor’ as well as her name, and business name. Since she only teaches online, we did not need to optimize for a location.

If you teach in a specific location, be sure to add it as a keyword often. How many times do you search for things like ‘holistic dentist Boston’? (Random example, but you get the gist). When you’re looking for something in a specific location, you typically just tack it on to the end of your search query.

You can also use free tools like Moz to check out your keyword ideas. I’ll do a more complete post on Moz another time, but you can review the video (timestamp 2:40!) to see how you can use Moz to gauge the effectiveness of your keyword and get other keyword suggestions.

Best of luck! Xx, Kara

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