Everything You Need to Know About Blogging for SEO in Squarespace
Blogging is one of the best ways to increase the visibility of your website and drive organic search traffic to the services and products you’re selling.
When someone lands on your blog post from search results and doesn’t immediately hit the back button, that tells Google they’ve found the right place and your blog is full of useful content.
But let’s be honest, there’s a lot of noise out there between the interwebs and simply writing content every week won’t be moving the needle anywhere.
Optimizing your blog post for SEO, helps people find your business on search engines. Using keywords relevant and specific to your niche whilst creating valuable content will help you get into almighty Google’s good books. And it’s no secret that Google happily recommends its faves over and over again!
But, if you’ve landed on this blog post, you’re more interested in knowing how to blog for SEO in Squarespace than the benefits so let’s get to it!
How to write a blog post for SEO in Squarespace
In this post, I’m going to be talking about on-page SEO to help you boost your blog traffic from search engines. It’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint and trust with Google and your readers is grows over time. As the saying goes...There’s no such thing as an overnight success!
Whether you’re writing once a day/week/month, overtime providing valuable content that reaches your target audience will increase your site traffic. There’s no question about it.
To help you optimize for SEO in Squarespace, here’s what we’re going to cover:
Focus keywords
Optimizing URLs
Page title tag
Meta descriptions
Internal links
External links
Alt text
Compress images
Blog post length
Social sharing
Blog post structure & using keywords
Google Analytics and Google Console
Are you with me? Here we go!
Use a focus keyword relevant to your topic
This is easier said than done.💁🏽
Let’s just say every time I do keyword research, I’m on 1 or 5 cups of coffee, so don’t worry if you find this confusing at first.
Finding a good keyword is a balance between:
High search volume (from your target audience)
Low competition (there aren’t too many major bloggers who have already made their mark on page one of Google)
The keyword summarizes the topic of your blog post
If you’re in a niche that’s saturated you’re going to have to dig harder for those keywords that will help you rank in Google.
Thankfully there are some great tools out there and my favorite one at the moment is Ubersuggest.
Let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios.
Example 1: Writing a blog post and aiming to rank for the keyword ‘SEO’. The results from Ubersuggest...
At first glance, things are looking pretty good. The search volume is really high with 135,000 search results every month. Whoop!
But wait… The SEO difficulty (SD) is at 71 where higher the number, the more competition there is to rank.
Whilst ‘SEO’ perfectly summarizes your blog post and there’s a high volume of search traffic, unless you’re a seriously established blogger there’s no way you’re going to be ranking for that search term.
Let’s get back to the drawing board, shall we?
Example 2: Writing a blog post about ‘guest blogging for SEO’
Awesome, the competition is really low. But... the volume is waaay lower too.😏
Remember how I said it’s a balancing act?
Long-tail keywords aren’t super competitive but they tend to have a lower search volume. If you’re a new blogger or in a competitive niche, these keywords will get you started on Google, as you establish your site.
If you’re looking for ideas, a great way to find long-tail keywords is to use the Google search bar and make a note of Google’s suggestions.
Pro tip: Put a space in front of the search term and it’ll appear as a question.
Optimizing URLs
This one’s easy. Keep your URLs short, clean and evergreen.
Here’s a bad URL: /everything-you-need-to-know-about-blogging-for-SEO-in-Squarespace
It’s super long and has random fluff words like ‘to’, ‘in’ and ‘about’. You can remove those.
Good URL: /Blogging-seo-squarespace
Much better. It contains my keyword and tells Google the topic of my blog post. Shorter URLs have a better chance of ranking in Google.
If Squarespace adds a date stamp to your URL, remove it before you publish. Even if you update your blog post in the future, the date stamp will remain the same, making your article always appear outdated.
To change your URL in Squarespace 7.1, head over to the gear icon on the blog post.
Under Options -> Post URL -> type in your URL
Blog post headline and title tag
You get one chance to make a first impression. And your headline is it.
You need a headline that:
Uses the h1 tag
Incorporates the focus keyword, preferably at the beginning where possible.
Engaging and compelling enough to make your reader want to click on the post and read the body text
Roughly no more than 50-60 characters long in Google (title tag)
As a best practice, use one h1 tag in your blog post. You can use as many h2 and h3 tags for your subheadings.
A helpful tool I love to use is Coschedule. It provides a clear breakdown of your headline and where you can improve and if it’s too long for Google.
Once you’re happy, you can add it to the title tag of your blog post.
Head over to the gear icon of your blog post.
Under SEO -> SEO title -> enter in your title tag
If you choose not to do this, Google will pull your blog post headline into the search results. But if you have a longer headline, now is a great time to customize it so that it doesn’t get cut off in the search results.
Create a custom meta description
A meta description is a short summary that appears in search results explaining what your article is about.
It’s not compulsory to use your focus keyword as it doesn’t directly affect your ranking but it can help convey how relevant your blog post is to the search.
Every blog post you write must have a unique meta description. The best practice is to keep the text below 160 characters as Google will shorten it.
To add your meta description to your blog:
Click the gear icon on the post.
Under SEO -> SEO Description-> enter in your meta description
Internal links
Using internal links can have a positive impact on your search ranking. If you have a blog post that’s ranking well, adding internal links can help spread the SEO juice to pages in your website that need a boost.
Using anchor text that incorporates keywords to describe your linked content, helps Google understand your site structure better and the topic of your linked content.
An easy way to incorporate internal links is to use a summary block to add related posts at the bottom of every blog post. See how I did that?😉
Linking throughout your blog post to relevant content and updating old content with links to newer content will help keep people engaged and on your site longer, reducing your bounce rate.
External links
External or outbound links connect to sources outside your website. There’s often a fear that external links are bad as they lead people to another website. In fact, linking to authoritative sites is good in Google’s eyes and helps boost your own SEO ranking.
I’ve included a couple in external links in this post already including the link to Ubersuggest.
The trick is to open outbound links in a new tab.
Link your anchor text to the external site. Click on the gear icon which will bring up the below window.
Under web address -> toggle open in a new window to the right -> hit save
Optimize alt text
Using images on your blog post is another way to drive organic search traffic to your website.
Google can’t actually ‘read’ images. It’s up to you to describe the image in your alt text, using your focus keyword in at least one of the images.
In Squarespace, the alt text is the same as a caption.
To add alt text to an image block:
Upload image -> write your caption -> under the design tab choose “do not display caption” -> hit Apply!
For gallery blocks the alt text is the same as the image title.
Upload your images into the gallery -> click on the gear icon for one of your images
Under edit image -> add image title -> hit save
Under the design tab -> uncheck ‘show title’
Rename and compress images
If you’re using Pinterest, the name of your image will appear as the Pinterest description. As much as leaving your image titled IMG_09675 seems harmless, nobody on the web is going to be searching for that.
Best practices for naming your images is to use a keyword and describe the image in a few words.
When resizing and compressing your images, keep your images to below 500kb. This will help your site load faster.
A few helpful tools to compress images:
MacBook (Open image in preview->Tools -> adjust size)
Jpeg mini
Adobe Photoshop
Blog post length
Ahhh… The age-old question. How long should a blog post be?
According to a study by Backlinko long-form content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short articles and outperforms shorter content in social shares. Content ranking in Google tends to be on the longer side and the optimal length is around 1000-2000 words.
That said, creating a fluffy long article is not going to hook your reader so keep it as long (or short) as it needs to be.
Social sharing
Google has said that they don’t use social media shares as a signal for ranking. But, it does have an indirect impact on SEO where your blog posts receive more views, thus increasing the chances of receiving backlinks.
You want your social share icons to be customizable so they’re on brand, visible at all times whilst scrolling down the page, and not get in the way of reading your content.
Let’s be honest, the Squarespace sharing social icons aren’t amazing and are normally buried somewhere in your blog post. Using a third-party service like Sumo will make it easier for your site visitors to share your blog posts.
In my efforts to do the best with Pinterest, I create a pinnable graphic for each blog post. By adding alternate graphics and then hiding them in my blog posts, I’ve found that creating multiple pins increases sharing. So feel free to experiment with a few different layouts!
To add your Pinterest thumbnail, click the gear icon on your blog post.
Under options -> Thumbnail image -> upload image -> save
Blog post structure + using your keywords
Now you might be wondering, those keywords I mentioned in the beginning… where do I put them in my content?
On-page you’re going to want to put the focus keyword and variations of it everywhere. This includes:
Page title
At least one subheading
Introduction
Conclusion
Sprinkled throughout the text every 300-500 words.
If your focus keyword or related keywords don’t fit somewhere, for example, the first paragraph, don’t worry about it. Go with wherever it makes the most sense. Avoid keyword stuffing!😉
I’m a visual person, so here’s a simple structure I use for my blog posts:
Connect google analytics and google console
Yayy! You made it this far! Congrats 🙂
You’ve done all that hard work and it would be a shame for it to go to waste. If you haven’t already, connect Google Analytics to your site to keep an eye on your traffic.
Then set up your site with Google Console and connect it in Squarespace under Analytics -> Acquisition -> Search Keywords.
Google will crawl your site every so often. But if you’ve published a recent blog post you can submit your URL after publishing for Google to index it faster.
To conclude writing a blog post for SEO in Squarespace
There we go! And that’s how we roll...
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about where to start, take it step by step. SEO is a beast to tackle. Start with searching for a few keywords and adding them throughout your post. Over time as you generate blog traffic, you can pick another task and implement that.
Good luck!🥂
