Is Squarespace Good for SEO?

Squarespace is an accessible website-building platform that lets creators, small businesses, and plenty of big companies design darn nice websites without spending $30,000 or more. One of the few knocks on the platform over the past several years has focused on SEO. Squarespace purportedly had relatively poor SEO compared to other platforms, notably WordPress. But is that still true?

Why SEO on Squarespace Got a Bad Rap

Online commenters claiming Squarespace is bad for SEO typically refer to outdated examples of poor SEO default settings. Squarespace invested in design and creating an intuitive user interface. That caused SEO and other technical elements of the site, such as canonicalization, to sit on the company’s to-do list longer than most users would have liked.

Some of Squarespace's most glaring SEO issues have been resolved, including two big ones.

Duplicate meta descriptions. Squarespace encourages users to enter a default meta description during site set-up. On one hand, that’s a good way to avoid missing meta descriptions on pages, which can hurt organic performance. Unfortunately, that can cause duplicate meta descriptions on multiple pages, which likely offsets any benefits.
Alt text. Squarespace is largely WCAG compliant by default, but adding alt text to images in Squarespace wasn’t easy. They’ve improved the photo upload process to put image titles and alt text front and center, which has helped website owners stay compliant.

SEO Squarespace Tips

We’ve created dozens of client sites on Squarespace. For SEO, we’ve found that following basic best practices will ensure your content is served up alongside much more expensive and difficult websites. Here are a few ways to maximize the SEO value of your Squarespace site.

Submit your XML sitemap. As you would with any site, submit your XML website to Google Search Console. You can view your sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml to your domain. It should look like this:

https://www.sovismedia.com/sitemap.xml

Once you have your sitemap, create a free Google Search Console account (if you don’t already have one) and submit it. Oneupweb has a handy guide to sitemaps that’s definitely worth a read.

Make sure your site is crawlable. While logged into your account, make sure search engines have permission to find your site. Select:

Settings -> Website -> Crawlers

Make sure the toggle for “Search Engine Crawls” is on. Squarespace has this turned on by default, but there are some cases where publishing and unpublishing your site during the design process can cause issues.

Check your SEO settings. Make sure your site is set up for SEO success. After you log in to your account, head to:

Settings -> Marketing -> SEO appearance

This allows you to set a default page title and meta description, but you will still need to create a unique page title and meta description for each page on your site. Keep titles under 55 characters and meta descriptions below the 155-character limit Google recommends. You’ll do this on every new blog post, too; we can help you clean up old content!

These SEO tips work on all websites, so no matter your content management system (CMS), make clean SEO a priority (or let us handle it). Whether it’s Wix, WordPress or Squarespace, SEO is kind of our thing.