Website builders like Squarespace sometimes get hate from SEO enthusiasts.
Look at reviews of different companies using Squarespace, and you will find many complaints about the poor quality of Squarespace SEO.
Some SEO service providers even refused to work with clients on Squarespace (we’ve been guilty of that).
So, is it that bad?
Yes, no, maybe, it depends. That’s my final verdict.
I’m kidding! But you’ll get a variety of opinions across the web. Here’s mine.
First of all, Google and other search engines do not favor any website builder over the other. It mostly boils down to on-page and off-page SEO, including content and backlinks.
In this post, I’ll share the pros and cons of Squarespace SEO so you can decide whether to use Squarespace or not. Read to the bottom for some lesser-known SEO factors that Squarespace lacks.
Squarespace is great for many things, but it’s not perfect and still has some flaws that need to be worked out.
These days, anyone can hop on the internet and build a website with “drag and drop” interfaces like Squarespace and Wix if you have the time and energy.
Suppose you know exactly how to design an exemplary user interface and create a great user experience. In that case, you can drag and drop a website pretty quickly using a builder like Squarespace.
While this is a good and quick option for a small business owner with limited competitors, it has a few downsides to small and medium-sized business owners trying to have the best possible ranking on search engines such as Google.
Bottom line: If you want a website with the best ROI chance, you might be better off with a WordPress website and an SEO specialist. Let’s discuss why.
The Pros of Squarespace
Squarespace is a website platform that’s been around for over 10+ years now.
It started as a service to host websites but has grown and is now one of the most popular website builders.
What’s excellent about Squarespace is that it’s easy to use, has beautiful templates, and the hosting is decent (at best). It’s also got fantastic blogging tools. It ticks off almost all of our SEO boxes.
Squarespace SEO customizations aren’t as good as other platforms like WordPress, though. Squarespace SEO isn’t bad, but it’s not as good.
It has made some tremendous strides in the past few years, making it easy for anyone to look up a few keywords to optimize their site.
As of 2022, Squarespace has various SEO features to help your site get discovered by search engines like Google.
Some of the key features are:
- H1-H4
- Meta tags
- Clean URL/Permalinks
- Alt text
- Google AMP
- Redirects
- Integrates with Search Console and Analytics
P.S. – Our SEO Squarespace tips include utilizing best practices for the above.
That’s pretty good for starters!
Again, we think it’s great if you are a small business with few competitors on Google.
We’re talking a coffee shop in Victor, ID, or a second-hand gear shop in Jackson, WY. Can you tell where we’ve been lately? ?
You can get away with having a Squarespace site and DIY it if you have a small, not-too-competitive business like this.
Suppose you are in a more competitive market or have a higher cost, such as a wedding venue, luxury brand, hotel, or backcountry gear shop that makes online sales. In that case, you’re better off hiring a web designer and SEO specialist.
Why?
A CMS such as WordPress gives you more power, the ability to customize, and optimization plugins. Especially paired with an SEO expert.
But just cause you have WordPress doesn’t mean you automatically have the upper hand in SEO. You have to pair that with SEO expertise. Take my website for instance.
I’m way too busy serving my client’s SEO needs to work on my own website SEO (whoops). My SEO isn’t great, which is hilarious, sad, and pretty ironic. I have literally all the tools at my fingertips, but making the time to work on my site’s SEO is nonexistent once I factor in my clients and skiing ?.
Whatever CMS you choose, do your keywords research, include internal and external links, a beefy title and meta description, and optimized images and pages.
Bottom line: Squarespace is an excellent option for building a simple website, not having too many local or national competitors, and not relying on Google that much for business.
Wedding vendors, for example, typically rely on being referred by wedding venues, so their rankings aren’t usually as important to them.
On the other hand, wedding venues in a highly competitive market are one of the first searches from wedding couples once they’re engaged, which is why business-savvy wedding venue owners care about their SEO.
The Cons of Squarespace
It doesn’t easily cover some technical SEO aspects. You have control over a few of these factors in Squarespace, but some important technical SEO factors are:
- Website Crawling
- log file analysis, XML and/or HTML sitemaps, mobile bot crawl behavior
- Mobile
- AMP, Progressive Web Apps, Responsive design
- SSL
- HTTPS, HTTP/2
- Structured data
- Schema markup, Microdata & JSON-LD, Rich Snippets
- Migrations
- Domain migrations, relaunches, CMS changes, HTTP to HTTPS
- Page speed
- Rich media and script compression, CSS sprites, CDNs, server speed optimization, parallel downloads and minify, caching
- Rendering
- Critical rendering path/lazy loading, DOM rendering, Javascript frameworks rendering
- Content optimization
- Entity optimization, duplicate content, thin content
- Status codes
- 3xx, 4xx, 5xx, orphaned pages
- Indexation
- Canonicalization, robots.txt, meta-tags
- Site structure
- Internal linking, URL structure, taxonomy
If that sounds like a bunch of gobbledegook to you, no worries. Basic SEO is easy and a no-brainer for most who have access to Google to learn (and the time). Once it starts getting more technical, people start to get a little lost. Here are some easier-to-understand concepts below.
Page Speed
Ah yes, the elephant in the room and the hotly-debated topic: page speed. Let’s dive right in.
Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) are almost always going to give a bad score for Squarespace sites, and it’s primarily due to the massive number of scripts loaded every time a page loads.
This can worsen if you are loading content from a third-party source (FB Pixel, Google Analytics, Hotjar).
Most of this is out of your control on Squarespace, but the image and file sizes are the most significant factors you can control.
Some people will tell you that you can test your site on GTMetrix or Pingdom for speed, which is true.
But ignoring PageSpeed insights and Core Vitals is turning a blind eye to one of SEO’s most important ranking factors.
I know I’ll get a lot of hate for saying that, but I have to keep it real for the business owners reading this.
That being said, you could DIY your WordPress website or hire a bad WordPress web designer and still get a bad score and have a slow-loading website.
It’d be easier to increase your page speed if you hired the right person or learned how to defer/delay javascript and minimize scripts as we do at Snowmad.
Bottom Line: Speed is a ranking factor in SEO and shouldn’t be ignored.
Content reigns king over site speed, but when you need every competitive edge to outpace your competitors on Google, you need to make sure you’re on top of everything.
Schema Markup/Structured Data
The Squarespace e-commerce site automatically generates structured data that helps Google understand your page content. But there are a few things wrong with the process.
For example, when using “text” in your local business schema and not an image logo, your image field will be left blank. Whoops!
Canonical Tags
Canonical tags allow you to choose the version of a page (or the site’s main index) that search engines should focus on. This prevents them from competing or cannibalizing traffic from one another.
This issue occurs when your Squarespace site’s page has a rel=canonical link in place, but Google disagrees with it and chooses another URL. To fix this, inspect the URL to make sure Google your desired canonical URL.
Squarespace puts canonical tags on your pages automatically. But if you want to edit or change them, you’re out of luck. No bueno!
Template Behavior
Some Squarespace themes do something unusual about SEO – they display that SEO info right on the site. If this happens to you, there are workarounds, but it’s a very odd quirk to manage.
Squarespace layouts are responsive, which is great 90% of the time.
Sometimes, losing control of what content is placed on your mobile site can provide a less-than-desirable experience for the users and affect the experience, which will unsurprisingly lead to ranking issues.
For example, I often modify my mobile design to ensure it has a better experience, and it’s only slightly different from the desktop design but still impactful.
404 and Redirects
Most website builders will automatically create a redirect for you or warn you when changing your URL to avoid site visitors landing on the dreadful 404 page. Squarespace does not automate this. They also don’t show a warning. Oops!
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that many businesses use to create and manage their website.
There’s always some new flashy technology or site designer, but WordPress has stood the test of time. It’s an open-source CMS, unlike Squarespace. This means you can pick your hosting and CDN, for example.
WordPress also integrates well with other marketing tools, making it effective to reach your target audience and promote your business.
However, Squarespace is more beginner-friendly for SEO. While WordPress has more powerful SEO tools, Squarespace can help you start SEO relatively quickly and without any prior experience or knowledge.
We always recommend Squarespace for small-business owners who want to DIY everything in-house.
But if you don’t want to keep up with Google algorithms, stay on top of best SEO practices, spend 10 hours a week writing content and fine-tuning on-page and off-page SEO, and want the highest potential ROI, do yourself a favor hire a great web designer and SEO specialist.
SEO is a highly complex field, so you can’t expect 100 similar opinions if you ask 100 SEO experts how they feel about it.
You can continue reading to see the top FAQs regarding Squarespace SEO.
How do I maximize SEO on Squarespace?
Many people struggle with the question of how to maximize SEO on Squarespace.
One way is to use the keywords tool to see which keywords have been used and optimize your website accordingly.
Another way is to make sure your content has the proper keywords and a good website title.
There are several ways to optimize your Squarespace website for better search engine visibility.
Some essential techniques include using keywords in your titles and meta descriptions, creating custom URLs, and adding metatags.
It is also essential to keep track of your website’s SEO progress so that you can make changes as needed.
Keyword research is necessary to identify the appropriate keywords and optimize their content.
What is the catch with Squarespace?
Squarespace is a website builder that offers users a wide range of templates and designs to choose from.
It also provides a strong foundation for SEO, with good on-page optimization and built-in features like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools integration.
However, there are some restraints for customizability and technical SEO.
For example, you cannot add your scripts or modify your site’s HTML/CSS code.
Additionally, Squarespace’s platform can be limiting for more experienced web developers.
How do I optimize SEO for Squarespace?
There are a few things you can do to help optimize your SEO for Squarespace.
- Do some keyword research to find a list of targeted and related keywords.
- Then create high-quality, keyword-rich content for better SEO results.
- Add relevant keywords to title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, heading tags, image alt tags, and in the content body.
- Optimize your images. Make sure to reduce their file size and add appropriate alt tags.
- Maintain deep internal linking, which will help increase your website’s search engine ranking potential.
- Additionally, fix any technical errors (such as crawl errors) that may be negatively affecting your Squarespace SEO rankings.
- Finally, build links to your website through email outreach and other forms of content marketing.
Is Squarespace good with SEO?
Squarespace is generally good for SEO, but there are a few things to keep in mind.
First, if you are comfortable working with Squarespace, it’s fine for SEO as long as you have the time.
Second, the platform has generally good features like URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text.
However, Squarespace websites could load a bit faster, and those built with the older version of the platform don’t adhere to Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) specification.
You sacrifice some level of customization in comparison to WordPress when using Squarespace.
Why you should not use Squarespace?
You should not use Squarespace because it does not have a Yoast/Rank Math plugin or extension like WordPress does. This makes optimizing your website for SEO difficult and time-consuming. However, there are some pros to using Squarespace for business such as its ease of use and design capabilities.
Is there a Squarespace SEO plugin?
Squarespace is a website builder that offers powerful SEO features. However, one downside is that they don’t have any SEO plugins.
The reason for this is that their built-in tools are powerful enough on their own. This means that you can create a website that is optimized for search engines without having to use any additional tools or plugins.
Is WordPress better than Squarespace for SEO?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether WordPress or Squarespace is better for SEO. It depends on the specific website and its needs.
Definitely, WordPress must be better than Squarespace when it comes to technical SEO – that is, optimizing a website for search engines.
If a site is small and simple, Squarespace might work well because it offers built-in SEO features.
If SEO matters to you and you need more customization, scalability, useful themes, and plugins, you should use WordPress for the best SEO output in all search engines.
Does the Squarespace Built-In SEO Work?
Squarespace is a platform that many people use to create their websites.
It has many features, including SEO-friendly features. People often have questions about Squarespace’s SEO capabilities, but the truth is that it is very easy to use and doesn’t require any plugins as WordPress does.
In-built SEO features make it a preferred platform for people who want to focus on creating great content rather than worrying about the technical aspects of SEO.
Squarespace is a closed system, meaning you can’t add plugins or themes from other developers. If you want to extend the functionality of your Squarespace website, you’ll need to hire a developer or learn how to code.
On the other hand, WordPress is an open-source platform that allows you full control over your website and its content. You can add plugins, change themes, and even edit the source code.
Why is my Squarespace site not on Google?
Squarespace is a platform that helps users create and host their own websites.
It offers built-in SEO features to help you improve your site’s visibility in search results.in order for Squarespace to work its best.
There are a few things you need to do yourself, including submitting a sitemap to Google’s Search Console and registering your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Your Squarespace site is not on Google in case of the following reasons.
1. You haven’t submitted your site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, or you have not completed the verification process on both platforms.
2. Your sitemap is not properly formatted.
3. You have blocked Googlebot from crawling your pages by using robots.txt or meta tags such as “noindex” and “nofollow.”
4. Your site is not fully indexed yet.
5. You are using a custom domain, which requires approval from Google to be crawled and verified.
6. The sitemap you are using is not approved by Google Webmaster Tools.
7. Your content does not match the title tag or meta description of your pages.
What are the downsides to Squarespace?
There are a few downsides to using Squarespace for your website. While Squarespace is great for people who are not as tech-savvy or want more out-of-the-box features, there are some restraints when it comes to customizability and technical SEO.
Editing and adding content can sometimes be difficult, especially for people who are not familiar with website design or coding.
There is no phone support available, so if you need help with your site, you will need to submit a ticket and wait for a response.
There is no support for third-party apps, plugins, or extensions. This can be limiting if you want to add more features to your site or if something goes wrong with one of the integrations.
Apart from, pricing is more expensive with Squarespace than other website builders.
Which is the best website builder for SEO?
There are a variety of website builders available on the market. They all have their own unique features and benefits, although we still remain that WordPress is THE best CRM for SEO. Aside from WordPress, there are other CRMs that have some very limited built-in SEO features: Wix Weebly Squarespace (the topic of our article) GoDaddy Shopify Webnode Webflow Dreamhost Gator by HostGator I do not recommend any of these CRMs, but they do offer some functionality
Yes! As a matter of fact, Squarespace is frequently used for affiliate marketing in New Zealand and throughout Australasia due to its simplicity and since it is heavily promoted in those locations.
There’s a whole lot more we could cover on this topic, but hopefully, you get the picture. Good luck with your SEO efforts!
