What is SEO and Why is it important for Squarespace?
Every website designer desires to create stunning and functional sites that just work. And by working, we mean a website that serves both users and the client.
And what better way to serve a client than to build their site for SEO?
Now, what is SEO, and why is it important?
The acronym is short for search engine optimisation, a strategy that helps you enhance your website visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). These strategies help your website reach potential clients without extra promotion.
This brief guide will quickly explain why SEO is important when designing websites.
The Importance of SEO for Websites
If spending less on generating website traffic sounds exciting, you should understand why SEO is important. SEO is simply the practice of optimising your site to increase its ranking in search results. In other words, SEO helps your website appear organically when someone searches for relevant keywords.
While blogging on Squarespace can boost your online presence, SEO can help you maximise your blog’s digital potential. When done right, it also ensures that your website is optimised for mobile users accessing it on their phones or tablets, especially considering that 55% of website traffic comes from mobile. This helps ensure everyone can find the information they need quickly and easily, regardless of how they access your site.
Moreover, a good SEO strategy means that your website will be more attractive to potential customers because it will be easy to use and navigate — something that all web designers should strive for. In essence, don’t leave out SEO in your web design process; it’s essential for success!
On-Page Optimisation: Optimising Your Website Content
On-page SEO is a critical optimisation strategy that enhances a website’s content to improve informativeness, usability, and relevance for search engines. You can achieve this by creating quality content that contains relevant keywords and phrases.
When it comes to optimising website content, there are several things you need to consider to ensure your site is both user-friendly and Google-friendly.
Here’s an overview of the critical elements for on-page optimisation:
1. Page Titles
Page titles should be concise and include essential information about what each page offers. They should also include the main keywords that are relevant to that page and should be between 55 and 60 characters. Lastly, including clarifications in brackets within your page title can boost click-through rates (CTR) by up to 38%.
Consider this as an example: How to Achieving a Stunning Squarespace Design [Video]
2. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are summaries that help users understand your page’s content before clicking on it. So, ensure it’s catchy enough to grab the user’s attention. Meta descriptions should also include relevant keywords where applicable and not exceed 160 characters. For more meta description best practices, we suggest you check out this Squarespace SEO checklist.
3. Content
You should write your content from a user perspective and include key terms commonly used when searching for a particular topic — this will help with SEO rankings in SERPs. Additionally, your content should be well organised, logically structured and easy to read while including internal links to other related pieces of content where possible.
Extra Tip:
While enhancing your on-page SEO strategy will help improve your website’s visibility in organic search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you’ll also need an SEO plugin for Squarespace. Squarespace SEO settings aren’t comprehensive due to their focus on simplicity, but using a plugin can supercharge your efforts. For example, this plugin can help detect broken links, incorrect meta description formats, poorly optimised pages, etc.
Off-Page Optimisation: Building Quality Backlinks
For a strong SEO foundation, off-page optimisation is an absolute must. You can think of off-page optimisation as building solid relationships with high-quality websites to link back to your website via backlinks.
Backlinks help search engines understand the quality and relevance of a website. If high-quality websites link to yours, it must mean your site is valuable and authoritative.
Link-building should be part of your SEO strategy; for one, it helps search engines understand that your site should be ranked higher than others when someone searches for specific keywords. For context, the #1 result on Google has about 3.8x more backlinks than results in positions #2 to #10.
Here are some essential tips to ensure you build only quality backlinks:
Ensure you only link to reputable websites; low-quality links can hurt your rankings.
Try not to have too many links pointing from one web page; this is called “link stuffing,” and it’s against Google’s guidelines.
Take the time to create excellent content; this will attract more authoritative websites when they see something worth linking back to.
Keep an eye on competitor links and replicate them if you think they’re good enough for your website, too!
These Squarespace SEO tips offer other proven means of securing excellent backlinks for your website, so we suggest you give them a look.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main benefit of SEO?
A good SEO strategy can give you more traffic and increase sales through your sales funnel.
How much does it cost for SEO?
The cost of SEO varies by the size of your business. You can expect to spend between £299 to £10k per month if you’re outsourcing. On the bright side, you can slash most of these costs when you take advantage of the Squarespace SEO plugin mentioned earlier.
Wrapping It Up
Understanding and utilising SEO is an absolute must for website designers. Whether you’re designing a new website from scratch or optimising an existing one, SEO should be a priority.
So far, this guide has outlined what SEO is and why it’s important. It’ll help you rank higher on search engines and increase organic traffic, but it’ll also help you create a better user experience and generate more conversions.
Again, an essential tool in your arsenal is the SEOSpace plugin; we’d recommend you explore it with the free subscription plan.