Myths about Squarespace SEO
I recently had a conversation with a business owner who is keen to switch her WordPress to Squarespace because she loves the aesthetic of Squarespace websites (she is in the beauty business, so looks are important!)
She was concerned, however, that by switching to Squarespace somehow Google would view her website less favourably and she had heard from ‘others’ that Squarespace is ‘not good for SEO’. Ahhh, the old myth about Squarespace and Search Engine Optimisation raises its ugly head again!
Do you know what, it’s simply not true!
Firstly, what is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it basically means what steps you can take to ensure your website shows up on Google, Bing and other search engines. For my article on what SEO is, see here.
There are lots of factors which influence whether your site will show up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and none of them involve the platform you are using. If the site is set up correctly and is well designed, Google is not going to favour one platform over another. The brilliant people at Squarespace really want your site to perform really well. This is why they make it as easy as possible for you to set your site up properly for SEO, providing many fields and settings that optimise your site. After that, it is strategies such as content creation, back-links and a host of other things you can do to improve your SEO, none of which have anything to do with the platform you are using. Trust me, there’s a whole heap you can do yourself to improve your SEO on your Squarespace website and knock the naysayers out of the park!
Another common comment about Squarespace is that all their templates are equally good for SEO. Well, now they are because Squarespace has recently changed the platform to only one template. Yep, just one, but with multiple page layout possibilities. This is the new Squarespace 7.1. Personally I am still a fan of Squarespace 7.0 because they have not yet transferred all functionalities of 7.0 to 7.1, especially parallax scrolling which I still think is rather cool. So, are the 7.0 templates all equally good for SEO? Well, it has to be said that the ultra-versatile Brine family of templates has so many different site styling and formatting possibilities, particularly in the index pages which offer multiple places to input SEO settings on just one page alone.
The client I was referring to at the start of this article was worried about her SEO dropping if she switches to Squarespace from Wordpress. If the new site is correctly built, with redirects from URLs on the WordPress site or replicated URLs on the new site, there is no reason for the SEO rankings to drop. The Google spiders are still crawling the same page addresses and for the most part will find the same content on those pages. If the redirects are not properly set up, then yes Google will penalise you for bad links, but this is not because the new site is on Squarespace. Trust your Squarespace web designer to do the job properly and your rankings will not change. He/she will upload a new sitemap to Google too, once your new site is finished so that Google is up to date on the latest version of your site.
With Squarespace, your SEO settings will be at your fingertips and monitoring keywords and phrases in your page settings will be even easier.
And just to finish on this topic, I find it hard to believe that the gang at Squarespace would not be working very hard,24/7 to ensure that their platform is totally top-notch, so that millions of people around the world will use it.
Also, those same people might not know that you have to submit your new Squarespace website to Google Search Console. If you don't do that, of course it will have an impact on SEO and how Google crawls your website content!
So if you do switch over to Squarespace, trust me that you will have plenty of control over your SEO settings and with the right content strategy, you can watch your rankings grow.
