So now you have your website up and running, we need to make sure that people are viewing your website. Obviously a good way to promote your website is to share on social platforms, but another key to success is with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), this is the process of helping bots (these are website crawlers sent out from search engines like Google) to crawl and index your site. This means that when someone googles ‘Local paint shop’ Google will use the information that is has from all the indexed websites to return the most relevant results.

So how do we help these bots know what your website is about:

Optimize your website content

Ensure that your website content is keyword-optimized and relevant to your target audience. Use your target keywords in the page title, headings, and body content. Remember your website is still made for humans, and so should be easy to read and understand, not just full of keywords. But if your website sales pet collars, make sure its in text somewhere, don’t rely on images or known brands to reference what your business does.

Use structured data

Structured data means using headings, lists and quotes correctly. While you could achieve the same look by making a title bold, and changing the colour, make sure you are selecting the text, and setting the heading Type. Take this blog for example, our heading is a H1, as this is the most important, and then its split into multiple h3 tags for each of these sections. This helps the bots understand the structure of the content.

Use Alt Text for images

Make sure to include descriptive Alt Text for all images on your site. This helps search engines understand the content of your images and can also improve the accessibility of your site. When writing the alt text for an image, describe the image itself, such as ‘girl reading a book on a beach’, or ‘Lucky Night Graphic Logo’. For how to do this check out this useful documentation from Squarespace

Improve site speed

Site speed is a big factor for search engine ranking. While Squarespace does handle a lot of the page speed, a couple of tips could really help:

• Reduce image size (Squarespace help)

• Don’t make a single page too long, can split out into multiple pages if it takes some time to load

• Remove some of the animated backgrounds if you have any

Optimize your URL’s

The URL of a page on Squarespace is usually generated from the page title. In most cases this is perfect and exactly what you want, however its best to check them, for example if you have 2 pages with same title (usually happens when you want to replace a page without editing the original page), in this case the page will have a number added on the end, for example: ‘homepage-2’. When it comes to making this page live, you want to make sure that it avoids using random numbers, this is also the case for things like /black-friday-sale-2022. In this case its better for your SEO to use /black-friday-sale and update the page every year.

Use internal linking

Linking to other pages within your site can help search engines understand the structure of your site and can also improve the user experience. This can be from simply adding a link to a blog or FAQ page, or even adding related products on your product page (Squarespace even has built-in support for this).

We hope this post has given you some inspiration for your Squarespace site! As always, feel free to reach out on Instagram @luckynightstudio or via email at hiya@luckynightstudio.co.uk if you have any questions. Catch ya later!

Louise & Naomi