How to Improve Your Squarespace SEO Score (in just 15 minutes)!
About this Squarespace video tutorial
Want to know how I improve my SEO score in just 15 minutes? In this real-time Squarespace tutorial I'll be covering how to use the free SEO tool Seobility to check your website’s search value, giving you valuable insight on how to optimize your website to be better crawled by search engines such as Google.
Timestamps
0:38 - SEObility Results Page
1:39 - Page Quality
2:12 - Using H1 Text In Copy
5:50 - Repeated Use Of Tags
6:46 - Tags Being Too Long
7:55 - Images Without Alt Tags
9:53 - Social Sharing Links
10:50 - Page Structure/Header Levels
11:55 - Anchor Text
14:29 - Retesting Your Site
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Using SEObility To Check Your Website
On the website SEObility, you can three times a day check the SEO value of your website for free. Once you’ve tested a page on your site (homepage is recommended), you’ll get a score and some quick suggestions for ways you can increase that score. If your SEO score is lower than 80, you need to make some changes.
Page Quality
In the section for ‘page quality’ you’ll see a couple of quick suggestions on how to improve your score. Some of the examples we’ve seen are:
Not using your H1 text in your page copy
Repeating certain tags too often
Tags being too long
Images without any alt text
H1 Text
Your main header or H1 tag is the most important tag on your page, and you want Google to understand that you’re consistent with this language. Not having that text anywhere other than the H1 tag is an issue, and while you want to be sure not to stuff it randomly throughout your page, find a place (or a few places, even better) where it makes sense and repeat that H1 copy.
In optimizing the Designing The Row home page, that H1 text is now used three times throughout the page copy.
Repeated Tags
If you have a phrase on your website bolded, Google will mark it as a ‘tag’. Tagging the same phrase too many times can actually be a problem for Google, even when it’s not intentional. On my home page, the tag for Designing the Row was used to frequently, even though the bolding was just a design decision. It’s always a good idea to go through and think hard about which instances of certain tags you want bolded so you can have your site designed how you’d like without it causing an issue with search engines.
Tag Length
Similarly, when a bolded section is too long, that tag will also be flagged by Google; SEObility recommends that tags be no longer than 70 characters. By keeping your tags under this length, search engines will have a far easier time figuring out what is in your page and how to best show it to your intended audience. If you’re unsure about character limits, you can always use Character Counter for assistance.
Image Alt Text
Putting alt text on all of your images is one of the easiest ways to boost your SEO value. Whenever you have a new image in your site, through Squarespace’s tool you can easily provide a quick meta description of the image so search engines can use that image information as part of their search algorithm. While it can be time consuming and might require some redesigning, it’s worth taking the time to give all of your images alt tags.
To add an alt tag:
Click on your image when editing the page.
Click on the ‘pencil’ icon to edit the image’s information.
Scroll down to the section ‘image alt tag’ at the bottom of the image information section.
Write your short tag and save.
Header Levels
Home pages in particular need to use a variety of header levels or H tags to differentiate sections of the copy. SEObility recommends not skipping any header levels when building out your site. For example, on my home page, I had an H1 tag, multiple H2 tags, multiple H4 tags, but no H3 tags to keep the header levels consistent. This can cause issue when search engines are crawling your site, so you may need to design your site around this ladder of header tags.
Re-Testing Your Site
Once you’ve made the changes you want to make to better optimize your website, you should use the SEObility tool to re-check your site. As a reminder, you only get three free uses of the SEObility tool per day, so you should hold off on checking your score until you’ve finished making any changes to the search quality of your website.
Now that you know how to check, adjust, and re-check your website’s SEO score for free, it may be time for you to add more valuable assets to your site such as adding videos or building out your Squarespace blog, which you can learn more about here or by checking our more of my videos below!
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