Will building with Squarespace impact my SEO?

This is a very common question for businesses thinking of switching over to the Squarespace platform. And certainly, if you have strong search rankings for key pages or blog posts, switching from any one platform to another may lead to a temporary drop in rankings. But, with Squarespace, we can do a lot to mitigate the negative effects.

Your Page Slugs

A page 'slug' is the address used by browsers to find a page - in other words, it's your domain name, then a forward slash, then a page name. For example

goodwincreative.ca/portfolio

When we upgraded our website and relaunched in Squarespace 7.1 we changed that page slug to

goodwincreative.ca/squarespace-design-portfolio

Unfortunately, making a change like this can seriously affect your google ranking. This is because Google has your original page name indexed - and will for a while - so when people click on it they get a 404. Google doesn't like 404s.

This negative impact to your SEO can be easily avoided in two ways: 

1) Don't change your page slugs.

When we help a client change from an old site to a shiny new Squarespace site, we pay very close attention to their page slugs. Using an index of all pages (sitemap), we carefully duplicate the slugs from the old site onto the new site. 

Sometimes, it's not possible to copy all page slugs over. The new site might have far fewer pages, for example. If this is the case, then we move to

2) Redirect old pages to new pages.

Page redirects are acceptable and help preserve the SEO value of pages that don't transfer over to the new website. We examine the sitemap and carefully create a page redirect for each old page to a page on the new site. This is done in a settings area in the Squarespace back end. Each redirect looks something like this:

/portfolio -> /squarespace-design-portfolio 301

Now, if you type in or click on a link to the old page slug, you will be shown the new page.  If there is no matching new page, we'll often simply redirect to /home.

Redirects can be an arduous task especially if you are planning to move a large site over to Squarespace, but it is a vital step in maintaining your SEO ranking.

What our clients have said about SEO and their new Squarespace websites:

I was concerned about transitioning our old site to a new design because it was at a time when the business was at risk. But Sky (Goodwin Creative) was patient and diligent on maintaining the integrity of our SEO for every page and now, about 90% of our leads come from Google searches which indicates Google still recognizes our pages well, we are easily found, and users like what they see!

— Andrew Fredericks, CEO Karma Teachers Yoga

“Never been so busy and EVERY SINGLE PERSON mentions the new website!”

— Maddie Mulvaney - Luminous Studios

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Squarespace makes it easy to sign up to Google Analytics and all of our clients are advised to do so, with our help if need be.

Once your site has a Google Analytics account, we can start submitting your sitemap to Google Search for indexing. We might submit important individual pages as well, depending on the content of your site. 

Your Mushroom Blog

Squarespace advertises a 'blog-import' function but quite frankly, we have not had much success with it.  For one, it's not possible to duplicate the page names of your Wordpress blog (for example) in your Squarespace blog because of the nature of the Squarespace framework. Here's an example:

Wordpress blog page slug

mymushroomblog.com/whatmushroomstoavoid

Squarespace blog page slug

mymushroomblog.com/blog/whatmushroomstoavoid

as you can see, there's an blog name inserted in the page slug: /blog/

Yes, you can change that blog name but you can't remove it.

The only way to truly match the old blog post to a new blog post on your new squarespace site would be to create an actual page on the new site and call it 'whatmushroomstoavoid' - that might work for a few blog posts, but if you have many, it's not a workable solution.

So, long story short, if you have a huge blog, it's not recommended that you move it over to a Squarespace website. 

However, adding a new blog to a Squarespace website is easy and the blog tools are excellent. We have one 'blog' based magazine-style website that has been posting articles for almost 10 years. And we're still very happy with the site's performance.

Renaming image files

In an earlier article, How to Turn Your Website's Images into Google Juice, we explained how image file names can play a big role in your SEO ranking. We recommend using keywords in your file names to help your website get discovered by more visitors, thus increasing your traffic.

In the above article we explained how you can rename your images on your desktop. However, recently Squarespace has launched its Assets Library which now allows you to change the file names of images right on your website. This works really well for screenshots and stock images. You can add in the name of your business, or your service. For example, the hero image at the top of our website could be named

AdobeStock_604686007.jpeg

or we can change it to

squarespace-website-builder-vancouver-bc.jpeg

It’s obvious which name will help our company’s SEO more, right?

SEO Checklist

And finally, the folks at Squarespace have put together an amazing SEO Checklist which you can access here

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002090267-SEO-checklist

This will help you understand the work that needs to be done from beginning to end. But note, Squarespace ends with a disclaimer - 

SEO strategy falls outside of the scope of Squarespace Customer Support because search engine technology frequently changes and everyone's marketing needs are unique. Because of this, we can't guarantee results like ranking changes or listing appearance in a search engine.

That's why there are companies like Goodwin Creative to help you get through this!