Sue Warnke breaks down SEO for Squarespace sites: structure your navigation and headers to signal page importance, research both branded keywords and generic terms like "best bakery in New York City," then embed them in titles and product descriptions. Your homepage needs to grab visitors instantly or they'll bounce and hurt your rankings.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Great. What does that mean? This means formatting your website in a way that makes it easier for search engines to find your site and direct people to it.
Headers and site navigation are incredibly important for SEO. It allows search engines to very quickly identify what the most important content is on a page. Site navigation is also important because you're allowing search engines to quickly identify what pages are important. A mega menu, a dropdown, a header, a footer— all of these are static interlinks that search engines are going to crawl over and over again. And the more links you have, the more equity and authority those pages are assigned. One of the reasons that you might see websites with a bunch of links in the footer is something called interlinking. Interlinking is incredibly powerful for SEO across hundreds of thousands of websites because it allows users a quick way to navigate the entire website just through Twitter, but it also allows search engines to pick up what's really important and connected to this page. Keyword research and content planning is really where a lot of the fun starts for most people when they're really starting out in SEO. So in keyword research land, we have 2 main groups: branded and non-branded. Branded is you. It's people typing in your name, your brand, your company, your portfolio, whatever there is about you. There might not be a lot of people looking for you just yet, but it's very important to track who is. Which you can find in the Search Console integration we actually have at Squarespace. Non-branded is where things get different. Non-branded doesn't include your name and can be anything from one word all the way to a phrase like best bakery in New York City. These are all non-branded terms that have a different SERP per term, and it's incredibly important that you narrow down which ones you care about that get you traffic that converts to what you want it to do.
Once you've identified those non-branded keywords, make sure to use them in your headers, page titles, product descriptions, blog posts, or wherever else you can on your site. Don't underestimate the power of your homepage. If your homepage doesn't grip your visitors from the second your site loads, they're gonna bounce back to their search engine before they even look at your content, sending a signal that your site wasn't the answer they were looking for, meaning your site will likely get bumped down on their index. So make sure your homepage has clear and relevant titles, High-quality links or imagery, and some kind of action for your audience to take. That means buttons, directions to other pages, or something as simple as an add to cart. In conclusion, you don't need to be a web whiz or strategist to be an SEO pro. You just need to know the basics. And now you do.
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