Squarespace SEO for Beginners
SEOSpace Plugin - Beginner Setup and Live Review
I have been following SEOSpace for some time now and just installed their plugin, the only SEO plugin for specifically for Squarespace. It is amazing!! This is by far the easiest way to approach Squarespace SEO for beginners!
If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of SEO, this is the solution for you! The plugin really tells you exactly what to do.
However, installing any new kind of software can feel like a lot. So, I have recorded a walkthrough of what this process looks like! Watch this 15 minute video and learn what you need to do to install the plugin and how to get the most out of the free version if you are just getting started with SEO.
Disclaimer: I was not paid or asked to record this video. I love this product and use it for myself and my clients and genuinely think it’s the best SEO solution out there.
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00:02 This video is going to cover what to expect from the free version of SEO Space, the SEO plugin for Squarespace.
00:10 If you've ever felt at all overwhelmed by SEO, and you have a Squarespace website, this is definitely your solution. The plugin itself is super easy to use, but I know that sometimes getting into new software and even just setting something up for the first time can feel really overwhelming.
00:27 So I just wanted to do a quick review of exactly what this process looks like. So you can preview this, you can watch the video ahead of time, feel good about the process, or watch it in real time, pause it, and set things up along the way.
00:41 So the first thing I want to talk about is we're going to go to the SEO Space website, which is right here on the screen, and we're going to create an account.
00:50 And you're just going to go to the top here and click Install Plugin. It's going to bring up this screen.
00:58 You probably haven't already created an account. Because you're watching this video, so you're going to go to haven't got an account.
01:05 And this is going to bring up the screen that allows you to create an account. You can put your information in and create your account, or you can just join directly with Squarespace.
01:13 Honestly, either one of these works. If it's easier to sign in with your current Squarespace credentials, just click this button right here.
01:23 So the next step is setting up Google Chrome and the extension. So I'm going to go ahead and close this browser.
01:30 Now this plugin works through a Chrome extension. So if you've never used Chrome before or never used a Chrome extension, I'm going to really quickly show you what this looks like.
01:41 I promise it's not hard. Now if you are a Mac user and don't have Chrome, don't worry. I am a die-hard Mac user and I use Chrome for Mac.
01:50 That's what you see here on the screen and it's great. I'll include a link below of where you can download Chrome for Mac.
01:57 Once you have that installed, you can go to Google and you can either Google Chrome extension store or I'll provide a link directly to this this SEO space plugin for Squarespace and if you click on that link this is what it's going to look like.
02:11 I already have it installed so when you look at this page it'll say install extension. Of course I already have it installed so this button has changed.
02:20 Now once you install that extension it's going to show up right here in the upper right hand side. So you're going to click on this and it's going to prompt you to log in and again you can log in with the credentials you just set up or log in directly with your Squarespace credentials if that's how you
02:37 set up your account. Now, once you do that, you'll have the ability to go to your dashboard, but there's actually one more step you need to do.
02:46 It's going to prompt you to sync up with your Search Console account. So if you haven't done Search Console, I promise this is the easiest thing you're going to do all day.
02:55 So you're going to come into your Squarespace account and you're going to go to Analytics. Now I'm in my demo account, so everything is zero.
03:05 Don't worry. Then we're going to go to Search Keywords. And if you click on this, you're going to get this little prompt here.
03:13 It says Google Search Keywords and you're going to connect. And when you click on this Connect button, it's going to ask you to sign in to your Google account.
03:21 Now this is, this could be your Gmail account, your YouTube account, Google Drive, any of those Google tools. That's your Google account.
03:32 So all you're going to do is click the Connect button, put your Google account credentials in, and it's actually going to completely set this up for you.
03:39 And that's all you have to do. Now we can use the plugin. So I'm going to go to my live site so we can actually audit a real live page.
03:51 Okay, so up until this point we've created an account and signed up for the plugin. We installed Google Chrome, um, the browser if you didn't already have it.
04:01 We installed the extension and then we set up Google Search Console if you didn't already have it. And if you do, you of course can just sign in to your Google account and it will automatically find it for you.
04:12 So now that we're on this live page, once this extension is enabled, this little check mark is going to show up on bottom here.
04:20 And when You click on this, it loads the plugin and it's going to prompt you to scan the page. Now I've already done this page, so it's showing 100%, but these are the parameters that you'll get.
04:33 It'll look through your Heading 1, Security, SEO Title, Images, Meta Description, URL, Bye'all. Indexing Links, and Work Count. Now if you hover over these little eyes, it'll tell you exactly what these are.
04:47 So if you're not quite sure what a Meta Description is, or why it's scanning your images, it will give you information on each of these.
04:54 And then under these, you get more information. Now I'm going to go ahead and audit another page. This is page of mine in real time, so you can see what this looks like.
05:04 Now this is my About page, and I have not scanned this page yet. So we're going to do this in real time together.
05:14 Alright so I'm going to go ahead and run my scan. Now, they do give you recommended pages, so if you're feeling completely lost.
05:20 Completely overwhelmed, and you don't know where to start. You can start here. I ran this on my site, and it recommended that I optimize some of my blocks.
05:27 Which makes sense, because those are some of the pages that rank the highest. But for this particular demo, you know I am interested in scanning and optimizing all of my pages, so I'm going to go ahead and do my About page.
05:39 So let's go ahead and run this scan. Alright, so here we go. So this is pretty similar to my homepage before I made some changes.
05:54 It's not terrible, but it's not great. So you'll see a lot of these areas I already have optimized. You know I do this for a living, so I already have a head start.
06:03 However, there is some stuff that this plugin is suggesting. Now I completely stand behind the SEO plugin and Henry and all of these suggestions and really feel that everything that they do is right on.
06:15 So I am going to take the time to optimize this page based on these suggestions. So let's look through some of them.
06:22 So they're saying the URL word count is 2 and they're saying try to make it between 3 and 6. So we'll take a look at that in a second.
06:32 The heading, they're recommending a little bit longer, not much but a little bit. Every single page on your website should have one and only.
06:40 Only one heading one and mine, if I go ahead and minimize this, here's my heading one or it should be.
06:46 I'm going to take a look at that in a second. Let me bring this back up. I love that this plugin that you can keep this box open while you're making changes and editing your site.
06:55 So you can kind of go back and forth. And then it's saying the SEO title needs to be, it looks like.
07:00 Like slightly longer. So I've optimized my, some of my SEO descriptions and titles based on some other recommendations and I'm now going to come back and recommend it all based on the SEO space recommendations.
07:12 So you might be wondering if you've never done SEO before, it's great that it tells you all of these things to do.
07:19 And this is probably already. I'm already feeling in some ways really exciting but maybe a little overwhelming. So I just want to show you how to edit some of these things.
07:27 Now I love that this makes SEO as easy as I think is humanly possible. There is still a little bit of a learning curve but it's just so clear exactly what you need to do.
07:39 And this is the free plan. So there's already so much to do. So in order to make these changes we're going to do URL heading one and SEO title.
07:47 So I'm going to go ahead and click on this little gear icon. So to access your SEO information you can hover over any page and click on the gear icon.
07:57 So let's go ahead and do that. And I'm actually going to minimize this just so I can see this better.
08:01 So here we have page title, page URL, and our settings. So it's saying the URL word count should be a little longer and it's also saying SEO title can be a little longer.
08:15 So let's go ahead and see what I've set up here. So my SEO title is Squarespace Designer. So I might want to make this a little bit, maybe something like Squarespace Website Designer might make it the right the right word count, the right character count.
08:32 I'd have to mess around a little bit, but something like that not only makes it the recommended length, but it puts the word website in there which is just going to make this even more searchable, right?
08:41 This is my about page. Now trying to rank for the keyword Squarespace Designer or Squarespace Website Designer is going to be pretty competitive, but this is my about page.
08:51 I'm not trying to rank on page number one with this particular page. I just want to make it really clear to Google what I do.
08:58 But anything I can do to make this more searchable, and make it more clear to Google exactly who I am and what I'm offering, and how that ties into my blogs, which I do want to have rank on page number one, is all for the best.
09:11 So this is where I would do the SEO title and just optimize that a little bit. Now the SEO title, it's great if it matches your page title, but in this case, I went ahead and put in a unique one.
09:23 Then let's see here, we've got the URL, so if I come back to general, so under SEO, we have SEO title and meta description, and this is where you can optimize those.
09:36 Under general, we have our page title, now in this case, my page about, and I wanted to come in here and put something unique for SEO, so if there's nothing in here, it's just going to show your page title, and if for some reason you don't want your page title to be your SEO title, you can edit that.
09:57 Now, back under general, this is where I can go in and do and change the slug, so I'm going to have to take a minute to think about what I want to do there, and exactly how to integrate this, so I'm not going to do anything right now, but URL, that's where you find your URL, so I'm going to hit cancel
10:14 , and the very last thing that this wants me to do is the heading, so I'm going to minimize this again, and I'll to show you how to edit a heading on a page.
10:25 Alright, so I'm going to click edit, we'll just see what's going on here. Yeah, so this is my heading one, when I hover over this you can see it's heading one, which is great, and it's suggesting, again, just a few more words.
10:39 It wants a few more characters to be added, so this a little longer. So, basically I would go through this process, I'm going to go ahead and save this page, and I'm going to rescan, and we're just going to see if we get a little bit better score.
11:00 Alright, so. So, let's scan. So, now that I'm up here, I'm going to say rescan. Now keep in mind, the free option only allows 15 basic scans a month, so if you're just getting started, this is a good way to kind of dip your toes in the pool.
11:16 Now we are going to have to rescan without a designated keyword, because that's only available on the DIY paid plan and above.
11:23 Now, if you're just getting started with SEO and this is all completely new, honestly, you're probably not ready to get into keywords anyways and I'll give you some tips for that later, but for now, we're going to go ahead and rescan without a keyword, because we're just trying to basically make sure
11:39 we've covered our basics. Got all the meta descriptions, and the headings, and the URLs, and everything else in place. All right, so we're doing better.
11:50 You can see that I fixed my heading one. It was happy with that and SEO title is still saying that it's not quite the right length and of course I have to come back and do the URL.
12:00 So, you can go through and do this for all your pages. Now what I did with my home page, I'll show you on my dashboard.
12:07 So to access the dashboard, you can either click this logo right here, or you can come up to the extension and click go to dashboard.
12:16 When you click on that, you're going to get your dashboard. Now this is my home page right here from a previous scan.
12:23 I'm going to click previous scans, and you'll see these are the scans I did this morning when I installed the plugin.
12:29 So, similar to my about page, it started off at 63, I made a very variety of changes, and then eventually got it to be 100% based on the plugin's recommendations.
12:42 So, that's it for this plugin. I am going to give a brief introduction to keywords, if you're just getting started.
12:48 So, if you have never done SEO before, and the whole keyword thing feels overwhelming, all I want you to do is make a list of the things that you think your potential audience is Googling.
13:00 Literally, pretend like you're a potential customer or client. What would those people type into Google? The actual things they would type into Google?
13:08 And come up with a list. It can be a few things, it can be a dozen different search queries, really whatever you think they're typing into Google, write that stuff down, and here's where you're going to put it on your website.
13:20 So, you're going to want to put it in your heading 1, so these can be full phrase, full keyword phrases, it can be partial keyword phrases, for example, I'm a Squarespace designer so I want to have the word Squarespace show up in certain places, the word website, Squarespace website show up, I mean,
13:39 it doesn't have to be full. It be the full thing, but just take some of the words and put those in certain places and if it makes sense you can put the full key phrase.
13:48 So take that list, we're going to put some things in your heading, in the, you can always include something in your first paragraph, that's really helpful, and then the meta description, So you're going to come back.
14:00 to these SEO settings, and you're going to take those keywords, or those key phrases, it's helpful if you put it in the URL slug, it's helpful if you put it in the page title, the page title and navigation title can be the same, unless it's super long and then you may need the navigation title to be
14:19 a little shorter. And then for SEO, if your page title, from here, if that isn't specifically what you want to show up in SEO, you can customize that, and have a custom SEO title and description.
14:34 And those are the places you want to put these things. So let's just review that one more time. You're going to put those, take those.
14:40 Key phrases and keywords, however they make sense, put them in a heading 1, first paragraph on your page, come into SEO settings, whoops, go back to general.
14:52 You're going to want to put it in your page title, in your slug if it makes sense. This may or may not make sense on your main pages.
14:59 is, this is a little. bit better for blogging, but if it makes sense, put it in your slug. SEO, you can put it in your SEO title if the page title doesn't already match what you want for SEO and your meta description.
15:11 So if you can take what you think your people are googling and integrate it into those spaces, that is enough to get you started.
15:19 That in combination with this video. This plugin which is going to help walk you through all of the essential pieces on your website that you might be forgetting.
15:25 Like again, I have a lot of green checkboxes because I do this quite often on my site and client sites so I've already compressed my images and worked on a lot of the other things, but in terms of keywords, before you're ready to upgrade and start searching for them, search for keywords and try and figure
15:42 that out, that is how you can approach keywords. So that's all I have for you today on this demo. I'm going to go ahead and upgrade to the DIY plan and do a little review on that and then the designer plan.
15:55 Now, this platform, SEO Space, at the time of recording this video is coming out with a keyword research tool on the designer plan.
16:05 So if you want to take things to the next level, if you're on the free or the DIY plan and want to take things to the next level, you can sign up for that plan, sign up for the designer plan and do your own keyword research or work with a designer such as myself to find better keywords.
16:20 But just using this free version and thinking through what your target audience is searching will go a long way in getting your site starting to rank on Google.
Table of Contents
Setting Up the SEOSpace Plugin & Creating an Account
The first thing you’ll need to do is create an account with SEOSpace and install the plugin.
Installing Chrome (if you don’t already have it)
If you don’t already have the Chrome browser, you’ll need to install it. This plugin works through a Chrome extension. If you are a Mac user, don’t worry! I use a Mac and use the Chrome for Mac application and it works great. To make sure you download a real copy, only download directly from Chrome itself!
Installing the SEOSpace Extension
Now you need to install the SEOSpace extension. If you have never done this, it’s easy, don’t worry. Just click the link below to go directly to the Chrome Extension Store and click the “install extension” button!
Download the SEOSpace Chrome Extension >
Installing Search Console (if you don’t already have it)
You do need to connect to Search Console for the SEOSpace plugin to work, but this is really easy too.
Go to “Analytics” on the left-hand menu and click on “Search Keywords”. This will prompt you to log into your Google account. It will automatically set it up FOR you!
Not sure if you have a Google account? If you ever log into Gmail, YouTube, or Google Drive, you have a Google account! Use the credentials you use to log into one of those accounts.
Demo of the Free Trial
In the video (above) I will walk you through how to audit a page in real time (we do this together so you can see my brain in action). If you aren’t sure how to actually implement some of the suggestions, here are some more free articles to help:
Keyword and Keyword Placement Suggestions for Beginners
If you are just getting started, putting together a keyword strategy is going to feel overwhelming. Don’t worry, I have some tips for you!
1) make a list of all the things you think your target audience might type into Google. Yes, the exact phrases or words they would type into Google.
2) make a list of as many as you can, even if it is just a few.
3) take these phrases and use some of these words in the following places:
Heading 1 (each page should have one and only one Heading 1)
In the first paragraph of text
Page Title
SEO page title (if the page title doesn’t work)
Meta Description
URL (if possible, this may not make sense on some of the primary pages of your site).
Next Steps
Install SEOSpace for free to get started! Then, if you need help, working with a Squarespace SEO expert can help you take things to the next level! We will start with a free call to talk about your unique needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you get good SEO with Squarespace
Yes, you can get good SEO with Squarespace. The website platform you use is not a ranking factor. The Squarespace platform has everything you need to optimize your website for SEO and to rank on the first page of Google. There are built-in options to customize urls, page titles, and meta descriptions, and much more.
Can a beginner do SEO?
Yes a beginner can do SEO. You just need to make a list of the search phrases your audience is likely typing into Google and optimize your website with those search terms. If you need some help, you can check out my beginner DIY SEO checklist or optimize your website with the free version of SEOSpace, a jargon-free SEO plugin specifically for Squarespace.
How much does Squarespace SEO cost?
It is free to optimize your Squarespace website for SEO. You will need to pay for Squarespace hosting. If you want to take your Squarespace SEO to the next level, you can pay an Squarespace SEO expert to help you, or start with the free version of the SEOSpace plugin.
Can you add SEO keywords to Squarespace?
Yes you can add SEO keywords to Squarespace. You can add keywords directly on your pages and blog posts. Additionally, you can go to individual page settings (by clicking the “gear icon” and add in keywords to your page title, url, SEO title, and meta description.
