A Client-Ready SEO Checklist for Traditional and AI-Powered Search
As a professional web designer, setting your clients up for long-term success means more than delivering a beautiful website. Implementing a strong SEO strategy before and after creating their Squarespace website is an important step of offboarding a project. This article serves as a checklist for the SEO tasks your client should be doing to stay visible in traditional and AI search after you hand off their site.
1. Include strategic keywords throughout your website
Search engines are good at figuring out what you’re trying to communicate. But keywords and specific phrases help the search engine better understand the content on a particular page.
Whether you add a new page or update content on an existing one, identify the relevant keyword that customers are likely to search. Include these keywords in the page’s title, headings, and body copy. Keep in mind that AI search engines weigh clarity and context more heavily than keyword density alone, so writing for your audience serves search engines and AI tools well.
2. Use Squarespace’s built-in SEO features
Squarespace built-in SEO features already do a lot of the work for you. Without them, maintaining a proper sitemap and URL structure can become quite complex. Here are a few features to take advantage of:
Title or heading tags: Your H1 should be the biggest text size and should always be the headline of the page. There should only be one H1 per page.
Footer: Create a footer that includes links to prominent pages and subpages, such as your about and contact pages.
Font sizing: Search engines care about user experience (UX), so use a minimum of 15px font for the base font and maintain healthy spacing across your pages.
Contrast: For readability and accessibility, use high contrast between your background and text. For example, black text on a white background.
Sitemap: Squarespace automatically creates and updates your sitemap. Use each page, blog, and product page as close to its original purpose as possible.
3. Add internal links between your pages
Identify the most important content on your site for customers and search engines with internal linking, or adding links between pages. As a rule of thumb, it should take less than three clicks to go from your homepage to any given page on your website.
When linking internally between pages in your site, keep URLs clean by only using the part after the forward-slash (/) and not the entire domain.
4. Use proper and clean URLs
Your URLs (slugs) are important and should be intentional. While it’s not a key ranking factor, they let visitors and search engines know what to expect on a page. Some examples of clean URLs include /about or /services or /contact, while URLs like /home-new or /home-3 look messy and can impact SEO performance.
URLs for blog posts should match the search query you want them to show up for.
5. Redirect broken links
Over time, you might get rid of a few pages or combine pages. This is a common change, but it’s important to consider SEO implications. To ensure that visitors and search engines aren’t hitting a dead end, redirect pages that no longer exist to the closest live page on the site.
If you’re replacing an old page, try to preserve the same URL. If you change it, set up a 301 redirect so visitors and search engines land on the new page automatically.
6. Add your site’s SEO description
Your SEO site description—also known as your site’s meta description—is the text that appears underneath your site’s title in search engine results. For those using traditional search, it’s often the first impression of your business. Write a clear, one-to-two sentence summary of what you do and who you serve.
You don’t need any special extensions or plugins to manage this. Squarespace has a dedicated field built right into the platform. Keep the text between 50 and 300 characters.
7. Add SEO titles and descriptions to all your pages
Add an SEO title and description to each individual page and blog post on your site. It’s important to fill this out so you’re optimizing for specific content on that page.
For example, your about page should have an SEO description that summarizes your business in an engaging way while addressing what someone searching for a business like yours actually wants to know. A blog post description should preview what the reader will learn and reflect the specific question or topic they searched for.
Use Squarespace AI to scan your site, find areas where SEO page descriptions are missing, and review or edit suggestions offered for those fields. These suggestions optimize your content for keywords related to your business or brand.
8. Include alt text for images
Visuals are a great opportunity to capture additional SEO value. Include a description of every image on your site to help search engines understand what your images contain.
Adding alt-text is also a best practice for improving the accessibility of your website. Customers who are visually impaired may rely on alt text fields to interpret the image, so include an accurate description, up to 250 characters, wherever possible.
If you have a lot of images to update, Squarespace AI can scan your site for images missing alt text and suggest descriptions for you to review, edit, or regenerate.
9. Use Squarespace AI Visibility
AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews are quickly becoming a new front door for how people discover businesses. If you’re not tracking whether your business shows up in these AI-generated responses, you have no way of knowing whether you’re actually visible where searches are happening.
Squarespace’s AI Visibility tool is built directly into your site’s dashboard. It runs both branded prompts (searches for your business by name) and non-branded prompts (searches for what you offer) across leading AI platforms. Then, it gives you a search visibility score that combines your traditional SEO and AI performance in one place.
Check your dashboard regularly to see where, when, and how your business shows up, surface any missing or incorrect information AI tools may be using to describe you, and monitor your visibility trends over time. You can also benchmark yourself against competitors and create custom prompts tailored to what matters most to your business. Learn more about how to show up in AI search from Circle partner Khara Wolf.
10. Monitor your site with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you how your site performs in search, including which pages are indexed, which search queries drive traffic, and any technical issues Google has flagged.
Register and verify your site to get started, then check back regularly, even after your site has been live for a while. It’s one of the best ways to catch indexing issues or duplicated content before they quietly hurt your rankings. Learn how to verify your site with Google Search Console.
Consider registering your site with Bing Webmaster Tools. It’s a similar free tool as Google Search Console but built for Microsoft’s search engine.
11. Set up and connect Google Analytics (GA4)
Your analytics can help you uncover new opportunities or areas of concern within your site. Start by connecting your site to Google Analytics for a top-notch (and free!) data source for your Squarespace site.
Here are a few ways to use your analytics to improve your site:
Make the most visited pages easy to access: Link them both in the main navigation and footer. For lesser visited pages, link them only in the footer.
Highlight your best content: Prioritize displaying most-viewed pages, blog posts, and products on your site. Squarespace has two features for helping you do this: summary blocks and featured blog posts. Use featured blog posts to manually select the best performing content, then display summary blocks throughout your site to prioritize their visibility.
Prioritize design for popular device views: Most website traffic comes from desktop or mobile devices. Check your analytics to see which one drives the majority of your traffic, and prioritize that experience.
Turn this checklist into ongoing support
Share this checklist with clients as part of your offboarding process, and explain that a new site will see rankings change frequently. SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it task, so set expectations early that ongoing optimization is key to seeing long-term success.
This is also a great opportunity to let clients know how you can continue supporting them. Whether that means offering SEO maintenance as an ongoing service or referring them to a trusted specialist, clients are more likely to invest in their site’s long-term success when they know where to turn for help.
Related resources:
Frequently asked questions
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The higher a website or web page appears in SERPs, the more likely searchers will click on it. SEO is essential for clients who want to increase their online visibility and attract more visitors to their websites.
What’s the difference between SEO and AI search visibility?
SEO improves how a website ranks in traditional search engine results pages, while AI search visibility determines whether a business gets mentioned or recommended in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews. Both matter, but they aren’t optimized the same way—AI search rewards clear, credible, well-structured content over keyword density alone. This isn’t a niche concern either: two-thirds of small businesses expect AI search to be very or extremely important for how customers find their business in the future.
Why do you need SEO as a web designer?
A beautiful website is an important foundation of an online presence, but strong SEO takes things to the next level. There are a couple reasons why this is important:
It positions you as a high-value designer: You may attract more clients if you can offer SEO optimizations and become a subject matter expert.
It impacts the long-term success of the project: You might not see the immediate SEO impact, but the extra effort can improve results in the long run for your clients.
It increases future work opportunities: Clients may be more likely to work with you again or hire you for SEO maintenance.
Optimizing for SEO throughout the design process and providing a list of related tips for clients can help you offboard them with success.
How does Squarespace make SEO user-friendly?
Squarespace makes it user-friendly for both designers and clients to implement SEO tactics. Because Squarespace is SEO-friendly, industry best practices are built directly into every site. The built-in SEO properties include mobile optimization, automated sitemaps, and on-page SEO fields such as metadata and the URL.
You and your client can manually enable SEO features like meta tags and SEO descriptions. Squarespace also handles a lot of technical SEO in the back end, so you won’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty details like site speed or installing plugins.
This article was originally published on October 28, 2022. It has since been updated.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers and web design agencies. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
