Client Checklist for Boosting SEO
As a professional web designer, you want to set up your clients for future success—and this means more than delivering a beautiful website. Implementing a strong SEO strategy both before and after creating their Squarespace website is an important step in the web design journey and helps your work thrive.
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 users will click on it. SEO is essential for clients who want to increase their online visibility and attract more visitors to their websites.
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 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 your website for SEO throughout the design process and providing a list of related tips for your clients can help you offboard your clients with success.
How does Squarespace make SEO user-friendly?
Fortunately, Squarespace has made 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 site maps, and on-page SEO fields such as metadata and the URL.
Many SEO features can also be manually enabled by you or your client, including meta tags, SEO descriptions, or accelerated mobile pages. A lot of technical SEO is also covered by Squarespace in the back end, so you won’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty details like site speed or installing plugins.
To help your clients rank high on search engines, we’ve put together a website SEO checklist below.
11 Essential Optimizations For Your Clients Squarespace Website
As you’re building your client’s site with Squarespace, here are 11 SEO optimizations you should consider when building, designing, and offboarding the project.
1. Include strategic keywords
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 specific page.
As you design each page, make sure to identify the relevant keyword that customers are likely to search. This will help the search engine match your site’s content to the right people.
2. Take advantage of native Squarespace features
Squarespace makes it simple for designers to build with SEO in mind. Some features that you can take advantage of include:
Title tags: Your H1 (a.k.a. heading tag) should be the biggest text size and should always be the headline of the page.
Footer: Create a footer that includes links to all prominent pages and subpages.
Font sizing: Search engines care about the user experience, so use a minimum of 15px font for the base font and use 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. Ensure that pages, blogs, and stores are being used as close to their original purpose as possible.
3. Link pages within your site
Clearly identify the most important content on your site for customers and search engines with internal linking, or adding links between pages. The number of clicks it takes to go from your homepage to any given page on your website should be less than three.
Pro tip: When linking internally between pages in your site, keep URLs clean by only using the text after the forward-slash (/) and not the entire domain.
4. Disable duplicate or unused pages
When designing a new Squarespace site for a client, you likely have several versions of different pages. Maybe these are templates, alternative designs, or even just duplicates.
Pro tip: As you get closer to delivering the final site, make sure that these additional pages are hidden or disabled. This is especially important when you request Google to index your site because you don’t want to index demo content or half-designed pages.
5. 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.
Pro tip: URLs for blog posts should match the search query you want them to show up for.
6. Redirect broken links
When designing a client website, you might get rid of a few pages or combine pages from their old website. This is a common change, but it’s important to consider SEO implications in the process. To ensure that users (and search engines) aren’t hitting a dead end, redirect the pages that no longer exist to the closest page that is live on the site.
If you are recreating an old site page, preserve the same URL—but if you decide to change it, make sure it has a 301 redirect set up. Use 301 redirects for permanent changes to links under Settings and Advanced in your Squarespace home menu.
7. Fill out the SEO tab
Another way Squarespace prioritizes SEO for designers is by providing a simple tool for adding SEO site descriptions. This metadata is what your client’s customers will see on the search engine results page. You’ll find this in the menu under Marketing and SEO. The SEO tab also includes quick links for other resources like an SEO checklist.
Pro tip: When in doubt, ask your client what they would like to see for their homepage SEO description.
8. Add SEO titles and descriptions to all your pages
You can also add a title and description to each individual page. It’s important to fill this out so you’re optimizing for the content on that specific page. For example, an About Us page should have an SEO title and description that summarizes the details about your client in an engaging way. You can do this in Squarespace by going to Pages in your home menu. Then navigate to the Settings of each individual page by clicking the Settings wheel.
Pro tip: Consider adding a social sharing graphic for each page, product, and blog post so that when visitors share links, they are more engaging.
9. Register and verify your site with search engine tools
You’ve worked hard on your client site, and now it’s time to make sure search engines know it exists. You can register and verify your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
10. Setup & 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 some tips for improving your site’s design for SEO by following your analytics:
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 best blog posts: Prioritize displaying most-viewed pages, blog posts, and products on your site. Squarespace has two wonderful features for helping you do this—summary blocks and feature posts. Use feature posts to manually select the best performing content, then display summary blocks throughout your site to prioritize their accessibility.
Prioritize Design for Device: Typically, most website traffic comes from either desktop or mobile devices. Your design should prioritize the experience of whichever gets the majority traffic.
11. Include alt text for images
Visuals are a great opportunity to capture additional SEO value. Including a description of every image on your site helps 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 you’ll want to include an accurate description wherever possible.
Conclusion
As you share these SEO solutions with clients, make sure they understand that a new site will see rankings change frequently. It’s also important to set expectations and let the client know that they will need to continue with optimizations to maintain their success.
Ready to give Squarespace a try for your next project? Start a Squarespace trial today.
