Is Squarespace Bad for SEO?
Introduction
Squarespace is a ubiquitous platform for website development that offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop feature. Squarespace’s templates are beautiful, and the platform already provides ecommerce capabilities which are very easy to use for anyone to create a high quality site. However, despite its many features, some have wondered if Squarespace is bad for SEO or search engine optimization. In this article, we will try to understand if Squarespace, in some way or another, limits your chances of ranking well on SERP.
The Basics of SEO
To establish whether Squarespace is damaging to SEO, it’s first necessary to understand what SEO means. Search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the process and practice applied to enable a website to have better rankings and, therefore, appear more often in the results of search engines.
Good SEO typically includes:
– Page titles and meta descriptions made more SEO friendly
– Relevant keywords and high-quality content
– Short loading time and being mobile device friendly
– Correct website structure and internal linking
– Links from other sources: the number and quality of backlinks from other websites that link to your website.
These areas must be optimized to make it easier for search engines such as Google to crawl, index, and interpret the content to evaluate its relevance to user queries.
Squarespace Page Builder
At the core of every Squarespace site is its powerful and highly flexible page creation system. It helps to create the web pages by using the drag and drop feature along with different elements to include on the page such as the text boxes, images, galleries, and so on.
But how does this page builder influence SEO?
Pros for SEO
– Clean code structure
– Tools like the title and description fields are integrated into the templates to perform an SEO role
– The choices available for URL slug customization
– With Google Analytics
Cons for SEO
– Little influence on the technical aspects of the site’s layout
– This is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of optimizing the internal linking structure of an organization’s website
– Cannot edit the base code
Although the page builder is relatively simple to use, certain basic adjustments enable full SEO tuning.
Squarespace Templates
Squarespace has a plethora of stunning templates that one can select. The templates are flexible to cater to different businesses and styles.
Much like the page builder, the pre-designed templates come with some SEO advantages and disadvantages:
Pros
– Templates are mobile-friendly
– Clean code structure
– Fast load times
Cons
– Limited customization options
– Images and scripts can’t be optimized
– Some of them use flash which is not friendly with the search engines regarding SEO.
Squarespace templates are highly customizable but have a rigorous layout and implementation, so while they make for a clean user experience, they also make detailed SEO work a bit difficult.
Additional Squarespace SEO Considerations
Beyond the page builder and templates, there are a few other Squarespace factors to consider when evaluating its SEO capabilities:
Limited Add-Ons
Although Squarespace does provide some extensions and integrations to improve the website’s functionality, it still lacks compared to other website builders. Some critical SEO implementations like XML site maps or JavaScript site searches cannot be implemented.
No Access to Server Level
Squarespace users, unlike users of self-hosted CMS like WordPress, do not have access to the server level of the website. It blocks some technical enhancements, such as changing the server directives.
Not suitable for large websites
In terms of the appropriateness of the platforms, it is suitable for small to medium sized websites. However, it becomes less effective at larger scales, leading to speed and crawling problems on the site. This makes it less suitable for the larger and more complicated sites.
Conclusion
Squarespace enables anyone to create a beautiful, professional website with no fuss. But its interface and the fact that it does not engage in personalization are problematic regarding more complex on-site SEO.
However, you can still tweak your content, titles, URLs, etc., to use the proper SEO best practices on Squarespace sites. But if you are concentrated on creating good content that gets natural visits and links, you can still obtain good rankings in the SERPs.
Marketers, however, who are running complex websites or who have to target the top positions may require the versatility of a WordPress site. A crucial disadvantage of Squarespace is that Squarespace SEO options are pretty rigid, and one cannot tweak them to the extent that is possible with other platforms.
Squarespace is an excellent website builder for entrepreneurs, businesspeople, artists, and bloggers. However, it still lacks the “maturity” of its more complex SEO abilities as far as digital marketers are concerned. Squarespace websites can attain relatively reasonable organic visibility if optimized tactfully and the content created is of high quality. Just do not anticipate the same flexibility as what is being offered by the open-source platforms.
Bill Yeager, Co-Owner of High Point SEO & Marketing in CT
