Getting SEO Right in Squarespace

When you hit a wrong note, it’s seldom the instrument’s fault.

Growing up, I played saxophone in an amateur group through my church. There was one trumpet player who, whenever he missed a note, would stop playing and look at the keys of his horn as though he expected to find something wrong there. Eventually, the director called him out: “Stop blaming the instrument when you miss a note.”

Maybe you’ve built a beautiful, functional website on Squarespace; or perhaps you’re considering it for a new project. But a nagging voice, one you may have encountered in a marketing forum or from a developer, whispers a discouraging thought: “Squarespace is bad for SEO.” This single idea has caused lots of unnecessary anxiety and strategic paralysis for expert-led businesses who want the simplicity and ease-of-management that Squarespace provides but worry about the tradeoffs.

But the premise is flawed. While it contains a grain of truth, it ultimately distracts from the work that actually matters and overlooks the real-world tradeoffs of other platforms.

Acknowledging the Full Context

In all honesty, Squarespace does have some technical SEO limitations compared to a platform like WordPress. You have less granular control over things like the sitemap and advanced code structures. For an SEO purist, these limitations are valid points.

But it’s crucial to view this in context. To achieve that granular control on WordPress, you almost always need to rely on third-party plugins like Yoast. These plugins introduce their own complexities: additional subscription costs and, critically, potential security vulnerabilities if not diligently updated. And sometimes the multiple plugins required to provide the robust control in WordPress can conflict with one another, crashing the entire site. Squarespace’s all-in-one system trades some of that granular control for enhanced security and simplicity, a tradeoff that is often highly beneficial for busy professionals.

With that said, blaming the platform for poor rankings is like a musician blaming the instrument when they just don’t know the music.

What Search Engines Actually Care About

Here’s the bottom line: Google does not rank platforms; it ranks individual web pages. Its algorithm is designed to find the most relevant, authoritative, and helpful answer to a user’s query. A website’s ability to provide that answer is platform-agnostic.

This is why you can feel confident that the site I build for you will be positioned for success. We focus not on platform debates, but on the foundational pillars that search engines actually reward.

The Four Pillars of Squarespace SEO Success

Instead of worrying about the platform, we achieve remarkable results by channeling energy into these four areas of SEO, all of which you have significant control over in Squarespace.

1. A Deliberate Site Structure A clear, logical site structure with intentional internal linking is critical. This means organizing your pages in a hierarchy that makes sense to both users and search engines, distributing authority throughout your site.

2. Content that Serves Your Audience SEO is no longer about stuffing keywords onto a page. It is about creating high-quality, valuable content that genuinely answers the questions your ideal clients are asking, positioning you as an expert.

3. Strong On-Page Optimization These are the fundamentals, and Squarespace makes them easy to manage. Every page and blog post needs a clear, compelling meta title and description. Every image needs descriptive alt text. These simple acts provide essential context for search engines.

4. Earning Authority with Backlinks A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and search engines view them as votes of confidence. We lay the groundwork for this by creating content so valuable that other sites in your industry will naturally want to link to it.

Making the Right Choice For You

Every website platform like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and Webflow has its own unique constellation of strengths and weaknesses. If you want a robust e-commerce setup, Shopify is a great choice. Granular control (and a willingness to juggle plugins)? Go with WordPress. But for service-based businesses that need to have a great-looking portfolio, the ability to schedule lead meetings and discovery calls through their website, and a reliable, easy-to-maintain platform? Squarespace is an excellent option that I can heartily recommend.

Any platform is only as good as the strategy behind it. When built with the foundational SEO pillars in mind, a Squarespace site is not a liability; it is a powerful, secure, and effective engine for attracting your ideal clients.

Want to build your Squarespace website? Contact me to request more information.