SEO and Squarespace? Is this Really an Option?
-
Hi all,
Any feedback on Squarespace, SEO capabilites and ranking factors? I have a client wishing to use the platform and despite the good reviews, which appear to be from resellers by the way, the forums say not.
Although apparently Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz (yes right here!) gave them a big thumbs up “The square space team have put together a remarkable platform, SEO friendliness!
Really not sure here and don’t agree, there are many limitations and hosting with a template provider is always big no no.
Cheers
Virginia -
Hi guys,
Confirming that there is no way to add a custom meta description to Shop pages on square space CMS. Dont understand why these folks dont take suggestions seriously when its negligence is costing its customers huge business!
-
I friggin love u man
-
I discovered a new issue today.
If you're migrating from a site that uses special characters in their URLs (like bigfolio), you can't create individual page-to-page redirects. Squarespace doesn't allow special characters in their redirect syntax and there's no way to create a custom .htaccess file to work around that limitation.
-
I'm having exactly the same issue as you, Jared. Our new site runs on Squarespace, but also utilises two Hubspot sub-domains to host our blog and certain landing pages. The Hubspot pages were indexed without a problem, whereas the Squarespace site just isn't indexing.
-
Thank you, Rand.
-
Yeah - I'd say the inability to customize the titles and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself. That said, it shouldn't be impacting indexing -- could be that Google's crawled those pages but determined they don't have enough unique content, enough link equity, enough positive user/usage signals, or a combination of these, to keep in the main index.
At this point, though, I would probably consider migrating. Wordpress is still my first choice for the customization abilities, but Hubspot's a good one, too.
-
Most of the on-page seo work done by our agency is done through HubSpot. We are not perfect, but we try to implement best practices suggested by Moz and HubSpot. Recently, we have had a few sites designed in Squarespace, and they are subsequently hosted by Squarespace as well. The templates are beautiful and the interface is quite user-friendly. However, we have experienced many of the aforementioned frustrations regarding the customization of the on-page seo. In fact, we are really having serious challenges with Google and indexed pages. We have submitted the sitemap according to the instructions and Google is only indexing 7 of the 72 pages (See attached image for reference). We have submitted the sitemaps of other clients, who are hosted by other platforms (HubSpot, Webflow, etc), and they are not having the same indexing issues that our Squarespace sites are experiencing. Has anyone else experienced this indexing issue with Squarespace? I have contacted Squarespace support, and they have given me the standard "it just takes time" answer. I am wondering if these indexing issues are related to the challenges mentioned in this thread.
Also, I thought we had customized our page titles inside of Squarespace, but I checked back after reading this thread. I see where the website name or name of the business is automatically added to the back end of each page title. I have also attached an image for reference. Is this what you guys are seeing as well?
If this is indeed the case, we will most certainly be migrating our sites over to HubSpot or other platforms that allow for more customized SEO.
Thank you for the helpful feedback. This has cleared up so much for me.
-
Thanks for the heads up Mirabile! Sad to see -- hopefully Squarespace fixes this soon and re-enables fully customizable Title & Meta Descriptions to the other page types.
-
I was prompted to write a response to this article today after helping a friend look into her Squarespace site. It's not like I expected it to have the equivalent of Wordpress' amazing Yoast SEO plugin, but I was at least expecting some nice control over metadata.
However, I discovered users have almost no control over the Title or Meta Description tags on the individual page level.
I even tweeted at SquareSpace support, and they admitted it was not an option yet (at least of 9/2/2016): https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp/status/771819238101176320
Right now, you can only add custom titles and descriptions on what Squarespace calls "pages" - but beware, not all pages are created equal. Blog posts are not pages. Neither are e-commerce products. My friend wanted to optimize her product page title tags, but she can't. So disappointing.
Fingers crossed that SquareSpace updates their CMS to maybe allow for this someday....
-
Hi - it certainly looks like there's a number of issues around basic SEO friendliness and accessibility that need addressing on that site, but I'm surprised that SquareSpace's CMS doesn't allow for/enable that. Can you edit the source code on the pages? Or contact their support to look into it?
BTW - I'd also suggest making the homepage title more friendly. Currently, it looks like SEO spam - just keywords jammed together without spaces and without the name of the business. All the page titles have inherited this problem throughout the site.
I might suggest reading https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization and https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/on-page-seo-8-principles-whiteboard-friday which contain a lot more detailed information on how to think about keyword targeting and on-page SEO.
-
Hi Rand,
I recently spent two months locked in my study creating my new website in SquareSpace. After a short learning curve, I found it quite user-friendly and created a website that I thought looked very professional and beautiful.
Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my SEO rank when I launched it about two months ago, and I've been trying to figure out what happened ever since. On-page optimization, 301 redirects for old pages, submitting a site map to Google and submitting the site for indexing has made little difference.
Then I found this:
Please check out Google Cache, text-only version for our home page (www.kanataskinclinic.ca) to see what Google sees. Here's what you'll find:
- A LOT of duplicate content. So much it's crazy! Including mutliple title tags.
- Sliders and carousels appear as the same phrase, written over and over again.
- Image file names replaced by generic SS static names.
- alt text that magically appeared out of nowhere, because I didn't put it there. (possibly drawn from the page description?)
What do you think? Could this be killing my SEO?
-
For anyone looking into this, I'd like to offer an update regarding Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. Squarespace has a huge issue in that many of the templates use the title tag and/or meta description to populate content overlaying the main image on a page. As you can imagine this is a HUGE pain in the neck when designing / optimising a site. I'm sure there are workarounds using javascript yet it is still troublesome.
-
Hi,
Thanks for the reply - I have just about managed to convince the client that he should move his website http://www.cssgplc.com/ over to a new platform as I couldn't solve the issues easily for them, and their developers were not interested in finding a solution.
thanks again,
Ben
-
Hey Ben,
No, actually there is no solution to the issues described above. Support is very limited and there is no work-around for these. The only way to change how the platform is working is by editing and customizing the theme yourself, which I have not done for my clients, afraid that the next theme update will ruin it all and make me redo the whole work again.
On the other hand if you have the limitations in mind, and you do not mind complying to those, you can build up a good website on Squarespase, but test the theme seo settings first.
I personally would never use Squarespace as a platform. The designs are great, but WP has so many great designs that can be purchased for little money and you can keep your WP website safe by being careful with plug ins.
I hope this helps,
Biljana
-
Hi Biljana,
I am interested to know if you ever resolved your issues with Squarespace as I had the same problem a few weeks back and couldn't find a solution?
thanks,
Ben
-
Hi Bijana - that's really frustrating and you have my apologies. When I reviewed Squarespace (which, granted, was 18+ months ago now), I didn't encounter that issue, but I also don't remember how deep I dove trying to update Meta Descriptions. I'd say it's definitely worthy of bringing up to their support folks, and for what it's worth, you can tell them I'd strongly endorse/recommend making that change, too.
-
Hi,
It happens that two of my clients are asking me to optimise a sqarespace website at the same time. With the first one I had an issue adding a meta description to the website without impacting the webpage content. Namely the meta description showed up as a hero image content and there was no was to change it, as it was a feature of the theme. So I added the meta description tag in the custom code area, but now I'm facing to have two meta description tags (one is empty) on each page. I did not even get to the posts seo on this client's website.
With the second client I discovered that the only way to add meta description is through the excerpt of the post. No other way. The title is coming form the post title and no way yo add a title different than that.
If this is a sqarespace theme issue, please let me know which one of their themes is without these issues. And Rand here is telling me that it is SEO friendly, It's not, not in these two cases at least. I advised my clients to leave sqarespace and go for WP. At least there are more options to solve seo issues with WP.
-
Hi Virginia - happy to give my $0.02. Basically, on SquareSpace 6 (the active version out now), I think they've done a solid job with SEO features and functionality. I actually consulted a bit (informally - not paid, just helping out because I want folks to provide good SEO, especially popular CMS') with the SquareSpace team, and reviewed some of their implementations. It's good stuff, and SquareSpace is a good company (good customer service, honorable folks, good about refunds, excellent with uptime, etc).
That said, you can certainly get more flexibility by hosting your own system. Wordpress enables a lot of this, especially if you have a good developer making changes to it. Out of the box, SquareSpace is friendlier on many aspects of SEO than Wordpress, but with customizations, the latter can exceed the former.
One last word of advice - be cautious about trusting all the forum chatter, especially the stuff that comes from SquareSpace v6 and earlier (which wasn't very SEO friendly). I don't mean to be a pure advocate/defendent of SquareSpace (and I have no financial or other interest in the company), but do want to be fair to the strides they've made.
Hope that helps!
-
It is a good product and I'm sure they are working to get all the exposure they can, especially from someone who's so well respected in the web world as Rand is. I would be doing the same thing with graces from an individual of his level
-
Thanks for the double confirmation Patrick. I was concerned that Rand had given this product the thumbs up and Squarespace are milking this for all its worth.
-
Thanks for the confirmation Tom. I cant tell you how many clients/friends have wanted SEO help with Wix/Vistaprint/Webs etc.....and then they cant rank the site on Google. I even called up Wix once to be told that Google will just find my site if I have good content and no meta title etc.......not a chance! Thanks for the link.
How do you find ranking parallax sites though? I have been pondering this.
Virginia
-
I second what Tom said on all accounts, Virginia. We've turned down a couple projects for clients wanting to use SquareSpace or helped convince them we could do the same work with a self-hosted WP site using cool parallax features.
Tom, thanks also for the link to ThemeForest. I haven't seen those parallax designs yet, so going to take a peak now!
-
Hi Virginia
Your last point really clinches it for me. Hosting with a template/CMS provider is something I'm really not happy with (especially given the price). I find the CMS and the resulting website very friendly to use and I think it's quite well SEO-optimised, but the limitation of hosting with Squarespace is just counter-productive to me.
If your client really likes Squarespace, there are a number of parallax scrolling Wordpress themes you might be interested in. Here's a selection at Themeforest.
Hope this helps
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Mobile SEO vs. Usability - SinglePlatform
I have a restaurant client that we're setting up with SinglePlatform.com to distribute their menu and make sure all of the restaurant sites have updated information for their business. As part of SinglePlatform's service, they offer a mobile site. Normally we would just create a mobile site and make sure that it's optimized but this client isn't ready to invest in a customized mobile site yet. The mobile site we can get with SinglePlatform is very simple. Call, Menu, Address, View Full Website, Photos, General Info. I know this would make it much easier for mobile users to find information and contact them but it's not mobile best practices. Whatever main page they land on would redirect them to the home page of the mobile site (i.e. not a 1 to 1). We also won't have any Google Analytics information for this site. The question comes down to usability or SEO? I'm leaning toward the mobile site for now and sell them on a customized solution later. I guess I'm just looking for some verification or any insight. ZRVbARv
Web Design | | JaredDetroit0 -
Does anyone know if the YOAST SEO plugin works 100% on a responsive wordpress template?
Hi, Does anyone know if the YOAST SEO plugin works 100% on responsive wordpress template? In other words, when you configure the custom title and metadescription is it also configured for the tablet and cellphone views as well? Thanks Carla
Web Design | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Optimizing a Wordpress Blog For SEO
Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog. In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.
Web Design | | GKLA0 -
So apparently SEO moz will get us de-indexed according to a SEO company!
Each and every day i get called up from an SEO company who promises to get me top spots in Google rankings if i quickly get on their special offer they have today normally i would say "no thanks and put the phone down" but i had a bit of spare time so i indulged the guy and we got talking. After the introductions and speal about his company he was showing me what his company does and how they go about it to get me top ranks (they don't get me ranks but create a website they own which then passes leads to me- kinda clever since they could then start charging me per lead or my competitors) We continued to talk and i mentioned i used SEOmoz to check my rankings and back links etc and he told me that Google are cracking down and anyone using these types of software/websites will get their websites de indexed. This struck me as BS but i wanted to get your thoughts on the matter, i personally don't believe Google would ever do such a thing as this since it would be so easy to get your competitors websites taken down (i.e. negative seo) but its certainly a talking point.
Web Design | | GarethEJones0 -
SEO while designing the website and continuous SEO
What's the difference between SEO while designing/developing a website (ie, setting up a website so it is crawled by search engines) and the SEO that people talk about that needs to be viewed analyzed and changed all the time? I don't have a ton of money to spend on SEO right now but I do want to make sure my website is set up by an SEO expert (if possible) so when I do have money to spend on SEOthe website is set up properly to work with more advanced forms of SEO. I guess I don't understand where you can draw the line (if forced due to money constraints) between SEO in the beginning and continued SEO. What do I need to look for with SEO and the design of my website. How do I get some type of SEO without breaking the bank??
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
What site do you admire/like for its SEO - technical, content, whatever - and why?
I am gathering examples of great SEO'd sites and would appreciate your examples. The rationale can be anything - great SEO structure, great linking, solid content - you think stands out. Thank you!
Web Design | | josh-riley0 -
How can the Web site designer and the SEO strategist work together peacefully?
The organization I work for has decided to re-design or re-develop the existing company Web site. My part in this project is to come up with new features to add to the site, as well as making the site SEO-friendly (copywriting, link-building, keyword research, etc.). I don’t know a thing about Web site design, coding, format, etc., and I guess I will have to work with a designer on this project. How would I go about finding a Web site designer? Should they have some SEO knowledge? How much designer, coding and site structure knowledge should I have? And how do we not infringe on one another as we work together? (Sorry so many questions.)
Web Design | | Obie0 -
I have a button that repeats it self many times on same page, what can i do so button name does not affect my SEO?
I have a shopping car button named "Add to car" but it repeats on many pages on my website, is this affecting my seo? If yes.. What should i do so it does not affect? Should button appear on hover? Thanks
Web Design | | SeMeAntoja0