Where to edit your Squarespace website’s SEO Settings
Not an expert in SEO? That’s okay! You don’t need to be an expert to make these quick & easy changes.
I’ve walked you through the bare-bones basics in a couple other posts about Squarespace SEO basics, and now I’ll show you where to update your individual page SEO settings with the new UI/UX changes, because it’s gotten EVEN EASIER!
Where do I edit the SEO settings for each page?
PAGE SETTINGS
Squarespace has that little gear wheel ⚙️ that appears when you hover over the page in your Pages menu, right? Click that for the page you want to edit first.
I’d start with your most important pages, like your Home, About, Services, Contact, etc. We’re talkin’ the pages that show up in your main navigation, then move on from there, ideally customizing SEO settings for all or most of the pages on your site.
PAGE TITLE, NAV TITLE, & URL SLUG
When that settings popup appears, you’ll have the opportunity to give it a Page Title (appears in the tab of your browser), and a Navigation Title (appears in your site navigation, what viewers will use to find this page once on your website), and URL Slug (www.example.com/url-slug <– everything after the “.com”).
*NOTE: if you’re changing your page’s URL slug and you know you have stuff linking to it already, changing the slug will break those old links. They’re easy to fix but can be time-consuming! So choose your URL slug wisely from the get-go and you’ll save lots of time by not having to readjust & fix those broken links later.
SEO
There’s a menu on the left in the Settings pop-up, click SEO there.
Now you’ll see an area with a preview of what your Google search result will look like, and underneath that is where you edit that information.
Your Title will be listed first, then the description area. Both will have a character count limit, so watch that number & don’t try to write a book here. KISS = Keep it simple, stupid! 😉
Include they keywords you’ve selected for your business, naturally, in sentence form. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about here, then make sure you read Squarespace SEO Best Practices: Using Keywords to help you figure it out!
Once you’re happy with the changes you’ve made, check the preview again & then click Save. Repeat for each page in your site that you want people to be able to find.
To see this in action, watch the video below:
Other SEO settings to adjust for your entire website:
WEBSITE LOGO & TITLE
While you’re logged in, in the Squarespace platform menu on the left, choose “Design” then click Logo & Title.
Add your best, main, most popular keyword there, and add another in the tagline area below that. (You can hide the tagline in your website’s Style Editor/Site Styles.) So for example:
Title: Studio 1862 | Squarespace Website Designer
Tagline: Freelance Squarespace Designer
GENERAL WEBSITE SEO
From the same home page menu, click “Marketing,” then “SEO” from the menu.
There’s a couple quick links at the top to help you out. The first goes to Squarespace’s SEO checklist and the 2nd goes to your own website’s Analytics section on Google Search Keywords. These are keywords people are actually using to find your website!
Next you can dictate how Squarespace lists the title of your page by choosing a variable that’s automatically filled for you. Your options are either page title or site title and you can use either or both. To type the variable, hover over the little question mark icon to see how to type it in & which variable means what.
%s = Title of your site.
(For me this would automatically plug in “Studio 1862 | Squarespace Website Designer”)
%p = Title of your page.
(For me this would automatically plug in “Squarespace SEO Update: Settings”)
%p %s = Title of your page, then title of your site.
(For me this would look like: “Squarespace SEO Update: Settings - Studio 1862 | Squarespace Website Designer”)
Then you need to give your entire website a very simple description. Keep it 50 to 300 characters, the shorter & more succinct, the better. The more you type, the more likely that your description will be cut off in search results when Google doesn’t have room to display all of it.
Make sure you add your best/most popular/most effective keywords here! This is the description for your entire site!
Check the preview, then click Save when you’re done!
Focus on what makes you money,
while I focus on the details of updating your site. Sound good?
