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How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engines (SEO)

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The more people that visit your website, the more likely you are to make a sale, find a new client, or win over a reader for your blog. Simply put, getting traffic to your website is key to achieving your goals. That’s why it’s important to understand search engine optimization (SEO). When you know how to optimize your website for different search ranking factors, you have more control over where your site appears in search engine results pages (SERPs), how many people see your website, and who finds you online. 

Read on to learn more about SEO—from how it works, to SEO best practices, and tools for tracking and improving SEO on your website over time.

What is SEO?

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that makes it easy for search engines like Google or Bing to understand the content of your website. Search engines regularly crawl and index websites—meaning they “read” the content on all of your web pages and set search engine rankings based on what you offer and who could benefit from your products or information. Good SEO will help search engines easily decide when to show a piece of content from your website to searchers, and make it more likely that you’ll connect with the right audiences for your brand.

The SEO strategy we’re discussing focuses on organic search results and organic traffic, rather than traffic from paid search results. There are two main branches of SEO: technical SEO and content marketing.

Technical SEO

A website’s technical SEO includes aspects of your website’s design and structure, like the time it takes for your website to load or how it adapts to different screen sizes. Some website templates come with technical optimizations, like sitemaps and tagging, so you can focus your efforts on optimizing other areas of your online presence.

Every Squarespace website template has built-in responsive design, so your website shows up well on desktop or mobile devices, and handles some technical SEO needs. In an ideal world, technical SEO and user experience go hand-in-hand, making it easier for both search engine crawlers and human visitors to navigate your site with ease.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a strategy that involves publishing high-quality blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media to spark interest in your brand, establish its authority, and boost SEO. Whether you launch a blog or add descriptive copy to your landing pages, the more website content you create, the more information you’re offering search engines to understand and rank your website.

Creating quality content for SEO purposes usually involves using free SEO tools to research search queries related to your business or brand’s niche, then creating new content related to those search terms. You can also boost your website’s SEO by using relevant search terms in your page headings, meta descriptions, and title tags, and creating internal links between your different pieces of content and web pages, sometimes referred to as on-page SEO.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because most people only look at the first page of search results—and only at the first few links that appear on page one. You can take additional steps to grow your audience, like building your brand on social media, but optimizing your site to appear more frequently in Google Search is key to reaching potential customers and moving the needle on metrics like sales

For example, if you have a shoe line and you’re launching an online store, you can strategically optimize your product pages so that your top selling sneakers appear as an option when someone searches for “best women’s running shoes” online.

See more ways to promote your website

How to improve your website’s SEO

You can hire an expert to optimize your website, review our SEO checklist, and take your own steps to improve your website’s SEO. No matter your approach, it’s good to know how to do some SEO work yourself. Search engines regularly update their algorithms and change how they evaluate content, which means your website needs to adapt over time, too. 

Even a basic understanding of how to manage your own SEO efforts can pay off in the long run, making it easier to take quick actions to maintain your site. Taking some time to learn the fundamentals of SEO best practices and search analytics platforms is a key priority for any entrepreneur building a brand online—especially as search algorithms continue to change and evolve.

1. Do keyword research

Keyword research will help you identify the most relevant words and phrases people use when they’re searching for topics that are related to your products or services. You can use keywords in your website copy and content, which will prompt search engines to surface your web pages for searchers.

 Free tools that you can connect to Squarespace, like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, can help you get started. You can also review your website’s keyword analytics to find out which terms are already driving visitors to your website.

2. Write effective website copy

Don’t forget to include keywords in copy throughout your website, but don't go overboard either. Focus on writing useful, helpful content for your customers first. That will allow for keywords to appear naturally anyway while supporting your SEO efforts.

Fill in your website’s metadata, and incorporate keywords in product URLs, product descriptions, page titles, blog headers, and image alt text—text that helps screen readers parse your images—to help search engines read and rank your content.

Whether your website exists to sell a product, promote your services, or showcase your portfolio, good copywriting will go a long way in helping search engines index your website. 

Get help generating website copy with Squarespace AI

3. Improve your website design

Search engines prioritize websites that offer a good user experience (UX). Websites that have faster page speeds (meaning they load quickly), that are mobile and tablet-friendly, that prioritize readability in their design, and that have clear site navigation are likely to rank over other websites.

Manage variables like page speed by avoiding overloading your website with large video and image files, and choose a website builder, like Squarespace, that is flexible and responsive to different screen sizes. 

Learn how to choose the right website template

4. Build topic authority

Publish blogs and other in-depth content that signals your authority on topics related to your brand. For example, if you’re marketing your photography business, you might launch a blog to showcase your knowledge and expertise in the field. You can link to other authoritative sources in your content to signal your expertise to search engines. 

As you build authority, other websites may link back to your content—a strategy called link building. More backlinks to your website signals authority and interest in your content for search engines as well. The more you position your website and brand as an authority, the more search engines will prioritize your content in search results.

5. Track your growth

It can take weeks and months to see the impact of an SEO strategy, because it also takes time for search engines to crawl your website, index it, and start surfacing it for searchers. After you make updates to your website, monitor new users and traffic sources to understand whether your SEO strategy is driving people to your website. Pay attention to metrics like bounce rate and conversion to understand whether you’re getting qualified traffic—meaning that the people finding your website are your target audience. 

Learn more about how to measure your website’s traffic and performance

This post was updated on October 31, 2023.

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