How Your Website Can Make Friends With Google
It’s such an exciting day when we hand off a brand new website to a client! Such time, effort and collaboration has gone into creating an online home for their business - one that authentically represents their brand and clearly communicates what they do to their target audience. Every design detail has been accounted for, each word considered thoughtfully, and every image specifically curated to produce an excellent finished product.
This is a big finish line for our clients to reach! But there is a realization that often hits at this point…now what?
How am I going to more eyes on this stunning website?
Enter SEO.
Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO, is the practice of optimizing a website to rank higher on search engine result pages. With over 5 billion Google searches daily, it's no surprise that businesses and website owners are investing in SEO to increase visibility, traffic, and ultimately, conversions. In this blog post, we'll cover the basics of SEO and how to best optimize your Squarespace website to achieve higher rankings.
Understanding Search Engines
Before we dive into the technicalities of SEO, it's essential to understand how search engines work. Search engines like Google use algorithms to crawl and index websites' content. When a user enters a query into the search bar, the search engine retrieves relevant pages based on the query's keywords and the content's relevance, authority, and usefulness. The goal of SEO is to optimize a website's content, technical aspects, and user experience to make it more visible and rank higher. The higher the rank, the more traffic a website can potentially receive.
We could certainly go down a long path of details about SEO but now that you have the basics, let’s get to what you really want to know:
Three easy steps you can take to optimize your Squarespace site
1. SEO checklist
Squarespace has a fantastic article all about what you can do to optimize SEO before and after launch. If you are an Averson client you can skip this step! We complete all foundational SEO practices when we create your website so that you don’t have to worry about it.
2. CREATE A GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE
This is MUST if you are a business owner that wants to be easily searchable. You can setup your own profile at this link, and below is a quick tutorial explaining how this works. (Note: You do need to have a google email address to utilize this feature)
3. VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE ON GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
A crucial part of Google’s ability to index your site is the site map. Google Search Console is a tool that will allow you to verify your website and the structure of your site, making it that much easier for search engines to see all pages. You can set up Google Search Console at this link, but before you do, watch the tutorial below to learn how this can be connected directly to your Squarespace site.
The text that you’ll need from the video to verify your domain on Google Search Console is “sitemap.xml”.
That’s it!
This blog post is designed to be short and sweet. These crucial steps will optimize your site and we don’t want you to miss them! But we also know you have more important things to do, like run your business.
Curious to continue learning? Here are a few ideas:
Content is Queen
If you really want to prioritize increased traffic to your site, generating new content for search engines to populate is the #1 way to do this (outside of paid ads, which we will cover in a moment). The main way to generate new content on your site is by creating a blog and generating posts or updating your portfolio or gallery page frequently. If this is the route you want to take, here is our advice:
Be Realistic! There is nothing more discouraging to a business owner than making an amazing plan for all the ways you are going to produce marketing content and then running out of time, energy, and literal bandwidth after week two. Take your time, develop a strategy, and be realistic about what you can produce. It’s way better to post quality content once per month or once per quarter than to burn yourself out generating a weekly blog post that isn’t valuable to your audience. Which leads us to…
Know Your Audience. Developing a clear understanding of who you are speaking to is crucial to the success of your content. Developing a clear understanding what they value, what their problems, hopes, and desires are will not only generate a lot of ideas for your content, but it will actually bring the right people to your website! We don’t want you to do all this work only to attract someone that doesn’t need your services. Our team’s strategy process is designed to help you with this step if you are feeling lost! Reach out to us or sign up for our email list in the footer to receive our Brand Foundations Worksheet and start your own strategy work today.
Make a Plan. This may seem obvious after the points above, but we can’t encourage you enough to take the time to map out your long term goals for content, evaluate purpose and target audience, and generate a list of ideas to keep you moving in the right direction. If you make a (realistic) plan and strategy it will take you that much farther in your marketing efforts and give you a reference to come back to even when the plan changes - and it inevitably will!
Keywords
If you are going to prioritize content marketing, it is worth your while to do a little keyword research as well. What is keyword research? It's the process of identifying the search terms users enter into search engines when looking for information or products related to your website. Keyword research helps you understand your target audience's search intent, what they're looking for, and how to best optimize your website to rank for those keywords.
To perform keyword research, you can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. These tools give you insights into the search volume, competition, and relevance of your target keywords. You can then use this data to optimize your website's content and metadata to rank higher for those keywords.
Our disclaimer: this can be overwhelming! Take it in baby steps and don’t be shy about acknowledging when its time to ask for outside help with this step. There are sooooo many entrepreneurs out there offering niche services for SEO support and they often have great resources for the ambitions DIYer!
paid advertising
If you have developed a content marketing plan for yourself and are consistently creating content for your website, it may be a good idea to explore Paid Google Ads or other forms of digital marketing to increase traffic to your website. Squarespace has some great integrations for this that can help you track your progress! It is worth noting that paid ads are an investment. You can pay literal dollars per day for an ad, but this does nothing for your traffic and is basically like giving money away to Google with no return. It’s wise to plan on investing a minimum of $500 a month (maybe more, depending on your business) if you want to gain traction on Paid Ads. We also want to caution you here - don’t rely on paid advertising alone! A quality website with quality content must come first, and this is what will make paid advertising effective for you.
Do you need some help leveling up your website or creating a content marketing strategy? We would love to hear from you!
