Soft Refresh: SEO Beginner’s Guide & Checklist
In the sweet romantic comedy film, The Holiday (2006) it may have been SEO rather than a twist of fate that plants Amanda (Cameron Diaz) and Iris (Kate Winslet) into the perfect Holiday rentals. When Amanda googles “best vacations alone” —up pops the Rosehill cottage in the English countryside on her browser. The discovery begins an exchange that changes holiday plans and their lives. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web. They go from site to site to collect information by rendering and indexing. The algorithms are used for ranking filters and matching signals. These analysis algorithms and the crawl process determine the order in which pages appear in search results for any given query. Paid ads or google ads are displayed before any organic results. To optimize your search engine visibility means you have prepped your website to perform well in a targeted search. The more visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to draw new visitors to your website. Industry and location are important considerations in understanding SEO for your website.
For SEO Basics, to optimize for search engines means you have prepped your website to perform well in a targeted search.
The more visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to draw new visitors to your website.
LET’S LOOK AT A SEARCH IN ACTION
What are the online engagement needs for your business? Are you building an email list? Selling physical products? Showcasing your expertise with a portfolio? Do you need clients to book appointments online? For a Squarespace website, as far as SEO goes, you are positioned well thanks to their security features and responsive design. The rest is up to you and the needs of your business. Let’s look at a search in action to better understand optimizing content for search engines. Open a new tab in Google and perform a search for blueberry muffins. Do you notice the matching words function? Previous searches similar to your query determine the search options shown. Then you will select a topic variation or a topic detail, such as blueberry muffins recipe, blueberry muffins healthy or blueberry muffins near me. Now, after your next selection, the search engine will display a list of websites and images as your results. These results can also be informed by your browser history. What search words, phrases, images will your ideal website visitor be googling? Keywords play a crucial role in prepping your website content. A website best practice is to have at least 8-10 words or phrases for SEO keywords.
What search words, phrases, images will your ideal website visitor be googling ?
Another way to explore the search is answerthepublic.com. Here you can enter our test topic of blueberry muffins to see the most popular search words or phrases. Make sure to change the country setting from UK to USA for your once-a-day freebie search at answerthepublic.com. You can download a visualization or CSV file of the results for keyword research. Popular search words or phrases for a blueberry muffin query: Blueberry muffins for kids, blueberry muffins with almond flour, blueberry muffins to die for, are just a few of forty top results.
3 LEVELS FOR SEO
For a closer look at SEO, there are 3 levels-Basics, Intermediate, Advanced/Strategic. Squarespace makes the Basics super do-able. A checklist and in-depth walkthrough of 10 SEO Basics (that includes keywords and meta descriptions) is provided in this blog post. For SEO intermediate, this refers to websites that are not brand new to the world wide web. SEO intermediate refers to websites that have had Google Analytics set up for at least 90 days or up to 6 months + of tracking website performance. At the intermediate phase, you have the basics covered and you have the data for an SEO audit to discover changes to increase website traffic. You could include extras such as using alt text, browser icons and on-brand favicons, 301s or URL redirects as SEO Intermediate. For SEO Advanced/Strategic, this can refer to course correction strategies, product launch preparation and upstaging techniques for e-commerce websites or websites where a rebrand or other events and changes will affect visibility.
SEO BASICS WALKTHROUGH
A CHECKLIST
Welcome to the SEO Basics walkthrough. Here is a checklist you can use for your Squarespace website. You will notice they are phrased more like SEO affirmations.
“EACH WEBSITE PAGE HAS A TITLE FOR SEO.”
In your Squarespace website, go to pages > gear icon for any page. After General, select SEO. In your SEO prompts, check your page title is aligned with your navigation and content. For example, page title should not say, “new page” or “Contact 1” or “new page 3”. You can check your page titles for each website page.
“I FILLED IN ALL MY META DESCRIPTIONS.”
What are meta descriptions? Go to Pages > gear icon for any page. After General, select SEO. In your SEO prompts, see Preview, Title, Descriptions. A meta description is 100-300 characters that describe your business and website content and includes your keywords. Fill in meta descriptions for each page. Do not duplicate as you can be penalized in google for duplicate descriptions, so make sure to modify the details for each website page. Note the description space allows for 400 characters, though you will want to keep it very brief and accurate at closer to 300.
“I HAVE 10 KEYWORDS FOR SEO.”
Choose 10 keywords that best describe your business, your website content, who you serve and the services or products displayed on your website. Keywords should be in alignment with your industry such as fitness, garden, interior design, travel, fashion, beauty, women, creatives, conservation, vacation rentals, healthy recipes, lessons. Need some help with keywords? Go to keywordtool.io or check out the keyword research at spyfu.com
“MY URLS FOLLOW WEBSITE BEST PRACTICES.”
For each website page, check your URL slugs by going to pages > gear-icon > select general > scroll to URL slug. Confirm URL slugs are aligned with the page’s content. Keep URL slugs under 100 characters –short and sweet. This rule especially applies to URL slugs for blog posts. To check your blog post URL, go to main blog page, then go to a specific blog post settings (three dots), select options to see the post URL. Make sure to create custom URLs that complement your post and are keyword-centric, instead of using the default URL that is generated with random numbers. If your blog post is “Top Five Holiday Gifts under $60” you will use hyphens and write a url slug such as blog/top-five-gifts-under-sixty. Another way to check up on your URL slugs is to check your site for broken links. To do this, go to this free broken link checker here.
Designer Theresa Chaney has a great SEO guide and offers this advice for SEO friendly URLs. “Google recommends keeping your URL structure as simple as possible. Make sure to use hyphens (-) between words for readability. Removing unnecessary words will make a URL shorter and easier to read.”
“I CHECKED MY PAGE SIZES.”
For a Squarespace website, pages need to be under 5 MB. If you read my blog post, How to Prep Images, you are most likely in this range. If some of your pages have lots of images, it can be a good idea to double check the page size to ensure that the download speed has not been affected. If download speed has been slowed, you will need to reduce those page sizes. To find out your page sizes, go to your website, open the developer tool in your Chrome browser. Go to Chrome > view > developer > developer tools. Hit command R to refresh and then choose Network. Review the page size at the bottom left side of the screen, it will read 2.0 MB transferred. If the size is greater than 5 MB, you need to reduce your page size. You can read the Squarespace support tips for reducing page sizes here.
“MY IMAGES ARE HI RES AND I RENAMED MY IMAGE FILES.”
All image files uploaded to your website should be under 500 KB. For more info on prepping images for web pages, you can read this guide. It is ideal for website images to be high resolution so they retain their quality and depth across various browsers. You will want to carefully rename all your image files. You can do this during upload in the Squarespace prompts for your image filename. Though I recommend it be a step you prep before you upload the image. You can read more detail about this in my image prep guide. How to chose image file names? If your website was a parking lot or parking garage and each page was a car in the lot, the file names should reflect the where & what in a concise way.
“I CONNECTED MY WEBSITE TO GOOGLE ANALYTICS.”
Once you have a new website up and running, you will want to connect to Google Analytics (free service to set up) to track visitors and all website performance activity. Some of the data provided by Google Analytics: How many site visitors go to your website? How long do website visitors stay on a page? Where are they arriving from when they find your website-from search results or from facebook? How many pages were viewed? Squarespace offers a built-in integration to connect your site to Google Analytics. You can read more about that here. You will need to set up a Google Analytics account to begin. You will receive several identifiers for your new Google Analytics account. This may include terms such as a property ID or measurement ID. You may ask yourself, what is my Google Analytics account number? You may read an SEO guide and it says you need to locate your tracking code. For Squarespace users, this refers to your GA4 number. Google Analytics provides a tutorial for set up steps and you can find that link here. Update: In Squarespace, you used to use your UA number and your GA4 number for your Google Analytics account. Here is an article about the phase out of UA toward GA4.
“MY BLOG HAS EXTERNAL LINKS AND CONTENT LINKS.”
The blog for your website or business needs to be well integrated with all other website content on your website such as services, products and socials. The blog is the most niche-centric of your website content. Make sure to include links to other pages on your website (content links) and share with your website visitors how the blog post topics relate to your products, services or expertise. It is also wise to include external links that you think resonate with your readers. In SEO, these external links in blog posts are known as backlinks. Here is a great article from Moz about backlinks. When a website earns backlinks, it is a sign that the content is valuable. If you want to learn more about affiliate links (often used by bloggers for product recommendations) check out Designer Christy Price’s course about blogging.
“EACH WEBSITE PAGE HAS A HEADLINE.”
For SEO + website best practices, each page needs a healthy balance of image, text, headlines, sub-headings. Think yin and yang in a good way. Too much text can be really expecting a lot from website visitors who are likely to be scanning or shopping. On the other hand, all images and socials and no legit content does not inspire trust from smart shoppers looking for thoughtful solutions. A healthy balance of image, text, headlines, sub-headings give context and focus to your content. For headlines in Squarespace, you will want to use your SEO keywords with H1, H2.
“MY WEBSITE IS OPTIMIZED FOR MOBILE VIEW.”
If you have a Squarespace website, it can easily be optimized for mobile or ipad view. To check your various browser views for Squarespace 7.0, click the small line at the center at top of screen in the editor to select your browser view options. To check your various browser views for Squarespace 7.1, choose from the browser icons at top of screen to view your pages for iphone, ipad or desktop. It is likely that at least 50% of your website visitors will see your website for the first time on their mobile device.
Has this website scenario every happened to you? You viewed a website for a store or café on your laptop before visiting in person. Then, the next day or next week, you are pulling up to the store or café. You go to quickly check the parking details (or you took the subway and need to see if that sale is still happening). Gasp..a totally different website on mobile, not readable at all. The store or café did not set up their web pages for mobile optimization. Don’t let this be your website! For a Squarespace website, not only is optimization do-able, go ahead and customize that mobile menu.
To check your website is mobile friendly, learn more here
SOME SEO INSPO!
Let’s play SEO for a faux website in a pretend world. The Australian TV show, Wanted, spans three seasons following the good-hearted duo + accidental outlaws, Lola and Chelsea. In this faux website story, in a pretend world of season 4, Lola and Chelsea settle down and their names have been cleared. The years on the run have made them famous survivalists. They have a camping goods blog (with affiliate links) and a small online store loved by camping and nature enthusiasts around the world. It’s time to fill in their SEO prompts in Squarespace for their homepage and their blog. What are 10 keywords for Lola and Chelsea’s camping goods website? Should they focus on the retail angle or play up their renegade years that were well documented in the press? Watch the show and let me know your SEO keywords for Lola & Chelsea. Forget about your own SEO prompts in Squarespace for just a day! Spend a cool minute brainstorming a 300 character meta description for Lola and Chelsea’s new online home. For their blog post called, How to Stay Alive in Thailand when you are wanted in New Zealand, what product links are they including? Knives? First Aid Kit? Sunscreen? Rain boots? Ropes? What backlinks are they generating? This is Lola and Chelsea’s chance at a new life, to honor all parts of their long strange journey toward entrepreneurship. Next time you sit at your desk for keyword research, if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for Lola and Chelsea!
WANTED: Lola and Chelsea become renegades on the run when they witness a murder involving dirty cops and are framed for the crime. Starring: Rebecca Gibney, Geraldine Hakewill, Kerry Fox (Creators: Rebecca Gibney, Richard Bell) Netflix series (Australia, 2016) Television, Crime Drama
Bonus: SEO Resources
When it comes to SEO, there is always more to learn. Perhaps best understood as an evolving practice. Check out the free SEO Audit tool by SEOptimer or the affordable refresher sessions with Collaborada. For online courses, SEO Plus with Kerstin Martin (online course $95) and make sure to download the SEO Starter Kit from Meg Casebolt at Love at First Search. Not sure the story with your SEO ? Fear not, we can look into the matter in a Power Hour and make sure you have the Basics covered. For any New Website package, SEO Basics are included!