SEO and Squarespace? Is this Really an Option?

[StillLearning]

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?

[randfish]

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://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization and https://moz.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.

[mirabile]

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....

[randfish]

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.

[JaredBroussard]

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.

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[randfish]

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.

[JaredBroussard]

Thank you, Rand.

[ifan.kaldain]

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.

[DonnaDuncan]

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.

[Meier]

I friggin love u man

[AndMine]

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!

[Njnbiure45r4]

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