SEO and Squarespace? Is this Really an Option?

[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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