Squarespace vs. Wordpress SEO

Squarespace vs WordPress – Which platform is better for SEO?

We’ve heard that there is a misconception going on right now, with many WordPress developers trying to convince the world that Squarespace is not great for SEO.

Whatever you are told, we advise you to first understand what SEO is, what it does, and how it works. You’ll then be able to make your own judgment and know that SEO is not platform-dependent. It’s the person who builds your website and their understanding of SEO tools, techniques, and methodologies that impact your rankings on Google. Plus, your own efforts in maintaining your website content will ensure good rankings.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques and methodologies that help increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website in search engine results. There are many tactics that can help you improve your SEO.

Firstly, there's on-site SEO, which is about designing your website with SEO in mind. This includes things like optimising your page titles, page descriptions, image descriptions and URLs.

Secondly, there's technical SEO, which is all about making sure your website is visible to search engines. This includes submitting your website to SEO tools (Such as Google Console) and search engines (such as Google, Bing and so on), improving site speed and security, and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly.

Lastly, content SEO is an ongoing strategy that helps your website rank well. It involves creating high-quality, relevant content that resonates with your target audience, using keywords and internal linking strategies and updating your website frequently to keep it fresh and relevant. 

How does SEO work?

Google (or any other search engine that you use) has a robot that goes out and crawls all the text on websites it can find on the internet. The robot brings back all the words and data on your website and creates an index, which is then matched with the term that is being searched. This means that if your website is well-optimised and includes the keywords that your audience is searching for, Google will show your website to those users.

Squarespace vs WordPress

The way we usually explain the difference between platforms to clients is as follows: WordPress can be compared to a Windows computer, and Squarespace can be compared to an Apple Mac.

Windows is usually loved by the tech-savvy crowd, who can hack in, change things, program, and alter parameters within the software—it’s very flexible.

Apple Macs are loved by non-techy creatives who want their laptops to work well with minimal maintenance and look great!

It’s similar to the WordPress vs. Squarespace debate.

WordPress is usually best suited for developers, programmers, and coders—people who know their way around HTML and are able to program it to work the way they want. It’s usually more difficult to maintain WordPress websites if you’re not an experienced user due to plugins going out of date and easy exposure to cyberattacks. It can also be a real struggle for a novice business owner to update their WordPress website, as the process is not that straightforward. Once your website is handed over to you and you decide to opt out of an ongoing maintenance package with your developers, you’re pretty much on your own. So, if anything happens to your website, you’re in trouble.

Squarespace is usually best suited for small business owners, entrepreneurs, creatives, and anyone who wants to be in full control over their website. It’s super easy to update, fully supported by an award-winning Squarespace technical support team available 24/7 to answer questions and troubleshoot problems, and it’s never down or hacked as their hosting is protected by a worldwide team of experts. Once the website is finalized by you and your designer and handed over, you’re in full control and still fully supported. 

Now that we’ve explained the differences between platforms, let’s get down to the very topic of Squarespace vs. WordPress SEO and the opinions attached to it. 

So what is all the fuss about?

The main agent in the WordPress vs. Squarespace SEO debate is a little plugin called Yoast.

This plugin is for WordPress only, and that is the reason why some people claim that WordPress is better for SEO. The Yoast plugin indicates to its users whether they did a good job optimising their website content or blog posts through a traffic light system. If you've done a good job, it will show you a green light, and if you've done a bad or mediocre job, it will assign a red or orange light to your efforts. It will also give you hints and tips on what to tweak to reach the green light.

We personally feel that this is a lazy approach. The thing with SEO is that once you know what to do to optimize your pages and content, you don't need a plugin to tell you whether you've done a good job or not—you will just know!

So, while Squarespace doesn't have an equivalent plugin, you can write yourself a checklist of things to do within each page's content or in a blog post to ensure your website ranks highly on Google. Then keep using the checklist until it becomes second nature!

Here is your SEO checklist:

• optimising H1, H2 and H3 tags on each page and blog post

• optimising website images with keyword-rich file names and image descriptions

• creating keyword-rich page titles and descriptions, while keeping the number of characteristics optimal

• including a Call to Action in the copywriting and buttons to determine a goal and purpose for the visitor

Then there is also a technical side to SEO, but this part is best left to your website designer:

• Sitemap

• Clean HTML

• Mobile optimised website

• Correct page architecture

• Clean URLs

• Submitting your website to SEO tools and search engines

What we really love about Squarespace SEO is that all the above SEO elements are within your reach and very straightforward to access and update (which isn't the case with WordPress; you need your developer to help you out with some of those).

In conclusion, depending on what you prefer: ease of use or depth of technical customisation, you might choose to use WordPress or Squarespace to design your website. 

As a company, we choose to use Squarespace for its all-in-one solution, ease of use, simplicity, security, support, and more. Our clients love it because, once we train them on how to use it, they can easily manage and update their website whenever they like, without having to come back to us.

And as for SEO, I hope that I managed to clear up some misconceptions relating to the Squarespace vs. WordPress debate and helped you understand that your ranking on Google is not platform-specific and depends on three factors:

• You purchase a web design package that includes SEO or buy a dedicated SEO package on top of your web design package.

• Your own efforts when it comes to keeping your website updated with fresh content several times per month. 

• Marketing your website to your audience via your channels to drive traffic to it.

If you are looking for support optimising your Squarespace website for search engines, we offer a Squarespace SEO Boost Package where we research your competitors, select your top keywords, develop a strategy, write the descriptions and implement them across your entire website.

Or, if you prefer to learn how you can implement an SEO strategy all by yourself, we have a Squarespace SEO Expert Call where we can teach you all about it!

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