If you’re designing your site on Squarespace, you can create a beautiful site that’s simple to navigate and presents your business in a positive light. But just designing your site isn’t enough – you have to think ahead towards optimization to better reach and serve your intended audiences. Enter SEO.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of ensuring search engines can crawl and index your website.

It’s important to keep SEO in mind from the start. Doing so ensures you start on the right foundation.

But how do you design a one-of-a-kind website while ensuring it’s SEO-friendly? Let’s cover our five pro tips you can use while you build your website. These tips will help you set up your site properly so that SEO becomes a lot easier to achieve, without having to spend a huge amount of time on it.

Tip 1: Create Consistency In Your Design

Unfortunately, some sites are a bit unclear. There is little consistency with colors, design styles, and overall identity. This creates a confusing experience for your visitors.

To avoid this problem, be sure to use the same brand colors, fonts, and elements across your Squarespace website. A clean, cohesive design can reduce your bounce rate, increase dwell time, and improve your SEO.

Pro tip: SquareKicker’s tools can help you with this. The text tool, for example, enables you to create consistency across fonts, layouts, borders, shadows and more for a professional appearance that tells your audiences what you’re about and shows them you can be trusted to get the details right.

Tip 2: Increase Dwell Time

If your site is beautiful, people will enjoy navigating and exploring your website. The longer that visitors stay on your Squarespace site, the better your dwell time, which boosts your SEO.

Dwell time is the length of time a visitor spends on your page after clicking on a search results link, and it’s one of the important ranking factors used in Google’s search algorithms.

By designing ease of use, consistency, relevance, beauty, and straightforward navigation into your site, you’ll encourage visitors to stay longer, ultimately improving your SEO.

Tip 3: Add Internal Links

Our next recommendation on our list of Squarespace design tips is to add plenty of relevant internal links.

These serve two main purposes:

They make it easier for people to navigate your site without getting lost
Search engines recognize navigation links & links used frequently throughout your site as important content

In addition to adding internal links to your regular page content, you can add them to your Squarespace site’s summary blocks.

SquareKicker’s summary block tool simplifies the creation of these versatile, useful site elements, complete with links, buttons, and more.

Tip 4: Develop Clean Code For Fast Load Times

If you’ve ever clicked on a search result and waited, waited, and waited some more for the site to come up, but it never fully loads, you understand the importance of fast load times.

Developing clean code will avoid unbearably slow load times.

At Spacebar Agency, when we optimize Squarespace sites for our clients, we see way too many websites that have customization with heavy, unnecessary code. This is bad for user experience, and bad for SEO.

Again, SquareKicker to the rescue!

SquareKicker overcomes this problem by ensuring that the code is light. This leads to pages that load quickly, which keeps users on your site, helping with your SEO.

Tip 5: Improve UX/UI

So far, we’ve referred to user experience (UX) a few times in our Squarespace design tips.

For our fifth tip, we focus exclusively on this.

That’s because user experience makes or breaks your Squarespace SEO, and both UX and UI matter:

User experience (UX) is about focusing on what users need and value
User interface (UI) is the way that a user interacts with your website

The better UX/UI that you build into your Squarespace site, the longer that users will stay on a page on your site, and the longer they’ll stay exploring your other pages, too.

At the core of great UX/UI is ease of navigation. Adding buttons at key locations helps immensely with site navigation, and SquareKicker’s button tool simplifies inserting these into the right places throughout your Squarespace site.

Keep in mind that you don’t want people to simply visit your site. You want them to have an awesome experience. Making it easy for them to locate what they’re looking for will do wonders for making your Squarespace site stand out above the rest.

Ready To Speed Up Your Development & Improve Your SEO?

We hope you’ve found our Squarespace design tips useful. The bottom line is that SEO should never be an afterthought. You need to build solid SEO into your website right from the start.

Having helped hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs develop an online presence and improve their SEO, we fully understand that website development isn’t for everyone.

Business owners want to focus on doing what they do best: running and growing their businesses. Spending hours upon hours on website development and optimization is not necessarily the best way to spend your valuable time.

For a faster website development process and quicker SEO improvements, Spacebar Agency recommends the following:

For a personalized, customized website without spending $10K or months on development, give SquareKicker a try.
To improve your site’s SEO, start with Spacebar Agency’s free SEO audit tool.

5 pro tips for designing your site on Squarespace that help with SEO