How to Optimize Your Blog on Squarespace

As you probably know, blogs are a very powerful marketing tool. And while it’s true that they’re not the only option these days—there are other ways to do online marketing—I still believe they’re the kings of content marketing and often serve as the cornerstone of a solid SEO strategy for selling products or services.

On the other hand, it’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Squarespace. It’s the platform I use for my own site, and I recommend it over WordPress for creative entrepreneurs like you who want a website that works flawlessly, is easy to manage, and doesn’t cause constant headaches. In my opinion, if you want to focus on your business and have a functional, efficient website that doesn’t take away from the time you spend on what matters most to you, Squarespace is a great option. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

For these two reasons, in this post I’m going to show you a few tips to help you make your Squarespace blog really shine and take full advantage of all the possibilities this platform offers for serious blogging.

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Optimize your posts

There’s no point in having a blog with an attractive design if your writing is a mess. If we agree that blogs are still the key tool for content marketing, then content should be the very first thing you optimize.

On the other hand, if you have good content to start with but it’s poorly organized and doesn’t encourage visitors to keep reading, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to continue providing value to that reader, help them get to know you better, and build a strong relationship based on trust.

That's why the first thing you need to optimize on your blog is the posts themselves. How?

Add categories and tags to your posts.

With Squarespace, you can organize your posts using categories and tags. Categories represent the broadest topic covered in a post, while tags refer to more specific topics within a category.

For example, on this blog I have three topic categories: Squarespace, Photography, and Design. Any post I write will focus on one of those three. This post you’re reading right now belongs to the Squarespace category, because that’s the general topic. But in addition to belonging to that category, I’ve assigned it two tags: Blogging and Design.

Organizing your posts this way has several advantages:

• You give your readers an idea of the general topic covered in each post.

• You can pull together posts that belong to the same category or tag and display them together in a specific place using a summary block. One of the most common uses for this is the carousel of related topics that I include at the end of each post.

• It's good for your site's SEO because it's a way to let Google know what topics you cover on your blog.

Here is a summary section, and you can see that the category each post belongs to appears below it. If you click on the category, you'll be taken to a page listing all the articles published under that topic.

 

includes a summary of the post

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In the "Options" tab within the post's properties, you can add the summary and the featured image.

Another thing you can do with Squarespace is add a summary of the post or an introduction to the topic you’ll be covering. Including this short text is good for SEO and helps your readers understand what each post is about in a bit more detail than the title alone provides.

includes a cover image

Another thing I recommend you always include along with your post summary is a featured image. They can really help drive traffic to your site if you use them strategically on Pinterest, they can boost your SEO if you optimize them properly, and they’ll help you visually showcase your blog’s content.

Use the gallery and summary blocks

Content blocks are one of the most amazing features of Squarespace. They’re the elements you use to add all kinds of content to a page and organize its layout. There are many types: text, images, code, music albums, restaurant menus... the list isn’t endless, but it’s quite extensive, and in this other post, I’ll talk a bit about how to use them to customize your website’s design on Squarespace.

Two of the ones I use most often (besides the text block) are the summary blockand the gallery block. I use the first one to create the carousel of related posts at the end of each blog post, although it has other uses as well that I’ll discuss in a separate post, since there are quite a few. The second one is for inserting image galleries that can help break up a very long text or visually complement what you’re explaining.

For example, there are times when you need to add several images side by side, and the best approach is to use a gallery block instead of uploading multiple individual images. Or maybe you simply want to display a photo gallery of a product, a photo shoot, or an event... In any case, this gallery block is your best friend, and it offers plenty of options for customizing the gallery’s layout.

Create post templates with the option to duplicate them

This feature is very useful for saving time and maintaining consistency in the structure of your posts. It’s relatively new on Squarespace, and the user community has been extremely grateful for it. Previously, if you had multiple elements in your posts following the main text, you had to add them manually every time you wrote an article.

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To duplicate a post, click "Duplicate" in the post properties window.

For example, in my photography posts, I always include a banner at the end promoting my photography course, a subscribe button, a dotted line (which is an image), a carousel of related posts (pulled from the Photography category), and another dotted line... Having to add the same things every time I wrote a post was extremely tedious, and on several occasions I forgot to include something.

Fortunately, it’s much easier now. I simply have a draft for each type of post (photography, design, and Squarespace) that serves as a template. When I need to write a blog post, I duplicate the relevant draft and… voilà! All I have to do is add the text and images specific to that post, and I’m done. This simplifies the process of creating blog posts for me and ensures a consistent structure across all my posts.

Schedule your posts

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You can schedule your posts on Squarespace.

If you're an organized person who plans ahead, you probably have a content calendar for at least the next three months. If that's the case, you won't have any trouble with Squarespace because you can easily schedule the publication date and time. Simply open the post properties window, click "Draft" at the bottom, choose the date and time, and click "Save." You’ll see that the post appears as "Scheduled."

 

 

 

Optimize engagement with your posts

All right... you've already optimized your blog content; now let's see what you can do to make it easy for your audience to engage with that content.

Configure the comments section

You can configure comments on your posts in several ways within Squarespace.

You can:

• Enable or disable them globally.

• Enable or disable them individually in a post.

• And enable or disable comment moderation before comments are posted on the blog.

In addition, you have the option within the platform itself to embed comments using Discuss if you prefer that service. To do so, simply go to Settings > Website > Blogging and enter the shortname of your Discuss account.

If you decide to use Squarespace’s native system for managing comments (as I do), keep in mind that Squarespace currently doesn’t send email notifications when a comment is replied to. In other words, I receive an email notification every time someone comments on the blog, but when I go to the post and reply to that comment, the person who wrote it can only see my reply if they revisit the post because Squarespace doesn’t notify them.

Add social media sharing icons

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Here you can paste any code you want that applies only to the blog, such as the code for SumoMe or Shareaholic social media sharing icons.

Depending on the Squarespace template you use, you'll have the option to display social media sharing icons at the end of your post in various ways. The template used on this site hides the icons behind a share button at the end of the post, which isn't very convenient.

The good news is that you don't have to settle for what your chosen template offers. Fortunately, in Squarespace, you can easily add code—either site-wide or to specific pages—and thanks to this, you can add social media sharing icons from services like Shareaholic or SumoMe. It's very simple. Just copy the code provided (from both Shareaholic and SumoMe),goto the blog’s properties window, click the “Advanced” tab, and paste the code you copied (from both SumoMe and Shareaholic).

As you can see, I used Shareaholic and set it up so that the icons always appear on the left side of the page... this makes it easy for your readers to share your content if they liked it or found it useful.

Verify your site with Pinterest and Facebook

Squarespace makes this very easy for you. On Pinterest, this pageexplains how to verify your website. On other platforms, after verifying your site, you have to follow a separate process to enable rich pins on Pinterest (if you’re not sure what rich pins are or why you should have them, check this out). With Squarespace, this process happens automatically. In other words, once you’ve verified your site with Pinterest, every time an image is pinned from your blog, it will automatically appear as a rich pin.

Here's a great tutorial on how to verify your site with Facebook.

Automate the posting of your content on social media

With Squarespace, you can automatically post your blog posts to social media. All you have to do is go to the post settings, then to the "Social" tab, and select which social media platforms (from those you've already linked to Squarespace) you want your post to appear on as soon as it's published on the blog.

 

 

 

 

in short

Squarespace is just as good a platform as any other for serious blogging. Of course, the first step is to know who you’re writing for, what topics interest them, and to write high-quality posts. But if you’ve already got that down and follow the recommendations I’m giving you here, your Squarespace blog will be attractive and functional, and it will help you develop your content marketing strategy.

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